As she had been the last time, Shendra was escorted to the room by the innkeeper. A short, barely-out-of-childhood girl was with them, because there was too much food for the innkeeper to carry by his tottering self, as tough as he was compared to his old, frail looks. There wasn’t any space on the table left to place the trays, so they left them on the bed. The girl scooped up the tray from their last meal and ducked out of the room. The innkeeper tried to stay and make conversation, but Shendra hurried him on his way with a generous tip. She shut the door after him and clicked the lock closed. It wasn’t until she turned around that Kiri saw how tense she was.
“What happened?” Kiri asked. “Is Mala still with me on this?”
Shendra’s jaw clenched and she swallowed hard. “I do not know,” she said. “But I have come here because I believe that she is--or would be. If she could.”
Part of Kiri could see that Shendra was overwhelmed by something, and if she was patient she could find out what. The rest of her was not that patient. “What are you saying?” she demanded. “Go back to the first thing: what happened?”
“I have not spoken to Lady Mala,” Shendra said. “I had not yet had the chance when the attack began last night. Useph sent his guards to lock Lady Mala away in her room. They did not let any of the Order in with her, and when I arrived they seemed to be barely tolerating the presence of my girls with them guarding her door. They would not let me in, not without bloodshed. I would have freed my Lady anyway, but we were well outnumbered and the escape from the palace would have been risky. Wisdom suggested to me she will be safer where she is than in the thick of the fight as we move against Lord Useph. And I remembered your offer of allies.” She looked down her nose at Neal. “But you have only brought one of Useph’s underlings from Laed. What use is he?”
“He’s not our only ally,” Kiri said. She pointed to Del, who stood hidden in shadow. “And there’s others. They’ve gone on ahead.”
“Ahead?” Shendra said. “Where?”
“Um,” Kiri didn’t want to discuss the fact that she didn’t actually know the answer to that question. “Do you think Mala is all right? Unhurt? Has anyone actually seen her?”
“My girls were there when the guard first locked her up. She is locked in a room with no access but one door, and no windows either, so we have no way to sneak in.” Shendra pushed aside one of the food trays to sit on the bed. “Lord Useph visited her, alone, he let no one else in. We could hear her voice. So she was alive when he entered the room. I will not give credence to the idea that she may not have been alive when he left. Why leave a guard on a dead woman? No, she is alive.” Shendra sighed heavily. “But we cannot be sure she is unhurt.”
Kiri took some grapes from the tray Shendra had pushed aside. It might be rude, but this might also be the only chance she got to eat for a while. Night was approaching, and she doubted they’d stop for snacks until this whole business was over.
“So we need to add rescuing Mala into the agenda,” Kiri said.
“Perhaps we should wait until Lord Useph is taken care of,” Neal said.
Shendra rose from the bed, her face somehow turning threatening without any obvious change in expression. It was more a dangerous light in the eyes and a gathering tension in her whole body than anything.
Neal held up a hand. “You said yourself she will be safer away from the action. Even with such excellent guards as the Order, battle is dangerous.”
“He might be right,” Kiri said. “But he also wants her out of the way.”
“Ah,” Shendra took a step forward. Neal, without seeming to notice that he did, dropped back by the same amount. “You have designs on the Thief Lord’s power. You are concerned about her getting in your way.”
“He is, and she will,” Kiri said. “But we’ll still rescue her.”
“Of course,” Neal said. “But exactly when and how--that’s the sort of details we need to work out with everyone. So, onward, right? Del?”
Del had been standing still as a statue during the entire discussion. He nodded once, sharply, when Neal addressed him, and strode straight for the door.
“Hold up!” Kiri said. “The food!”
~
The bolthole really was a hole.
Sometimes, despite the best efforts of dowsers, and the experience of workers, an attempt to dig a well is a failure. Either the expected water is never uncovered, or some large, immovable rock lies in the way. Kiri suspected that this bolthole was an attempt of the latter kind. Del had taken them to a narrow alley behind a row of shops. Once there, he then brought out a short metal rod and pried up a number of the stones from the road surface. They hadn’t looked suspicious at all, no different from their neighbors, but they had been covering a thick board, large, square, and graying with age. Kiri helped pull the last stones off the board, stacking them like Del had against the side of the building. Neal and Shendra didn’t seem to think they were expected to pitch in. They stood aside, arms crossed, and watched Kiri and Del do the work. The stones were heavy.
When the stones were cleared off, Del shoved his rod under the corner of the board and lifted it a little off the ground. Kiri grabbed the edge alongside Del and they both heaved it to the side. Kiri was glad she had followed Del’s example and crouched low, so that she was well-balanced and not about to fall into the deep, straight-sided hole the board had covered. Standing at its dirty bottom were Riular, Garon, and Weta. The other two, faces upturned, were staring at Kiri and Del, but the Eldan, seemingly unconcerned, was looking downward.
“But-what-” Kiri stammered. “How did you cover it back up?”
Garon gave an exaggerated shrug.
“I brought food!” Kiri hefted her bag on her shoulder by way of demonstration. She turned to Del. “How do we get down?”
He reached a hand a little way into the hole and pressed it against the straight earthen side of the hole. Slowly, like a hard surface revealed when wind scrapes away a cover of dirt, tree roots in the perfect shape of ladder-rungs emerged from the side--or did the dirt pull away? Either way, after a few moments they were fully revealed, forming a ladder made of living wood all the way down to the bottom of the hole.
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“Guess that explains everything,” Kiri said. She shook her head at Del. “I thought you didn’t like Eldan magic.”
“Magic?” he said. “What do you mean?” He twisted around and swung his legs down into the hole, descending the ladder quickly. Kiri followed him down. She thought it was funny how people never seem to have any trouble with the magic that helped them, but the second someone else had some they made a fuss. In the case of Fatefall, they were right to be upset.
By the time Shendra came down the ladder, the bottom of the old well was getting very crowded. No one could have sat down even if they’d wanted to on that filthy surface. The bottom of the well was hard bedrock, as Kiri had thought, but it was caked with plenty of mud.
As soon as Shendra was firmly on the bottom, Del reached past her and laid his hand on the earth between two of the ladder rungs. They immediately began disappearing into the earth as the soil rolled back over them, covering them. At the same time there was a scraping sound above, and a shadow crept across the huddled group. Kiri looked up just in time to see the last sliver of light before the board clanged into place, leaving them in complete darkness. Sounds continued from above, scraping and banging, and Kiri imagined that it was the rocks, putting themselves back into place.
There was a hollow hiss followed by a building glow as someone lit a lantern right behind her. Kiri looked around at Weta, who was holding the lantern out toward her. She didn’t seem bothered by the sounds above, but Kiri noticed that Garon and Neal were shooting nervous glances upwards. They, like Kiri, seemed unsettled at being magically entombed. Even if they were down here of their own free will, and would be leaving soon, it was just creepy. It didn’t make Kiri feel any better that she didn’t actually know how to activate the magic that would let them back out again. No wonder Weta and Del had been willing to take them here. Without the knowledge of the magic, the place was near-useless, and maybe even a death trap. Kiri wondered if all their other boltholes were equally strange, and if there was any chance that the two might activate some other, unknown magic, and escape to leave the rest here to rot. Well, at least she’d brought snacks.
“You mentioned food,” Weta said, almost as though she’d read Kiri’s last thought.
“Sure,” Kiri unslung her bag and hauled it around to her front, knocking it into Garon, who had come up beside her. He helped her dig through it and dole out food. Everyone (except Riular, who ate only a small handful of grapes) ate hungrily, and soon Kiri’s bag was much lighter. Garon helped her back on with it, and she didn’t complain since otherwise she probably would have hit him with it again.
Having eaten, Kiri was a little more able to act as though she didn’t want to scream to be let out and actually had an interest in getting to the task they were supposedly here for. No one else was talking, so she said, “Did you discuss plans at all before we got here?”
“No,” Garon said. “Weta said there was no reason to, until we knew what Shendra had to say.”
“Well, she was probably right,” Kiri said. “You’d have to start over anyway; things have changed.” And she gestured to Shendra, who explained to the others about Mala’s captivity. She stared at Riular the entire time, but she didn’t say anything about him. Maybe she was trying to figure out what he was. Kiri didn’t mind leaving her in the dark. Too many people knew about him already, and she didn’t trust most of them.
“I told her we would make rescuing the Lady top priority,” Del said to Weta.
“It’s a priority,” she agreed. “But would the Lady be better off left safely locked in her rooms until we remove the danger to her: Lord Useph?”
“I believe that is the case,” Neal said. “She can’t be anything but a liability in a fight.”
“She is just a pretty young thing, agreed,” Weta said. “We will release her when we have defeated Useph.”
Shendra pursed her lips, considering, then with a quick shake of her head she interrupted. “She is more capable than you know. And many in the palace are loyal to her, perhaps even more than Useph, since he has been behaving so strangely. As long as she’s locked up, she can’t bring them against him.”
“I find it difficult to believe she is capable of anything beyond selecting curtains for the hall,” Weta said. “She’s even more empty-headed than most noble ladies. She’s a peasant--not even born to power. You expect me to believe she’ll turn Useph’s own men against him?”
“She has my respect, and the other women of the Order,” Shendra said. “You do not like me, Weta. But you know my respect is not easily earned. You, for example, do not have it.”
“All right, this isn’t helping,” Kiri said. “Let’s say Shendra is right, and Mala could get us more allies. How does that fit into our plans?”
“Our plan is dependent on stealth,” Weta said.
“So no good Lady Mala getting the whole guard to fight each other, then,” Neal said. “Unless it’s as a distraction.”
“That’s a lot of downside for a distraction,” Kiri said. “How many might be killed?”
“It might be where this whole thing is heading no matter what,” Garon said. “They all will choose up sides by the end.”
“Well, maybe we can make it a foregone conclusion before they get a chance,” Kiri said. “We want to get the Sceptre back, not turn the palace into a bloodbath.”
“I do not like that idea either,” Shendra said. “What is Weta’s stealthy plan?
“The usual,” Weta said. “Sneaking in. Assassination.”
“Right,” Garon said. “Yeah.”
“The Firebrand will be key,” Weta said. “Useph does not have defenses against her. One of us will sneak her in while the other creates a distraction for the guard. She strikes Useph. You can kill with a single strike, correct?”
“Well-” Kiri was taken aback, though she knew she shouldn’t be. “I can.”
“But?” Weta said. “Is there a problem?”
“The Firebrand doesn’t kill in cold blood,” Garon said. “We’re here to get the Sceptre back, not murder people.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Weta said.
Neal shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, she’s like that. Get her to Useph, and she’ll do what needs to be done. Although, maybe you shouldn’t bring her boyfriend along.”
“What?” Garon said. His eyes were wide and looked a little panicked as he exchanged a look with Kiri. She hoped he would keep it under control.
For a few moments everyone was silent. They all looked suspiciously at each other, except for Riular and Del, who were holding themselves aloof from the tension.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about it,” Neal said. “You’re right about the guard choosing sides. This thing could get to be a real mess. We should break Lady Mala out while they approach Lord Useph, so she’ll be ready to take power immediately. If she’s not there, one of the guard captains could try to step in, and we’ll have a civil war on our hands.”
“Not on my hands,” Garon said. “I’m here for the Firebrand, not the people of the desert.”
“Your girlfriend will be safer if she doesn’t have to fight her way through a battle,” Weta said. “Do what Neal suggests.”
“Do not worry, friend,” Riular said in his musical tones. “The Firebrand will act honorably.”
Shendra’s head whipped toward him, and she seemed to flinch at the last word. “Honorably,” she whispered. “I am not acting so...if we are to be allies.” She blew out a breath and drew herself up. “The honorable thing is to tell you--you are not the first Eldan I have seen. There is another, in the Palace-my Lady’s captive.”
“Riulessa!” Kiri exclaimed and at the same moment Riular murmured. “She’s alive.”