She’d lost track of her companions some time ago, though she’d caught a glimpse of Varo dancing with surprising competence in the arms of a handsome young man. Tanax had been in his element, comfortable with the people who’d flocked to him just as they’d flocked to Maya.
Beq had just vanished, until now. Scanning the courtyard, automatically looking for Jaedia’s stern but understanding glare, Maya caught sight of a wave of bright green hair and a pained expression, headed rapidly through one of the glass doors that led back into the palace proper.
“I… have to go.” The words forced themselves out, past a thick throat.
Elodel cocked her head. “Really?”
“Sorry. My friend…”
“Of course.” Her smile seemed genuine. “Go and help.”
Maya extracted her hand, fingers tingling from the contact, and got unsteadily to her feet. Mumbling goodbyes, she hurried through the now-shadowy courtyard, following Beq. The glass doors led into a long corridor, soft carpet over polished stone, lined with small trees in decorative pots. Beq sat a little ways in, deep in shadow, her arms wrapped around one of the planters like it was a lifeline.
“Beq?” Maya said. “Is that you?”
“Mmm-Maya?” Beq’s voice was a drawl. “’S’that you?”
Maya padded over and knelt beside her. “Are you all right?”
“Feeling…” Beq shook her head carefully. “A bit better now. A little bit.” She looked down. “Hope nobody liked this pot.”
Maya examined the planter and wrinkled her nose at the sharp smell of vomit. “How much did you drink?”
“Dunno.” Beq waved a hand vaguely. “They kept bringing them.”
“Okay.” Maya held out a hand. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“’S’okay.” Beq leaned against the pot, fiddling with the gears on her spectacles. Lenses clicked and whirred. “I’ll be fine. Go back to the party.”
“I’m about done anyway.”
“Liar. Saw you with that girl.” Beq blinked, her eyes magnified hugely. “She’s pretty.”
“I wasn’t…” Maya shook her head. “It’s fine. Really.”
She took Beq’s hand and with a little effort managed to hoist the other girl back to her feet. Maya draped Beq’s arm around her shoulders and got them staggering more or less straight. A footman, not bothering to hide his superior look, gave Maya directions.
“’M not good at parties,” Beq said.
Maya laughed. “Probably not many formal dances back at the Forge.”
“The other apprentices used to sneak down to the empty levels,” Beq said. “To drink an’ play games. And…” She lurched against Maya, voice lowered. “Fuck. You know.”
“Beq,” Maya said, trying hard not to think about the body pressed against her. “Walk straight, would you?”
“Sorry.” Beq swung back into line. “I was never any good at them. Stopped getting invited, after a while. Silly Beq, rather read and mess with crystals than sneak out and kiss boys. Scared, wimpy Beq.”
“You’re not silly,” Maya said, shepherding her charge carefully up a spiral stair. “And you’re definitely not scared. You saved my life back in Litnin.”
“Was scared. Thought I was gonna pee myself.”
“You saved me anyway, though.” With some relief, Maya recognized their corridor and headed for Beq’s door. “That’s what matters.”
Beq fell silent. Maya thumbed the latch, and they made it as far as the couch in the sitting room. Beq slipped away from her arm and sat down heavily, pulling her spectacles aside to wipe at her eyes.
“Thanks,” she mumbled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin your party.”
“It’s fine. I’m not here for parties, anyway.”
“You should go find that girl.” Beq made a shooing motion. “Go. I’ll be all right.”
“You’re sure?”
The arcanist gave a weary nod and put her spectacles back on. “Go.”
Back in the corridor, Maya leaned against the wall and let out a long breath. Parties. Her own room wasn’t far, but she thought she should at least find Tanax and explain what had happened. Assuming he’s not stumbling drunk by now, too.
Unfortunately, reversing the directions the footman had provided proved to be more difficult than she expected. Most of the Spike was quiet and gloomy, the sunstones set to a gentle twilight glow, and all the corridors looked similar. She was reasonably certain she was headed in the right direction, but the courtyard full of life and light eluded her.
After a third wrong turn, Maya felt her head start to pound. Should have gone back to bed after all. She heard voices ahead and hurried toward them, willing to put up with a servant’s arched eyebrow. At the last minute, though, she pulled up short, recognizing one of the voices. Raskos.
“You’re certain?”
“Yes, sir.” The other voice was a man’s, clipped and professional. “Yora and Halfmask are there.”
Rebels? Maya eased forward. The dux was in a small study, the doorway half-open. He sat at a desk with several pieces of folded paper in front of him. On a torn envelope, Maya recognized the seal of the Council’s letter. The other man, tall and gaunt in an Auxiliary uniform, stood in another doorway, beside a hearth where a fire popped and crackled.
“Very well,” Raskos said, setting down his pen. “What do you need?”
“Ten squads, at least. Halfmask is tricky.”
“He’s a roach,” Raskos snarled. “You don’t need a blaster to crush an insect.”
“You want to ask your Order friends to assist?”
“Don’t be stupid. We can’t have them blundering about.”
“Then I need ten squads,” the man said.
“Take them,” Raskos muttered. “Just be certain you get them all.”
“Of course, sir.”
Booted footsteps walked away. Raskos looked down, mopping his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. His eyes shifted, reading, and then he swore quietly. He crumpled the page into a ball, tossed it into the hearth, and got up, coming in Maya’s direction. Maya quickly scrambled back from the doorway, arranging herself in the hall as though merely lost, but Raskos didn’t even glance her way when he emerged, turning in the opposite direction and striding off.
Maya held her breath until he was out of sight, trying to think. Ten squads is a big part of the garrison. That implied that Raskos thought Yora and Halfmask were a serious threat. So why doesn’t he want us “blundering about”?
She glanced around the doorway again. The torn envelope was still on the desk. I shouldn’t. But…
Before she could talk herself out of it, she slipped into the room. There was a sheet of folded paper still on the desk beside the envelope. Maya reached out, then hesitated. The dux just left it here. So how secret can it be? Jaedia probably would not have approved of that logic, but for the moment it quieted Maya’s pangs of conscience. She flattened the sheet with her hand.
She was almost immediately disappointed. It was written in neat, block capitals, on good paper, but the letters spelled only nonsense. Ciphered. Beq had mentioned that. No wonder Raskos doesn’t worry about anyone reading his mail. She glanced at the hearth. He must have burned the legible copy—
Maya paused. It had been a hot day, and the servants had only laid a small fire after dark. Flames leapt from the front of the hearth, but the back was dark and gray with soot. He threw it pretty hard. So maybe…
She touched her haken and closed her hand, and the fire went out. Yes! Wedged in the back of the grate was a small wad of paper, slightly singed but otherwise untouched. Maya knelt to dig it out, careful to avoid getting ash on her uniform. Excitement warred with guilt as she pocketed the crumpled page, straightened up, and reignited the fire with another brief touch to her haken.
Slipping back out into the corridor, she rounded a corner and found herself faced with a couple of footmen. Maya flagged one down.
“Yes, Agathios?” the man said with a bow.
<
br /> “I was looking for the party,” Maya explained, “but now I think I’m feeling a bit poorly after all. Do you think you could direct me to my room?”
“Of course,” he said. “Follow me.”
Maya followed, fingering the stolen letter, heart thumping hard.
Chapter 10
The sketch on the table was growing more elaborate by the moment. It had begun as a simple outline of Raskos’ private warehouse, an unassuming square building with a sloped roof and high, small windows. Then Nevin had started adding annotations in colored pencil, with accompanying mutters.
“Screamers here, here, and here. Reverser coils behind the walls here. Thread ward on the doors. Windows…”
The picture that took shape was practically a fortress. Raskos had spent years skimming off the scavengers, keeping the best finds to sell under the table for his own benefit. Gyre had known that, but he hadn’t realized that the dux had also been grabbing every nasty trap dug out of the ghoul warrens—often at considerable cost in blood—and installing them around his own private safe house. What in the name of the Chosen is he keeping in there?
Well. The Core Analytica, apparently. Whatever that is. He glanced at Kit. She sat at one end of the table, watching the preparations with hooded eyes, apparently bored. Yora, on the other hand, seemed to grow more restless with each passing moment, walking back and forth with her spear in her hand, tapping the butt against the ground. She tried not to show it, but Gyre knew Harrow’s death had hit her hard, as had Ibb’s defection.
Sarah was the only one who seemed immune to the oppressive atmosphere. She worked away on her own notes, writing as fast as Nevin could sketch. If anything, the prospect of tackling the dux’s trap-laden storehouse seemed to excite her.
With Harrow and Ibb gone, Yora had pulled in a few hands from outside her core team to act as security. A couple of broad-shouldered manufactory workers leaned against one wall, carrying cudgels and knives, and she’d posted lookouts in the approach tunnels to their secret meeting room. The newcomers seemed competent enough, but Gyre had to admit that he would have rather had Ibb with his blaster and rapier.
“I think that’s it,” Nevin said. “That we know of, anyway. None of our people have been past the anteroom, so there could be more inside.”
“Which leaves us with a whole set of contingencies,” Sarah said, scribbling rapidly. “We wouldn’t want to get past all the outer defenses and get stuck—”
“Can you do it?” Kit said. “Or not?”
Sarah blinked and looked at Yora, who gave a quick nod. The arcanist shrugged.
“We can do it,” she said. “We’ll need time and a fair bit of cash to line up the appropriate countermeasures. Lynnia can make some of what we need, but the rest we’re going to have to buy from the black market, and we don’t want to attract attention.”
“Cash I can manage,” Kit said. “Time may be in shorter supply. Raskos is trying to find a buyer for this thing. If he does, he may move it out of our reach.”
Sarah spread her hands. Nevin laced his fingers together, looking down at the table, and said, “If we run into a screamer and don’t have a way to shut it down, we’ll all end up buried under the Spike.”
“Every job has risks,” Kit said, waving a hand.
“She told you what we need,” Yora said. “We’ve already risked enough for this project.”
Kit raised her eyebrows but said nothing. After a moment’s glare, Yora turned away, tossing her spear from hand to hand.
“How much cash are we talking about?” Gyre said.
“Hard to say,” Sarah said. “I can make a scouting trip tomorrow—”
“Boss!” A young woman in rough laborer’s garb burst into the chamber, panting. “Auxies!”
Gyre was on his feet instantly, and Kit bounced up with her usual grin.
“Where?” she said. “How many?”
“Twenty at least,” the scout gasped. “Coming this way. I left Villam to keep an eye on them.”
No sooner had she spoken than a rumble echoed through the tunnels, attenuated but clearly recognizable. Blaster. Yora slapped her spear into her other hand and turned to the pair of guards.
“Gul, Hil, check if the other exits are clear. Go!”
Nevin was frantically gathering up his maps, and Sarah had pocketed her notebook, pulling down a pair of dark-tinted goggles. For a few heartbeats, they waited in silence.
Gyre knew—because he’d mapped it himself—that of the six tunnels exiting the meeting room, three were dead ends. Only one had originally been open, but a little patient excavation had cleared a narrow path through the others, precisely for this sort of situation. Unfortunately, the tunnel the scout had come down was one of the backups, which strongly suggested that the dux’s people had stolen a march on them.
Which leaves us with plan B. He’d never been particularly happy with plan B.
The snap of crossbow bolts echoed down one of the other tunnels, and a moment later the responding roar of blasters. One of Yora’s people emerged, badly cut up and bleeding from splinters of flying rock.
“Parak’s dead,” he reported. “Lots of ’em coming, loaded for fucking thickhead. Not getting out that way.”
Yora glanced at the third tunnel, where there’d been only an ominous silence.
Plan B it is, then.
“Get away from the table,” Gyre said. “Back up. Now.”
Nevin scrambled back, clutching his notes, and the others followed suit. Gyre dove underneath, pawing through the dirt until he found the long, coiled shape of the fuse. He sparked it with a firelighter, then shuffled backward as fast as he could. Flame raced across the floor and then down into the stone.
A batch of Lynnia’s special mix went off with a muffled boom. A cloud of dust and smoke engulfed the room, and stone and bits of furniture pattered down all around them. Where the table had been there was a dark hole in the floor, parts of it still crumbling away from the force of the explosive.
“You never bothered to mention we were meeting on top of a bomb?” Sarah said, waving away the smoke.
“Never came up,” Gyre muttered. “There’s more tunnels down there, but I don’t have a full map. We should split up, get as far as we can, hide if we have to.”
“Right.” Yora waved. “Come on, everyone down!”
The sound of many footsteps was getting closer on three sides. Yora tossed her spear into the hole, then jumped after it. Sarah, Nevin, and the rest of her people followed suit. Gyre looked to Kit.
“After you, Doomseeker.”
“Always prepared, right?” Kit’s grin widened.
“Right.”
She hopped over the edge. Gyre followed, absorbing the fall with a crouch. Only a trickle of light from the lanterns in the meeting room filtered through the smoke, and the ground was a mess of stone fragments. Vague silhouettes moved about. He felt someone take his hand and recognized Kit’s slight shape.
“We’re headed north,” Yora’s voice came out of the murk. “If we get clear, I’ll get you a message.”
“I’ll take the other way,” Gyre said.
“Good luck, Halfmask.”
“Good luck.” Gyre pulled Kit into a run and fled into the dark.
“Always prepared,” Kit whispered in Gyre’s ear.
“Right.”
“But not to the extent of… you know. Knowing where you’re going.”
“The thing about unexplored tunnels,” Gyre muttered, “is that nobody’s made a map.”
This is why I didn’t want to go to plan B.
His hope had been that the hole he’d blasted in the floor would link up quickly to some inhabited part of Deepfire’s tunnels, allowing for a quick escape. Unfortunately, that did not appear to be the case, at least in the direction he and Kit were moving. They prowled through the blackness, feeling their way along the smooth-walled passages and navigating chunks of fallen stone, Gyre mentally kicking himself for not carrying any nighteye w
ith him.
Gyre had a pair of glowstones in his pocket, but using them would announce their presence for a kilometer in the pitch-darkness. And it hadn’t been long after they’d started moving that he’d seen the flicker of torches behind them and heard the muttered sounds of conversation. The Auxies were sweeping the cavern—slowly and cautiously, alert for ambush, but they were coming.
And now…
“This is a dead end,” Kit said, feeling her way along the wall. “I’m back where I started.”
Gyre looked over his shoulder and didn’t see any light. He took out his firelighter, flicked it briefly, and looked around in the glow of its transient sparks.
“Dead end,” he agreed. It wasn’t even a collapsed tunnel, just a smooth wall of rock. “We’ll have to go back.”
“There were a couple of side passages at the last junction, I think,” Kit said. “But the Auxies have to be getting close.”
Gyre couldn’t see her expression, but there was certainly no fear in her voice, no more than there had been in their fights in the deep tunnels. Danger simply didn’t seem to matter to her. What did I expect from the Doomseeker?
“We could try to jump them,” she said. “Cut our way through and get back to the meeting room. It might work if we catch them by surprise.”
“They’re playing this safe,” Gyre said. “And they’ve got blasters. We’d never make it.”
“Then we’d better hurry.” He would have bet good money she was grinning again as she took his hand.
They backtracked a few hundred meters, until a change in the echoes told him they’d reached a junction. Farther on, tiny reflected gleams of torchlight showed on the walls, and he could hear the sound of quiet voices.
“Left or right?” Kit said.
Gyre struggled to remember Lynnia’s map and where they were in relation to the inhabited tunnels. In the end, he shrugged and pulled Kit to the left. They followed the tunnel around a long, descending curve, like a spiral ramp. The farther down they went, the more Gyre’s spirits sank. This is not going to end in a way out. He wasn’t sure if heading into the deep tunnels in total darkness would be more or less suicidal than simply trying to fight his way through dozens of Auxies.
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