Patricia Briggs - Masques

Her nakedness made her look even younger than she was. The white skin of her back was mottled with bruises and lash marks. An arcane symbol whose meaning eluded Aralorn, was etched into one shoulder in bright red.

Wolf grabbed both of Aralorn’s arms when she would have reached out to touch the girl. He pushed Aralorn behind him with more speed than gentleness and gripped his staff in one hand. Noiselessly, he drew his sword in the other.

“Child.” The word was gentle, his tone sad—for him; but he gripped the sword and held it in readiness. It was fortunate that he did so.

With a chilling cry and uncanny speed, the girl turned and leapt. Once her face had been uncommonly pretty, thought Aralorn, with a small tattoo next to her eye that marked her as belonging to one of the silk-merchant clans. Now the skin was drawn too tightly against the fine bones. Her china-blue eyes were surrounded by pools of bloodred. Her full lips were stretched over pearly teeth, the kind that all of the heroines in the old stories had—with a slight difference. The lower set of teeth were as long as the first two knuckles of Aralorn’s ring finger. Her mouth gaped impossibly wide as she launched herself at Wolf.

He knocked her aside easily enough, for her weight was slight, and in the process he cut her deeply in the abdomen. He ended her suffering with a second cut to the back of her neck.

Death was no stranger to Aralorn, so examining the body didn’t bother her—much. “One of your father’s pets, I assume.” It was a comment more than a question.

Wolf grunted an affirmative and touched the symbol on her back. “She’d have been a lot harder to fight if she hadn’t been so new at it. She didn’t even know how to attack.”

Aralorn jerked the embroidered bedspread off the bed and covered the pathetic little body with it before following Wolf out of the room.

The study was a wonder in cultured taste, not that Aralorn expected anything else. Wolf walked to the desk and picked up a sheet of paper. He laughed humorlessly and handed it to Aralorn. It read simply, “I’m in the dungeon. Join me?”

“Apparently,” said Wolf, “he was monitoring his little trap. He probably knows that you are with me. It is time for you to leave. Now.”

She looked at him with due consideration. “I probably should tell you that I will, then just follow you in.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?” Wolf’s voice was soft. He glanced at a decanter on the ae’Magi’s polished desk. It imploded loudly enough to make Aralorn jump. “Plague take you, Aralorn, don’t you see? He will use you against me. He already has.”

Aralorn felt her own temper rise to the surface. “Do you think that I am some weak helpless female who can do nothing but stand around while you protect her? I am not helpless against human magic or anything else he’s likely to throw at us.” She made “human” sound like a filthy word. “I can help. Let me help, Wolf.”

He was silent for a long moment, then he waved his hand with a haphazard motion and the decanter re-created itself, leaving the desk unblemished. He walked over and pulled the stopper. Taking a token drink from the neck of the bottle, he met Aralorn’s glare.

“I owe you an apology, Lady. I’m not used to caring about anything. It’s . . . uncomfortable.”

She tilted her chin up at him, flags of temper still on her cheeks, then she took the decanter that he was still holding and took a mouthful herself. She set it on the desk and muttered something that he wasn’t supposed to hear.

“What?” he whispered. Evidently, he’d heard her.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at him, tapping a foot impatiently on the floor. He didn’t have to look like someone had slapped him.

“I said, ‘It’s a good thing that I love you, or you’d be Uriah bait.’ Now that that’s settled, why don’t we go find ourselves an ae’Magi?” Without waiting for him, she stalked out the door into the hallway.

“Aralorn,” he said, his voice a little deeper than usual. “You’re going the wrong way if you want to find the dungeons.” He sounded . . . almost meek.

She glared at him, and he held out his hand in invitation. So she followed him through the twists and turns of the castle halls that were almost as convoluted as the secret tunnels. The dimly lit passages, which had seemed threatening and huge when she had gone through them alone, were not as intimidating as she remembered them.

Apparently there were no humans in the castle this late at night—at least they didn’t see any. The Uriah standing guard here and there paid them no heed. Aralorn was careful to keep her eyes from their faces, but she recognized Talor’s boots anyway. Wolf’s grip was steady on her shoulder as they went by it. Not him. Never again. It.

When they passed the entrance to the great hall, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to look inside. The bars of the cage were discernible in the moonlight, but the light wasn’t good enough to see if it was occupied.

The stairway that led down to the lower levels was well lit and smelled of grain and alcohol from the storage rooms on the first sublevel. Each storage room was carefully labeled as to its contents. Most of them contained foodstuffs, but other labels read things like weapons, fabric, and old accounting records. The stairway down to the next level was on another side of the castle.

The second sublevel seemed to be smaller, and here there were several small sleeping quarters intended for the use of apprentices; at least so Aralorn judged them by the traditional sparseness of the cells. The only other rooms were obviously intended for labs, but from the dust that coated the tables, they hadn’t seen use for some time.

The dungeon was on the third sublevel, Wolf told her, as they went down another set of stairs. Like the caves, the temperature was consistently chilly but not cold. The smell was overpowering.

Aralorn felt the hair on her arms move with the magic impregnated in the walls of the castle at this level. Countless magicians had bespelled the stones here to prevent the escape of the inmates, and the half of Aralorn that wasn’t human told her that the spells had been strong enough to keep some of the prisoners in even after they died. Sick as she had been during her incarceration here, she remembered the feel of the dead weighing down the air.

It occurred to her that she was lucky that she wasn’t a full-blooded shapeshifter—they could sense the dead almost as clearly as the living. A shapeshifter wouldn’t keep his sanity for very long in a place such as this.

Without the fever that kept her from shielding herself from the human-twisted magic, she could block out enough of the emanations that the pain was nominal. She ignored the discomfort that remained and kept close to Wolf.

The guardroom was empty. By prearranged plan, and it took a strong argument to convince Wolf, she entered the dungeons first—because it was unexpected, and the more off-balance they could throw the ae’Magi, the better off they were.

The first thing that she noticed was the lack of sound. There had never been a cessation of the moaning and coughing—sometimes the noise had almost driven her crazy. Now it was still and silent. The light was dim, and Wolf’s staff had stayed in the guardroom with him, so she couldn’t see inside the cells. She crept carefully down one side of the path and hid in the shadows. Unlike her, Wolf made a showy entrance. His staff glittered wildly, lighting the room with his power. The illumination slid off the shield of Aralorn’s magic and left her hidden.

It didn’t slide off the ae’Magi, who stood at the far end of the room. Like Wolf, he, too, carried a staff, massive and elaborately carved, which he tilted as if it were a lance. It wasn’t aimed at Wolf, but at her. She dropped instantly to the floor, which vibrated with the force of the explosion of the outside wall of the cell behind her. She was so distracted that she almost missed Wolf’s countermove, designed to force the ae’Magi to deal with him.