Chapter 12
Dalian attempts to escape from the pits. Meanwhile, Onyx stands in the path of the Ekkians and their Taken.
Dalian lay on the slab, eyes screwed shut, feigning death.
A grunt. The clang of metal against stone. The spray of something hot, wet, across his cheek. A slow exhale. Death gasp.
He opened his eyes. An unfamiliar face peered down at him. Azure-glassed spectacles perched on a beaky nose. Behind were sharp, pinprick eyes.
“Time to wake up.”
The bodies of two guardsmen lay on the floor. Another was leaning against the wall opposite Dalian, clutching a torn throat. Blood gushed through his hands, and after a moment the man’s eyes rolled back and he slid to the stones below.
The room was low-ceilinged, torch-lit. In its center was the grate marking the entrance to the pit, the winch that had hauled Dalian out hung over it.
His back ached, his gut spasmed, his skin felt hot. His knees and elbows were raw. Dalian was faint. He had not eaten in days.
The man standing over him cleaned his bloody crescent knife against a rag, slipped it into a leather shoulder belt. He was of average height and broad-shouldered, dressed in loose breeches and a tan jerkin that exposed hairy, muscled arms. His blond hair, streaked with gray, was tightly wound into a braid that wrapped around one shoulder, under his chin, and back over the opposite shoulder.
The man had a heavily lined face that, coupled with the spectacles, evoked the visage of scholar, not mercenary. He had to have seen nearly fifty summers. Still, he moved with a languid energy that Dalian recognized well enough. This man was no tottering oldster.
Dalian swung his feet to the edge of the slab and sat up. Behind the man, a low passageway exited the room, angled downwards. Feet fell on the stone.
Someone was coming.
The man caught his gaze. He flicked his fingers up and down in a wavelike pattern, a golden eerie tracking back and forth between them. “Don’t worry. It’s our scarred bitch,” he said. He tossed Dalian a prison tunic, and Dalian remember that he was entirely naked. He slipped the tunic on as the ex-Astari appeared at the mouth of the low passageway, draped only in a bloodied blouse. Wane’s lanky frame stooped behind her. She grimaced at Dalian, then cracked her knuckles.
“Glad you lasted.” She cocked her head to the newcomer. “You’ve met Yellen.”
The muscular older man clicked his teeth.
“Another of our friends here in town,” Lynch continued.
“Woman’s giving me too much credit,” Yellen said. “I’m a friend of coin.” He pushed his blue spectacles up closer to his eyes. “But no friend of the Baron, neither. Saw them hauling you through the streets, figured what was what. Hard to stay alive long in the pit. Can’t believe all three of you muscled it out.”
“We owe you,” Lynch said.
“Yeah. I’m counting on that,” Yellen said, smirking.
An emaciated Wane, barely skin and bones, slid his way into the room. The powderman was nursing what appeared to be a broken forearm, bandaged and haphazardly splinted. “We don’t have time for this,” he said. “We need to leave.”
“Where are we?” Dalian asked.
“Somewhere deep in the Baron’s keep, no doubt,” Lynch said.
Wane knelt in the corner of the room, checking the bodies of the guards. He drew a serrated chopper from a sheathe strapped to one of the dead men, held it up to the light and examined the scalloped edges. “So we’re in for a fight.”
“Not if our luck holds,” Yellen said. “These dungeons have more than one entrance. Bolthole leads outside the walls, to the swamp peatlands northwest of town. Last ditch escape for keep denizens. Baron wets the bed, gotta have a way to skim away. It’s how I came in. We move fast, we go out the same way.”
“You been down here before?” Wane asked.
“Running black tar and spiked moss to guardsmen and others on the staff with such taboo predilections, yes,” Yellen said. He paused. “And once to fuck a scullery maid.”
“You haven’t softened with age,” Lynch said.
Yellen winked. “But that sort of thing is a ‘look the other way’ endeavor. Killing guards, breaking out pit-trapped convicts, this is a first. But I’m sure I’ll be rewarded handsomely for my services.”
“You’ve made your point,” she said.
Yellen looked to respond, but alarm bells began to clang somewhere above.
“Eeries or not, you’re in it now,” Lynch said. “Lead the way.”
Yellen grabbed a torch from a sconce in the wall and ducked into a passage on the opposite side of the room. Dalian stooped and picked up a crossbow from a guard on the floor and followed, Lynch and Wane at his heels.