Spy, Spy Again

by Mercedes Lackey

  “You have allies,” the afrinn whispered. He gestured at the window. “Out there. I sensed someone using Mage Sight to look upon us. If there is some way you can communicate with them without alerting your foes here . . .”

  Not daring to hope, Sira jumped to her feet and ran to the window, cupping her hands around her mouth and uttering the quiet call of the cactus owl.

  She waited, then gave it again.

  And this time, she was answered! And not merely “answered,” but answered with the peculiar lilt at the end of the call that told her someone in her immediate family was out there! Her heart raced. She had help out there! She just might make it through this!

  She responded, this time with the flocking whistle of the top-knot quail, the one that the females would call to summon her chicks. She was asking whoever it was “how many of you are there?”

  Three peeps came back. So there were three! Her heart rose further, until she almost felt intoxicated. Now there was real hope!

  She replied with the warning call of the same quail, telling whoever was there to stay where they were until her signal—which in this case was going to be her, climbing down the side of the tower. At least, that was what she thought it was going to be . . . she turned to Eakkashet. “Do we have a plan?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “I do not,” he admitted.

  She thought quickly. “You and—” she had to think a moment to remember the Stone Man’s name “—Borkase go down into the prison and wreak as much havoc as you can. You go to the left at the base of the tower, and Borkase, you go to the right. Anything and anyone that can be smashed and burned should be. When you meet, I should be out of the prison and running.”

  The Stone Man nodded.

  “We don’t particularly enjoy killing . . .” Eakkashet replied plaintively.

  “Well, every one of these bastards has the blood of plenty of innocent children on his hands, one way or another,” she retorted, and she grimly detailed how the Karsites sought out children with Mind-magic and burned them alive, did the same to anyone they considered a heretic, and enforced their cruel regime with demons. The four afrinns listened silently until she was finished.

  “And every one of these wretches that you eliminate means one that won’t be able to go after us,” she concluded.

  “You make a good argument.” The afrinn sighed, then (visibly) brightened. “But if we just hurt them too much to chase you, then we not only eliminate that danger, we also stop those who will have to look after them from pursuing you as well!”

  Personally, Sira was fairly dubious that any of the Karsite guards were likely to care about anyone other than themselves . . .

  But I’m prejudiced. And they’re soldiers. Logically, they should have some sort of bond that keeps them from abandoning each other every time they fight something. And I’ve seen them drag off their injured or dead comrades. So . . . maybe he’s right.

  “All right,” she agreed. And then got a grim sort of satisfaction out of the fact that, if Borkase and Eakkashet actually did hurt the Karsites enough to put them out of the action, that would certainly mean broken bones and hideous burns, and the Karsites might well wish they were dead before it was all over. “If you see two men in robes, though, those two are certainly directly responsible for the deaths of children. They’re priests, and absolutely no one is going to weep if they are dead.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind,” said the fire afrinn.

  Now she looked at the other two. “Can you stay with me? With us? Are you willing to help us escape this miserable land?” she asked.

  They both nodded. She sighed, relieved. The illusion-creating ability of the air afrinn was likely to come in handy . . . and as for the water afrinn, they were going into the desert. Whoever was out there waiting for her certainly had food provisions but probably not much water. She had nothing but the dried beef and her water bottle from her kit. Food, they could do without for quite some time. But water? No. And it would be foolhardy to try to hunt for it in a near-desert while running for safety. But the water afrinn would solve that problem.

  “Thank you,” she told them, and she turned back to Eakkashet. “What about you two?” she asked. “ Can you catch up with me?”

  The Stone Man regretfully shook his head. “Tooooo sloooooow,” he said.

  “And Borkase would just make a very visible thing to follow, so he would lead the enemy right to you. Well, I am not too slow, and I can keep them from noticing me, so I will certainly go with you.” Eakkashet was silent for a moment. “Borkase, when I leave this place with the Sleepgiver, see if you can contact the other three afrinns she released and send them after us. Or if they cannot find us, ask them to set upon any of these Karsites they think are pursuing us.”

  The Stone Man nodded. “Caaaan’t prooomiisssssse.”

  “We know that,” Eakkashet said soothingly. “Just try. And now . . . how do you propose to make a hole in this wall?” He pointed to the one with the window that Sira had just called out of.

  Borkase got ponderously to his feet and approached the window. He studied it for so long that Sira began to fear this was all going to be for nothing, that the wall was so enchanted that not even an afrinn could get through it.

  But then the afrinn turned slightly and put both “hands” on the wall next to the window.

  And then . . . just stood there.

  The light outside strengthened. Sira’s heart pounded, and her throat closed with anxiety. She wanted to weep. Nothing was happening! The afrinn couldn’t get through it! All this was for nothing!

  But then she noticed something strange.

  Most of the afrinn was made of sand-colored “boulders,” with some ochre and rust-colored streaks through them. But now—the “hands” were gray.

  Gray, like the stone of the walls.

  They hadn’t been that color before.

  And as she watched, she saw that gray color creep up the “hands” to the “wrists.”

  And the “hands” sunk deeper into the walls.

  The afrinn was absorbing the stone of the walls into itself!

  So she kept her impatience to herself, until the afrinn was up to the “elbows” in the wall; then he slowly withdrew, leaving behind a hole roughly shaped like an hourglass on its side with a very fat middle. It was, if Sira was any judge, just big enough for her to squirm through, carrying her gear.

  They must have enchanted just the window and the stone around it, not the wall itself. That was smart—much as Sira hated these Karsites, she had to admire them for that. Enchanting the entire tower would have been ruinously hard on their Mages, but if they hadn’t done something, any prisoner with magic abilities would make short work of the bars on the windows or the stone into which they had been set. So they concentrated on fortifying the barred window, because not one prisoner in a hundred would have thought of going through the wall rather than the window. Well, she hadn’t! And neither had the first earth afrinn she had released.

  The Stone Man admired his handiwork for a moment, uttering that grating stone-on-stone sound that passed for a laugh, then moved out of the way. Sira passed her leather-strap “rope” with the helm fastened to the end through the bars of the window nearest the hole, then reached out through the hole and was just able to catch the rope in one hand and bring it back into the cell. The helm would anchor the rope in place so she could climb down it. If it was strong enough to stave off the blows of an ax or a warhammer it was certainly strong enough to hold her weight.

  “Are we ready?” Eakkashet asked.

  “Just about,” she replied. Thanks to her preparations of the night before, it was a matter of moments to get her belongings slung on her back and tied down, and all her weapons distributed where she could get them in a hurry. Then she nodded at Eakkashet, opened the door to the cell, then got the rope bighted around her waist and
in both hands.

  The earth and fire afrinns headed down the staircase, making as much noise as possible. It sounded like a combination of a forest fire and an avalanche. With some strange and inarticulate howling and grinding thrown in.

  When the sounds had diminished to the point where more noise was coming in through the windows than from the stairwell, she headed for the hole. The air and water afrinns darted past her and got out first.

  The hole was bigger now than it had been before; part of the wall had crumbled away after the afrinn had finished his work, and she was able to climb out with no trouble at all. She tried to ignore the prickling feeling between her shoulder blades as she rappelled down the wall, bit by bit; leather straps did not make the best of “ropes,” but at least there were the splices and rings at intervals to keep her from sliding too much.

  And then she came to the end of the leather.

  She looked down.

  Still at least two man-heights to go, down onto very rough and rocky ground.

  No help for it.

  She looked back up, concentrating on her hands and her grip, then slipped down, little by little, until she was dangling by her outstretched arms from the very end of the strap.

  Then she let go.

  * * *

  • • •

  Tory had scarcely known what to think when he saw a hole forming in the wall next to the window. How?

  Never mind that, he told himself. That’s the signal. We need to be ready.

  But Kee was not going to wait. Before Tory realized what he was up to, the Prince had already wriggled through the brush at the edge of their shelter and was eeling his way through the scrub grass, heading for the tower.

  “What does that idiot—” Ahkhan hissed in astonishment, then broke into another cascade of curses. But he made no move to join the Prince out there in the danger zone between the shelter and the base of the tower.

  Tory, however, did not hesitate. With a curse of his own, he set off on a course parallel to Kee, rather than in Kee’s wake. Using absolutely everything that Mags had taught him, he squirmed over rocks and under branches that threatened to lacerate him if he made one wrong move, trusting to his ears to tell him where the Prince was. After a while, that got a lot more difficult, since it seemed that a large riot was taking place inside the prison, and the noise penetrated to the outside.

  That actually made him feel a lot better. Those creatures, whatever they were, must be running rampant through the prison. And that would be taking every bit of attention of any human being in the place off of anything but the rampaging creatures themselves—and possibly escape routes for themselves. There weren’t any openings on this side of the prison, so they were safe from would-be escapees.

  And when he finally reached the area of rocks at the base of the tower, rather than raising himself up to look for Kee, he looked straight up at the hole in the wall—

  —just in time to see a pair of boots coming out of it, followed by the rest of the girl.

  She’s good, he thought, as she eased her way down the side of the building, using what looked like leather straps tied together somehow. Not the best material for a rope, but she was making it work. She moved swiftly and surely, and when she got to the end of her tether and found herself still an uncomfortable drop from the ground, she somehow managed the arm strength to let herself down until she was dangling from the very end of the leather by her fully extended arms—

  —and then she dropped.

  Right into Kee’s embrace.

  Tory had no idea how the Prince had gotten there that fast—Kee reached up as high as he could, caught her as she fell, and simultaneously made a leap to the side that carried them both onto a hummock of grass rather than the rocks she was heading for.

  Something pale and blue flashed by him, heading for Sira and Kee, and something pale and green slithered down the wall to join it, both things moving too fast for him to make out what they were.

  Tory just scrambled to his feet and dashed over to where he had seen all four disappear.

  He found Kee and Sira, still caught in an embrace, staring into one another’s eyes as if entranced. “Hey!” he hissed, startling both of them out of it. They let go of each other and scrambled to their feet.

  Sira looked over at the blue thing, which looked like a flying lizard sketched in the air in blue smoke. “Can you make us disappear? I mean, not totally, just make it look like the four of us are desert hares or something?” She looked back over at Tory. “You’ve got one of my kin with you, right?”

  “Ahkhan,” he replied shortly, since Kee seemed too breathless to reply.

  She looked back over at the blue thing, which was nodding. “All right,” she said. “Run.”

  16

  Sira had not expected to fall into the arms of anyone. Especially not the young man she’d been seeing in her dreams.

  The breath was knocked right out of her, and not from the fall. She found herself staring deeply into a pair of silver eyes that caught and held hers in a way that made her chest tight and her skin tingle and her thoughts turn to powder.

  It was only when someone else hissed “Hey!” that she came back to herself again, and all the peril of their situation struck home with the force of a body blow.

  But strangely, the effect of that entrancing stranger—presumably one of the three people who had come to help her—was to make her wits sharper.

  As she scrambled to her feet again, she looked to the air afrinn. “Can you make us disappear? I mean, not totally, just make it look like the four of us are desert hares or something?”

  Then, while it was thinking, she looked back over at the fellow who had startled her out of her trance. “You’ve got one of my kin with you, right?”

  “Ahkhan,” the stranger said, which was the best news she could have heard right now. She looked back over at the afrinn, who was nodding.

  “All right,” she said to both of them, and she reached out without thinking and seized the silver-eyed stranger’s hands. “Run.”

  And to make sure they did just that, she launched into a sprint. She thought she’d have to drag her stranger behind her, but no, he not only kept up with her, he waved briefly with his free hand, and the most beautiful sight in the world—her brother Ahkhan—burst out of cover and gestured for them to follow him.

  She was absolutely ready to do just that. She had no idea where she was, after all, and they did. After all, they’d gotten here, hadn’t they?

  They were heading north, at least by her reckoning. Deeper into Karse? Or did those bastards drag me farther north than I thought? Never mind. Either way, when the Karsites figured out she had escaped, they’d assume she’d be heading home, which was south. North was a much safer direction to go.

  Ahkhan lagged enough on the other side of the line of shrubs and trees that they managed to catch up with him. “We need to get as much space between us and this prison as we can, as fast as we can,” he said—needlessly, since that was obvious, but she was saving her breath for running.

  The air afrinn had changed its shape to something like a huge umbrella or bubble that managed to cover all of them. “Brilliant to see you, too, brother,” she replied. “Stay under the afrinn. He makes illusions.”

  There was not a lot of sign of the water afrinn except for a pale-green flash in the spaces between the clumps of grass ahead of them, but that was enough to tell her that he was keeping his promise and staying with them. She wondered what these strangers would make of the creatures.

  And who are they? How did Ahkhan find them? And how did he persuade them to come with him. And how did they all find me?

  She glanced over at the one whose hand she was not holding, just as he glanced over at her. There was a definite family resemblance there.

  To her family. She’d looked into features like those for far too
long not to recognize them even in a stranger.

  But he seemed much too young to be her father’s contemporary.

  He must have read the recognition and confusion in her eyes, before he looked away again and concentrated on running on the rough ground. “Cousin Tory,” he said briefly. “You’re with Kee. Not a cousin.”

  She looked back over at “Kee,” whose face lit up with a smile that left her dazzled—but still clearheaded. “Explain later,” he said, wisely. “Run now.”

  So run they did. And she still kept hold of his hand.

  * * *

  • • •

  They had to slow to a lope about halfway across the plain, but behind them smoke arose in several places from the distant gray shape that was the prison. Eakkashet was certainly keeping his promise to set things on fire.

  She finally let go of the silver-eyed stranger’s hand when they slowed; she didn’t want to, but she felt the pressure of her brother’s gaze on her. She still wasn’t sure where all these odd sensations of utter familiarity with him were coming from. It was as if she had known him all her life, and yet she’d never seen him before he’d popped up in her dreams—

  “Were you scrying me all this time?” she asked him abruptly. He didn’t seem at all confused by her question as he loped along, easily keeping up with her and Ahkhan.

  “Well, Tory and I can Farsee anyone who’s related to either of us,” he said. “I guess that’s what you’d call scrying if it was done by a Mage?” He looked up briefly, to make sure they were still under the “umbrella” of the air afrinn. “And near as the three of us can figure, you sent out a kind of powerful shock along those kinship lines the night you were attacked by the demons. Maybe because you’re a Mage. And the two of us got hit with it, maybe because of our Gift. Then your brother turned up to ask for Herald Mags’ help, and Mags told him we’d be better suited for his needs than Mags would be. So here we are, and we’ve been trying to get glimpses of what was happening to you ever since we knew it was you who sent out that shock.”