Jon looked around for a moment once they were inside. The sprawling room was packed with gaming tables. A large crowd had gathered at one corner, yellow and green backs circled up. There looked to be a huge amount of staff on hand, already cleaning up the few overturned tables and signs of violence. Seemed the management of the club wanted to forget about tonight as quickly as possible.
“Finn,” Jon said over his shoulder, eyes on the crowd in the corner, “check the exterior. Signs of where they came in and out. Anyone who might have seen them. Anything wet that shouldn’t be, not that the rain will help with that.” After Finn quietly vanished, Jon turned back to look at Jenner. “You mind talking to the Queen’s Guard? Maybe fill us in a bit. All signs say they got one of ours.”
Jenner nodded and started heading back towards the entryway.
Aaron followed Jon as he approached the crowd gathered in the roulette corner of the club. A mix of Queen’s Guards and City Guards clustered around a well-dressed, stressed-looking man with a carefully curled mustache.
The man was talking to the crowd. “And by the time I was able to get the door open, they were all gone. A couple of the valets from out front were near the doors, dead. So I found the City Guard before I went any further. You’ve seen the rest.”
A City Guard led the questioning. “How many employees do you estimate were here?”
“Between the dealers and waitstaff, probably thirty in the room. The security are mostly dead.”
“How many security are usually on hand?”
Aaron was distracted from the answer by a low whistle off to the side. He turned his head to see Miriam standing back near the curtains. She beckoned Aaron with a slight tip of her head. Aaron quietly slipped back from the crowd and approached, following Miriam behind the curtain.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
She ignored the question. “You’re going to want to see this,” she said in a quiet voice, and began leading him back into one of the halls. Aaron could see scratches on the fine wallpaper. More than one was shaped like an arrow, pointing them farther down the hall.
“This was the Sunken?” Aaron asked.
“Oh, yeah. Not much question about that. Whoever they are exactly, this was them.”
“And they got Cal.”
“If he was here, and you haven’t seen him elsewhere, they probably did. He wasn’t among the dead.” Miriam led them through a door that was propped open, then down a staircase. There were more marks along the walls, several people having come this way, either careless with weapons or deliberately marking their path for those who may follow. The stairs continued downward, deep under the club. Aaron finally saw one of Cal’s marks, a sideways tally of the enemy. At least ten.
Aaron’s calf began aching where Locke had hooked him. One of his ears was swollen from the beating Lorimer’s man had dished out. Surdoore was proving miserable, nothing but pain and unanswered questions around every corner. The wet footprints, the muskrat man from his vision of the princess’s kidnapping, the Sunken below rising above. Aaron wanted to be someplace else, seated, drink in hand. He couldn’t decide if he wanted Miriam there or not.
At the bottom of the stairs, there were several Queen’s Guards removing thick bricks from an exterior basement wall. They were stacking them to the sides, leaving an opening wide enough for a few to pass through. Miriam marched past them without hesitation and Aaron followed, no one challenging their authority to be here yet.
“The Sunken made an effort to hide their passage, but this was too high profile for that.”
Aaron remained quiet as two men, City Guards, passed them going the other direction. No one spoke in the tight and dark quarters. When their footsteps faded, Aaron asked, “You weren’t here, were you?”
“No, I got here later. Who did that to your face, by the way?”
Aaron stifled his reply again as more men approached in the opposite direction. This pair was Queen’s Guards, the first a nondescript young man. The second gave Aaron pause, some familiarity to his features. Aaron stopped walking and turned to watch him continue down the tunnel. After a moment, he hurried to catch up to Miriam.
She passed through another opening and then they were in a large storeroom. A group was clustered around a pool of water at the far end.
“It’s another gate,” Aaron said. It seemed any hopes the Sunken were trapped below the Plate were fading fast.
“They already sent some poor soul down to check. Looks like there’s an opening in the Plate down there under the water but it’s locked. As in, has bars installed with a pretty hefty deadbolt. So the Sunken or whoever retreated back there can come through whenever they want but we can’t follow. Guard says it might take days to crack it open given the conditions.” She looked over at Aaron. “They’ll keep guards here, I’m guessing, but if Cal’s down there this might not be an easy path back. There have been no ransom demands yet.”
Aaron nodded, staring at the dark water. “You know if they ever got ransom demands off the last kidnapping? The one at the Laurent House?”
“I don’t know, but if anyone would it would be Jon. Maybe you want to show him this? I’m gonna hang back. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for Cal.” She gave a quick smile, but a worried glance at the water belied her optimism. “If it turns out he’s down there and you need any help springing him, let me know. Likewise if you need to have a word with whoever felt comfortable roughing you up.”
Aaron nodded again and turned to make his way back down the tunnel, glad to leave Miriam behind him for the moment. On the way up the stairs, he stopped to examine Cal’s mark on the wall. Confident and unhurried, but according to Locke this Lord Gale was no one to mess with. Was there a way Aaron could help Cal get out of his clutches?
He arrived back at the hall near where he’d first seen Miriam beckoning from the shadows. Jon, Jenner, and Finn were all clustered together. Aaron gave them a nod as he huddled with them and scanned the room. It was much the same though there was more traffic into and out of the hall, the word about the trail taken by the Sunken spreading. He could see the two Queen’s Guards he’d passed in the tunnel. The younger and the one with oddly familiar features.
Jon turned to Aaron, “There’s a list of all the table reservations. Should give us an idea of how many people were here, who they are. At least most of them. I’m getting a copy. Any sign of Cal?”
“They’ve got him. He left a mark on the wall for me. There were a lot of them. Well organized.”
The group fell silent for a moment.
“Jenner, you recognize that guy over there in yellow?” Aaron asked, reaching for his cigarettes then remembering Lorimer had stolen them. Finn handed him one and he lit it as Jenner looked back over his shoulder.
“Sure, he works Palace security. A branch of the Queen’s Guard. For this many of them to be here they must have had someone taken. Name’s Brooks Borland. Why do you ask?”
Aaron took a long drag off the cigarette, then blew the smoke out into the air. “Would you say,” he paused, as though testing out the words, “would you say he looks a little like a muskrat?”
The Beguiling Tides
Chapter 15. A Key Unexpected
Cal woke to water hitting his face. He gave an inward groan. The knife hilt in his hand, the hard, cold rock at his back reminding him he was in a cell under the Plate, in the hands of the Sunken. He’d been asleep maybe a couple of hours. He opened his eyes and got another soft splash of salty water in them for his trouble. He blinked several times to clear them. When he opened them again, he turned his head to see Nalani Chambers standing at the bars, waist deep in the standing water which filled the chamber.
She still wore a dark cocktail dress plastered to her shapely body, her wet hair flat against her face. It was hard to stifle Cal’s first reaction, which was one of desire. But her face spoke of urgency and quiet, her finger to her lips. She held up a key.
He rose, flinching as the cold water washed over hi
s partially dried legs. He tucked the knife into his belt and waded to the bars. “Where’d you get that?” he whispered.
She drew in close, their faces nearly touching. After looking around to ensure they remained unobserved, she spoke quietly. “Off one of the guards. You want out of there?”
“Yes.”
“There’s writing in some of these cells. They’ve had other prisoners very recently. Lots of turnover is not a good sign. Have you heard anything about recent escapees of the Sunken?” When Cal shook his head, she continued. “We need to get out of here. If I let you out, you help me escape. I don’t make it, you don’t make it. Will you agree to that?”
“I’m just as eager to get out of here as you are. I don’t mind company.” He looked past her, towards the other cells. “We should bring the others.”
“Not an option. I’m taking my chances with you. Otherwise I’d go alone. Most of this crew spent last night crying and hugging. Some pleaded with the guards, along the way making it clear they would happily sell out the others. After I stole the key, I asked some of the others to help me make a run for it. The first couple were too scared. The third one I spoke to got that look in his eyes. That I wonder what I can get if I tell the guards look. I don’t think the Club Diamond crowd was Surdoore’s best and brightest. I’m not taking more chances than I have to.”
“Then why me?” Cal asked.
“You spoke to the guards, got taken away, brought back without a scratch on you, then slept like a baby while everyone else was too scared to breathe, the whole time the water rising. And somehow you’ve got a knife. You and me or else I go alone. Now, should we see if this key works? Otherwise I’ll have to say goodbye.”
Cal nodded, watching as she put the key in the lock. She turned it as Cal held his breath. There was a sharp click and the door swung open. Cal waded out of his cell. They both got low and began making their way towards the entrance in a crouch.
The chamber had seemed too dark before, but now the faint green glow exposed them. They passed one or two cells with others, most asleep or staring off into the distance, none paying attention to their quiet passage.
Cal gently pulled Nalani behind him as they neared the entrance. It was an open cavern mouth, roughly the size of a door, raised so that the water was only ankle deep. Cal straightened and walked through, the water streaming off his clothes making noise as it fell. A Sunken guard appeared. Cal buried the knife in his neck before he could react. Pushed him to the side and pressed forward. Another guard was just poking his head around the corner and Cal was able to close the distance quickly. The guard struggled to get his sword out. Cal stabbed him in the chest, dodged as the injured Sunken swung a fist heavy with sharp coral, and slit his throat. He studied the body for a moment, the cavern still. “They bleed red,” he said quietly as Nalani caught up to him.
“I threw the key to another set of prisoners,” Nalani said. “Might create some confusion.”
“Good. Now let’s see if we can get out to the edges of the Plate. Something tells me that gate we passed through will have a lot of guards. Any idea which way the harbor is?”
…
It took Cal only an hour or two to figure out he hated the dark underside of the Plate more than any other place he’d ever been. Worse than the barren Ashlands. Worse than the Bay of Castalan, where the waves had tried to pull him down as he swam for his life. The worst kind of hell. Every path was bent and crooked, treacherous and unpredictable. Tunnels with walls and floors smoothed by countless tides would suddenly become sharp and jagged. Dead ends lay around every corner, some only revealing themselves at the desperate end of the swimmers’ lung capacity as they passed through countless coral tunnels. The stretches of open water, where tunnels and cave floors dropped off to the deep, were no better. The light of the occasional patch of the glowing fungus only carried a few feet, leaving the escapees with no idea what was below them. Nothing good. Dim shapes circled the water as though waiting for them to tire and sink, or get far enough away from a refuge that they could be caught in the open and devoured.
At times the Plate was directly above them, within a hand’s reach of the bobbing water or whatever stony shelf they’d found to crouch on to catch their breath and rest aching limbs. He would reach up a hand and feel its weight, its impenetrability. No way through. Or at least few ways through and all hidden or guarded. The Plate pressed down on Cal and Nalani as they traversed slowly and painfully across its underside, hoping they were moving south towards the harbor, no idea if that was the case. It was a hellish weight above them. Cal wanted it gone, wanted to punch through it, tear it to pieces. But still it pressed down on them. If he felt this after only hours, he couldn’t imagine what the Sunken felt.
They came upon another of the traps Cal had seen earlier, a wooden frame lined with wire, only this one held a live thresher. Cal swam close to study it. There was a harpoon punched through the shark’s side, dark blood in the water. The thresher was nearly Cal’s size. In the dim light, Cal could see mottled rust-coloring atop smooth grey skin. Ugly teeth showing as it snapped at his approach. Cal felt Nalani’s impatience at his back and swam on.
They were finding more and more open stretches of water the farther they’d traveled, which Cal took to be a good sign. He swam with his knife held in his teeth. They had not encountered any Sunken after the guards, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out here. The glowing patches led them, more or less, towards pockets of air where they could surface, faces close together in the green light as they tried to catch their breath. Their need for a place to rest was growing desperate, but it had been long since they’d encountered anything that offered relief from the waters below their feet.
Cal was noticing there seemed to be a pattern to the placement of the air pockets. Or at least the glow that marked them. It was creating a path, marked in the green light. He and Nalani had fallen into a sort of rhythm. They would catch their breath in a pocket, move on to the next. They had been doing so for five minutes or so, both trying to conserve what little energy they had left, when Cal got a feeling he was missing something. He looked around. There was the series of glowing circles ahead of them. A few small patches off to what they were assuming was the west. There was nothing but blackness to the east. There was something to the blackness that was throwing him off.
At the next air pocket, he caught Nalani’s hand and took the knife out of his mouth. “Wait for a second.”
She looked at him impatiently.
“Just,” he said, gasping and spitting out the salty water that crept into his mouth, “look around for a second. What do you see?”
Nalani let her head sink below the water. She turned slowly in a circle, all the while treading water with her tired limbs. She looked below her feet, then brought her head back up out of the water. “It’s a path,” she replied. “And it’s heading where we want to go. I think. And we’d better keep moving. I still think there’s something below us.”
“Why isn’t there any light over there?” Cal gestured weakly to the east. “We must have traveled at least a couple miles by now but this is the first time we’ve seen true dark, no light at all.”
“It couldn’t be the harbor, we’d see sunlight. Or moonlight.”
“I know. I think it might be something else. I’m going to take a closer look. Wait here.”
“How are you going to find the next air pocket without any light?”
“I’ll turn back if I can’t find anything. I’ve just got a feeling about it.”
“Why change direction if we think the path is going where we want?”
Cal’s face was drawn with exhaustion. “I’m not sure. Just, this is a well-lit path. They might want us on it. They might be counting on finding us on it. I think there’s something over there. Something they don’t want us to find. This fungus seems to grow pretty much everywhere. Except there. Maybe someone made sure it didn’t. Either way, just wait here.” He dipped below the water for a momen
t, looking east and planning out his route. He resurfaced a second later. “If I don’t make it back, get a message to Aaron Lorne or Jon Harpish. Tell them the Queen’s daughter is alive. She’s a prisoner of Lord Gale. And tell them to keep the Sunken away from the dragons.” Without waiting for a response, he put the knife back in his mouth, sank back below the cold waters, and swam towards the darkness.
He swam fast and hard into the black for about half a minute. He was just considering turning back, no sign of an air pocket, the Plate tight and flat above him, when dumb luck saved his life. He turned his head back to look for Nalani, and a sharpened spike of coral struck the knife in his mouth. The blade shifted only slightly, enough to slice open a part of his lip but doing nowhere near the damage it would have if it hadn’t been gripped tightly in his teeth. Or if he’d run straight into the spike. Ignoring the pain as the salt sank into the cut, Cal studied the trap in front of him in what little light he had. It was a set of sharpened coral spikes, radiating down and outwards like a crown, positioned to impale the lightless and unaware. He dove under the long spikes, breath running short. On the other side there was an opening which held a faint glow. He swam up warily and was relieved to break the surface of the water moments later. He was in near total darkness, but there was plenty of room above him. He tentatively reached out and felt smoothness ahead of him. The hidden chamber had a floor. They could rest on solid ground.
Alliance of the Sunken (Spies of Dragon and Chalk Book 3) Page 11