David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

They walked more briskly now that they were out of sight of the guards. These corridors made do with a lamp at each corner, and those would burn down by morning.

"I'mnot sure you should go," said Liane. "My agent certainly thinks the business is dangerous, and he's not easily alarmed."

"If there's wizardry involved…," Garric said. "And there is, Dipsas is a wizard and what else'd she be doing in the vaults under the palace? If there's wizardry, then nobody's more fit than you and me to judge what's going on. Except for Tenoctris, of course, and if she were here I'd insist on going with her or sending Cashel."

"I'm not disagreeing," Liane said, looking over her shoulder to smile at him. "I'm just saying that I understand why others might."

She paused by a door covered by a swatch of age-rotted tapestry nailed to the jamb and transom. "This is the room," she said, then tapped twice on the wood-with the ivory hilt of the little dagger Garric had seen her kill with, he realized.

The door swung outward, frame and all. There was no light inside. "Watch the hole!" an unfamiliar male voice whispered. "Half the floor's gone in here, that's why they closed it."

Liane slipped in, elbowing the door wider: they couldn't leave the load of washing out in the hall without attracting attention. Garric followed, closing the panel behind him. The shutter of a dark-lantern scraped open. The light of the single candle behind a lens of thin horn blazed like a burst of sunlight.

"Who's he?" the voice demanded; a sharp-featured youth in the bleached-white tunic of Earl Wildulf's palace servants, Garric saw. "You weren't supposed to bring anybody. Anybody!"

"You know who I am," Garric said. "Now tell us where Dipsas and the Countess go at night."

The room contained a broken bedframe and a litter of smaller objects, but it wasn't completely filled with junk the way the suite turned over to Garric had been. The floor, concrete poured over a lattice of withies, had sagged when a supporting beam gave way; half the slab had then collapsed into the darkness beneath. The response of whoever was in charge of palace maintenance at the time had been to close the room instead of trying to repair it.

When Garric glanced into the hole, he could understand why nobody'd wanted to work down there. He grinned. He wasn't looking forward to it himself.

"You weren't supposed to tell anybody who I am!" the youth said peevishly to Liane. "My life's in danger, you know that!"

"All our lives are in danger," Liane said calmly. "Yours will be in less danger if you stop angering me when time is so short. Where does the wizard go?"

The spy twisted his mouth as if for another complaint, then caught himself with a shrug. "Right," he said. "Right, and anyway, what's done is done."

He pointed his thumb toward the hole where the floor had been. "I've left markers on the walls with mushroom spores. When your eyes adjust, you'll see them. It's not the same path Dipsas takes at the start-it's a rabbit warren down there, there's tunnels off every direction and I don't know where half of 'em go. Anyway, you'll join her route about two levels down."

"Won't Dipsas see the markings and know someone has followed her?" Liane said with a frown.

"No, they take lamps, her and the Countess," the spy explained. "If there's any light at all, you can't see my marks. And even if they did-"

He shrugged again. "Chances are they'd figure it was natural, it seems to me. You get that sort of glow in caves. That's where I gather the mushrooms."

"Then you'd better close your lantern," Garric said, "so our eyes can adapt. They're there tonight, Dipsas and Balila?"

"Right," the spy said, sliding the cover over the lens. The smell of hot iron and candlesmoke was suddenly more noticeable, though that was probably because Garric's eyes no longer distracted him from the odors. "They started down at their usual time, an hour ago. I've followed them three times when I wasn't on duty, and they always go the same place."

The spy made a sound with his cheek as though he'd tasted something sour. "The bird and that jabbering little moron the Countess keeps with her, they went too," he said. "They always do. I don't understand why. Idon't."

He's frightened, Garric realized. But not, I think, by anything he could put a name to.

"He seems a sensible fellow," Carus remarked with his usual grin. It was always daylight at the place where he stood in Garric's mind. "So perhaps he just doesn't like wizards."

"I see a glow down there," Liane said, her voice calm but perhaps too calm.

"There's a ladder here to take you down the first part," the spy said, sounding embarrassed. "Look, I can't go with you tonight, I'm on duty in the message room. I ought to be there now."

"No one's asking you to come," Garric said. He shifted the belt holding his dagger so that it was over the borrowed tunic instead of under it. His sword was too long to conceal from the guards, and in the close confines of the tunnels a dagger might be more useful anyway. "You've done your job, and more."

"It's really pretty clear," the spy said. The door opened. As his silhouette slipped into the hallway he added, "You shouldn't have trouble."

"I'll lead," said Liane. Garric heard thetick of the long reed she'd concealed on the handbarrow, then the creak of the ladder as it settled under the girl's slight weight.

Garric followed, smiling as he thought of the way he had to sneak around in order to carry out a task he really was the best available person for. He hadn't seriously thought of forbidding Liane to come, though he was frightened at the risk to her. She'd been in worse places than this was likely to be, and she'd likely put herself in worse ones yet as long as she survived: for the kingdom's sake, and Mankind's sake.

A life spent hiding until Evil triumphed wasn't a life of safety in any real sense. Garric wouldn't order Liane to waste her abilities in that fashion, any more than he was going to allow his well-meaning guards and advisors to force him to twiddle his thumbs.

He could see the markings clearly now, irregular bars of yellow-green that didn't illuminate any more than themselves. The floor at the base of the ladder was firm but scattered with bits of something that scrunched beneath his feet-fallen plaster, perhaps, or tesserae loosened from an ancient mosaic.

Liane handed him one end of her sash, several times normal length but hidden till now beneath the tunic she'd gathered above it. "Ready?" she asked.

"Ready," said Garric and drew the dagger. He might have done better to keep his hand free, but for now the hilt gave him a little extra confidence as they started into the near darkness.

When Garric got used to it, hedid find it surprisingly easy to navigate through the cellars. The phosphorescent markings were adequate, each within sight of the ones before and after it. Even more important, the path itself was clear. The spy must've spent considerable effort preparing the route instead of simply scouting and marking it.

"He's a good man," Garric said aloud.

"All Liane's people are," said Carus, grinning like a bear in a honey tree. "Between her and Tenoctris, I've had to change my opinion of wizards and spymasters both!"

"He had reason to be angry," Liane said, her reed brushing across the ground ahead of her with atick-tick-tick. "But I couldn't warn him that you'd be with me. Just in case he were caught, you know."

Garric hadn't known. He'd never really thought about the problems of not knowing who to trust. Now that hedid think about it, he realized that meant you could never trust anyone. How could Liane live in that world, at least part of the time?

They reached a blank wall where a glow faintly arrowed towards stairs to the left. They were brick and solid despite a crack splitting them in the middle. Their thin marble veneer had flaked away dangerously, but somebody-presumably the spy-had swept the broken slabs to either side.