I waited. No sound.
A deep breath, calming my thundering heart. I slipped through the open door and stepped carefully along to the right. Only one occupied cell this way, and with luck he would be asleep and I could creep past unnoticed.
I passed cell after cell, all empty. The prisoners were well spaced out, presumably so we couldn’t communicate. I wondered how large these dungeons were, and how much wine had been stored here once.
A face, wide awake, staring at me through the bars. I jumped in alarm. A middle-aged man, with the full beard of a sailor, but lightly trimmed. A lower-ranking officer, then. His clothes were respectable enough although torn and stained.
I put a finger to my lips and he nodded.
His lock made more noise than mine, and we both froze, listening for any sound from the guards.
Nothing.
He hauled the door open, the hinges protesting, and stepped to freedom, a surprised grin on his face.
Again we waited, but there was no response. I crept on.
“Wait!” A hissed whisper that brought my heart to my throat.
I waved him to silence, hands flapping widely in my agitation.
“What about the others?” he whispered, gesturing in the other direction, past my cell.
“Later!” I mouthed. No point releasing anyone else until we knew the escape route was clear.
I tiptoed onwards, the man following, keeping close to the cells on one side, and the dim glow ahead gradually brightened. Still no sound, nothing to alarm us.
The final cells were open, free of bars, and the lamp, or whatever the light was, hid in one of them. I paused, concentrating on my breathing, slowing my heartbeat to calmness, as my father had taught me to do before walking into an important meeting. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out.
I put my head quickly round the corner. Empty. A quick look both ways confirmed it. Both the end cells were empty, one set up with an unlit brazier, a table and two chairs, the other almost filled by a roughly built set of wooden stairs, no more than poles and planks. The lamp burned on one plank, about halfway up. Tucked under the stairs was the trolley, a basket of water flasks and a line of unused lamps. In another corner stood a jar, presumably of lamp oil.
“No one here,” I said, and he peeped out from behind me.
“But there’s our way out,” he said, pointing up the stairs. At the top was a wooden trapdoor.
But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t shift it. There was no lock, no metal barrier above, but presumably heavy boxes or sacks had been pulled across to keep us in.
I took the lamp to examine the rest of the walls, but they were as solid as everywhere else.
We were trapped.
22: The Tunnel
Dragon’s balls. I’d depended on finding a simple locked door, and now I was defeated by something even simpler. How was I ever going to escape now?
“Let’s get everyone else out, and then we’ll be ready to jump those guys when they turn up in the morning,” the sailor said cheerfully.
I’m not in the habit of planning fights with armed guards, so that hadn’t occurred to me, but actually it was a halfway decent plan. We had a dozen prisoners, at a guess, and no more than three guards. I smiled at him, feeling better again. We could worry about what was beyond the trapdoor later.
“Pity they haven’t left us any weapons,” he went on. “A short sword would be perfect.”
“I still have my kooria,” I said. Not that it was much of a blade, but better than nothing.
“Really? They didn’t search you? Hmm.” He looked me up and down, as if noticing me for the first time. “Odd. And you can unlock doors by magic.”
“It’s not magic. I just have a connection to metal.” How strange it was to say that out loud.
He grunted, eyeing me suspiciously. “Whatever you call it, I’m grateful for it. Wait, is that blood on your shirt?”
“Probably. Let’s wait until we’re out of here before we worry about gratitude.”
He grinned at me, revealing a couple of missing teeth. A bar fight, probably. It was almost a point of honour for a sailor to display a few gaps as proof of manhood. One tooth for every winter you survive at sea, so they said. At least he’d be handy in a scrap with the guards. He wasn’t large, but he looked wiry and reasonably fit.
We took the lamp and made our way back down the row of cells to release the rest of the prisoners, not bothering to whisper any more. The first we came to was another seafarer, a younger man, who greeted the other with familiarity. He had an injured arm, and looked pale and wobbly. Not so much use. I hoped the rest were in better shape.
A few cells down, a more promising specimen, a sleeping form who uncurled to reveal a large, well-built man. The sailor lifted the lamp a little higher to fall on his face. My heart stopped.
“Mal?”
“Fen? Is it really you?”
The lock clicked open before my fingers could reach for it, and I flew through the door and into his arms, safe at last.
“Oh Fen, Fen! Gods, I thought I’d never see you again!” His voice cracked. Before he could say another word, I pressed my lips onto his in a frenzy of relief. I had no idea how he came to be there, but I couldn’t care less. There he was, holding me tight, his strong arms wrapped around me, kissing me and hugging me as if he’d never let me go. I’d have been quite happy with that, too, just at that moment.
When we surfaced, an age later, he laughed and stroked my face. “Are you all right?”
“All the better for seeing you.”
His face lit up. “Really? And you came to find me? How did you know where I was?” Before I could answer, he kissed me again, and I lost any power to think straight. “Oh Fen,” he murmured, between kisses. “Oh my sweet, darling Fen. I love you so much…”
That stopped me cold, for an instant. Mal, perpetually flirting Mal, in love with me? Impossible. He went on in the same way for quite some time, murmuring lovingly into my ears and showering me with kisses, but my joy in seeing him was spoiled. This was a complication I didn’t want.
A sudden searing pain. I gasped.
“Gods, Fen, what is it? Are you hurt?”
I’d almost forgotten the injury to my head, reduced now to a low grumbling throb in the background. In the excitement of release I’d stopped noticing it. But his wandering hands must have pressed the gash, and set it off again.
“Someone… hit me over the head. The… pendant helped… but not enough.”
“Where does it hurt? Just here? Right, hold still.”
Gingerly, he lifted off my bloodstained cap, clucking at the state of it. His paw of a hand rested over the injury so that his palm lay on my forehead. “I’ve never tried this before, so I don’t know whether it will work.”
He closed his eyes. At once, magic spilled into my head with a comforting warmth. The pain receded, and gradually diminished to nothing. I felt well, full of energy, but still the magic flowed.
“It’s all right, you can stop now.”
His eyes flew open. “Did it work? It worked! Ha! I knew how to heal myself, but I’ve never tried on anyone else. Lucky they didn’t find my belt, eh? They beat me up pretty well, but here I am, right as a rainbow. Oh Fen, whatever have they done to you?”
And then he was kissing me again, as if there were only the two of us in the world.
A discreet cough. “If you two lovers could stop canoodling, perhaps we can get on?”
We both laughed, and disentangled ourselves. Mal led the way out of the cell.
“Hello, I’m Mal.” He made the greeting salute. “You know my wife Fen, it seems.”
The sailors were nonplussed. I supposed it was a Bennamorian custom, to hand over your name to complete strangers without waiting for a formal introduction.
“Oh. Um… Tun. This here is Lors. Shall we?” He waved us onwards.
It was a wearisome business, releasing the remaining prisoners. Most w
ere either injured, or so weak from incarceration and the poor food that Mal had to heal them before they could walk. One old man couldn’t be roused at all, even with the aid of magic.
Our numbers had risen to eleven and we’d almost reached the end of the cells, but we hadn’t found an occupied one for some time.
“Is there any point in going further?” someone asked. “There’s nothing else down here, and there’s no door ahead of us.”
“We’ll check to the furthest end,” I said. “There might be another trapdoor.”
“Must be a way out,” one man said. “They take the bodies this way.”
“Bodies?”
“Ya. When they brought us in, we passed a man in a yellow shirt, just lyin’ on the floor by the bars. Coupla days later, they carried ‘im off this way. Looked pretty dead ta me. Grey an’ all.”
We walked on to the furthest point. The last two cells were unbarred, just like the two at the other end, but there was no furniture, no stairs and no trapdoor, nothing but blank walls.
“Well, that’s it, then,” Mal said. “No way out.”
“Yes, there is,” I said. I pointed to the featureless wall at the back of one cell. “There’s a door there. I can feel the hinges and the lock. It’s unlocked, though.”
“Where?”
I walked across and set my hand onto the place where I sensed the lock. It was hidden behind the stone, somehow, but I knew it was there. My probing fingers found the thinnest of slots to allow entry for a key. I focused my mind and clicked the lock into place, then unlocked it again.
“I can hear it,” Mal said. “Lamp, over here.”
The seafarer held the lamp high, and we all peered at the wall. “No sign of it,” Tun said.
“Well, it’s here somewhere,” Mal said. “There’s no man in a yellow shirt here, and no other doors, so he must have gone through here. The lock’s just here, and look, there’s a scratch just above it to mark the place, but where are the hinges, Fen?”
I showed him. He took a deep breath and heaved. The door opened so easily that he almost fell through.
A woman screamed.
The room beyond was filled with light, dazzling to our dark-accustomed eyes. I raised a hand to shield my eyes, and several of the others stepped back, away from the brilliance.
Something flew out of the light, a small red-headed creature, and hurled itself at Mal, shrieking loud enough to burst my eardrums.
“Mallaron! Mallaron!” she squealed. “You have come to rescue me at last!”
Then she yanked his head downwards and began to kiss him noisily.
Tun leaned closer to me, a grin cracking his face. “Your husband’s a popular man today, Mistress.”
I rolled my eyes. This was one of the hazards of a husband who flirted relentlessly with everything in skirts. I wasn’t annoyed, merely surprised that the only other woman in the place turned out to be one of Mal’s conquests. Besides, I could see him leaning backwards in his struggle to escape her smothering embrace. Eventually, he grasped her shoulders and forcibly pushed her away from him.
“Stop it, Hesta!”
Hesta? Ah. I hadn’t expected that. No wonder he’d been looking for her so obsessively. They had a history, and this little blur of a woman wasn’t a casual Dristomar fling, the work of a few quarter moons. She and Mal had known each other a long time, and their relationship could have been a deep one. Maybe I was the impulsive new diversion, and she was – something else.
Panting a little, Mal swung her round to face us, grouped around the open door, still squinting in the light. Now that I saw her face, the mage tattoo was garishly visible.
“Hesta, this is my wife, Mistress Recorder Fen. Fen, this is Lady Mage Hestaria.”
How awkward. At least I’d had a few seconds’ advantage to get my wits in order.
“The Blessings of the Goddess to you,” I managed. Not the most appropriate greeting for a Bennamorian, but all I could dredge up on an instant.
She gaped at me. “Wife? Wife, Mallaron? You got married?”
She went as red as a lobster, and I thought she was going to explode. Mal had the sort of panicked expression on his face that people got when caught out in an affair.
This was getting annoying.
“Long story,” I said crisply. “Not the time for it. We need a way out of here.”
At first glance, the room was promising, a spacious circular chamber lit by high windows, with flagstones of several colours set in a complicated pattern on the floor. A stone stair curved up one wall. But the arch at the top of the stair, which should have led us to freedom, was bricked up. Another archway at ground level was similarly closed off. In the centre of the floor a round wooden cover was the only obvious possibility.
“There!” Hestaria said, chortling with glee and pointing to the cover. “That is the only way out! I have been stuck here for two days, and I assure you there is no other way.
“Why didn’t they put you in a cell, like everyone else?” Mal said.
“Oh, I was, to start with, but I wouldn’t stop screaming, so they put me here.”
I could imagine that. I might even have heard her, that first day, a long, screeching wail that turned my blood to ice. No wonder they moved her.
Two of the men heaved the cover up and to one side, and the sound of rushing water echoed round the chamber. An overpowering smell explained the nature of the underground river. No doubt the bodies were tipped down here, to be carried far out to sea.
“We’re not so desperate that we need to crawl through sewage pipes,” I said briskly. “Let’s try the door over there.”
“What? There is no door!” Hestaria squawked.
Mal grinned. “Aha! A pair of matching secret doors.” He strode across the room, turning back and forth to gauge the spot exactly opposite the door we’d entered. “About here?”
“Slightly to the left. It’s locked, though.” A moment’s concentration. “There.”
The clunk was audible, even from the far side of the room. Hestaria’s face was a picture, and more than compensated me for the irritation of watching her kiss my husband.
“You are a mage!” she squeaked.
“Not at all.” I tried not to gloat, but I was almost purring with satisfaction. “I just have – an aptitude for locks.”
“I can’t shift it,” Mal called over from the door.
“I expect it opens inward.”
“Well, how are we going to open it? There’s no handle.”
I laughed, and crossed the chamber, pulling out my kooria. My father had always told me it would be useful in a crisis, but I don’t suppose he’d envisaged this sort of crisis.
Pushing the blade into the key hole, I willed the tip to bend around the lock. Then I pulled. The door swung open, and I straightened the blade and tucked it away in its sheath.
“Neat trick, Mistress,” Tun said, and the others murmured their agreement.
“Let’s see what’s beyond the door before we get too pleased,” Mal muttered.
On this occasion, I had to agree with his pessimism. It had crossed my mind that the symmetry of the doors might be reflected in other ways, too. The last thing we needed was another dungeon with no exit.
It was not so. The door hid a broad passageway leading off to left and right. In the gloom, I could already see the luminous markings on the wall. An escape tunnel, then.
“Lamp!” Mal called. “Where’s the lamp?”
There was some milling about before we tracked it down behind the opposite door. It had gone out.
“Anyone got a flint?”
No one had.
Tun the seafarer grunted. “I suppose someone will have to go back for another.”
“No time,” I said. “The sun is already well up, and we need to get out of here before there are too many people about. We just have to follow the markings on the tunnel walls. With care, once our eyes adjust, we can manage without a light.”
“If I had my ve
ssel…” Hestaria said sorrowfully.
“I have a stone belt,” Mal said. “You could make a glow ball.”
“I cannot use…” she began, then she gasped. “You are wearing a belt! Mallaron!”
“I’ll answer for it to the Mages’ Forum, if need be, but it’s been very useful, Hesta. Most of these people wouldn’t be here now without it.”
“Ay, we were half dead till he fixed us,” Tun said cheerfully, not picking up the sudden tension in the atmosphere in the slightest.
“You have healed with it! Mallaron – I am utterly speechless.”
Oh, if only that were true. She would have gone on and on about it, but I grew impatient. “We can sort that out later. If one or other of you can make a glow ball, please do so. Otherwise we’ll manage without.”
“I can’t,” Mal said. “I don’t have the control.”
“Well, of course not, with no training,” she squealed. Goddess, she made so much noise for someone so small. In the end, Mal fished out one of the jade stones from his belt, and she held that in one hand, and made a feeble sort of flickering light in the other, still jabbering away at him.
“Wait through there,” I said, giving her a little shove. “All of you, into the tunnel. Mal, will you help me shut the other door?”
I could have pushed it shut with one hand, but I could feel my temper rising and I needed a moment of peace before we started our trek through the tunnels.
“Sorry,” he mouthed at me. “I’m glad she’s safe, but…”
I knew what he meant.
“Are you going to lock it?”
“No. We’re going to leave it exactly as it was, and the cover off the sewage hatch. They’ll think we went out that way.”
As an afterthought, I tossed the useless lamp down into the racing river below. Now they wouldn’t even know exactly when we left.
We joined the others in the tunnel. I used my kooria to close the door behind us, and then locked it. We were shut in the gloom. The door muffled the echoing sound of the sewage stream, but now I was surrounded by voices. “Which way?” “We’d best go that way.” “There are steps not far ahead.”
The Mages of Bennamore Page 24
