by Jon Kiln
And brought with it a hail of bolts.
One of them skimmed Vharn’s shoulder, spraying her in blood as Suriyen rolled on the floor. Sparks flew on the cobbles as the ugly little black quarrels broke and shattered.
“Did you know it was booby-trapped? Did you know?!” Her captor was howling and hissing in anger as he examined his wound. It was bleeding freely, but Suriyen noted that it wasn’t spurting, and she couldn’t see the white of any bone in there. He’ll live, sadly, she grimaced.
“Of course I didn’t know. I was trying to pick the lock!” Suriyen snapped back as Vharn tied a not-very clean cloth around the wound and spat.
“Bloody stupid Fuldoonian spies…” he muttered, standing up to kick at the door and peer into the gloom beyond.
There was a small hallway, barely big enough for two people inside, and an open archway that appeared to lead into some sort of equipment or store closet. Other than that, there was a set of stone stairs going up.
“Ladies first, I think,” Vharn grumbled, “especially if this place has got traps in it.”
I don’t doubt that it has, Suriyen thought. Maaritz had been a cunning one.
“Fine.” She picked up her (now-sharpened, her mind informed her) staff and moved the broken door, bashing at the lock until it fell down, and kicked it out into the small plaza.
Yeah, I don’t put it past him at all… She prodded the first few flagstones, hard.
The sound was subtle and smooth, nothing like the angry hiss of the crossbow bolts of the previous trap. Suriyen had just enough time to jump back as the first flagstone fell inward, revealing a deep hole whose floor was criss-crossed with serrated blades.
“Maaritz, you sly old dog!” Suriyen hissed, even earning a chuckle from Vharn behind her.
“Get inside,” the Menaali chief said, prodding her shoulder, and apparently not caring if she fell into the trap or not.
“I’m going.” Suriyen scowled, prodding the flagstones beyond before hopping daintily to the far side. Inside the small hallway, the walls were still made of the same dark brick, but there were wall sconces on the walls, the first of which she paused to alight, before taking the torch out of its bracket.
Suriyen continued to test the floor and the walls around her. “Safe,” she called out after she had made a pass of the whole hallway. Only then did Vharn feel comfortable enough to join her. The wall-captain could see the whites of his eyes growing large as he peered superstitiously around them.
“What’s in there?” He pointed to the only other room at this bottom level, a store room that was barely the size of a closet.
Suriyen, at his side once again, did the rounds of knocking and thumping the walls and floors. Nothing popped, hissed, or shot out at her this time, but what she did uncover was a simple space with a selection of large robes with tall collars ranging in different colors. Must be his official robes, she thought. As well as a stack of more functional tools: rope, boots, fire lighters, backpacks, provisions and even a stand of crossbows. All the sorts of equipment needed when you’re out to hunt a monster. Suriyen felt a pang of sorrow at the man that she hardly knew. She wondered if he had managed a good death, in the end.
There’s so few of us Guides left. So few remember the old ways. She paused for a moment by the cloaks, swearing that she could smell a trace of the heavy incense that Mother Aldameda had always favored. Had she come here, during those long years? Of course she had, Suriyen realized instantly. While I was off gallivanting after my revenge, Mother Aldameda and Maaritz were here, alone, working out how to save the world.
The ex-wall-captain felt bad about that, of course. She felt terrible in fact, but her heart hardened as she considered that now her revenge was all that she had left. Maaritz is dead. Aldameda is gone, probably dead. Fuldoon had fallen – and the heavens alone knows where the Abomination is!
Another heavy sigh.
“’Ere! It’s no time to dawdle!” Vharn tugged cruelly at her leash. “Night’s coming, and I want to find the best of it in here and find a safe spot to sleep if we have to spend the night in this strange place.” Vharn pulled again at her rope, pointing up at the stairs. After squeezing past him, the Menaali grinned, seized the crossbow from its stack and a quarrel of bolts.
“This is more like it!” he said, gesturing for her to hurry up.
The stairs inside the tower were circuitous, always passing doors on the inner left, which Suriyen knew meant that the stairs must run along the inside of the wall. She banged each one as she climbed – but still no traps.
Maybe that was all that Maaritz had installed, Suriyen found herself hoping, but not likely…
The first door that they came to, stood on its own landing, and was a simple wooden one with a handle. No lock, Suriyen frowned, before she prodded the door handle gently with her staff.
Something small and spring-mounted jabbed out of the door frame and buried itself in the wood of her staff and got stuck; a tiny blade shaped like a cat’s claw, with some black ichor substance upon it.
Suriyen swore, holding the staff in place as she carefully edged her hand around to the handle to pull it, opening the door. With a slight creak and a splintering noise, the claw trap was pulled from the door frame still embedded in her staff, and the door was opened.
“Sweet ancestors…” she heard Vharn breathe behind her. So concentrated had she been on the trap that she hadn’t spared a glance inside, but now she did so, and she could only echo her captor’s statements.
The room was filled with gold. But it wasn’t in any form that the war chief beside her could easily carry away, Suriyen saw. There was a table, inlaid with gold. There were four chairs, also inlaid with gold. There were long cloth-of-gold drapes hanging over the dark walls. There was a large candelabra sitting on the table, beside plates and dishes and cups – all, similarly, gold.
“There must be thousands in here! Tens of thousands! A king’s ransom!” Vharn capered on his feet, despite his age or his recent wound.
What were you doing with it all? Suriyen wondered, taking a hesitant step inside to the table, where there sat next to the gold plates and cups perhaps the only thing that wasn’t made of gold in this place. A large leather-bound ledger. Idly, she flicked it open halfway through, to see tables and lists of names and accounts, with money added or deducted.
Prince Carlotta… 765 gold pieces, Efusian the Guildmaster… 500 gold pieces, two Avantis Rugs… and so on it went.
These are debts owed, and money lent, Suriyen thought, raising her head back to the room.
“Perhaps this place is a cities’ ransom,” Suriyen muttered. Was that what you were doing, Maaritz? Amassing wealth enough so that you could pay off Fuldoon’s enemies? Or bribe the Dal Grehb himself?
Everyone knew that the greatest trading city in the world had plenty of enemies. You don’t become wealthy and successful without the other city-states and northern kingdoms looking jealously at your walls, after all. She couldn’t stop thinking about her old colleague Maaritz, working quietly in here to send money to far off parts, or to offer trade deals in return for favor or coin, and keeping the trading city alive each dangerous season.
“Either way – it’s ours now, girlie!” Vharn cackled, struggling to pick up one of the gold dishes (it must be solid gold, to be so heavy) and slipping it into his backpack. On second thoughts, he picked up one of the cups as well, but put this in a side pocket instead of his backpack.
A little something for your own coffers, Chief Vharn? thought Suriyen.
“This will be enough to get us a promotion, for sure,” Chief Vharn crowed, examining the rest of the material. Suriyen struggled to think just what position a man who was already a chief could get promoted to, before deciding that she didn’t care. Would this be enough to get Dal Grehb all the way out here? She turned back to the door.
“There are still more levels,” she said. And I hope that there will be something up there that will bring the Dal like a bee to honey,
she scowled.
33
The central room of the next floor up was again fronted by a simple wooden door – but this one had a lock. Suriyen paused, looking at Vharn beside her, who rolled his eyes.
“What do you want me to do about it?” he said. She noted that he hadn’t called her ‘slave’ or ‘girl’ – so maybe finding all of that gold has put him into a better mood.
“Axe?” She held out a hand.
“Ha. I’m not likely to give you a weapon now, am I? Now come on, move out of the way.” He waved her up a few steps, checking that she was out of range with her staff if she wanted to strike him (she wasn’t, Suriyen was sure, but still the warrior woman just looked down at her feet. Let him think that I’m cowed and helpless, she thought). He prodded the door with the axe gingerly, expecting another trap like the first.
Nothing. More’s the pity, Suriyen thought.
Another series of blows on the hinges managed to crack the wood, and Vharn hastily stepped out of the way. “Use the stick to open the rest. I don’t want to just stand here and get a mouth full of arrows, thank you very much.”
“Great. Thanks,” she noted, and got to work pounding at the door.
This time, the trap that activated as soon as the door broke its footing was a wave of heat and light.
Suriyen dropped to the floor as a ball of flame, smelling acrid and heavy, rolled over her, singeing her hair and causing her hands to scream in pain. “Heaven’s damn it!” she spat, rubbing at her now raw and red hands.
There had been some sort of fireball emitted from the doorframe, and as Vharn laughed and Suriyen warily stood up once more she saw its source. Metal boxes had dropped some sort of liquid, and the door had a steel and flint located along its top inner jamb of wood, igniting it. Suriyen guessed that by using the proper key it would have disabled the mechanism, not that it did her any good.
The room on the other side was dark, again windowless, and this time stacked to the ceiling with books, scrolls, and ledgers. Ladders went up to higher platforms of shelves, and Suriyen realized that it must occupy several floors of the tower. We must be getting near the top, she thought as she looked around.
Suriyen became sure that this was the real treasure that Maaritz was guarding, as she thumped the floor tiles before walking cautiously into every new book-lined avenue.
“Books? Paper? Come on – who cares about all of that?” Vharn snarled, waiting by the doorway.
Suriyen saw titles embossed on some of the book spines, ranging from simple letters A, B, C, and so on – to names. Thranes. Castil, Vitillo, Phremes…
“Your Dal Grehb will care, if he has any sense,” Suriyen muttered, but turned away from the room all the same.
“What did you say?” Vharn sneered at her.
The woman paused, looking at him hard for a moment before answering. “These are records from one of the most well-informed and well-respected Councilors of the city. Who knows how much lore he has amassed here? How many details that might be useful to an ambitious man like Dal Grehb?”
And the witch Aisa Desai, as well, Suriyen thought with an instantaneous sense of horror. What have I done? The wall-captain knew that if that witch got her claws into this place – then she could probably do more damage than even Dal Grehb could do.
She’s a clever one, Suriyen remembered as Vharn looked at the room speculatively. Suriyen had seen evidence of demon summoning in her quarters when she was first captured. Was the witch in league with the devils that plagued the world now? What greater cruelties could they perpetrate if they had access to all of Maaritz’s lore?
I will have to come back and destroy this place, if it gets to it, Suriyen decided, finding the notion distasteful – but unsure as to what else that she could do.
“It’s getting late, and I need my sleep, so let’s finish this now, shall we?” Vharn nodded back up the stairs for Suriyen to continue their trek.
The stairs curled around the tower several times before finally coming to the last room. This time a door was set across their path on its own interior landing. And it was open.
Suriyen paused, her heart hammering inside her chest. Why would Maaritz leave it unlocked? Unguarded? Unless, of course – he had no time to secure it before he met his end. She cautiously thumped the landing stone, the door, the doorframe, and the flagstones on the other side of the threshold as well. Nothing. No traps at all.
Instead, her approach was met by the sound of rustling in the darkness, and the warm smell of dirt, and life.
Careful, Suri… she counseled herself as she slid into the odd shaped room, to see that they were not alone.
The last tower room occupied the roof of the building and held large shuttered windows – all of which were closed but let in dregs of bluish moonlight. She could hear the distant slap of ropes on wood, and water against the burnt-out docks. One entire wall was fitted with cabinets between the shuttered windows, and each cabinet held wire-fronted boxes, inside of which sat collared doves, disturbed and rustling in their sleep.
His messenger birds… she thought, feeling a lurch in her heart as she saw the adjacent table with its careful collection of feed grains, water, bandages and even tiny splints as her friend must have taken care of them.
“They must be starving.” She moved to the table to start pouring seeds into the grain trays.
“What in the names of hell are you doing now?” The chief behind her laughed, and hit the nearest cage cruelly, causing its denizen to hoot and call in alarm. “At least we have dinner for tonight, ha!” the man said, looking around. “What’s that?”
Suriyen finished her task and turned to see what Vharn was pointing at amidst the jumble.
Unlike the exact professionalism of the rooms below, this place was a mess of material and tools. Suriyen saw tables and shelves stacked with bottles and tools, scrolls next to leather aprons. This must have been his workroom. There were a number of stranger items here as well, beside the dismantled crossbows and the attempts at mechanism. A brass scrying bowl sat on a pedestal, a mirror with glass that was oddly opaque and distorted, a couple of small telescopes pointing out of the shutters – next to a far larger device, the same one that Vharn had been pointing at.
It was hidden by a sheet of waxed cloth, and Suriyen pulled at it gingerly to reveal what looked a little like a cross between a telescope and a canon.
It was tubular, but with several tubes of metal around the central hub of metal, and at its back was a set of wheels attached to some sort of chamber compartment. Opening it suspiciously, Suriyen smelled the iron and sulphurous tang of gunpowder.
“I uh, I don’t know…” she said, honestly. Although she had an idea.
“You don’t, huh? Well I do. Look!” Vharn nudged the boxes of ammunition at the foot of the strange weapon: boxes with lots of small iron balls, each one no bigger than his fist, and seemingly cast of two halves, with a wax stopper. “I reckon that they go into there…” he tapped at the smaller barrel of tubes that rotated around the outside. “And they all come out of the end there,” he tapped at the extended, telescope-like tapering barrel. “Yeah, one after the other, like seeds from a plant.”
“Rotating shot?” Suriyen saw in awe. As a warrior who had served in several warbands and armies before, she was familiar with the idea – although no one had ever managed to design one that worked. A cannon that could fire multiple instances of cannon balls, one after the other in quick succession without the tiresome time taken to reload the repack after each shot. She looked again at the rear of the machine, seeing handles, and a swivel mechanism that meant that the operator could move it as it was firing.
Looks like Maaritz worked out how to make one – but will it work? She knew that if anyone was clever enough to make such a machine work, then it was probably him.
“But where does it point to?” She reached beyond the barrel to push open the wide window shutters and saw the expanse of the docks below.
“It’s a ship k
iller,” Vharn said with apparent relish. “Now this is something that Dal Grehb will want to know about!” He clapped his hands and started shuffling tables out of the way. “I’m going to kip down here for a bit. Where do you want to be tied up, girlie?”
Pig, she thought, but still held her hands out as he looped the rope from her collar around her wrists and tied it securely to the machine-cannon’s legs. She wasn’t comfortable, but she had a clear view of the blackened harbor, and the moon light glinting silver on the waters outside.
And the ships. Suriyen froze in her position as Vharn was busy tying her hands. There were dark shapes that she had taken for wreckages and shadows of the half-demolished dock, but now she saw that they were in fact moving. Who were they? Why are they here? she thought uneasily as the dark shadows outside suddenly made sense to her.
Rescuers? The Kingdom of Thrane? Suriyen wondered. She had a terrible feeling. My plans to lure Dal Greb will be ruined. He won’t come if the city is under attack. She breathed quickly through her nose. What should she do? But wasn’t it a chance for her to get rescued? But then what – sneak through the camps on her own to try and kill Dal Grehb and his witch?
“There. Nice and cozy now, so you can’t get any nasty little thoughts into your head of getting up in the middle of the night and bashing me over the head with something now, can you?” Vharn straightened up, leaning to crack his back as Suriyen tried to take her eyes off the dark shapes out in the harbor.
But Vharn had already turned to lean against the window, spitting outside to the cobbles far below. Don’t see them, don’t see them… Suriyen prayed desperately. She needed more time to work out who they were and what they wanted.
“What the…?” Too late. Vharn stood up sharply, peering at the night time visage until his eyes, too, deciphered the sight.
There were black shapes cutting through the water towards the docks. Black shapes that could only be boats – but none of them had lights on their deck or gleaming from windows. There were many of them, of all different sizes; large shadows that could only be approaching galleons, smaller ships that must be long boats or rowboats, and they were heading straight into Fuldoon.