Elizabeth Haydon - Requiem for the Sun

Gwydion Navarne smiled. “Or perhaps it is just beginning.”

Osten waited in the shadows impatiently, watching with grudging admiration the precision with which the semi-human beasts that were the Bolg he a watch. There was no perfunctory movement, no yawning or evidence that the ritual was rote. The king’s guards took their duty seriously.

All the better.

She would have preferred to slip in and slit their throats but she had take so long and spent to much time setting the trap that she didn’t dare tip he hand now.

So she waited.

It had required painstaking hours to covertly search the general vicinity of the corridor whose general location she had knobbed out of Shaene. But in the end, it was the Bolg king’s meticulous security that gave her the clue she needed. His inner sanctum must lie beyond this most guarded of intersections.

Somewhere in the distance she could hear an uproar, a sound of muster, or something like it, rumbling through the mountain, but the guards did not deviate in their watch. Upon consideration of it, she realized that the noise had been building for the better part of the day, like preparations in the face of a coming storm. This deep inside the mountain, however, little impact could be felt.

In truth , she mused, hearing the three-quarter-hour bells sound, it probably is overkill to trap the king’s bedchamber . The tower had been brilliantly constructed, the subterfuge of the snare was so subtle, so unexpected, that she fully expected to blow the top off of Gurgus, crumbling the rest of the peak in upon itself, burying the king and all the Bolg he allowed to be present at the inauguration of the tower with it.

But it never hurt to have a backup plan. And she wanted to be certain that the Bolg king paid for his incursion into her guild, for the loss of her tunnel into the artery below Entudenin.

She wanted him to suffer horribly before he died. If her timing was good, he would be enjoying the full effects of the exposure before he was crushed to death.

The last communique she had sent to Dranth had included the general directions she had knobbed out of Shaene. The memory of riding his shapeless body, his pathetic wheezing beneath her, gave her a chill of disgust that she shook off, wanting to be ready when the watch changed. As long as the idiot’s information was good, the Raven’s Guild would have detailed maps and schematics to the most sensitive areas of the inner Teeth, she knew, along with the intelligence she had gathered and passed along previously.

Her opportunity presented itself just as the soldiers crossed in front of the triple pass, a juncture where three major tunnels met in the dark basalt walls of the inner sanctum. Esten had been timing the dead space, the moments in between when one shift of soldiers had left and the next arrived; it was never more than a matter of seconds. When she saw it, she slipped around the corner of the corridor and down the left-hand hallway, blending into the shades of dim light and fuzzy darkness, running her hands along the veined walls, until she was standing before what could only be the doorway to the king’s own bedchamber.

Like everything else about the king, the doorway was concealed, hidden amid the striations that marbled the stone of the walls. Esten marveled at the masterly hiding of such a large aperture; had she not known that this was the right corridor, in a labyrinth that contained hundreds of corridors, even she. with her extensive training and experience in ferreting out the hidden, never would have found it.

That disgusting tumble was worth it after all , she thought.

The catch that served as a handhold to the door was locked.

With the speed born of years of practice, she took her thin picks from hei mouth where she carried them and set about opening the lock; it was a puzzle lock of ancient design, with an undoubtedly obscure code, but she did not need to know what it was to pick it. Instead, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small vial of quicksilver mixed with filings of lead; a drop applied to the shaft of the pick formed an impression of the inner works of the lock. With the lightest of touches, she turned the makeshift key.

The door opened silently.

Esten slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind her.

Her bright, dark eyes, raven’s eyes, scanned the room.

The king’s bedchamber was a surprising mix of austere decor and lush linens. The walls, the sheets, the wooden canopy over the bed draped in satin, were all in black; the marble desk, the wooden chairs, the enormous chest at the foot of the bed, everything formed of dark materials. It was a place of deep quiet; there was a sense of thick, solid softness evoked in the room, a place where someone with much on his mind could sleep restfully.

Esten smiled.

Quickly she set about searching the chamber, opening each small chest, each drawer, examining the nooks in the wardrobes and finding very little. The Bolg king might be lord of the ruins of one of the richest empires in history, but he had taken little material wealth for himself.

Methodically she continued her search, finding nothing of note, until she pulled back an area of the silk tapestry on the floor and discovered a tin) irregularity that would have been unnoticeable to any but the sensitive fingen of the mistress of a guild of professional thieves.

She ran her finger around the outline, checking for traps and finding none, then carefully sprang the locking mechanism.

A small reliquary in the slate of the floor opened, in which a rectangular box the length of two of her hands rested, swathed in a velvet covering.

Esten stared into the hole for a moment, then reached in and took the box: when she opened it, her brows drew together.

In the box was a key of a sort, a strange, curving key that looked like it was made of bone, like a large rib.

She slipped the key into an inner pocket of her shirt, closed the box, put it back in its velvet pouch, and resealed it in the reliquary. Then she went back to her search.

The chest at the foot of the king’s bed gave her the greatest effort. The traps were so devious she could not wait to put some variations of them to use back home in Yarim. When she finally was able to spring the lock, she opened the lid, only to have a dank wind slap her across the face. Esten blinked in surprise; she was staring down a long passageway of rough-hewn steps. Where it led to, she had no way of fathoming.

Sandy! Get up, you lazy sinner!”

Shaene pounded on the door again; the noise of the barracks was so ever-present that Omet had no doubt grown used to it. Why the boy insisted on bunking with the soldiers in the ascetic quarters was beyond Shaene’s understanding; the ambassadorial suite to which he had been assigned was far more comfortable, though certainly not opulent. If one was to be forced to live, as a result of an ill-thought-out contract, in the land of the Firbolg, one might at least opt for the most comfortable accommodations available.

Hearing no reply again, Shaene turned to Rhur.

“Maybe he’s ill,” he said the to the Bolg artisan.

Rhur grasped the door handle, expecting to find it locked; Omet was fanatical about locking his door of late, ever since Theophila came to the mountain. To his surprise, and that of Shaene, it opened easily.

The stench of illness hung in the tiny windowless room.

“Gods!” Shaene cried. “Omet?” He and Rhur hurried into the room; in two steps they were at the young man’s bedside.

Omet’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. His skin was the color of the stone walls around them, except for his cheeks, in the center of which two bright spots of fever burned, hot as the fires of the forge.