Maiden of Pain p-3

by Kameron Franklin

  She met the man halfway, putting her hand up to stop him. His look of annoyance changed to one of confusion, mixed with a hint of fear when he realized who had stopped him. His bowl-cut hair and large nose made it was almost comical.

  "What can I do for you, sir? Is everything all right?"

  "Nothing for you to worry about. I just need to know where the witchweed is kept."

  "I–I don't know. I just clean the family chambers upstairs."

  "Then who would know? I don't have time to be stopping everyone wandering in the halls and ask."

  "Whoever's on duty downstairs in the guard post would know. You should check with them." The servant was looking up at her strangely, but he glanced back at his feet when she narrowed her eyes.

  "You've wasted enough of my time, then. I hope you aren't this disrespectful with the other guards. I've half a mind to report you."

  "Oh, no, sir. I didn't mean anything. I'm terribly sorry." He bowed hastily and scuttled away.

  Ythnel sighed. She should have known better than to think it was going to be easy. It looked as if she would have to try to bluff her way past the guards after all. Recalling the stairs she had climbed from the palace dungeons on her previous visit, Ythnel moved down the hall to her right until she came to the first door past the entrance to the audience chamber. It opened to a torch-lit corridor that angled to her right and ended in a flight of steps leading under the palace.

  At the base of the stairs, she found herself in a large space separated from the rest of the dungeon by walls of bars on two sides. To her left were the cells, one of which she had been kept in. The room itself held a table with a couple of chairs, a desk, and a cot. A guard sat hunched over the desk.

  "What do you want?" he asked disinterestedly. Apparently he had heard her coming down the stairs. Uncertain how to answer, Ythnel cleared her throat. The guard stopped whatever he was doing and turned to face her. It was Corporal Urler from before!

  "Do I know you?" he asked, squinting at her from his seat.

  "Uh, no, I'm normally stationed out on the west wall."

  "What are you doin' here?"

  "There have been some fires in the city." Ythnel's mind scrambled for words, ideas coming each time only as she started to open her mouth. "One of the fires is at Lord Naeros's tower. His stockpile of witchweed was torched. I was sent over here to guard the palace's storeroom in case it was also a target."

  "There's no way anybody could git past the palace gate, let alone make it down here," Corporal Urler bragged.

  "I'm just following orders," Ythnel shrugged. "If you want to vouch for"

  "All right. No need fer that." He got up and moved to the gate that led farther into the dungeon. "You waitin' fer an invitation? Come on."

  The hallway was lit by a single torch about halfway down its length. They passed a closed door on the right, followed by an open archway that led into a large chamber hidden in shadows. As they neared the end of the hall, a door stood in the left wall. Corporal Urler stopped before it, removed a ring of keys from his belt, and unlocked the door.

  "Here you go."

  Ythnel spoke two harsh words born in the depths of the Abyss and struck out with her hand, grabbing a hold of the guard's face. The dark aura of the Power exploded around wherever her flesh touched his, and small gashes began to appear on his exposed skin. With a strangled cry, he stumbled away from Ythnel, but the damage was already done. Blood poured from open wounds as he backpedaled into the wall and slid to the floor. By the time he hit the ground, he had stopped breathing and his eyes were rolled back into his head.

  Ythnel dragged Corporal Urler's body into the room. It wouldn't do to have someone come down the hall and notice him there. Grabbing the torch from its place on the wall, Ythnel set to work. When she had several fires going, she closed and locked the door behind herself. On her way out, she tossed the keys into the corner of one of the far cells then headed back up the stairs.

  Once more in the great hallway, Ythnel turned to leave the palace but paused. Something nagged at her in the back of her mind. A memory stirred of her standing bound in the audience chamber before Jaerios Karanok. From his robe he withdrew a medallion in the shape of a scourge. It was her medallion, and here was her opportunity to retrieve it.

  It was a crazy idea. The likelihood that he even still had it was remote. The chance that she could find it if he did was even smaller. Yet she had to try. It was one more thing the Karanoks had taken from her, and she meant to haye it all back. The servant had said the family lived on the second floor. She would start looking there.

  From where she stood, Ythnel could see a stairway that led up just past the protruding corner of the audience chamber. She darted across the hall and ascended.

  The stairs ended in another great hall much like the one below. The numerous tapestries hanging along the full length of the hall, however, depicted members of the Karanok family, often in locations Ythnel guessed were somewhere in the city. While she recognized a few faces, there were many she did not. She hoped the unfamiliar ones were from generations past. It was an unsettling thought that this fanatical family might be so prolific that the woven portraits represented numbers in their current ranks.

  Even if it were so, there was nothing Ythnel could do about it. It was best to concentrate on the problems at hand, and her largest one was determining which of the many doors lining the hall led to the chambers of Jaerios Karanok. Checking each one would not only take an incredible amount of time she did not have, but it would also greatly increase her risk of discovery. Yet she had no way of knowing otherwise.

  Caught by indecision, Ythnel remained rooted at the top of the stairs. There were three doors within twenty feet of her, two to her left at the end of the hall and one straight ahead. While she debated which one to open, a noise at the bottom of the stairwell caught her attention. Someone was coming upstairs, and whoever it was, was moving quickly. Forced to choose before she was discovered, Ythnel moved briskly to the end of the hall and tried the door on her right. It opened, and she stepped inside without looking, just as she heard whoever was behind her reach the top of the stairs. She left the door cracked enough to peer back out into the hall. An older man in a white night robe, his head crowned in a wreath of gray hair, swept around the corner from the stairs and headed down the hall away from Ythnel. At about fifty feet, he turned to his left and disappeared down a passage Ythnel hadn't realized was there. Moments later, she heard the distant echo of someone knocking, and a muffled voice calling for Lord Jaerios. Then there was silence.

  While Ythnel waited, crouched behind the door, it occurred to her she didn't know where she was hiding. She turned, half expecting to see the room's occupant glaring at her balefully. Fortunately, there was no one. Moonlight spilled in from a window in the wall to her left, just five feet from the door. It appeared she was in some sort of study. Bookcases lined the right and back walls. A large desk sat in the middle of the room, with a high-backed chair on the far side and a single, nondescript chair on the near wall. A marble bust stood next to an unlit candelabrum, both bathed in the pale luminescence of the moon. The bust looked familiar, but she couldn't quite place who it was supposed to be.

  Voices in the hall returned Ythnel's attention to the door.

  "The fire in the palace is contained to the dungeon, my lord. However, with at least two other fires burning in the city, I thought it prudent you were notified."

  The older man in the robe she had seen earlier came into view first, talking over his shoulder to someone behind. Before he finished speaking, Ythnel saw who followed. Lord Jaerios's gray-streaked dark curls were tousled, and he wore a silk robe of deep crimson over his night clothes. His current state was a far cry from the regal commander she remembered seeing, but there was no mistaking the man who had condemned Ythnel to death. The pair was trailed by a single guard as they made their way to the stairs. It was all Ythnel could do not to rush out and attack them. Her retribution on Jaerios wo
uld have to take another form, however. She could not risk an alarm being raised now.

  Once the three passed beyond range of her hearing, Ythnel slipped out of the study and down the hall to Jaerios's chambers. The short passage off the main hall led about twenty feet before turning sharply to the right to end at a closed door. It was the room beyond the open door at the corner of the passage that Ythnel entered. The long, rectangular room had two windows in the far corner, one on each wall. While less ostentatious than his son's room, Jaerios's bedchamber was still richly furnished. The four-poster bed against the wall to the right of the doOr was a dark-stained wood with beautiful grain and lightly gilded trim along the head- and footboards. A matching bureau stood just to the left of the door. In the far corner was a writing desk and chair, positioned so that whoever sat at it would have excellent views of the palace grounds out both windows.

  Closing the door to prevent anyone from hearing her search, Ythnel rummaged through the bureau drawers first. She pulled handfuls of neatly folded clothing from their resting places and tossed them to the floor, but her efforts yielded nothing. Her scourge medallion was not tucked beneath a stack of underclothes, nor did any of the drawers have a false bottom in which something could be hidden.

  Frustrated, Ythnel stormed over to the writing table. She gave a cursory glance to a freshly inked letter that seemed to be informing an ally or family member that the purging of Luthcheq had finally been accomplished. With a dismissive snort, she set it back down and inspected the other objects that sat on the desktop. A small ceramic jar held a dark fluid that Ythnel guessed was ink, but was too narrow at the neck to have stored her medallion. The slender, wood box next to it kept Jaerios's writing quill. Ythnel sighed, ready to give up. The desk had a center drawer, but at this point, she felt certain the medallion wouldn't be found. Shrugging to herself, she decided to check anyway, opening the drawer only partway with a half-hearted tug. A ream of blank parchment was stacked inside, slightly skewed from the force of the drawer opening. Ythnel started to push the drawer shut when she noticed a slight bulge in the center of the stack of paper.

  Opening the drawer the rest of the way, she lifted the corner of the pile and looked underneath. There lay the small scourge, nine straps of five-inch long leather secured to a four-inch handle of iron. Ythnel smiled triumphantly as she scooped up the medallion and fastened it around her neck by two of the leather straps. She felt whole again with it tucked under her breastplate and nestled against the flesh of her chest; an emptiness in her heart she had tried to ignore was now filled. Regardless of what she had been taught during her time at the manor, this symbol of her faith had become a link to her goddess she could not do without, and she intended to never lose it again.

  Her purpose accomplished, all that was left for Ythnel was to figure out how to leave. Walking back out the front door was not going to be an option. The fire in the witchweed storeroom had likely alerted the palace to the presence of a malicious agent, and anyone who could not be readily identified would be stopped and questioned. She would have to find an alternate means of escape. It was not an easy task considering she was unfamiliar with the layout of the palace. Standing around in Jaerios's bedchambers was not going to change that, though it might certainly increase her chances of getting caught. Still pondering what to do, Ythnel left the room and headed back down the hall toward the steps. She paused at the head of the staircase, listening for the sound of anyone approaching. She could hear the echoes of footsteps and the murmurs of distant voices, but the sounds came and went, with no one appearing at the bottom of the stairs.

  Perhaps they were still fighting to contain the fire in the dungeon, Ythnel thought. Even so, that did not change her options. The activity below told her that she would be discovered before she could cross the great hall.

  Feeling exposed, Ythnel decided to hide in the empty study to think things through further. She left the door cracked again so she could hear in case someone climbed the stairs to this level. For several moments, she paced in silence before the single window, which was divided into many square panes by thin strips of wood and stretched from floor to ceiling. The grounds outside extended off into the darkness. A single outbuilding sat a few yards away at the edge of visibility. Ythnel paused and looked up into the night sky. Clouds were converging, the stars no longer visible and the moon a pale haze behind the billowy, dark gray forms. No torches or lanterns where lit on this side of the palace. It was as though this small section of Luthcheq was cut off from the rest of the world.

  Inspiration struck Ythnel, but she would have to move fast. The fire would occupy the attention of people inside the palace, but what she planned would probably make enough noise that anyone outside might come to investigate. She moved to the chair on the near side of the desk but changed her mind and went to the pedestal that supported the marble bust. She had finally recognized who it was and thought it fitting that Lord Jaerios would aid her escape. Ythnel tried to rock the pedestal, but it wouldn't budge. For a moment, she panicked, unsure if she could get her idea to work. But she swung around so she was between the window and the pedestal and began to slide the bust to the edge. It was incredibly heavy, and she wondered if she would drop it once its full weight was brought to bear. She paused for a moment to gather her strength, and with one last effort, Ythnel pulled the bust from its pedestal, letting the statue's weight and the momentum pivot her around. She released the bust as she turned toward the window, and the marble piece crashed through the glass and wood to fall head-first, so to speak, almost twenty feet to the paving below and shatter.

  There was no time to catch her breath. Ythnel shoved and tugged the heavy desk toward the broken window until it was just a few inches from the ledge. Taking her whip from her belt, she tightly wound the tapered end around one of the desk's legs. She gave it a few hard tugs to make sure it wouldn't come undone and the desk didn't move. Then she tossed the handle out the window. Peering down, Ythnel saw it come up-short, leaving her a good drop of at least six feet. For a moment, she considered running back to Jaerios's bedchamber and grabbing his sheets, but she decided it would take too long. Knocking several large pieces of glass out of the way, Ythnel let her spear fall to the ground outside, swung over the edge and lowered herself down the whip. She dangled for a breath when she reached the handle, looking at the ground below, before letting go to land on the balls of her feet. Forced to leave the whip behind, Ythnel retrieved her spear, darted to the corner of the palace, and glanced at the gate. A group of guards huddled there, but they broke apart as she watched, some heading back out into the streets and others to the palace. Ythnel ducked back behind the corner, and when she checked again, only one guard remained.

  Ythnel skirted along the front of the building, keeping her back to the stone, until she reached the side of the grand staircase. Then she drew herself up and moved boldly out into the courtyard toward the gate.

  "It's starting to get crowded in there," she said gruffly as she neared the gate guard. "Captain ordered me back to my regular station."

  Without waiting for a reply, Ythnel jerked the gate open and walked into the street. Citizens still clogged the area, but any celebrations had ceased, and most were craning their necks to catch a brief glimpse of what was happening beyond the gate. Some were whispering to one another in anxious voices about what was going on. They parted easily for Ythnel in her guard disguise as she headed south toward the Temple of Entropy.

  Walled off on its own but not gated, the Temple of Entropy stood just south of the Karanok palace. The main building was nearly three stories tall, its center rising well above the outer section. Thick, fluted columns formed a portico around the exterior, winding around the squared-off, U-shaped entrance and disappearing around the sides of the structure. An annex was connected to the north end of the temple, and a single outbuilding squatted to the south. The grounds were dark and quiet; no celebrations were going on here. Ythnel strode through the silence like a nocturnal predat
or stalking its final prey whose scent was so intense and all-consuming, its presence so close that no other thought entered her mind except to take it down. She sprang past the short flight of steps and slipped into the shadows of the giant columns. The great bronze doors were closed and locked, so Ythnel rapped the butt of her spear against one of them and waited. Soon she heard the click of a key turning in a lock on the other side, and one of the doors came open enough for a robed figure to emerge. Light from inside the temple flooded out onto the portico, forcing Ythnel to squint in the brightness as her eyes struggled to adjust.

  "Yes, what is it?" The figure's features where hidden in the shadow of a cowl, but Ythnel knew it was a man from his voice. She could also tell he was not pleased with having to answer the door.

  "Someone is setting fires in the city." Ythnel had been rehearsing what she was going to say as she walked to the temple. Her voice was confident but disinterested, as though she were just following orders. "Both Lord Naeros's tower and the palace were targets, and the witchweed stored there was burned. I've been sent to check on the stockpile kept here." She waited expectantly for the invitation to come in.

  "Tell your commander that everything's fine. I'm sure we'll be able to handle anyone who tries to break in. Good night." It was obvious from his tone of voice that the temple clergy did not have a high opinion of the city guard. Before Ythnel could protest, the door was closed and locked once more.

  She stood there for a moment, stunned. Anger and indignation welled up, and she proceeded to hammer the door with her spear shaft until it swung open again.

  "What is going on outyou!" The man who had first answered the door shouted over Ythnel's pounding, his head sticking out past the door. "Why are you still"