Once more Aiden held the key close to the door and the glowing lock appeared, allowing him to insert the key and push on the handle to open the door. Inside was a small foyer, furnished with a hat stand, shoe rack, and a dresser for longcoats and other apparel, all of which were empty. The air was warm and dry.
“You have returned early, my Lord,” a man’s voice said from just around the corner, where a large room with vaulted ceilings beckoned. “Were you successful in convincing the sen…” he trailed off as he walked into the foyer and saw eight heavily armed strangers glaring at him. He was dressed as a butler in expensive, dark attire, and his receding hairline ended in thick eyebrows that were drawn together above narrowed eyes.
“Be at ease, sir, we represent the Crown on official business,” Maggie stated, stepping forward to address the butler. “We are here to conduct a search of the building, so if you and your staff would co-operate, we can be done as quickly as possible and you can go back to your duties without further disruption.”
“This is highly irregular,” the butler complained, looking down at the diminutive woman. “I see no representatives of the City Watch here, nor have you presented documentation to back up your claim.” Aiden fetched the duke’s letter of commission from his tunic and presented it to the obstinate butler, who began reading it carefully. While he was busy, Aiden gestured at Ronan, Pacian and Sayana to start searching the house.
“I see nothing specific to a search of these premises written here,” the butler sighed. “But the duke’s signature is legitimate, and it is quite clear about providing you with what assistance I can. He apparently gave you his key to allow you entry, which is very convincing in and of itself. Very well, conduct your search, ladies and gentlemen, but my employer will have things to say about this when he returns.”
“Please gather your people into the kitchens, if you could,” Maggie continued, showing a flair for dealing with the public that made Aiden wonder if she had previous experience as a city guard. The butler reluctantly did as he was told, calling the staff away from their current tasks and into the kitchen. There were four servants in addition to the butler, and none of them struck Aiden as being much of a threat, so he started to look around the house, leaving Val, Sir William and Nellise to keep guard.
The huge dining hall was magnificently appointed, with large, expensive paintings hanging from the walls and a fireplace on the other side of the room. Although roughly two centuries old, the house appeared to be in remarkably good condition with little sign of aging. Most striking of all however, was the oversized chandelier hanging over the twenty-foot long table, with two dozen candles flickering through sculpted glass providing a mesmerizing effect.
Ronan was moving along the back wall, searching without success behind the paintings for hidden compartments while Pacian had gone up the nearby staircase to check the top floor. Sayana found a narrow stairwell leading down to a basement and disappeared through a small service doorway. After a few minutes of this, Nellise sauntered closer to Aiden and made sure nobody else was listening before she spoke.
“Do you have any idea what we should be searching for?” she asked quietly, prompting Aiden to ponder the sort of evidence they’d be likely to find. It was unlikely the senator would keep any written evidence lying around, unless he was lacking in both intelligence and good sense.
“Journals, notes, letters… something in the rubbish that he’s thrown out and not destroyed properly… perhaps even signs that he has been meeting with the assassins,” Aiden told her at a normal volume so Ronan could hear him.
“Nothing like that out here,” the sailor called as he started looking in vases and under furniture. “Course, it was always a long shot that he’d keep damning evidence out in his dining room.”
“Hopefully Pace is having better luck,” Aiden muttered, his confidence fading with every passing minute. Could he have misjudged Thomas Bartlett? He seemed to be telling the truth at the time, but Aiden had only just met the man right after being discovered breaking into his house. “Keep an eye on the servants,” he added, “I’m going to see how he’s doing upstairs.”
Aiden crossed the room and headed up the stairs two at a time, discovering a long hallway at the top with five doors leading off at regular intervals. The sound of someone shoving furniture around emanated from the first door on the left, and peering inside, Aiden saw Pacian had torn the room to pieces. From the nature of the material strewn around the room, he guessed this used to be a study, or office, complete with an enormous mahogany desk and cabinets filled with papers.
“We could be here for hours - look at all these papers,” Pacian griped as soon as he noticed Aiden enter the room.
“Just stick to searching for vaults or secret compartments,” Aiden advised, daunted by the sight before him. “If the information we need is in those cabinets, it’s going to take days to find it, but I’m betting Johnson keeps his damning evidence someplace safe. Check out the other rooms, I’m going to see what’s happening downstairs,” Aiden said, dejected.
He hurried down to the ground floor without waiting for a response from his friend, and glanced at the butler and his staff being watched carefully by an increasingly impatient Valennia. There was something odd about the expression on the butler’s face that irritated Aiden, a kind of haughtiness that alluded to a sense of satisfaction concerning their failure to uncover evidence against the senator.
“Tell me you found something,” Aiden asked of Ronan, who was emerging from the kitchens with patches of flour on his dark longcoat and gloves. He shook his head slightly in reply.
Aiden had genuinely thought they would uncover the Senator’s links to the assassins and the greater conspiracy against the Crown somewhere in the house, but now the prospect of being thrown in prison was a very real possibility. It wasn’t just his own life at stake - every one of his companions would suffer a similar fate, not to mention Sir Godfrey’s reputation.
“If you are quite finished tearing up my master’s home,” the butler remarked, “I will direct my staff to begin cleaning so it will be tidy for when he returns and destroys what remains of your lives.”
“Speak again and I will remove your tongue,” Valennia said in a voice filled with promise. Aiden noticed Maggie over near the basement trying to catch his attention during the tense moment, so he walked over to speak with her.
“Aiden, Sy thinks she’s found something downstairs,” she said, trying to keep her voice low.
“Some good news I hope?” he asked quietly.
“I’m not sure, but it seems a little strange to me,” the raelani druid replied, her tiny brow furrowed in thought.
“I saw that look!” Valennia suddenly shouted, causing everyone in the room to stare at her in astonishment. She was pointing an accusing finger at the butler, who shied back in terror from her fury. “You know something, servant. Speak!”
“I have no idea what you are talking about!” he cried.
“Val, what the hell are you doing?” Aiden exclaimed.
“When Margaret spoke of a discovery downstairs, this one flinched. He fears what you will find down below.” Aiden hesitated to take her word for it, and any expression of guilt or knowledge had been wiped from the butlers face, replaced with fear.
“Keep an eye on them while I go and check it out, and for God’s sake, don’t hurt them Val,” Aiden ordered. “Ronan, come with us.” The sailor followed him and Maggie down the narrow stairs, ducking their heads to avoid the low ceiling along the way.
Maggie led them along a short passageway and through an old wooden door into a sprawling chamber. Away from the warmth of the fires upstairs, the basement was freezing cold, with icicles forming on the ceiling. Aiden shivered in the bitterly cold air as they continued along, walking in-between shelves filled with casks of wine and blocks of cheese hanging from the ceiling until they finally found Sayana in an open area at the end of the room.
She was inspecting the walls, moving her
palms slowly over the ancient stone blocks. On the floor around her were a dozen sleeping pallets and a pile of blankets in the nearby corner. They were similar to those Aiden had seen at a military barracks in Fort Highmarch weeks ago, and although rough, it was better than sleeping on the floor. The implications were obvious.
“Do you think the assassins or their associates stayed here?” Aiden asked, suspecting the truth.
“There’s no direct evidence of that,” Maggie explained, looking around with her hands on her hips. “But Sy found a few faint tracks on the dust and said they were similar to the ones she saw when we took down Holister.”
“So why is she checking the walls?” Aiden inquired.
“Because ‘she’ thinks there is a secret door here,” Sayana replied archly. “There are no signs of those footprints near the basement door, and it is unlikely they could have entered or left the house through the front door without someone noticing.”
“I think whoever was here, left only recently,” Maggie added. “Call it a hunch.”
“I’ll take what I can get at this point,” Aiden breathed. Sayana suddenly stopped, and began carefully following a crack in the wall with one delicate finger until she had outlined what appeared to be a door, cunningly hidden in the stone.
“My turn,” Ronan suggested, moving in to carefully examine the discovery. Aiden’s feeling of relief quickly turned into one of caution, for if the assassins had been here only recently, then something was afoot.
“Should we send word to the duke about this?” Sayana asked as she watched Ronan figure out how to open the door.
“There’s not enough here to get the senator into any kind of trouble,” Maggie said, shaking her head. “We’d need solid evidence to have even a chance of putting him away, and a few beds hidden in the basement just won’t cut it.”
“I know a copper when I hear one,” Ronan remarked, giving Maggie a sidelong glance. She grinned ruefully back at him but remained silent.
“Maggie, bring the others down here if you could,” Aiden asked of her. She hurried up the hall to the stairs, leaving him with Sayana and Ronan for a few moments.
“This is going to be awkward, isn’t it?” Ronan observed, still tracing out the edge of the door. Sayana crossed her arms and looked coldly at Aiden, as if daring him to say what was on his mind.
“Look, I just want to know if we can work together without a problem,” Aiden stated plainly. “The last thing we need are distractions, considering the type of people we’re dealing with.”
“I’m fine,” Ronan shrugged.
“I’m so glad to hear that,” Aiden drawled.
“It sounds like you’re the one with the problem,” Sayana remarked.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m not the best at dealing with women.”
“I am,” Ronan smirked.
“Not really,” Sayana said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“Wait, what?” Ronan blanched as the sound of footsteps returning down the corridor interrupted their delightful conversation.
“You didn’t have to be so intimidating toward those people,” Sir William warned Valennia as the rest of their companions approached. Ronan and Sayana went silent, and Aiden felt the need to smack himself on the forehead for making this worse instead of better.
“They work for the man you consider to be a traitor, and you would have me coddle them?” the akoran woman shot back.
“I suppose we should be thankful you didn’t kill one as an example to the others,” Pacian remarked dryly.
“Do you think that would have worked?” she wondered, sounding disturbingly genuine.
“Enough,” Aiden barked as they arrived at the sleeping area, sensing an ominous trend in the diverse group. “Ronan, can you get that door open?”
“Yeah, sure,” the sailor muttered, fidgeting with a piece of the stone wall until it slid open to the rumble of stone against stone. Beyond the door was a narrow stone tunnel, and the sounds of water rushing became distinct and clear.
“A secret passage,” Sir William remarked. “I wonder if it was part of the original construction.”
“I doubt it,” Ronan murmured. “The sewers weren’t built as part of the original city, and I’m afraid that’s where this door leads to, if my nose isn’t mistaken.” A quick whiff told Aiden that this was indeed the case, and he recoiled slightly at the stench.
“Was there any sign the door was opened recently?” Maggie asked.
“Hard to say,” Sayana replied with a shrug.
“We follow it and find out more,” Pacian suggested, moving ahead to be the first one down the tunnel. Valennia followed, and one by one they filed through. Aiden re-summoned his arcane light, placing it on his sword and holding it like a torch to illuminate the passage. It was dank and mouldy, and more than a little cloying as most of them had to stoop to avoid scraping their heads along the low ceiling.
The sound of rushing water increased in volume until eventually the tunnel came to an abrupt end, and they emerged onto the walkway astride the turgid flow of the aqueducts. They stood at a junction, with the vast network of the sewers leading off in three directions.
“The scrapes on the floor show this door was opened within the last hour,” Valennia reported, crouching down to look closer at the filth-encrusted stone. “There are obvious tracks here, but it seems whoever passed this way made an effort to cover them. Our prey knows they are being followed, though they did not count upon a tracker of my talent pursuing them.”
“Where do the tracks lead?” Aiden asked, daring to hope they might be able to pick up the trail. If they could find these assassins and capture or kill them, it would vindicate their quasi-legal search of the Senator’s home. Valennia carefully examined the stone further, taking a few moments to follow the markings before answering.
“Many passed this way,” she explained absently. “They are wearing armour… and they all move in that direction,” she finally answered, pointing across a small walkway that led to the other side of the tunnel. She moved ahead, being careful to check the ground every few yards to ensure they were on the right path.
Aiden’s sense of direction underground was terrible and he had no idea of where they were heading, but after ten minutes the trail suddenly veered into a dry, narrow passageway off from the main system, ending in a solid stone wall.
“The tracks are indistinct,” Valennia stated, “but appear to end here.”
“More secrets,” Ronan muttered, moving forward to closely inspect the wall.
“Does anyone have a clue where we are right now?” Pacian asked.
“We were moving west,” Sayana replied. “I do not know where in the city that puts us, though.”
“Moving west takes us very close to the senate building,” Sir William postulated. Everyone was silent for a moment as that information sunk in, and Aiden almost gasped as he suddenly understood the magnitude of what was going to happen tonight.
“The note we found at Thomas Bartlett’s place,” he breathed, having the full attention of everyone present. “It was trying to frame him for plotting to do something terrible to the senate. I thought it was just a fabrication, but if those black robed cultists are heading there, then they were actually planning to kill key members of the senate and place the blame for the murders on Thomas.”
“And the princess is speaking there tonight,” Pacian added darkly. “They’ll either grab her or kill her along with the others.”
“Find that door,” Aiden ordered Ronan, who was already working on it as fast as he could, with Pacian rushing over to assist.
“What could they hope to achieve by assassinating members of the government?” Nellise asked nobody in particular.
“This ‘Number One’ individual clearly seeks to seize the throne, and he or she is taking steps to eliminate the King’s strongest supporters,” Sir William replied tersely. “The audacity of this plan beggars belief.”
&
nbsp; “Found it,” Pacian cried in triumph, pressing in a small piece of stonework that caused a part of the wall to slide open. A small passage beckoned, and at the edge of their light, a stairwell leading up could be seen.
“This was used recently,” Sayana said, checking the floor for signs of passage. “We are closing in.” Ronan slipped past her and moved down the hallway, taking the stairs two at a time and disappearing around the corner. The rest of the group followed quickly, with a pressing sense that time was growing short.
When he reached the top of the stairs, Aiden found Ronan standing before another blank wall, but one which stood out starkly from the ancient, dirt-covered stones they had been passing the entire journey with its clean, white brickwork. The wall had a latch on it, which Ronan turned as the rest of them caught up, opening into a dimly lit room.
Holding his glowing sword aloft, Aiden could see a room lined with shelves of books and a desk covered in loose papers. Tiles lined the floor underfoot and a door across the room was slightly ajar, through which the sounds of whispered conversations from nearby could be heard echoing. Ronan and Pacian crept forward cautiously, wary of some sort of trap but found nothing awaiting them in the room.
“Is this the senate?” Aiden whispered as the rest of them made their way into the room, weapons drawn.
“The tiles and stonework do bear a resemblance to the senate building, “Sir William mused, “although I am not familiar with some of the more obscure antechambers and storage rooms in the building itself.”
“Come over here and take a look,” Pacian prompted the old knight.
“Yes, that is the entry hall for the Senate,” Sir William confirmed after peering through the gap. “Nothing seems amiss, from what I can see.”
“The trail of mud from below ends here,” Valennia declared. “If they travelled further into this structure, it will be impossible to tell.”
“We should get to the senate itself and warn them,” Sir William advised.
In Defence of the Crown (The Aielund Saga Book 2) Page 34