Ruby Guardian (17 page)

The girl spent a few moments just studying the various individuals in the room, noting the cut and coarseness of their clothing, their unkempt appearance, and the way they carried themselves. Though she found them generally repugnant, she had to admit that they seemed to be enjoying themselves to the fullest. One man, small and wiry with greasy hair tied back from his head, was seated almost directly below her. Her eyes were drawn to him when he began to laugh, for he really guffawed, slapping his hand on the table and sloshing drinks. Across from him, a bulky woman in a bodice that barely contained her ample breasts sat on another man’s lap, a huge bear of a fellow with a thick beard and mustache. He was laughing and singing along with the song being performed on the stage, and the hefty dame was bouncing in time to the music and singing right along with him. Though Emriana was embarrassed that the woman seemed to have no shame, the girl was also a bit envious that she seemed so comfortable in the company of the men she was with.

Emriana sighed and was just about to turn back to the safety of her alcove when she noticed a face staring up at her. It belonged to another woman, though she was obviously a bit more refined than the plump matron the girl had been watching. Dressed in purple leggings tucked into supple leather boots and a magenta vest over a white shirt—both of which were unlaced to an indecent level near her navel—the woman had short blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. She was sitting alone on a bench that rested against the far wall and had no table to accompany it, and she was staring right at Emriana intently.

The girl began to stare right back, cocking her head to one side as if to say, “What, exactly, do you want?” When the stranger realized she had been spotted, she shook her head once in consternation and got to her feet. She glanced up once more as she made her way toward the rear of the establishment. Emriana thought the woman had a smug smile on her face. The girl frowned, unsettled by the silent confrontation, and started to follow. Then she remembered her aunt’s warning and restrained herself.

No, she trusted me to come with her tonight. I’m not going to make a mess of things.

‘ Emriana returned to her seat in the tiny alcove and waited. After a while, growing bored, the girl began to examine the surface of the table. Countless knives and daggers had carved up the wood, cutting names, simple caricatures, and cryptic symbols over the entire surface. Even so, the wood looked fairly new, not stained and dark as she would have expected.

I wonder how often they have to replace them? Emriana pondered, remembering her aunt’s tale of the previous night, when half the furniture in the common area below apparently took a beating. Imagining such a brawl made the girl grin. She could just picture Xaphira in the midst of it all, leaping, kicking, and punching, just as she had against the dire-cats earlier that day. She must have been intimidating, the girl thought.

Emriana began to get restless. Xaphira’s meeting was taking longer than she would have imagined, and the girl was growing agitated. She did not want to have to sit there and wait much longer.

When another quarter-hour must have gone by, Emriana realized she was growing genuinely worried. Several times, she half rose from the seat with the intention of hunting her aunt down, just to make certain the woman was fine, but each time, she stopped

herself, not wishing to interrupt whatever delicate negotiations might have been taking place.

Suddenly, Emriana remembered her pendant. Fool! she silently snapped at herself. It’s been hanging around your neck the whole time.

The girl snatched up the opal dangling on the chain and withdrew it from inside her shirt. Clutching it, she closed her eyes and envisioned her aunt, dressed in her telltale red shirt and cloak. Emriana began to speak.

“Aunt Xaphira, are you well? It’s been quite a while since you left, and I’m worried about you. Do you need help?”

She paused and waited for a response. There was nothing but silence.

Growing more concerned, Emriana looked at the pendant, wondering if it was functioning properly. She had no way of knowing whether the enchantment had ceased to work or if Aunt Xaphira could not respond at the moment. Either way, she was going to have to find out the old-fashioned way.

Rising to her feet, Emriana slid out of the booth and to the balcony, wondering which direction Quill had taken Xaphira. She was just about to start down the row of alcoves, intent on poking her head inside each one, when a flash of red caught her eye down below, in the common area.

“Aunt Xaphira!” Emriana called out, but her aunt had her back turned and vanished beneath the stairs, never turning around.

Emriana darted down the balcony toward the stairs, rushing to catch up to her aunt.

What’s she up to? the girl thought, reaching the bottom of the stairs and pushing past the people milling about. Why did she leave without me?

Emriana was so focused on catching the older woman that she no longer noticed the leering stares

or the crude comments uttered in her direction by the other patrons. Just beyond the base of the staircase, a narrow hallway ran toward the back of the establishment, leading to a set of private rooms, including a kitchen or pantry of some sort. Emriana had to dodge and weave to make her way through the passage, for it was crowded with serving folk both coming and going. One skinny fellow with grease stains on an apron covering his front shouted an obscenity at her and told her to get out, but Emriana ignored the man and slipped to the far end of the hall, where it ended in a doorway leading out into the night.

Once through the doorway, Emriana had to stop and let her eyes adjust to the dimness of the evening. The alley in which she stood was dirt, and it stank of rotting vegetables and raw sewage. It couldn’t have been more than three paces across, and all the buildings on either side were at least two stories tall, most even higher than that. But there was no sign of the other woman.

“Aunt Xaphira!” Emriana called, taking a few steps away from the doorway and the noise issuing forth from it. She then stood very still and listened. At first, she could hear nothing except for the din of conversation from inside the rathrurand the trickle of some fluids running down the alley, but a moment later, she caught wind of a faint scuffling noise off to her left.

Growing suspicious, the girl turned in that direction, slipping into the shadows and padding silently along the alley, peering into every dark cranny she came upon, listening still for further sounds of movement. At the juncture of The Silver Fish and the next building over, she found what she had been looking for. There was a gap between the two structures, not really wide enough for a man, but certainly spacious

enough for a more diminutive woman or girl to squeeze into.

Emriana peered cautiously into the gap, but she did not see anyone moving through it. Then a thought occurred to her and she gazed up just in time to catch the silhouette of someone climbing up the gap, using both walls as support. It was too dark to make the person out clearly, but from Emriana’s vantage point, it certainly looked like a woman in a cloak.

Convinced that she was not following her aunt, but rather someone who intended to look like her, Emriana hesitated. She was wary of a trap, but her growing fear for Xaphira’s well-being pushed her onward. As silently as she could, she began feeling for hand-and footholds, following the mysterious figure above her. She found the going fairly easy, and she had pulled herself halfway up the building when the figure she was pursuing reached the top and disappeared over the side of the roof.

Damn it all, Emriana silently fumed as she continued her ascent. She’ll be long gone before I can get up there. She hastened her pace, hoping against hope that perhaps she could make up some ground and keep her quarry in sight.

As Emriana grabbed at the next handhold and began to haul herself up, there was a bright flash of light overhead and a gout of flame roared down from above, directly at her.

D

Pilos hurried along a dimly lit and rather uninteresting corridor toward the narrow door at the far end. Though the chances

of the Abreeant encountering another priest in that particular section of the temple—a seldom-used wing devoted primarily to storage—at that time of the night was unlikely, he did not wish to be seen. Even the suggestion of impropriety on his part would make the young priest lose his nerve and return to his quarters. And his quarters were the last place in which he wished to spend any more time.

True to his expectations, none of the high priests of Waukeen had sent any kind of word to Pilos on the Grand Syndar’s condition in well over a day. As the Abreeant had suspected, Grand Trabbar Lavant had had no

intention of keeping Mikolo’s attendant informed of the old man’s health or potential for recovery. Though he had tried to remain obedient, Pilos could not stand to await news any longer.

Of course, the Abreeant could not approach the Grand Syndar’s chambers and demand an explanation. At the very least, the high priests would order him back to his chambers with an admonition to perform some penance for his indiscipline. At worst, they might permanently remove him from his duties and assign him to baser tasks as punishment.

If they didn’t just decide I was unfit to serve Waukeen altogether, he silently lamented.

With that thought, Pilos nearly halted his progress and spun around to return to his rooms as fast as he could. The very idea of being denied the opportunity to bathe in the glory that was the Merchant’s Friend was abhorrent, and part of Pilos dared not even consider the consequences of what he was preparing to do in place of a frontal confrontation.

When the priest reached the end of the small hallway, where the narrow door faced him, he paused, taking a deep breath and peering back over his shoulder one last time to make certain there was, no one there to witness his transgression. Satisfied that he was alone, Pilos slipped a key into the lock of the wooden door, twisted it, and half smiled at the sound and feel of the faint click. Nervously, he pushed the door open, slipped inside, and hurriedly shut it again.

In the dark Pilos could see nothing, so he clutched at his holy coin, which hung from a chain around his neck, and muttered a quick prayer to Waukeen. Instantly a tiny ball of illumination appeared, conjured onto the coin. The light was sufficient for him to see the entirety of the small room, the same as if he had lit a torch, though the glow of his coin was of a more

pearly hue, like moonlight. He let the symbol settle back against his breast and peered about.

It was nothing more than a storage closet, a small room lined with shelves on the walls holding linens that were not in use during the summer season. In the fall, when the weather cooled once more, the inhabitants of the temple would very likely retrieve the warmer bedclothes, but for the moment, no one would venture into the closet for any reason …

Unless they knew something unique about the chamber, as Pilos did.

When he had first been raised to the level of Abreeant and awarded, for his pious service in the temple, the position of servitude to the Grand Syndar himself, Pilos discovered a few secrets—or rather, he was taught those secrets by the Grand Syndar himself—about the architecture of the temple. One such secret was the numerous concealed passages that threaded their way through the temple structure, passing through the thickest of the walls and following narrow and steep staircases to different levels. The Grand Syndar seldom used those covert passageways, but they were there in cases of dire need. As Mikolo explained it at the time, one never knew when the Grand Syndar might need to move from one locale within the temple to another “unmolested,” as the old man had put it.

Pilos had never been able to imagine what use the Grand Syndar might have had for such secretive modes of travel, but he did not question their existence, nor did he ever reveal to anyone else that he was aware of them. Right then, he was feeling more than a little gratified that the Grand Syndar had seen fit to share their presence with him.

Moving to the back of the closet, Pilos stared at the shelving attached to the wall for a few moments,

trying to recall exactly how the Grand Syndar had made them function. He remembered something about a loose stone, but he could not recall exactly which one might be suitable. He shrugged and began to feel with his hands each of the stones that made up the wall. After the fourth or fifth one, he began to grow frustrated.

Perhaps it wasn’t a stone at all, he thought, pondering.

Then the young priest remembered. There had been a loose stone at chest height, but it was on the other side of the wall. From the closet side, the trigger mechanism was actually one of the shelves. In fact, Pilos remembered, it was the bottommost shelf. He reached down and felt with his fingers along the bottom of the lowest one. When they brushed across a small stud, he pressed it in and tugged. The entire shelf shifted, and there was a deep click from inside the stone wall. Very carefully, Pilos stood and pushed against the wall, watching with satisfaction when it swung backward, revealing the narrow passageway beyond.

Quickly, before he could lose his nerve, Pilos scurried through the opening and pushed the swinging section of wall back again, until he heard it click shut. Sighing, he wondered if he would be able to figure out how to open it again, but he did not stop to determine which stone was the correct one right then. Instead he turned and began to follow the passage, guided by his glowing coin.

After a short walk down a dusty and cobweb-filled corridor, the passage split into a four-way intersection, and Pilos considered for a brief moment the correct route. When he’d made up his mind, he turned to the right, went down some steep stairs, and turned left at another intersection. He continued to follow that passage for quite some time, passing a couple

of different points where he knew other doors were camouflaged in the stonework. Finally, Pilos turned a last corner and found himself in a dead end.