Masques (26 page)

“Myr has a mage with him. What does he look like?”

The ae’Magi’s voice was really extraordinary, thought Aralorn. Soft and warm, it offered sanctuary—but she knew those tones, and terror cat-footed toward her.

But not even that fear combined with the cuts he was making on her arm was enough to hold her attention for long. The pain from the recoil of centuries of magic woven tightly into the stones of the dungeons made what he was doing to her body seem secondary.

She wondered if she ought to tell him that if he used iron manacles in the torture chamber as well as in the cell, she would be much more aware of what he was doing. The iron effectively blocked her meager talents from picking up on the twisted magic that a thousand years of magicians had left in the stone of the dungeon.

A bucket of cold water brought her attention back to her body. It felt good against her hot skin at first, but then the chill made her shake helplessly. In a rational moment, she smiled; the lung fever would take her soon—in a few days—if she could just hide it from him so that he wouldn’t turn her into one of the dead things that hung restlessly in her cell. She’d been grateful when she didn’t have to look at them anymore—if only she could do something about hearing them.

He wasn’t using magic on her as he had the first time she’d visited his castle. Maybe the dungeon inhibited his magic as well—or maybe he was using all his magic for something else.

Baffled, the ae’Magi looked at the pathetic figure hanging in front of him. He had seen her smile while he was cutting her, and it bothered him. She wasn’t one of those who enjoyed pain, but she didn’t seem to even feel it. Torture wasn’t working on her.

She seemed confused sometimes, though. Perhaps stealth could get him what pain could not.

“Sweetheart, sweetheart, listen to me,” said the ae’Magi in Myr’s voice, his tones gentle, like a young man courting a mate.

Aralorn jerked in reflex at the voice.

“Sweetheart, I know that you hurt. I’ve come to get you out of here, but you need to tell me where Cain is. We need him to get you out.”

She frowned, and said in a puzzled voice, “Cain?”

“Yes,” asked Myr again, and she heard a touch of anger in the voice now, “where is Cain? Where is Myr’s mage?”

Myr wouldn’t be angry with her—even though it sounded like Myr, it wasn’t him. The certainty came from somewhere. She should know who Cain was, though, and it bothered her that she didn’t. That didn’t mean that she wanted the person who stole Myr’s voice to know that.

“Dead,” she said then, with utter certainty in her voice. Somewhere a part of her applauded the edge of melancholy she gave to her voice. “He is dead and gone.”

That hadn’t occurred to him; it simply hadn’t occurred to him. The ae’Magi paced the length of the chamber. It wasn’t possible. Angrily, he stripped off the gloves he’d fastidiously donned to separate him from her filthy flesh.

It would ruin everything if his son was dead. All his efforts would be for nothing. He raised the knife to her throat, then thought better of it. She still had information for him; he wouldn’t kill her for spite.

Turning on his heel, the ae’Magi stalked out of the chamber. As he passed through the guardroom, he left orders to have her moved back into her cell and, as an afterthought, told the dungeon master that if he could find out where the rebels were hiding, he would give him a silver piece.

The dungeons were among the parts of the ae’Magi’s castle that were very old—the result of those years was not lovely. The smell made Wolf choke as he snuck into them from the hidden entrance. Magic had taken him to the castle, but he’d been forced to use mundane methods to enter. The ae’Magi was in residence, which gave him hope that Aralorn would be, too—but it meant he had to be very careful about the magic he used.

No one saw him as he emerged into the walkway between the cells. The night guards were in the room that was the only passageway from the main dungeon, other than the hidden ones, of course. There was no need for their presence in the actual dungeon at this time of night, unless they were escorting a captive in or out—or someone was being tortured.

He stood on a wide stone walkway, in human shape. On one side were seven cells, sunken the depth of a grave, in the old style. On the other side was the torture chamber, also so sunken. It was unoccupied at the moment. The only hint of life came from the smoldering coals in the raised hearth in the center of the cell.

There was no light in the dungeon other than Wolf’s staff, but it was sufficient. The ring of keys was still kept on its holder near the guardroom door—for convenience’s sake.

He slid the nearest door open and climbed down the steep, narrow stairs. The prisoners chained to the wall were too far gone to notice him. He took wolf shape because of the wolf’s sharper senses and regretted the necessity. The smells of a dungeon were bad enough to the human nose, but the wolf’s eyes were watering as he backed out of the cell. Returning to his human form, he closed the cell back up. She wasn’t in there. He found the same at the second cell.

In the third cell, chained corpses littered the floor and hung on the wall like broken dolls, but they moaned and breathed with the pseudolife that animated Uriah. They watched him with glittering eyes as he shifted again to wolf shape to sample the air. But they were too new, too heavily controlled by the ae’Magi’s spells, to give alarm.

More people in the fourth cell. When he’d lived here, there had seldom been more than one or two people in the whole dungeon. He shifted to wolf, took a breath—and stopped breathing altogether.

He pushed the fierce joy of that aside. Time enough to celebrate when he had her safe.

He found her in the corner of the cell. Her face was different, but she was muttering to herself, and it was her voice, her scent under the filth. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, breaking into heavy coughing when he shifted her against him to take off the irons—the dungeons held so much magic that short of melting the stone, the ae’Magi wouldn’t feel what he did unless he was in the next room. That didn’t mean they could afford to stay here long. Wolf swore at the wounds the cuffs left on her ankles and wrists.

No time to look for further wounds. He had to get out of here.

Gently, he picked her up, ignoring the smell of dungeon that clung to her. He stepped over the huddled bodies of her fellow inmates with no more attention than if they had been bundles of straw. Although he had no hands free to carry it, the staff followed him like an obedient dog.

It wasn’t until he stood outside the cell that he realized he had a problem. The secret door he’d entered through was a crawl space, too narrow to get through with Aralorn unable to move on her own.

He didn’t have time to dawdle.

A touch to the mask with his staff and both disappeared. A brief moment of concentration, and the scars followed. He was no shapeshifter. The face he wore beneath the scars was the one he was born with: It was his as much as the scars were also his.

Trying to avoid causing her any further hurt, he positioned Aralorn on his shoulder, holding her in place with one hand and letting the other hang carelessly free. A ball of light formed over his left shoulder and followed him to the guardroom door.

As he opened the door, the guards scrambled for their weapons until they saw his face. Wolf carelessly tossed the keys on the rough-hewn table, where they left a track in the greasy buildup as they slid. When he spoke, it was with the ae’Magi’s hated voice, soft and warm with music. The illusion was simple—he didn’t need much to make his face look so near to the ae’Magi’s that in the dark they would not be able to tell him from his father.

“I think that it would be wiser from now on,” he told them, “for the guard in charge to keep the keys on his person. It is too easy for someone to enter the dungeon by other paths. There is no reason that we should make it any easier to get into the cells than it already is.”

Without looking at the men again, he walked to the far door, which obediently opened to let him through and closed after him. The wide staircase that led to the upper floors stretched in front of him, leaving but a narrow space against the wall, supposedly to allow access to the area under the stairs that was sometimes used for storage. It was this path that he took, ducking as he moved under the stairway.

Unerringly, he touched the exact spot that triggered the hidden door. As he stepped through, he whispered a soft spell, and the dust under the stairs rearranged itself until it looked as it had before he walked there.

He put out the light as the stone door shut behind him. The passage was as dark as pitch, and there was little light for even his mage-sensitive eyes to pick out. Tiny flecks of illumination that found their way through openings in the mortar made the towering walls glitter like the night sky. Their presence was the reason he’d put out the light—lest someone in a dark room on the other side of the wall witness the same phenomenon.

Wolf kept one hand against a wall and the other securely around Aralorn and felt the ground ahead with his feet. He slowed his progress when a pile of refuse he kicked with his foot bounced down an unseen stairway. With a grim smile that no one could see, he continued blindly down the stairs.

There were shuffling noises as rats and other less savory creatures scrambled anonymously out of his way. Once he almost lost his footing as he stepped on something not long dead. A growling hiss protested his encroachment on someone’s dinner.

Only when they reached the last of the long flight of steps did he decide they were far enough down that he dared a light. The floor was thick with dust; only faint outlines showed where he had disturbed the dust the last time he’d been here several years before, raiding one of the hidden libraries—there were more than the one he’d made off with completely.

Content that the passage had remained undiscovered, Wolf walked to a blank wall and sketched symbols in the air before it. The symbols hung glowing orange in the shadows until he was finished; then they shimmered and moved until they were touching the wall. The wall glittered in its turn, before abruptly disappearing—opening the way to still another obscure passage, deep in the rock under the castle. He continued for some time, his path twisting this way and that, through passages once discovered by a boy seeking sanctuary.