Liar's Bargain: A Novel

by Tim Pratt

  “What’s to stop you from blasting me with a spray of ice and running away with your friends after you get Hrym?” Bannerman demanded.

  Rodrick shrugged. “Nothing. Just my word that I won’t. Along with the knowledge that I’d rather not have angry crusaders from Lastwall chasing me for the rest of my life. It’s the best I can offer.”

  Bannerman stared at the lake for a while, then nodded briskly, and shook each of their hands in turn, starting with Rodrick. “We go in this afternoon,” he said.

  “Isn’t the dead of night more traditional?” Eldra said.

  “For sneak thieves like you, yes. Agents of the Bastion of Justice aren’t afraid of the light of day.”

  “The problem with the light of day is that your enemies can see you,” Rodrick said.

  Bannerman shrugged. “It’s also when the guard shift on the lower levels changes, so we can slip in through the tunnels when there’s a gap in the patrol schedule. I also want to kill Prinn before he goes to the feast. What if Prinn finds some excuse to speak to general Andraste alone, and steals her face?”

  “Andraste does have access to a better class of pleasures of the flesh,” Rodrick agreed. “I defer to your expertise. Though I get credit for the brilliant idea to recruit you to my cause.”

  * * *

  They made their preparations, which in Rodrick’s case consisted mostly of worrying about everything that could go wrong. At least when he was busy planning an operation he had something constructive to occupy his mind. Bannerman was running point on this, though, and all Rodrick had to do was whatever he was told. He was even too distracted to flirt with Eldra, who spent the time sharpening her knives, adjusting the spring-loaded spike in her parasol, and helping the Specialist put together a few useful concoctions. Rodrick tried to help with that too, but he was inattentive, and was forbidden to step within five feet of the table after he spilled a beaker of something that ate away a small portion of the table and a larger portion of the floor.

  At the appointed time they returned to the outskirts of the harbor, where Bannerman lurked near a dilapidated pier. He led them underneath the pilings and instructed Rodrick to clear away a heap of stones and other rubble. Back to brute force duty.

  He soon realized the point of the exercise, at least, when the removal of the rocks revealed a narrow opening, big enough for a grown man to crawl through. The Specialist went first, because crawling into dark places was a hobby of his, and he’d probably accidentally eaten so many spiders in his life that a few more wouldn’t make any difference. Bannerman went next, then Eldra, wrinkling her nose in distaste, with Rodrick in the rear.

  The Specialist had a lantern with a blackout panel, and he slid the cover aside to dimly illuminate the room. It was a slimy hole just deep enough for all of them to crowd into, and not quite high enough for anyone but Eldra to stand upright. “Charming place,” Rodrick said.

  Bannerman went to the stone wall at the rear of the hole and pressed on something. A section of the wall slid back with a grinding noise and the sound of shifting sand. “This is the far end of an escape tunnel that leads from the Bastion,” he said. “Meant as an emergency egress if the fortress were ever overrun.”

  “I thought crusaders never ran from a fight?” Eldra said.

  “We prefer to call it falling back and regrouping prior to a renewed assault,” Bannerman said. “Or a strategic movement to the rear. The tunnel wasn’t even made to open from this side, but Temple, bless her twisty mind, thought there might someday be a situation when one of us might need to get into the Bastion unobserved. Come on.”

  “If Temple knows about this tunnel, then Prinn might know, too,” the Specialist pointed out.

  “Fortunately Prinn doesn’t know you lot are alive, or that I know his true identity. As far as he’s concerned, I’m out sniffing around for leads on another batch of Volunteers.” Bannerman took the lantern from the Specialist and slid through the gap in the wall. The others followed. The brick-lined tunnel on the far side was dryer, cleaner, and more obviously wrought by human hands, and Rodrick straightened his spine gratefully.

  They proceeded down the dark corridor, so narrow they had to walk one abreast, for a distance of at least two miles. There was no sign of life apart from the occasional rat and beetle. The peace and quiet were maddening. Rodrick’s nerves felt like lute strings pulled too tight: another half-twist of tension and he might snap. Hrym was off in the distance somewhere, almost in reach, and until Rodrick held him once more in his hands, he wouldn’t be able to relax, not really.

  He probably wouldn’t be able to relax then, either, since he was obliged to go help kill a totenmaske immediately afterward, but he’d feel better anyway.

  “Here we are.” Bannerman shone the lantern’s light on a metal ladder bolted into the wall, leading up to a trapdoor. He went up and lifted the hatch an inch or so and looked through the crack. “Seems clear, come on.” He climbed out, swinging the hatch wide open, and the others followed. They emerged in a small storage room stacked with dusty crates—clearly not a place visited often. Once they were all above the floor, Bannerman closed the hatch again. “All right,” he whispered, “We’ll have to go down a well-lit hallway for about twenty yards until we reach a secret passage that will take us to Temple’s office, but we shouldn’t run into any guards, if we’ve timed this right. Once we’ve got Hrym in hand, Rodrick and I will go totenmaske hunting.”

  “I’m not even sure why I’m here,” Eldra said. “It doesn’t sound like there’s much for me and the Specialist to do, apart from escape down this same tunnel in half an hour or so.”

  “You’re here in case we haven’t timed it right,” Bannerman said. “Also because I hope you’ll reconsider your cowardice.”

  “I prefer to think of it less as cowardice and more as ‘strategic courage,’” Eldra said.

  “Cowardice is an excellent survival strategy,” the Specialist said. “Though I would argue that a reluctance to engage in unnecessary battle with a monster that can shape flesh like clay and eat memories is perhaps better described as ‘wisdom’ than ‘cowardice.’”

  Bannerman sighed and opened the door onto an empty stone hallway lit by wall sconces. He beckoned them forward, and they moved at a swift walk toward the secret passage.

  They made it almost ten yards before crusaders poured into the hallway from both ends.

  30

  THE WRONG SIDE OF THE BARS

  The Volunteers, if they could still be called that, were all experienced fighters. Rodrick knew his compatriots would look around them at the rapidly approaching hordes of armed men and women and make the same determination he did, which was: there are too many here to even bother trying to fight. Desperate flight was really the only plausible response.

  The Specialist lobbed a bomb toward one end of the corridor, and Rodrick braced himself for an explosion that would cause the ceiling to cave in and kill them all. Fortunately, it was only a smoke bomb, sending out a billowing cloud. The Specialist vanished into the black smoke, fleeing for the storage room and the hatch to the escape tunnel, no doubt. Rodrick thought that was a marvelous plan, and did his best to follow suit. Eldra was ahead of him. Bannerman seemed to be more interested in standing his ground and shouting, which was a peculiar way to respond to an assault by an overwhelming force, but what did Rodrick know? He wasn’t a crusader.

  Rodrick actually got through the door of the storeroom. The Specialist was there, but he was pushing a crate across the floor instead of jumping down the hole, which was baffling. Eldra threw open the trapdoor, though, and started down it.

  That was the last thing Rodrick saw before something heavy hit him on the back of the head and drove him down into the darkness.

  * * *

  “He’s waking up,” a woman’s voice said.

  Rodrick blinked up at a dark stone ceiling. “He is? Who is?”

  “You are.” That was the gruff voice of … what was his name … Bannerman? Oh. Yes.
Rodrick’s memory of recent events came trickling back. He groaned and rubbed his head, sitting up.

  They were in a dungeon cell, a larger one than Rodrick had been held in during his first day at the Bastion. This one was darker, and windowless, on some deep dark level, no doubt. Not one of the best dungeons, then. The Specialist was there too, sitting against one wall, and Eldra was on the floor beside Rodrick. She patted his knee. “Good,” she said. “You’re awake. Now we can go.”

  “Oh, good.” Rodrick looked around. The door looked very solid. The walls looked even more solid. “Where are we going?”

  “Out,” Bannerman said. “This was a disaster. I’m going to have to find another approach.”

  “We think Prinn got suspicious after meeting with Bannerman,” Eldra said.

  Bannerman stood up and punched the wall. “One of the men who captured us—I used to serve with him, and he told me Temple quadrupled the guard on the lower levels, and told them to detain anyone who came out of that storage room. They were pretty confused when they saw me coming out, and I might have talked my way out of trouble, if you lot hadn’t tried to run away.”

  The Specialist shook his head. “Even if you’d convinced them that we were allowed to be there, we would have shortly found ourselves alone in a room with Prinn, and shortly after that, we would be dead. Escape was the only approach that made sense.”

  Bannerman sighed. “At this point, I agree. The crusaders in the Bastion won’t kill us without an investigation, but Prinn could creep down here anytime and murder us in a number of ways. Come on.”

  “Come on where?” Rodrick said.

  “I was Temple’s right-hand man for a long time,” Bannerman said. “It occurred to me that her … flexible … approach to problem-solving might someday put me in conflict with her, and it didn’t seem impossible that I’d end up on the wrong side of a cell door. This is the dungeon where they keep the really dangerous people, you see, and I thought if she ever locked me up anywhere, it would be here.” He shrugged. “So I made provisions. I could get just about anything done in the Bastion, claiming Temple’s authorization, so I had some modifications made to this cell.” He brushed aside some of the straw on a floor, revealing a rusty metal grate. Bannerman pried at a large stone in the floor next to the grate, and it lifted cleanly away, revealing a hole. He moved on to the adjacent stone, and then Rodrick got the idea, and started prying up another. In a few moments they had a heap of large flat stones and an opening in the floor just big enough for a man to slip through.

  The Specialist descended first, and the others followed. They were in a dank, piss-stinking sewer hole, but at least the ceiling was spine-curvingly low. Bannerman handed the flat stones down to Rodrick, then descended himself. Rodrick handed him the stones one at a time while Bannerman reached up and put them back in place, sealing them into the dark. “There,” Bannerman said. “A nice disappearing trick, and with luck, they won’t notice we’re gone for a while. Standard protocol for dealing with prisoners like us is to leave them alone to stew in their own guilt and terror for a while.”

  “Where do we go from here?” Eldra said.

  “This sewer connects to the main escape tunnel, not far from here. We can go out the same way we came in.”

  Rodrick followed Bannerman and the others, thinking furiously. Hrym was up there, above them. “Are we going to try again?” he said.

  “Try what again?” Bannerman said. “To sneak into the Bastion? That didn’t work so well last time. I’ll reach out to some of my old friends in the ranks, or try to find a sympathetic officer who’ll believe my story. Though after tonight, Prinn could be living Andraste’s life—if totenmaskes lust for the pleasures of the flesh, Andraste has a lot more money, power, and prestige to burn through than Temple does. How can I possibly be sure where the monster is?”

  “Well, if Temple disappears entirely, that means Prinn has moved on—” the Specialist began.

  “I don’t care about any of that,” Rodrick said. “I only care about getting Hrym back.”

  “Then our interests don’t align much,” Bannerman snapped. “Piss off, Rodrick, I’m talking about the potential collapse of a nation here, not a trick sword.” They reached the end of the corridor, and Bannerman activated some particular stones in the wall by punching them viciously, and a secret door slid open. The corridor beyond was black. “Come on,” Bannerman said. “This is the escape tunnel. Head to the left, and we’ll be back by the harbor soon.”

  “I’m going back to the Bastion,” Rodrick said. “I have to get Hrym.”

  “You idiot!” Bannerman said. “Being captured once wasn’t enough for you?”

  “It’s possible the guards are less vigilant now that the threat has been dealt with,” the Specialist pointed out.

  “You don’t have any equipment,” Bannerman said. “They took our weapons, our tools, everything.”

  “Even my parasol.” Eldra sighed. “I had that custom-made.”

  “I don’t need weapons,” Rodrick said. “I’m going to rescue my best friend, who is a weapon.” He was terrified at the prospect of returning to the Bastion alone, but he wasn’t at all hesitant. There was nothing else he could do. Hrym was close.

  “Even if you avoid the crusaders,” Bannerman said, “you have to go into Temple’s office, and if you run into Prinn—”

  “Prinn is surely at the feast by now,” Eldra said. “Probably looking Andraste up and down and wondering how it would feel to wear her body.”

  Bannerman didn’t have an answer to that, but Rodrick could sense the crusader seething in the darkness.

  “I hid a few things in the storage room,” the Specialist said. “Just in case we managed to escape and wanted to retrieve them at some point. There’s a knife, a concussion bomb, and one or two other items. They might help.”

  “That was … forward-thinking,” Bannerman said.

  “I had to stay up all night, spend a lot of gold, and yell at a wizard to have the scroll made,” the Specialist said. “I wasn’t going to hand it over to Prinn that easily.”

  “Scroll?” Rodrick said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I meant it to be a surprise,” the Specialist said. “I planned to give it to you after we got Hrym back. The book I took from the Interdicted Library, the one about the creation and compulsion of the undead, included an interesting detail about a spell that can force a totenmaske to reveal its true form, and prevent it from changing shape for a brief period. I thought the spell could be helpful—at the very least, you wouldn’t have to worry about Prinn pretending to be someone else, and it would be easier to convince the other crusaders to fight an obvious monster than to turn on their leader.”

  “That was thoughtful of you,” Rodrick said.

  “Wait,” Bannerman said. “Wait. I have an idea.”

  “That’s nice,” Rodrick said, and set off down the dark tunnel to rescue his one true friend.

  * * *

  Rodrick heard the others following him, but didn’t pay any attention. He went up the ladder into the storage room, and shoved aside the crate he’d seen the Specialist moving during their failed attempt to escape. There was a scroll hidden behind it, which he ignored—Prinn was probably at the feast by now, and Rodrick wasn’t interested in tracking the monster down or exposing him. He had other priorities. Rodrick took a dagger, and the rough clay orb of a bomb, and a leather-wrapped cosh.

  “Rodrick!” Bannerman hissed from the trapdoor, but Rodrick just opened the door a crack and tossed out the bomb. He pushed the door closed, and waited through the dull thump and the blinding flash of light that shone through the crack beneath the door. Rodrick opened the door a moment later to find one guard unconscious and the other staggering and dazed.

  Rodrick hit the upright guard with the cosh, aiming the blow almost absentmindedly, his attention more on the way forward than the trivialities of the present moment. Once the guard was down, Rodrick walked purposefully along the corridor,
counting his steps. Bannerman had said the entrance to the secret passage was about twenty yards down, so at that point Rodrick stopped, examining the wall for a few feet in each direction. Soon he noticed one brick that seemed just a bit out of line with the ones around it, recessed perhaps a quarter of an inch deeper than the rest.

  Rodrick pressed the brick, and a section of the wall swung back an inch, and even farther when he pushed. He glanced down the hall, where the others were hurrying toward him, and stepped into the dark, not bothering to close the secret door behind him.

  He walked briskly along the narrow corridor for a bit … until he reached an intersection, where one passage went left, and the other went right. He’d made the choice to walk heedlessly into a dangerous place in order to get Hrym back, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he’d have to make any more choices, like which way to go.

  “I see you’ve noticed the problem,” Bannerman said. “These secret passageways are a maze. You can blunder around aimlessly and hope you stumble upon Temple’s office … or you can let me guide you straight there, and in exchange, help me with my new plan.”

  Rodrick looked past him to Eldra and the Specialist. “Why are you here?”

  Eldra sniffed. “I told you I’d help you get Hrym in exchange for the signet ring. I’d hate you to think I don’t keep my promises. I mean, I don’t, usually, but for you, I’m making an exception.”

  “I’d like to get my hands on the antimagic scabbard Hrym is sheathed in,” the Specialist said. “That quantity of skymetal is very hard to come by outside Numeria—or even inside it.” He paused. “And also, what Eldra said, about promises, and so forth.”

  “Do either of you know the way to Temple’s office?”

  Eldra shook her head.

  “I did not have an opportunity to study the layout of the Bastion in any depth,” the Specialist said.