Balanced on the Blades Edge #2 Deathmaker (5 page)

Her grunt suggested she wasn’t that interested in his theories. Or that discussions of sorcerers made her uneasy. Or maybe she was imagining sinking her throwing stars into his back again.

Tolemek was counting doors, or rather doorways since the wood had long since rotted away, and didn’t speak again. He wondered if the books and scrolls he hoped to find had rotted with age too. He hoped the ancient scribes had used their magic to preserve some of them.

“This is it,” he whispered when they reached the fifth doorway.

“The treasure room?” Ahn guessed.

Was that what she thought this was? Some quest for gold? He supposed it was as plausible a theory as any. “In a manner of speaking. This was their library.”

He slipped inside, forgetting some of his caution. He almost didn’t notice the long pause before she asked, “You planning to study some ancient magics?” She had stopped at the doorway. “To help you make better... goo?”

Her tone was full of wariness. She knew his name, the rumors surrounding him. She had to be uneasy down here with him, understandably so. He wasn’t sure how to settle that unease. He also hadn’t figured out how he was going to get her to his ship, short of overpowering her and knocking her out. As long as they were close, and she didn’t have the range to throw something sharp at him, he figured he
could
overpower her, but that seemed a poor reward for the help she had provided so far. If she hadn’t been there when that guard had rounded the corner, he would have aimed at Tolemek instead of her. Waiting for his goo to work at the end of the hall, he had been too far away to do a thing about it. But simply letting her escape into the jungle? He didn’t know if he could do that either.

“I prefer science to magic when it comes to my goos,” he said. “Not that I know enough about magic to know if it has any useful applications, regardless, but this—what I seek here—is to help another, not myself.”

“Some lover or relative sick?”

“What?” he blurted, almost tripping into one of the pockmarks in the floor.

In the darkness, he couldn’t see the shrug, but he heard it in her voice. “They say some of those old sorcerers were healers.”

Tolemek’s first reaction was to stop talking or to brush her off. Her guess had been a little too close—not even the captain knew what exactly he was searching for and why. But maybe he could lessen her wariness by talking about his family, making her believe that no matter what she had heard, he was simply a person.

A person who wanted to entrap her for his own gains. He grimaced at himself. Why was he even worrying about her when he had reached the room he had been scheming and planning to reach for the last three months?

“Not a lover,” he said by way of completing the conversation. “My little sister.”

“Oh.”

Tolemek fished out a match from his pouch and found a wall to scrape it on. The flame flared to life, revealing walls full of stone bookcases,
empty
stone bookcases. A few old tables had been pushed to the sides of the big room, and an expanse of mostly bare floor lay before him. The mold wasn’t growing on it, but piles of fine gray dust undulated across it. Rat and snake tracks disturbed it in places, but there was so much that it hadn’t been scattered completely by time or visitors.

Frowning, he crept forward and crouched, touching his finger to one of the piles. His match burned down, searing his flesh and going out, at the same time as he realized what he was looking at. Not dust. Ashes.

He snarled and slammed his hand into the hard floor. He couldn’t see them now in the darkness, but he felt the ashes stirring and rising into the air, tickling his nostrils with the scent of ancient books and scrolls long destroyed. Oh, he didn’t know how long it had truly been, but it didn’t matter if it had been a year or hundreds of years. He was too late.

* * *

Cas waited in the darkness beside the doorway. She wanted to get going—this far under the main fortress, she couldn’t heard the alarm anymore, but she wagered it was still going on, and it wouldn’t take long for guards to find that huge hole in the wall. Still, she suspected Tolemek would want to search further, if he had made the journey here specifically for this. Whatever this was. That room hadn’t looked promising from what she had seen in the handful of seconds the match had been lit, but maybe there was more to it.

“We can go,” he said scarce seconds later. He hadn’t even bothered to light another match.

Cas thought about telling him she was sorry he hadn’t found what he was looking for, but she wasn’t sure she believed his story about wanting to help his sister. For all she knew, he was looking for something to turn into a weapon. “I’m ready.”

He took the lead again, and she followed him through the dark passages, using a hand on the wall to feel her way along. She tried not to feel uneasy about the fact that she would be lost down here without him. Usually, she had a good sense of direction, but they had taken a few turns, and the darkness made it hard to note landmarks.

“Right turn,” Tolemek said, “and a tight squeeze.”

She found the gap in the wall, using both hands to get a feel for the opening. It wasn’t tight by her standards, more like the width of a closet door rather than a wide corridor. But as soon as she turned after him and bumped into his back, she understood what he meant. Maybe it
was
a closet.

“You can pick your hole,” Tolemek said, shifting to the side, “though my understanding from the blueprint I studied is that they all come together into a single vertical shaft that drops eighty feet before joining with the current sewage removal system.”

Cas stuck her foot forward, trying to find whatever hole—or holes—he was talking about. But she smacked her toe on a wall. No, the base of a shelf or bench. It took a moment for her to realize where they were. Not quite a closet. “Is this a latrine?”

“Yes. A centuries-old one. There shouldn’t be any biological contaminants left, if you’re concerned about cleanliness.”

Cleanliness? Please. “The eighty-foot-drop you mentioned is more problematic for me. Unless you’ve got a coil of rope hidden in that little pouch of yours.” She was beginning to see why he’d arranged to have himself captured instead of simply using his concoctions to infiltrate the ruins from below.

“Rope would have been impractical for someone to throw across the courtyard to my window.”

“Maybe so, but it would have made a much bigger target to aim at with a rock.”

He snorted. “The walls are somewhat slippery, making climbing up the shaft difficult, but I think we’ll be able to slow ourselves down enough to land on the bottom at a reasonable, unlikely-to-break-bones speed.”

How comforting. “I’m going to refrain from making sarcastic comments or telling you to stuff your head in a latrine, but only because I could be stuck back in that cell and waiting for my next beating right now.”

“And because I
will
be stuffing my head in a latrine?”

Huh, her pirate had a sense of humor. How odd for someone named Deathmaker. “Yeah, that too.”

Tolemek lit a match. “So we can see what we’re getting into.”

Between his description and her time feeling around, Cas already had an image of the place in her head, and it proved fairly accurate. Three holes in a sandstone shelf were all that remained of the latrine. The rims of the openings had crumbled away, so they were larger than they would have originally been. She could squeeze through one, yes, and he probably could, too, though it would be a tight fit.

When he held the match over one of the holes, she peered inside. If there was an opening at the bottom, it was too far down to see. He dropped the match inside, and for a moment, she had a good view of those walls before the flame went out, long before it got close to the bottom. The important thing was that the shaft appeared narrow enough for her to climb slowly down, bracing herself with her arms and legs. The stone was stained with time—or something more visceral—but wasn’t cloaked in algae and hadn’t appeared that slick in the light.

“I’ll go first,” Tolemek said.

“All right, but do me a favor, will you?”

“Such as?”

“If you slip and fall to your death, try to crash down in a way that won’t leave those spiky bracers pointing up for me to land on.”

“I’ll keep your request in mind.” He climbed into one of the holes, grunting as flesh smacked against stone.

Cas waited for the curses, scrapes, and bumps to fade away before she stuck the pouch of throwing stars into her mouth and climbed onto the shelf. She almost left the rifle there, but thought she could make something of a lap as she descended, her legs out and her back against the wall, and keep it from falling. She thought about waiting long enough for him to climb down the entire eighty feet, so that if she fell—or dropped the rifle—she wouldn’t knock him loose, but there had to be guards searching in the ruins by now. She imagined one running in, looking down, and shooting her while she was helpless. She didn’t want to die in some latrine drainage shaft.

With that cheery thought, she lowered herself into the hole, pressing her back against one side and her legs against the other. She lowered one hand, then the other, from the rim of the hole and placed them on the walls to either side.

“A promising start,” she murmured when she didn’t slip, then inched her way downward.

It didn’t take long for her to find the slick spots Tolemek had mentioned. When that happened, she slipped inches—or feet—before catching herself on coarser material. Each time, her heart tried to leap out of her chest, doubtlessly searching for a less insane place to reside. She almost lost the rifle a couple of times too. Tolemek would not be pleased if it cracked him on the head, but maybe those thick ropes of hair would offer padding.

Without being able to see a thing in the blackness, it was hard to judge how far she had gone, but she guessed she was halfway down when her butt bumped into something. That gave her heart another jolt. It turned out to be a bend in the shaft. The passage curved in one direction before returning to vertical, and maneuvering past the hump, which was slick of course, was scarier than her first time upside down in a flier had been. At least she didn’t pee on herself—a couple of her classmates at the academy had done that on some of their early flights. Although, if one were to have such an accident, this would be the natural place for it, she supposed.

“Ahn?” a soft call came from below.

She had lost track of time, so it surprised her. “Yeah?” she asked around the pouch of throwing stars, her voice as tense as the rest of her body.

“I’m on the ground. We made it.” Tolemek sounded like he was about ten feet down and standing right under the hole. Lucky for him that she had managed to keep bodily functions under control.

“Are your bracers out of the way?” she asked.

“Yes.” He sounded amused. Maybe deep down, pirates knew their wardrobes were silly.

Cas’s heart got one more jolt when she ran out of wall to brace herself against, and one of her feet slipped, dangling into emptiness. Her hands pressed against the side walls like immovable anchors. She didn’t say anything, but Tolemek must have heard her suck in an alarmed breath, for his hand came up to touch her leg. “You’ve got a seven- or eight-foot drop, and then it’s flat down here.”

She didn’t want to admit that his touch reassured her, but since she couldn’t see a thing, it did. She let herself drop, twisting in the air to land facing him and grabbing him as she fell—just in case he was on a ledge and there happened to be another hundred-foot drop for the foolish girl who missed it. Her feet landed on solid stone. She released a long, relieved breath.

“Are you trying to undress me?” Tolemek asked mildly. She had a death grip on his vest, her fingers clenched in the thick hide, and he was probably missing a few chest hairs too. “Or just admiring the feel of my clothing?”

As soon as he spoke, Cas released him and took a step back, glad for the darkness. An embarrassed blush heated her cheeks. She pulled the pouch out of her mouth and strove for a nonchalant response. “It
is
an upgrade to what they gave me to wear.”

Fortunately, he didn’t make any more jokes about her grabbing him—or mention that he’d noticed that the climb down had scared her. “Getting out should be easy from here,” he said, turning away from her. “This way.”

Cas followed him down a new passage, this one with water trickling down the middle—water that didn’t smell all that fresh—and was relieved when a warm breeze touched her cheeks. Finally.

They turned around a bend, and the blackness faded to gray, the bumpy green walls growing visible. The end of a tunnel came into view beyond a grid of rusted iron bars. The alarm gongs were audible again, and Cas wondered how many guards would be out there, searching for the escaped prisoners.

“You have any more of that metal-burning goo?” she murmured as they walked toward the bars.

“No, but I already applied it.” Tolemek strode toward the grate. “Last night, when I was hoping I could get into the ruins without having to deal with the dungeon or its guards.”

That meant Cas never would have met him—and would still be in her cell—if not for a thousand-year-old latrine. Fate was a capricious spirit.

Tolemek lifted a hand to stop her and dropped into a crouch near the wall. They were still twenty feet from the bars but close enough that she could see hinges, identifying it as a gate, and a shiny new steel lock securing it.

“Looks like someone noticed your sabotage,” Cas said.

“Annoyingly efficient of them.”

The sounds of foliage being snapped and trampled drifted in from outside. Someone in a uniform jogged past the entrance. The figure glanced in their direction, but continued on without pausing to peer more closely. Glad for the shadows, Cas reached in her pouch for another throwing star. She still had the rifle as well, but if they could slip past the guards without making any noise, they would have more time to escape into the jungle. Then again, if they were forced to engage in a skirmish out there, that might be her opportunity to slip away from her pirate, especially if the guards, considering him more dangerous, focused on him. Once she was on the other side of those bars, she could find her own way home.