Sands of Memory

by Melissa McShane

  “They’re what?” Sienne demanded. “Are they hurting him?”

  “Not yet,” Vaishant said, in a voice that said there was nothing she could do to force him to explain further. “I will try to see the room…oh, that is simple, it is the throne room. Guards, Darinikh, a few servants with…” He blinked, and the light faded. “That is all.”

  “We have to go now,” Sienne insisted. “If they’re going to torture him…they’ve had him for over an hour—”

  “We need a plan, Sienne,” Dianthe said. “If we go bursting in there, with all those guards, they’ll just capture us.”

  “I hesitate to say this, but Alaric generally comes up with our plans,” Perrin said.

  “But we’re not stupid,” Sienne said. “We can think of something.” She paced the room again. “If we could disguise ourselves…damn it, everything I can think of requires me to have my spellbook.”

  “And that’s another thing,” Dianthe said. “We need to retrieve our things, wherever they’ve been taken. I can always get another sword, but Kalanath and Ghrita—”

  “My staff was a gift from my mother,” Ghrita said. “I would prefer not to leave it.”

  “And that spellbook is priceless,” Perrin said. “Not to mention that, as you say, we stand a better chance of survival if we have it.”

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs. “There are guards coming,” Kalanath whispered. “We must attack.”

  15

  “Quick, everyone, back to where you were,” Dianthe said. “Sienne and Ghrita, beside the door. Sienne, put that light out!”

  Sienne waited for everyone to reach their positions, then stood close beside Ghrita and doused the light. Immediately a warmer light became visible, the faintest of glows that gradually grew stronger as the torch or lantern approached. Sienne pressed as hard into the wall as she could. The guards would see them almost immediately—unless they had a distraction. Without her spellbook, she couldn’t cast mirage or imitate, to fool the eye into believing something was there when it wasn’t or that someone looked like someone else. But she did have a small magic at her command, and while it wasn’t powerful, it might confuse the issue long enough to turn the tables in their favor.

  She concentrated, and a wispy form coalesced opposite the door, midway between Perrin and Vaishant. She couldn’t remember what Omeirans thought about ghosts, whether they were as afraid of them as the Rafellish were, but all that mattered was that the figure draw the guards fully into the room without noticing the women stationed on either side of the door. She put more detail into it, giving it Alaric’s face and size and trying not to think about the real Alaric, suffering who knew what kinds of torture. It grew more solid as the light brightened, standing with its arms crossed over its chest, the perfect image of the man sculpted out of mist.

  The light went abruptly brighter as the unseen guards rounded the last corner. Sienne let out the breath she’d been holding. A guard dressed in dark robes came through the door. “What is that?” he exclaimed, stopping a few feet inside the door.

  Alaric’s image stretched, and his arm pointed at the guard. “You,” it said in hollow tones. It sounded nothing like Alaric, because her small magic wasn’t capable of that, but it still chilled her.

  The guard drew his curved sword. Another guard, this one holding a torch, followed him into the room. Neither noticed the women, nor that none of the prisoners were bound. The first guard approached the ghostly form as a third man entered the dungeon. Sienne looked at Kalanath, who nodded. That was all the guards there were. She nudged Ghrita. Ghrita glanced at her, and she gestured, hoping Ghrita would interpret it as she meant it, to attack. The third guard reached for his sword, and Ghrita detached herself silently from the wall and took him from behind.

  Kalanath leaped for the torch bearer. Sienne made Alaric’s image dart forward, enveloping the first guard in white mist. The man screamed and flailed with his sword. Perrin called out an invocation, and pearly light flared around his left arm. He slid into place across from the first guard, bringing up the shield to block the flailing blow and shove the man back. Vaishant held up a hand, palm first, and took two steps toward the guard. The man flung his head back and screamed, then dropped.

  Ghrita had her man on the ground. “Take his sword,” she panted, and Sienne snatched it from its sheath, forcing Ghrita to lean back to avoid being slashed. “More careful?” she said, and Sienne flushed. Kalanath shoved the torch bearer against the wall, making him drop the torch. Dianthe retrieved it before it could go out. Then Vaishant was there, his palm upraised, and the torch bearer screamed like the first guard and sagged unconscious in Kalanath’s hands.

  Kalanath dropped the man, not gently, and said, “What was that?”

  “It is…energy, shaped and directed through the mind,” Vaishant said. “Like Sienne’s shout, as she described it.”

  “I have wielded such power myself before,” Perrin said. “It is effective.”

  Vaishant nodded and turned to where Ghrita crouched, pinning the third guard to the ground. “Don’t,” she said when Vaishant raised his hand again. “This man wants to talk to us. Where are our belongings?” she asked in Meiric.

  The man sneered at her. Ghrita smiled. “Dianthe, bring that torch over here,” she said. “Sienne, can you make the fire move?”

  “A little, with a magic breeze,” Sienne said. “You want—”

  “Yes,” Ghrita said.

  Dianthe held the torch close to the man’s head. He flinched, his eyes flicking between the fire and Ghrita’s face. With the firelight falling on her, Ghrita looked demonic. “Where are our belongings?” she repeated.

  “You’re prisoners. I won’t help you,” the man said. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.

  “We’re not prisoners any longer. Talk, and this one won’t burn your face off,” Ghrita said. Sienne concentrated and raised a little breeze just where the torch was, gesturing in what she hoped looked like a mystical way

  . The fire went mad, with licking tongues of flame darting in every direction. They looked like tiny arms, reaching for the man. He tried to break Ghrita’s hold, but succeeded only in jerking away from the torch. Sienne made the torch burn higher. One of the tongues of flame brushed the guard’s forehead, and he screamed, though it couldn’t have burned him much.

  “The guard post! Across from the dungeon!” he shouted. “Stop, please, stop!”

  Ghrita nodded. Vaishant held his hand in front of the man’s face. The guard convulsed, and fell unconscious. “A choke hold is not as elegant,” Ghrita said. “Now what?”

  “Disguises,” Sienne said. “We’ll pretend to be guards, or at least some of us will. The rest of us will be captives, summoned to the throne room.”

  “Sienne, that is too risky,” Perrin said. “We do not know if these guards have recognition signals, or if they are all known to each other. We may be attacked before we can reach the throne room.”

  “I don’t think we have a better idea,” Sienne said. “And we can’t afford to wait for another opportunity to drop into our laps. Alaric…” She didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

  “It will work,” Dianthe said. “It has to.” She jammed the torch into a bracket on the wall, then bent and began pulling the black robes off the torch bearer. “Let’s move quickly. They could wake at any moment.”

  Sienne helped Ghrita disrobe her fallen victim. “Good work,” she said.

  “It is what I am trained for,” Ghrita said. “That, and avoiding being decapitated by my companion.”

  Sienne flushed again. “Sorry.”

  Ghrita shrugged. “You think fast,” she said. “This plan might actually work. What are we going to do when we reach the throne room?”

  She’d addressed Sienne, but Dianthe answered, “Everyone should stay back until Sienne casts her spell to disable as many people as possible. We’ll almost certainly be outnumbered, so we want to even the odds. Then we attack. If Alaric is still chained,
I’ll free him.”

  “We have to get Darinikh’s ring away from him, and destroy it,” Sienne said. “I promised Jenani I’d free it—the creature I mentioned. Maybe it can fight on our side once it’s freed. At the very least, it will mean Darinikh can’t use its magic against us. I was thinking, if I can hit him with grease, and then use invisible fingers to grab the ring—”

  “That could work,” Dianthe said. “Damn it, I wish Alaric were here. I’m sure there are all sorts of details we haven’t thought of.”

  “We still have not achieved our original goal,” Perrin said. “How are we to access the temple if we are chased by Darinikh’s guards? Because I cannot believe we will be allowed to do whatever we wish simply because we have defeated him. And defeating him is still not certain.”

  “Let’s focus on getting Alaric and the ring,” Dianthe said. “Then we’ll make a new plan. Alaric always says there’s no point in planning too far ahead when other people are involved.” She held out a handful of dark cloth to Vaishant. “The fake guards need to speak Meiric for this to work.”

  “I shouldn’t be disguised,” Ghrita said. “We haven’t seen any female guards, and based on Darinikh’s attitude toward women, I think I would look suspicious.”

  “Kalanath and Vaishant, then,” Dianthe said, “and we’ll just have to take our chances at not being bound, because the only manacles are the ones attached to the wall.”

  They waited for Kalanath and Vaishant to dress in the guards’ robes. In identical clothes, frowning as they buckled on the curved swords, they looked so much alike it was impossible not to see them as father and son. Vaishant, like Manisha, looked far too young to have a son Kalanath’s age, which would work to their advantage now. He still looked a little too old to be a guard, but a casual observer wouldn’t notice anything strange.

  They trooped up the stairs, Kalanath in the lead, Dianthe bearing the torch in the middle of their group. At the top, Kalanath peered out into the hallway. “No one,” he said, and the rest hurried out.

  Perrin stopped them before they could go farther. “I think,” he said, “we should take precautions,” and removed a blessing from the riffle of papers. He pressed it flat against the dungeon door and muttered an invocation. A warm light like melted butter welled up in the grain of the door, outlining the metal bands and hinges. The next moment, it vanished as if soaked up by the wood. “That will prevent them opening it for an hour or so,” Perrin said. “Now, which is the guard post?”

  There was another door, not immediately opposite the dungeon, but across the way and to the right some fifteen feet. It was the only door in that wall. Kalanath gestured for them to stand back out of sight and opened the door. “The rakhyanam wants the prisoners’ belongings,” Sienne heard him say.

  “I have no orders,” an unseen man said.

  “I’m giving you your orders now,” Kalanath said. “Hurry up. You know what he’s like when he gets tired of waiting.”

  There was a pause. “I don’t recognize you,” the man said. “Who are you?”

  Kalanath stepped fully into the guard post, letting the door swing shut behind him. Sienne and Dianthe exchanged helpless glances. If he needed help…but if he succeeded in bluffing the man, would their intervention ruin his plan? And what if there was more than one man?

  Ghrita let out an exasperated sigh and flung open the door. Sienne crowded after her. Kalanath was lowering the unconscious guard to the floor. “Find our things,” he said, sounding not at all breathless.

  The guard post was practically empty. There were two tall stools next to a table where the remnants of the guard’s meal lay, reminding Sienne that it was nearly suppertime. She had no appetite, though the food smelled unexpectedly delicious. A couple of chests lay against the back wall, along with a weapons rack half-full of curved swords. Alaric’s greatsword dwarfed its neighbors. The thought of him without it…he wasn’t exactly helpless, but it was so much a part of him Sienne’s heart ached again.

  Kalanath took his staff from where it leaned against the wall near the rack and examined it closely. “I cannot carry this and look like a guard,” he said.

  “Hold it crosswise, like a baby,” Sienne suggested. “And Vaishant can carry the others the same way. Then it will look like a burden and not like a weapon.”

  “We just need a few seconds’ distraction, not to fool anyone long-term,” Dianthe said.

  “Sienne,” Perrin said, “your spellbook is not here.”

  A chill went through her. “It has to be.”

  “Darinikh was intrigued by it,” Perrin said. “He could very well have kept it with him.”

  The chill vanished, replaced by red-hot anger—anger that this upstart nobody had enslaved an innocent magical being, that he probably meant to torture Alaric, and that he’d dared to steal her spellbook. “New plan,” she said. “You all distract Darinikh and his guards, and I find my spellbook and blast the bastard until he forgets his own name.”

  “Sounds fair,” Dianthe said. “What if he’s holding it?”

  “I will attack him,” Kalanath said. “He has magic we know not what, but a blow to the head will make him as confused as anyone.”

  “It’s not his magic, it’s Jenani’s, but that’s irrelevant so long as Darinikh is the one using it,” Sienne said.

  “I do not think I can find the throne room again,” Kalanath said.

  “I can,” Dianthe said. “Follow me.”

  Sienne wasn’t any more able to remember the path the second time. She depended on Dianthe’s guidance and her own magical inner sense of direction to know they were headed west, toward the front of the palace. They passed real guards twice, both in pairs. The first ignored them completely. The second gave the “prisoners” a sharp look, but said nothing, and Sienne breathed out in relief. Either the guards were incompetent, or didn’t care, or maybe Darinikh didn’t like his servants acting on their own initiative.

  The halls seemed dimmer than they had earlier. Sienne had lost track of time other than her general sense that evening was approaching, but if the light came from the sun, it made sense that it was diminishing now. How did they light the halls at night? She saw nothing she recognized as lights, no frosted glass bulbs like they had in Fioretti, no lanterns or torches as they had in Chirantan.

  Just as she thought this, the hall brightened considerably. It took Sienne a moment to figure out the light was coming from the walls themselves, glowing softly like sheets of thin gold wrapped around a steadily burning fire. It would be a fire that gave off no heat, though, because the hall didn’t feel any warmer. Sienne veered off to touch the wall and found it cool. The radiance outlined her fingers and turned her skin a dull, unattractive orange. She returned to her place in their little group and said, “This place is unnatural. I hate it.”

  “I will be happier when we are free of it,” Perrin said. He held his riffle of blessings loosely in one hand, ready for use. Vaishant, immediately behind him, carried his armload of weapons as if they were a bundle of sticks, but Sienne noticed Ghrita’s staff was topmost and his other hand gripped it in readiness to hand it off to the woman, who walked nearby. Sienne felt naked and awkward without the comforting weight of her spellbook on her shoulder. If they were lucky, it would be sitting unattended all by itself in a place where she could whisk it to her side. She decided not to count on luck.

  Dianthe led them to a stair, narrow and without a rail, that went up one wall to an open doorway at the top. Sienne finally recognized where they were: one of the four doorways in the throne room, between the throne and the grand entrance. Dianthe gestured to the others to hang back while she ascended silently to the landing and pressed herself against the door frame, peering inside. Sienne, immediately behind her, saw her eyes widen. Then Dianthe’s face went so still it frightened Sienne. She turned and gestured to the others to join her.

  Sienne caught only a glimpse of the throne room, and the barest sight of a handful of guards gathered aroun
d something, before Dianthe hustled her behind her. “Darinikh is holding the spellbook,” she whispered. “Alaric is facing him, and he’s surrounded by guards. He’s unbound, but I saw guards with whips and I think it’s just a matter of time before they use them on him.”

  “I will attack Darinikh,” Kalanath said. “Ghrita and Dianthe, do what you can to free Alaric. Sienne, stay with me. Vaishant and Perrin—”

  “Are there more guards than those surrounding Alaric?” Perrin asked.

  Dianthe nodded. “All around the edges of the room. An honor guard near the great door and others beside the throne.”

  Perrin and Vaishant exchanged glances. “We can shield the room to keep those guards away,” Vaishant said. “It is a small thing only.”

  “A small thing that might make the difference between success and failure,” Dianthe said. “Let’s go before I figure out this is a stupid plan.”

  Sienne took up a position behind Kalanath, with Dianthe behind her and Perrin after that. Ghrita stayed close to Vaishant, who brought up the rear. Kalanath quickly checked to see that they were ready, then walked forward into the room.

  “So you insist—what is this?” Darinikh said, turning his attention from Alaric. Sienne studied Alaric with avid eyes. He looked about two seconds from erupting into violence, but bore no marks of torture. It would have relieved her mind if she hadn’t been so worried about the success of their tattered, probably stupid plan.

  Alaric saw her and his eyes went wide. He shifted his weight, preparing to throw a punch.

  “We have brought the prisoners as ordered,” Kalanath said.

  Darinikh took a step toward them. “I didn’t order any such thing.”

  Alaric roared and swung a heavy fist at the nearest guard, who dropped like a sack of rocks. “Now!” Kalanath shouted, and spun his staff into a fighting position. Ghrita snatched her staff from Vaishant seconds before Dianthe retrieved her sword. A pearly gray shield dome went up all around them, cutting off half the guards from their rakhyanam. Kalanath ran at Darinikh, and Sienne sped after him. All her attention was on the book he held tucked under one arm.