Requiem for the Sun (54 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Haydon

BOOK: Requiem for the Sun
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55
THE CAULDRON
E
sten waited in the shadows impatiently, watching with grudging admiration the precision with which the semi-human beasts that were the Bolg held a watch. There was no perfunctory movement, no yawning or evidence that the ritual was rote. The king's guards took their duty seriously.
All the better.
She would have preferred to slip in and slit their throats but she had taken so long and spent to much time setting the trap that she didn't dare tip her hand now.
So she waited.
It had required painstaking hours to covertly search the general vicinity of
the corridor whose general location she had knobbed out of Shaene. But in the end, it was the Bolg king's meticulous security that gave her the clue she needed. His inner sanctum must lie beyond this most guarded of intersections.
Somewhere in the distance she could hear an uproar, a sound of muster, or something like it, rumbling through the mountain, but the guards did not deviate in their watch. Upon consideration of it, she realized that the noise had been building for the better part of the day, like preparations in the face of a coming storm. This deep inside the mountain, however, little impact could be felt.
In truth
, she mused, hearing the three-quarter-hour bells sound,
it probably
is
overkill to trap the king's bedchamber
. The tower had been brilliantly constructed, the subterfuge of the snare was so subtle, so unexpected, that she fully expected to blow the top off of Gurgus, crumbling the rest of the peak in upon itself, burying the king and all the Bolg he allowed to be present at the inauguration of the tower with it.
But it never hurt to have a backup plan. And she wanted to be certain that the Bolg king paid for his incursion into her guild, for the loss of her tunnel into the artery below Entudenin.
She wanted him to suffer horribly before he died. If her timing was good, he would be enjoying the full effects of the exposure before he was crushed to death.
The last communique she had sent to Dranth had included the general directions she had knobbed out of Shaene. The memory of riding his shapeless body, his pathetic wheezing beneath her, gave her a chill of disgust that she shook off, wanting to be ready when the watch changed. As long as the idiot's information was good, the Raven's Guild would have detailed maps and schematics to the most sensitive areas of the inner Teeth, she knew, along with the intelligence she had gathered and passed along previously.
Her opportunity presented itself just as the soldiers crossed in front of the triple pass, a juncture where three major tunnels met in the dark basalt walls of the inner sanctum. Esten had been timing the dead space, the moments in between when one shift of soldiers had left and the next arrived; it was never more than a matter of seconds. When she saw it, she slipped around the corner of the corridor and down the left-hand hallway, blending into the shades of dim light and fuzzy darkness, running her hands along the veined walls, until she was standing before what could only be the doorway to the king's own bedchamber.
Like everything else about the king, the doorway was concealed, hidden amid the striations that marbled the stone of the walls. Esten marveled at the
masterly hiding of such a large aperture; had she not known that this was the right corridor, in a labyrinth that contained hundreds of corridors, even she, with her extensive training and experience in ferreting out the hidden, never would have found it.
That disgusting tumble was worth it after all,
she thought.
The catch that served as a handhold to the door was locked.
With the speed born of years of practice, she took her thin picks from her mouth where she carried them and set about opening the lock; it was a puzzle lock of ancient design, with an undoubtedly obscure code, but she did not need to know what it was to pick it. Instead, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small vial of quicksilver mixed with filings of lead; a drop applied to the shaft of the pick formed an impression of the inner works of the lock. With the lightest of touches, she turned the makeshift key.
The door opened silently.
Esten slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind her.
Her bright, dark eyes, raven's eyes, scanned the room.
The king's bedchamber was a surprising mix of austere decor and lush linens. The walls, the sheets, the wooden canopy over the bed draped in satin, were all in black; the marble desk, the wooden chairs, the enormous chest at the foot of the bed, everything formed of dark materials. It was a place of deep quiet; there was a sense of thick, solid softness evoked in the room, a place where someone with much on his mind could sleep restfully.
Esten smiled.
Quickly she set about searching the chamber, opening each small chest, each drawer, examining the nooks in the wardrobes and finding very little. The Bolg king might be lord of the ruins of one of the richest empires in history, but he had taken little material wealth for himself.
Methodically she continued her search, finding nothing of note, until she pulled back an area of the silk tapestry on the floor and discovered a tiny irregularity that would have been unnoticeable to any but the sensitive fingers of the mistress of a guild of professional thieves.
She ran her finger around the outline, checking for traps and finding none, then carefully sprang the locking mechanism.
A small reliquary in the slate of the floor opened, in which a rectangular box the length of two of her hands rested, swathed in a velvet covering.
Esten stared into the hole for a moment, then reached in and took the box; when she opened it, her brows drew together.
In the box was a key of a sort, a strange, curving key that looked like it was made of bone, like a large rib.
She slipped the key into an inner pocket of her shirt, closed the box, put it back in its velvet pouch, and resealed it in the reliquary. Then she went back to her search.
The chest at the foot of the king's bed gave her the greatest effort. The traps were so devious she could not wait to put some variations of them to use back home in Yarim. When she finally was able to spring the lock, she opened the lid, only to have a dank wind slap her across the face. Esten blinked in surprise; she was staring down a long passageway of rough-hewn steps. Where it led to, she had no way of fathoming.
“S
andy! Get up, you lazy sinner!”
Shaene pounded on the door again; the noise of the barracks was so ever-present that Omet had no doubt grown used to it. Why the boy insisted on bunking with the soldiers in the ascetic quarters was beyond Shaene's understanding; the ambassadorial suite to which he had been assigned was far more comfortable, though certainly not opulent. If one was to be forced to live, as a result of an ill-thought-out contract, in the land of the Firbolg, one might at least opt for the most comfortable accommodations available.
Hearing no reply again, Shaene turned to Rhur.
“Maybe he's ill,” he said the to the Bolg artisan.
Rhur grasped the door handle, expecting to find it locked; Omet was fanatical about locking his door of late, ever since Theophila came to the mountain. To his surprise, and that of Shaene, it opened easily.
The stench of illness hung in the tiny windowless room.
“Gods!” Shaene cried. “Omet?” He and Rhur hurried into the room; in two steps they were at the young man's bedside.
Omet's eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. His skin was the color of the stone walls around them, except for his cheeks, in the center of which two bright spots of fever burned, hot as the fires of the forge.
“Get a healer!” Shaene screeched, the sweat of fear springing from his skin, leaving his hands trembling. Rhur disappeared; Shaene stumbled to the bedside table and, with shaking hands, poured water from the face-washing basin atop it onto the towel that was folding neatly next to it. He hurried back to Omet's bedside and laid the wet cloth gently over the boy's forehead; the towel turned quickly warm.
Shaene clutched the hot, limp hand atop the covers and began to rotely chant the prayers he could recall from youth, from the last time he had sat vigil by a young man's beside. In the earliest days of his apprenticeship his old brother Siyeth had contracted scarlet fever, had wasted and died in his bed before Shaene's eyes; the sights and smells never left his memory.
From what he could remember of Siyeth's death, Omet looked worse. He had no comprehension of how much time was passing now. Rhur returned with Krinsel, the midwife, who was the chief of the Bolg healers, and several of her assistants; they had ministered frantically to Omet, only to see him edge closer to death.
“Come on, lad, come on,” Shaene muttered, patting the young man's forearm impotently. He turned to Krinsel, who shook her head, then to Rhur, who watched, as always, stone-faced, but with eyes that held deep worry.
Suddenly Shaene sat up straighter, as if struck.
“Rhur — the tower! We can take him to the tower!”
The Firbolg artisan's brow furrowed. “Why?”
“Do you recall the wheel? Sandy said that the tower and the wheel worked together for healing, I think.”
Rhur shook his head. “We know not how it be used, Shaene,” he said quietly in the common tongue tinged with the harsh accent of the Bolg.
“It can't come to harm, though, can it? We'll put him below the glass ceiling and set up the wheel.” Desperation rose in Shaene's voice. “We can't just stand here while he burns to death from fever!” He gestured toward the healers. “Send them to the journeymen, the apprentices, and tell them to get take the wooden cover off the dome. You and I can make a litter out of his cot, and carry him.”
Krinsel and Rhur exchanged a silent glance, then a few words in their native tongue, and finally a nod.
Shaene exhaled deeply. “All right, then.” He patted Omet's arm again. “Hold on, boy. Perhaps all your efforts are about to be repaid.”
56
E
sten stared down into the dark passageway, struggling to decide what to do.
Something of grave import must lie at the bottom of this tunnel,
she thought, patting the pocket of her shirt where the key was concealed.
There is nothing in the king's bedchamber itself that requires the level of guard he has posted, or the concealment of the door, or the traps. Any thief stealing his way into this place would be bitterly disappointed.
And yet there was a passageway hidden at the foot of the king's own bed, a sign that when he was in the mountain, he himself was the last line of its defense.
It was tempting, difficult to resist.
And yet Esten's time in the mountain had taught her that such passageways could go on for days, could misdirect, lead into other twisting hallways, designed to confuse, to cause the traveler to lose his way. It was possibly a journey for which she was not prepared. She just did not have the time to risk it.
A prickle ran over her skin, a shiver that she cursed, because it denoted a weakness in her she could not abide. The tunnel recalled the one she had been digging in Yarim beneath Entudenin, or, more accurately, her slave boys had been. While she was not averse to going to check their work, to correct their direction, there was a limit to the length of time she was comfortable remaining underground.
Living within the mountains of Ylorc had been difficult, but it was a difficulty she could abide. Esten was accustomed to back alleys, to dark buildings, to sewers beneath city streets, to the shadows in which all of her people lurked, hidden, waiting for the time to emerge, then blend quickly back into the darkness again. The tunnels, passageways, and rooms of Ylorc reminded her more of those alleys, those sewers; they had been built for men, after all, in the Cymrian era.
But this tunnel was different. If she was going to traverse it, she would need supplies and light.
She shut the chest and carefully reset the traps, meticulously following the order in which they had been originally laid.
Esten slipped out of the secret door and closed the entrance, when a great shadow appeared at the end of the hallway.
She glanced up, started, to see a giant there, a brutish man seven and a half feet tall, a cache of hilts and weapon handles jutting from a bandolier across his back. His skin was the color of old bruises; his horsehide-brown hair and beard dripped with rivulets of rainwater.
And his broad, tusked face was wreathed in a horrific scowl.
“'Oo are you?” he demanded, his thunderous voice echoing off the basalt hallway. “And what are you doing 'ere?”
Esten's mind, finely honed from years of nefarious trade and knife's-edge situations, focused quickly. She folded her arms across her chest and scowled back.
“My name is Theophila, Grunthor,” she said, taking a calculated risk that there could only be one fitting the description the Bolg king had given her. “And I am here because I
sleep
here now.”
The ferocious anger melted into a look of shock that resolved into mere surprise, dimming finally into embarrassment.
“Oi do beg yer pardon, miss,” the giant Sergeant said sheepishly, running
an enormous paw through his dripping hair. “'Is Majesty did mention you to me, o' course. Oi just didn't realize you were, er —”
“Knobbing him?” she said playfully, relaxing her stance visibly so as to mask the motion of drawing her blade. “Good. He promised to be discreet.”
Grunthor cleared his throat awkwardly.
“My apologies again,” he mumbled, then, seeing no anger or retribution in her eyes, broke into a wide grin. “‘Is Majesty asked me ta make certain you got everythin' you need. What say you we go to the mess hall and have some grub? We can get ta know each other better.” He gestured down the feeder tunnel toward the soldiers' dining hall.
In return he received a glittering smile.
“That would be nice,” she said simply, walking to meet him as he turned away from the hall toward the feeder tunnel. She manipulated the blade into her palm.
Kidney,
she decided.
Such a large target, and he's giving me a clean shot at it.
She increased her speed infinitesimally, holding her blade point-down, raising it just as she moved within range to strike, watching the movement of his soft leather jerkin over the vulnerable area of his back.
Her eyes narrowed slightly as she concentrated, aiming her blow between the moving muscles of his back.
Which continued to shift more than she expected as Grunthor swung fully around with the hand-and-a-half sword she had never seen him draw, separating her head cleanly from her shoulders with one beautiful, fluid motion.
Faster than anyone of that bulk should ever have been able to move.
Esten's dark, bright eyes had just enough time to blink open in shock before her head fell away from her shoulders; her body pitched forward on the ground, shuddering, while the head tumbled end over end, dousing the black walls with spurting blood, to land, spinning, on the floor just past the Bolg king's door.
The Sergeant-Major crouched down beside the body. He rolled it over onto its back; as he did, the blade fell from her lifeless fingers. Grunthor picked it up and shook his head, clucking in mock disapproval.
“Lesson One,” he intoned in his drill instructor voice, “when you're in 'and-to-'and combat, always go for
distance.”
He held up the slender knife beside his sword. “No matter what they tell ya, size
does
matter.”
He searched the headless body quickly, uncovering several phials and odd coins, and, hidden in the inner pocket of her shirt, the key that had been the rib of an Earthchild. The amusement on his face drained away as he rose and strode down the hall to where the head lay.
He picked it up by the hair and stared into the wide eyes.
“Sorry, miss, but I knew you just weren't ‘is type,” he said solemnly. “'Is Majesty tends ta favor a woman that can keep 'er 'ead about her in a crisis.”
And only one alive at the moment, he thought. The king would never 'ave compromised the Sleeping Child for you, darlin'
.
As the head tilted to the side, a pair of thin silver picks fell from the flaccid mouth.
Grunthor winced in mock dismay.
“My, you would have been a real pleasure in sack, wouldn't ya? Makes my privates shudder ta think about it.”
He jogged back up the hall and dropped the woman's head onto her belly, then summoned the guards on duty down the hall.
“Wrap this thing up in a cloak and take it to the armory,” he ordered. “Be careful; she's a real treasure trove of all sorts of 'idden things, some of which might kill ya. Carry 'er by the cloak. And get a new quartet of guards on duty.”
He waited until the soldiers had removed the body before opening the door to the king's chambers.
As he did, the floor and walls around him rocked with the reverberations of a violent explosion.
Instinctively Grunthor threw his arms up to shield his head, as debris and sand rained down on him. His head jerked in the direction of the sound, then turned back to the doorway.
Faced with the horrific choice of intervening at the Loritorium or the Cauldron, he pulled open the secret entrance and made his way in haste down into the cavern of the Sleeping Child.

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