Shifting Loyalties Read online

  It splashed against the cube and vanished.

  “Burn it,” Alaric said. Sienne flipped pages and read again, tears trickling down her cheeks from the burning sensation. Scorch would be more powerful, but it would also burn everyone in the area, so she stuck with its lesser cousin burn. Dark blue fire shot away from her to strike the cube, flickering across its surface.

  This time, she got the thing’s attention. A high, wavering scream joined the low hum, creating a discordant melody that felt like needles being stabbed into her ears. Alaric grabbed her and pulled her back as the cube accelerated toward them. It still wasn’t moving faster than a brisk walk, but the way it just kept coming, inexorable and ponderous, made Sienne want to flee.

  Alaric squared up to the thing and swung his massive sword in a great two-handed blow. It struck the cube, which made no effort to get out of the way. The sword sliced through the membrane of its skin, and a thick, clear liquid spurted out, striking Alaric in the chest. He shouted and sprang backward, swiping at himself. The stench of acid redoubled. Sienne stepped in front of him and read off burn again. The blue fire struck the cube, turning it a translucent sapphire color briefly. It sped up again. Sienne saw no other indication that her spell had affected it.

  Sienne turned to Alaric and nearly screamed at the sight of his chest, the jerkin and shirt burned away, raw red burns covering his chest and stomach. Alaric was paler than usual and grimacing with pain. “You need to get out of here,” he panted. “Take Dianthe.”

  “I’m not leaving you. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Sienne—”

  They’d backed almost all the way to the dead end. Hands grabbed Sienne and pulled her away from the oncoming juggernaut. Then Perrin said, “O Lord, have patience in your crankiness, and grant me this blessing.” A pearly gray wall went up between them and the cube, which was now only ten feet away and closing fast.

  “Smart,” Alaric said. “But will it last long enough?”

  “I have no idea. We did not see this thing earlier, so perhaps once it reaches the end of its route, it will return to wherever it lurks when it is not on duty.” Perrin stepped forward to the edge of the gray barrier. “Unless it does not consider itself finished until it touches the wall behind us.”

  Dianthe swore. “This is ridiculous. We haven’t seen a single blind corridor in this whole damned labyrinth until now. I refuse to believe there’s no way out of here.” She pressed her hands to the wall and closed her eyes, feeling her way along it.

  Sienne stood watching the cube advance. She felt Alaric put his arm around her shoulders and squeeze gently. “Get out of here,” he said.

  “Make me.”

  “I would if I could. Sienne—”

  The cube pressed against the gray barrier, which started to sizzle. The scent of jasmine and mint mingled sickeningly with the stench of acid. Sienne and Alaric backed away. “I have one more shield blessing,” Perrin said. “I will not go without a fight.”

  The shield popped like a soap bubble. The cube lurched forward. Perrin invoked the blessing, stopping the cube three feet from them. Sienne stared through the barrier at it. “At least we know which corridors are safe,” she said. “The ones with moss still growing on the walls. I wonder why those don’t get cleaned.”

  “If I remembered which ones they were, I could make a guess,” Perrin said.

  The barrier shivered. “Dianthe, if you’re going to make a discovery,” Alaric began.

  “Shut up, mountain,” Dianthe said through gritted teeth.

  With a pop, the shield vanished. The cube once again advanced. “Well,” Alaric said, “it’s been—”

  A whoosh of dank, sweet air free of acid taint blew past them. “Save it for later,” Dianthe said, grabbing Kalanath and hauling him through the gap she’d just opened. “Move!”

  2

  Sienne darted through the opening, followed by Alaric, who immediately turned and shoved the secret door closed. It moved ponderously slowly, and the cube began to press through the opening before the door closed on it, leaving them all in blackness. Sienne leaned against the wall, not caring about the dampness, and waited for her heart to slow. Beside her, Alaric breathed more heavily than his exertions accounted for. She fumbled in the dark until she found his hand and clutched it. He gripped her hand tightly and drew her into his embrace. She felt raw skin and pulled back slightly. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Not much. Make a light, will you?”

  “Oh. Sorry.” She made half a dozen magic lights and sent them spinning into the air. Her friends all blinked in the sudden light, which made them look ghostly, even dark-skinned Kalanath and the well-tanned Perrin. “I can’t believe we’re alive. I knew I should have made more of an effort to find transport. Ferry is just too exhausting with a team this size.”

  “Nobody’s blaming you,” Dianthe said. “Let’s take a look around this place.”

  Sienne made more lights and shot them off into the corners of the room. It wasn’t very big compared to the others they’d found, maybe twenty feet on a side and with the same low ceiling the entire palace seemed to have. Empty shelves lined the walls, with chests bound in corroded brass occupying the center of the room. All the chests had their lids flung open, and most were arranged in a way that suggested they’d been shoved around.

  Kalanath peered into one of them. “Empty.”

  “So is this one,” Perrin said. “I would guess they all are.”

  “Well, damn,” Alaric said. “If this was the treasury, we’re too late.”

  “We don’t know that it was the treasury. It could have been an ordinary storage room,” Dianthe said. She examined one of the shelves and shook her head. “Nothing here.”

  “An ordinary storage room wouldn’t have been stripped bare,” Alaric said. “Scrappers don’t take what they can’t sell, and they wouldn’t burden themselves with the kind of ordinary things people tend to store.”

  “But why would Perrin’s augury show this place had salvage, if it’s already been taken?” Sienne asked.

  “Possibly this was not Nocenti’s only treasure chamber,” Perrin said. “She was arrogant and clever, true, but she was also paranoid and mistrustful. I think we should be looking for a secret room.”

  “Go ahead,” Dianthe said. She’d moved from the shelf to the room’s only visible door and was staring at the latch with her hands on her hips. “Our friends, whoever they were, left us another trap. I wish I could find them so I could strangle them. This smacks of deliberate malice.”

  Perrin nodded and removed another blessing from the riffle. “Our thanks for the shields that warded us against that monstrosity, Lord,” he said, “and if you would, have patience in your crankiness, and grant me this additional blessing.”

  Violet fire flared, and lines of purple light traced the stones of the wall, turning all of them a funny gray color. They showed the secret door as a brightly lit rectangle that continued to glow long after the rest of the light faded. No second hidden door appeared. “I have only one more of these blessings,” Perrin said. “I hope I do not misuse them.”

  “I thought you said Averran likes it when people use their initiative to figure things out,” Sienne said.

  “He is also opposed to his worshippers leaning too heavily on his aid.” Perrin went to stand near Dianthe, but not too near. “We should exhaust our other resources before calling on him again, I think.”

  Dianthe was crouched before the door, peering at the latch. She brought both hands in front of her face, cupped as if catching a stream of water. Then, with a twist of her left wrist, she caught something invisible to Sienne and drew it away like someone gathering up a rope into a coil. “That wasn’t too bad,” she said. “Though it would have been unpleasant if we’d just walked through the door.”

  “Locked?” Alaric said.

  “No. They probably thought the trap was enough.” She opened the door and stuck her head through. “No acid-filled cubes. It’s another storag
e room.”

  “Dianthe, you start looking for a concealed door. Everyone else, let’s be thorough.” Alaric gestured for Sienne to precede him out the door.

  It was a storage room, but not bare like the first. Barrels and crates lay piled haphazardly throughout the room, some of them split open to reveal moldy grain or rusted metal. There were shelves here, too, all as empty as in the first room, but in this case it was because someone, or several someones, had swept the crockery and casks to the floor to lie in shattered heaps around the shelves. The smell of decay and fungus was strong enough Sienne had to breathe through her mouth. “What are we looking for? Because I can tell you right now, there’s no market for bolts of rotted fabric.”

  “We want to be sure not to overlook anything mundane that might have resale value,” Alaric said. “Though I’m not betting on it. The idiots who came through here first had no idea this pottery was valuable. If it weren’t shattered, we could get more than a hundred lari for each set. Old crockery is popular among the well-to-do.”

  “I could mend it, but that would take forever,” Sienne said. She picked up a handle and the curving side of a jug and fit them together, using a small magic to repair the crack. “Though it is a perfect repair job.”

  “We’re not quite so desperate for cash as to make you reassemble the lot.” Alaric took the mended piece out of her hands. “Dianthe?”

  “Still looking,” came the reply. “I wish I had a better sense for how this labyrinth was laid out. I have no idea which of these walls could theoretically have enough space for a secret room behind it.”

  “There are two doors,” Kalanath said. “I think the wall they are in is not it.”

  “Don’t touch the doors,” Dianthe said. “I haven’t checked them yet, and those idiots might have thought it was funny to leave more surprises.” She felt along one of the walls, then stopped. “This stone is a different color.”

  “How can you tell? It all looks black to me,” Sienne said.

  “I just can. There’s something here, but I can’t find it.”

  Alaric stepped up to the wall and began feeling along it with his right palm. His left hand, Sienne finally saw, was as blistered from the acid as his chest. “Do you need healing?” she said. “Your hand, and your chest…”

  Alaric looked at his palm and the backs of his fingers as if he’d never seen them before, then touched his chest gingerly. “It’s only just starting to hurt. I didn’t realize how much I’d burned myself getting that stuff off me.”

  “I cannot repair your clothing, but flesh is another matter,” Perrin said, coming to Alaric’s side. Sienne watched as he muttered an invocation and green light spread across Alaric’s chest and hand. The scent of jasmine and mint swept away the funk of mold briefly, making the room smell of spring. Alaric flexed his newly-healed hand and nodded thanks.

  “I think it’s time for that blessing, Perrin,” Dianthe said. “I’m sure there’s a door here, but I can’t find a way to open it. Maybe a little divine light will help.”

  Perrin tore off the last of the purple-smudged blessings and walked around a shattered crate to close to the center of the room. “O Lord, if you will, have patience in your crankiness, and grant me this blessing,” he said, “and if it is not too much trouble, guide our hands in this matter.”

  The violet light traced the black stones once more. Sienne gasped. A thicker line of light like glowing mortar outlined a jagged section of wall, then vanished. She stepped closer. Now that she’d seen it, she couldn’t imagine how they’d missed it before. The blessing had left the stones within the outline scrubbed dry, and the secret door was obvious.

  “Perfect,” Dianthe said. “Now we just have to find a way in.”

  “It doesn’t look like it was made to open,” Sienne said. “More like someone bricked it up when they were done. Thoroughly, so it blended with the other stones.”

  “That’s possible,” Alaric said. He ran his hand over the surface. “But I don’t relish the thought of having to batter it down.”

  Dianthe was on her hands and knees, creeping along the base of the wall with one hand lightly touching the stones. Her eyes were closed. “Just give me a minute.”

  They waited in silence. Sienne was sure Dianthe could work despite distractions, but there was no point increasing the difficulty of her task. She watched Dianthe stand and brush moisture off her knees. “Perrin,” she said, “I need your pastels.”

  “Certainly,” Perrin said, removing the packet of colored sticks he used to mark his blessings. “May I ask why?”

  “You’ll see.” Dianthe withdrew a pale blue one and drew an X low on the wall near the left edge of the dry spot. “Sienne, I want you to cast force on the wall, right where the X is.”

  “Are you sure? That could bring the ceiling down on us.”

  Dianthe handed the pastels back to Perrin. “I don’t think so. There are marks just here, radiating out from the spot I marked, that look like what force does to stone. And I’m certain there’s no other opening mechanism.”

  Sienne shrugged. “All right. Everyone stand back, just in case.” She read off the evocation. The power built within her until it burst forth with the final syllables of the spell. The bolt of magical energy shot away from her to strike the wall in the exact center of the X.

  A shuddering groan like two mountains colliding filled the small room. Sienne dropped her spellbook to hang loose in its harness and covered her ears. With a sharp crack, part of the wall popped free and swiveled toward the companions. Stale air rushed out of the dark space exposed by the spell. Sienne coughed and lowered her hands. She looked at Alaric, who’d stepped between her and the wall when it began to move. “Lights,” he said.

  Sienne made lights and sent them flying into the space. Their glow revealed a room no bigger than a closet, its whitewashed walls blinding after the darkness of the outer room. A chest big enough for Sienne to curl up in sat on the floor, its steel bindings and lock plate gleaming and free of rust. She let out a long, awed breath. “That has to be intact,” she said.

  “Let’s hope so,” Dianthe said, kneeling to examine the lock. “There’s no sign it’s been tampered with, and no traps. I bet Nocenti thought the secret door would be enough protection.” Her fingers were busy with her lock picks as she spoke. “That, and this lock is fiendishly difficult.”

  It felt like hours before the lock clicked open. Sienne spent the time staring at the doors they hadn’t yet opened, feeling superstitiously that another scrapper team might burst through them and attack. She found she’d opened her spellbook to fury without realizing it, thought about closing the book, and decided to embrace paranoia.

  The sound of Dianthe lifting the chest lid dragged her attention back to what mattered. She pressed forward with the others, then took a step back when Dianthe said, “It’s not going anywhere. But by Kitane’s eyes, there’s a lot of it.”

  Sienne dropped to her knees next to Dianthe to get out of the way of the men. She reached out to touch a silver mirror decorated with pale purple stones that winked in the white light. “This is the kind of treasure I dreamed scrappers always found.”

  “In nearly seven years of scrapping, I’ve never seen a trove like this,” Alaric said. He reached past Sienne and Dianthe and picked up an ivory scroll case, carved with starbursts and capped with jet. “Sienne, see if there’s anything wizardly in this.”

  Sienne scooted to one side and worked the cap off. Inside was a sheaf of parchment, tightly curled on itself. She shook it hard until the pages slid out into her hand, then spread the sheets flat on the floor. “Spells,” she said. “The parchment’s untreated…well, that makes sense, you can’t turn parchment invulnerable without destroying it. Looks like…break, cat’s eye, shift, and…this evocation is an old-fashioned variant on shout.” She smiled. “And I’ve never seen this summoning before.”

  “Is that good?” Kalanath asked. He had a pair of golden earrings set with agates in one han
d and a silver bracelet in the other.

  “Could be. A lost spell is worth far, far more than its market value. Well, it would have to be, because no one will know how much to ask for it. If I sold this to the university, or to Stravanus…depending on what spell it is, it could be worth the rest of this treasure combined.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” Alaric warned. “We have to get it home first.”

  “I know. Oh, that necklace is beautiful!”

  “Blue star sapphire,” Dianthe said, “and worth a minimum of a thousand lari.” Dianthe always knew about gems.

  “I believe this is Nocenti’s personal seal,” Perrin said, holding up a fat signet ring with an intricate pattern incised on the top. “A collector might find it valuable.”

  “Plenty of coin, too,” Alaric said, hefting a small sack. “We’ll count this later. Let’s load up.”

  Sienne handed out more treasure, a silver comb, a crystal egg with a silver stand, a cloak pin of a white-gold metal Dianthe said was platinum, and several more bags of coin. That left only one thing at the bottom of the chest, something that glowed in Sienne’s wizardly sight.

  Sienne lifted it out. It was a slim ash baton about fifteen inches in length, with a smooth grip shaped to a hand a little bigger than hers—well, her hands were small, so that wasn’t surprising. Tiny crystals embedded in the wood made a spiral from the tip to just above the hand grip. A few of them were dark, but the rest sparkled like diamonds. Sienne wrapped her hand around it and waved it, directing an invisible orchestra to attention. “It’s pretty, but I don’t know what it does.”

  “It’s fancy, for a stick,” Alaric said.

  “No, it’s a wand. An artifact. I’ve seen them before in Stravanus. They can let people who aren’t wizards cast spells—or, rather, each wand has a spell imbuing it, and if you know how to activate the wand, you can cast the spell.” She touched the darkened crystals, counted the rest. “But wands can only be used a certain number of times before the magic runs out. Looks like this one started with thirty spells, and eight have been used.”