by T. H. Lain
Once out of the inn, they crossed the street without speaking and silently slipped into the late night shadows.
"You managed to sneak out of the palace," Naull said at last, her voice barely above a whisper, "but did you have a plan for getting back in?"
Maelani looked at her, one eye peeking out from the edge of her cowl. The look was hard, accusatory, but at the same time fragile and embarrassed. Naull was briefly taken aback by the strong emotions the girl radiated. It had been some time since Naull had been with another young woman, and she'd grown accustomed not only to the company of men but the quiet stoicism of Regdar and adventurers like him.
They came to the end of the street, and the brightly-lit marketplace stretched out ahead of them. The huge dome of the Wizard's Horde glittered across the street. To their left was the bridge that would take Maelani back to her island palace. The guards standing at the foot of the bridge were plainly visible, as were their razor-sharp halberds that glowed with obvious magic.
The two women stopped on the corner, and Maelani drew her cowl even closer around her face. She met Naull's eyes.
"I was," she whispered, "not informed of…I didn't know that the lord constable was married. Please forgive me."
Naull held back a laugh, but not a smile.
"We're not married," she said. "We are sharing the room, though, as we have shared many things."
"I didn't go there to…" the young lady said, then she turned away.
Naull touched her elbow and gently drew her back so they could see each others' faces again.
"Your father knows about me," she said. "If he's pressuring you, as he's pressuring Regdar, I…"
Maelani tipped her head to one side, waiting for Naull to finish. The mage just sighed and looked down.
Naull felt warm, thin fingers touch her chin. It was Maelani's turn to bring the mage's eyes back to her own.
"I love my father," she said. "He is the best man I have ever known, and he has raised me well. His example has made me more demanding of young men than some girls can be. He isn't pressuring me or Regdar but if he gives an order, I, like the lord constable, will follow it."
Naull almost flinched from the cool challenge in the young woman's eyes.
"Not all of the duke's subjects are willing to set their private lives aside for his whims," Naull said, not sure herself where the conversation was heading. "Love, as they say, conquers all."
Maelani smiled. To Naull the expression seemed sincere, friendly.
"I was surprised to see you there," Maelani said.
Naull returned her smile and replied, "And I thought you were the murderer."
"No," Maelani said, "but I get the feeling you'd have been happier if I had been."
Naull felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck bristle and she said, "Not at all, Lady Maelani. If you were the murderer, Regdar and I would have to kill you. As it stands-"
"As it stands," Maelani interrupted, "you may want to anyway."
"He loves me," Naull blurted.
The wizard felt her cheeks flare red, but she kept her eyes on Maelani's.
The girl smiled, but the expression was a bit crooked this time.
"The bridge guards can see me from here," the duke's daughter said. "I won't be bothered by this murderer again tonight."
Naull tipped her head in agreement but kept her eyes on the girl's.
"I hope you and the lord constable can find this…thing, before anyone else is hurt," Maelani said, "but I also hope you'll continue to cover for me."
"You should stay in the palace," Naull said, more quickly and harshly than she'd intended. "Until the murderer is caught, it's the only place your safety can be assured."
Maelani nodded once and said, "I guess that means we shan't ever see one another again."
Naull tried to smile, but succeeded only in grimacing.
This made Maelani smile, and she was still smiling even as Naull stood there on the corner, watching her go.
15
Regdar couldn't have been more relieved when Naull and Maelani crept out the door of the room below and he was finally able to let the watchmen back in. The surprising appearance of Maelani had thrown him more off-balance than he would have imagined. Regdar wanted to believe that Naull didn't think he and the girl had planned it. Regdar wanted to tell Naull in no uncertain terms that he had no interest in Maelani and did nothing to encourage her to sneak into his bedchamber in the middle of the night. He hadn't had the chance, though, with the duke's daughter there the whole time. Turning Maelani away could easily be seen as an insult to the duke himself, and Regdar would die before he'd do such a thing-yet he had little choice.
"Lord Constable?" the sergeant prodded, breaking Regdar from his confusing, circular ruminations.
"Yes," Regdar replied, though he hadn't heard the question.
The sergeant narrowed his eyes in confusion and was about to speak when he was interrupted by a call from below. Both Regdar and the sergeant stepped to the edge of the hole and looked down. Two watchmen stood in the room below, one looking up at his sergeant, the other down the hole in that room's floor.
"The innkeeper says this room's vacant," the watchman reported. "Should I have a look around?"
Before the sergeant could answer, Regdar said, "No. Touch nothing. I want to examine it myself, and I will have a mage examine it as well."
The watchman nodded and said, "Yes, Lord Constable."
Lord Constable, Regdar thought. Duke…"What have I gotten myself into?"
"I'm sorry, sir?" the sergeant asked.
Regdar shook off the question, barely aware that he'd muttered that last bit aloud.
"Goes all the way down!" a voice echoed up from below.
Regdar looked down again and saw another pair of watchmen in the ground floor room, two stories below.
"What's below you?" Regdar called down.
Both of them looked around, then one called up, "Looks like a pantry or something. I see sacks of rice and flour and some crates."
"There will be a door down there," Regdar told the sergeant, "but one not easily recognizable."
"A secret door?" the sergeant asked. "Are you sure?"
Regdar thought of Naull's spellcasting the day before and nodded.
"One of my men's a half-elf," the sergeant said. "He's got an eye for that sort of thing."
Regdar nodded and the sergeant slipped away to give the order.
"Nice work, anyway," one of the watchmen called up.
"What was that?" Regdar asked.
"The carving," a watchman in the room below replied, pointing at the holes in the marble floors. "It was expertly done, I can tell you that."
Regdar crouched and ran a fingertip along the smooth, rounded edge of the hole. The floors were solid marble. The place was more regally built than Regdar imagined. It must have taken magic to lay those slabs and probably to cut them so perfectly in the first place.
"I used to work with my uncle," the watchman continued from below, "carving headstones. Depressing work, and I didn't have a talent for it like he did."
"This would take time, wouldn't it?" Regdar said. "Work like this through, what, six inches or more of solid marble?"
The watchman nodded and said, "My uncle could have done it, when he was alive. It would take him the better part of a month, and you'd sure as mages mumble have been able to hear him working at it."
The floors were kept polished by the Thrush and the Jay's dedicated cleaning staff. As Regdar felt the edge of the hole, he thought he felt ripples, like ridges or depressions.
"Fingers," he said aloud.
"Sorry, lord?" the watchman below asked.
"Nothing," Regdar said. "Best get you two out of there and seal the room. I want you four to guard those rooms, two on each door. No one goes in without my orders."
The watchmen in the rooms below made various signals and grunts of understanding, and disappeared from Regdar's view.
Regdar stood bu
t his eyes roamed the edges of the hole. He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd seen something like that edge before, and his mind wandered to his mother's pottery wheel. He hadn't thought about that in a long time, but he could see her fingers press gently into the wet, turning clay.
With a sigh, Regdar drew the jagged piece of steel from his pocket and eyed it.
"Who are you?" he whispered, "and how did you work solid marble like it was soft clay?"
And why, he asked silently, were you trying to kill the duke's daughter?
16
"Damn it!" Vargussel swore. "Damn it all to the Hubs of Hell!"
He picked up a chair, one of the few functional pieces of furniture in the room, and did his best to hurl it at the wall. The chair clattered to the floor, splashing into a puddle of fetid muck.
Vargussel put his hands to his temples and pressed. His head throbbed, his jaw was taut, and he thought his eyes might pop out of his head. He heard the shield guardian stomp into the confines of his secret laboratory but Vargussel didn't turn around to look at it.
Opening his eyes, he crossed to the elaborate stand on which rested a crystal ball. He touched the medallion that hung around his neck and silently commanded the shield guardian to take its usual place against the far wall. The construct complied without question.
"Damn you," Vargussel spat into the crystal ball.
Floating in the clear, colorless glass was an image of the basement of the Thrush and the Jay. light spilled into the room from above where the shield guardian had shaped a hole in the ceiling. Vargussel had spent most of the night patting himself on the back for his genius. The shield guardian had the power to store a single spell and use it at Vargussel's command. The spell he'd equipped the construct with that night allowed it to work the solid marble of the inn's floors as if it was soft butter. The shield guardian tunneled its way straight up to the new Lord Constable's bedchamber, the element of surprise intact. The construct had been in the room for only seconds before Vargussel had stopped patting himself on the back.
How could Vargussel have known the Lord Constable wouldn't be alone?
Vargussel rested his hands on the cool surface of the crystal ball and sighed, trying to calm himself.
"You nearly killed her," he muttered to the construct standing silently behind him.
Vargussel took his hands away from the crystal when he saw two men dressed in the tabards of the city watch cautiously step into view. Their swords were drawn, and their eyes were wide with fearful expectation.
"It's long gone, you fools," the mage said to the gently glowing image.
The watchmen had no reaction. They couldn't hear him. Vargussel could see into the inn's basement from the safety of the abandoned slaughterhouse but the soldiers would never know they were being watched. Vargussel didn't bother noting details about the two watchmen. They would either find the secret door or not.
"Try to find me from there," the mage mumbled, confident that the maze of sewer tunnels between the inn and the slaughterhouse would provide adequate protection from simple city watchmen.
One of the watchmen searched the wall dangerously close to the secret door, but still he hadn't see it.
"Oh, you're good," the mage grumbled.
Vargussel noted the gently rounded point at the top of the watchman's ears, the fair complexion, the pale green eyes…a half-elf.
"Well," Vargussel said with a wry laugh, "here they co-"
The crystal ball shattered in his face. It exploded into a cloud of razor-sharp shards so quickly and abruptly, the mage only barely had time to shield his eyes.
Vargussel threw himself back and landed hard on a pile of rotting lumber. A big, mangy rat squealed loudly and scurried from the pile, jumping over one of Vargussel's legs in its hurry to get away. The mage flinched away from the rat, then kicked at it. The rodent was long gone through a hole in the tumble-down walls.
"A new pet, Vargussel?" a familiar voice rumbled through the laboratory.
With a gasp, Vargussel whirled at the sound. In the air above him the shards of crystal had coalesced into a floating cloud of glittering slivers. The cloud took the shape of a man's face, its features smooth and ill-defined, though Vargussel knew exactly who it was. The floating image turned its attention on the cowering mage, who scrambled into a deep, groveling bow.
"Great One!" the mage simpered.
"Silence, servant," the image boomed. "Listen and learn."
Vargussel clenched his teeth to keep from talking or babbling in the face of the crystal image.
"Your progress is slow," the image said.
There was a pause and Vargussel looked up, still clenching his teeth, and raised an eyebrow for some sign as to whether the image required an answer.
"I believed in you," the image said, and Vargussel bent his neck again, scraping his forehead on the ground. "You persuaded me."
There was another pause, but Vargussel didn't look up.
"Speak!" the image roared, sending a tinkling spray of broken glass showering harmlessly over the groveling mage.
"The plan is moving forward, O Great One!" Vargussel shouted back. "Trust in me. I will not fail you. The girl will be mine, then the city, then the duchy will be yours. This I swear by the Many-Headed Hydra in the Center of the-"
"Enough!"
Vargussel wrapped his arms over his head and pressed his face into the rotting floorboards.
"Time passes, Vargussel," the image said. "Time passes quickly."
Vargussel held his breath and pressed his eyes closed at the sound of the thousands of shards of crystal raining down around him. He felt nothing, though, and after a few heartbeats had passed without another word from the image, he dared open one eye and look up.
The crystal ball sat on the pedestal again, intact and unmarred. In it was an image of the half-elf watchman waving his friend forward. The watchman said something to his companion that Vargussel couldn't hear, and the other man ran back up the basement stairs.
Vargussel touched the medallion at his neck and said, "Awaken."
The shield guardian lurched forward and stood ready as Vargussel watched the half-elf silently trace the top of a finger around the hairline crack that marked his secret door.
"Start clearing out this place," Vargussel told the construct. "Should they manage to find it, I want it to be empty and useless to them."
17
"Here, Lord Constable," the half-elf said as he crossed the basement floor and indicated a blank space on the wall.
"Show me," Regdar said, squinting at the wall but seeing no sign of a door.
The half-elf traced a straight line with the tip of a finger and Regdar stepped up to the wall. He had to lean in so close to the wall to see it his nose almost touched the rough masonry. There was a crack, no wider than the width of a single hair, but as the half-elf traced its shape Regdar saw it more clearly. The crack outlined the rectangular shape of a low, wide door.
"There's no handle," Regdar said. "How do we open it?"
"I've been working on that, Lord Constable," the half-elf replied, "but I can't find a catch or trigger or anything."
Regdar nodded and stepped back to survey the wall.
"We'll need more light," he said over his shoulder to the young sergeant waiting behind him. "Have lanterns brought in, and bring as many crowbars as you can find…and a pick and shovel."
The young sergeant nodded and hurried off.
"We're going to pry it open, my lord?" the half-elf asked.
Regdar shrugged and replied, "Unless you find a better way through before those crowbars get here."
The half-elf nodded, taking the hint, and went back to his close examination of the secret door. Regdar used the time to survey the hole in the ceiling, marveling at the fact that he could see clear up to the ceiling of the room he shared with Naull.
When the sergeant returned a short time later with a few more men and the necessary tools, Regdar looked at the half-elf with one eyeb
row arched.
The half-elf shrugged, shook his head, and stepped aside. Regdar put out a hand and the sergeant set a crowbar across his palm.
"Three men with me," he said, quickly counting five watchmen in the basement, "the other two stand ready with weapons drawn."
One of the younger watchmen swallowed and drew his sword in a shaking hand.
"Do you…?" the young man asked. "Do you think it's still in there?"
Regdar found the hairline crack, set the end of his crowbar in it, and said, "No."
He heard at least three of the watchmen sigh with relief, heard a second blade drawn, and the sergeant and two of his men pressed their own crowbars into the skinny crack.
It took them several minutes just to chip away at the surrounding mortar enough to get their crowbars set. When the three watchmen nodded to Regdar in turn that they were ready, the lord constable gave the order and they pushed. Regdar didn't put all his strength into the first attempt, in case the crowbar wasn't as firmly set or the wall as well-mortared as he thought. The crowbar dug into the crack but the door didn't budge.
"Are you set well?" he asked the other three. They nodded and Regdar turned his head to address the two men with swords. "I'm sure it's long gone by now, men, but look alive just the same."
The two guards swallowed and nodded. They held their swords in a ready position, their feet set wide apart. Regdar turned back to the door and tightened his grip on the crowbar.
"On three, then," he said. "One…two…three!"
They pushed with all their might, and at first it seemed as if they were trying to move a mountain. When Regdar felt the crowbar move, he backed off, thinking it had slipped from the crack and not wanting to accidentally injure one of the other men.
"It's…opening," the sergeant grunted.
Regdar blinked at the crack. It was indeed wider than it had been when the half-elf first found it.
"Put your backs into it," he ordered, then did the same himself.
With considerable effort, the four of them worked their crowbars deeper into the space between the door and the wall. When Regdar thought it felt as if the door was going to come open, he stopped pushing and held up a hand. The others stopped and Regdar motioned for them to back up.