After two hours of sitting on the cold stone bench, the pain in his back and butt had reached a near crescendo, but the Djinn didn’t allow himself to stir. He couldn’t afford to show weakness, no matter how small, in front of those who sat before him.

The Lords of Wēdīnīnu. After more than a year of serving them, he still didn’t know who they were. Twelve of the lords sat in front of him, but their identities were well obscured. They wore voluminous black cloaks, under whose shapeless forms he could not even discern whether they were man or woman. Their faces were shrouded too, covered by silver masks attached to odd-shaped helmets whose only purpose, as far as he could tell, was to hide the potentially distinctive shape of their horns. For all he knew, the people sitting before him could have been his friends. Family. Even his father. It was impossible to know.

“Our informants tell us that the king’s men have gotten their hands on one of the devices. Why have you kept this from us?” The paranoid lords or ladies had even taken pains to disguise their voices, with little glyphs inscribed in the silver mask that distorted them beyond recognition.

“Didn’t know,” he replied with a casual shrug. “Unlike you, I don’t have informants in military command. The only people I know there don’t trust me.” Thanks to you, he continued bitterly in his head.

“You knew one of the fires didn’t go off,” another one of the shrouded lords rebuked him. “It was a reasonable assumption.”

“So did you,” he fired back, “And if you recall, I was a bit busy dealing with the damage to my own camp - a fire you insisted I start to dispel suspicion. Thought I was going to go up in my flames myself for a while there.”

Nas̆ru’s head slammed into the wall as the stone bench he was seated on rose from the floor and flung him backward. He tried to stand up immediately but fell back down as stars whirled around the edges of his vision, hitting his head again against the wall.

As he struggled to recover, the stone bench melted mid-air and, separating into two separate sections, wrapped around his wrists. He was dragged into a standing position as the pair of stone manacles rose up the wall.

“Do you think you are clever,” the lord of Wēdīnīnu hissed. “Do not forget our deal.” The wall behind him bubbled as a tendril wrapped around his throat, constricting like a snake until his face had turned purple, only releasing him just before he lasted into unconsciousness.

As swiftly as they had formed, the shackles disintegrated, and a new bench emerged from the ground, catching him as he fell forward. He caught himself awkwardly before he hit the floor again and, with shaking arms, carefully lowered himself onto the seat.

No, he had not forgotten the deal they had forced on him. How could he? He didn’t know who lay behind those masks and he didn’t understand their endgame, but they had taken over his life. When they’d first contacted him and demanded he serve them, Nas̆ru had laughed in their faces. Who’d take a bunch of creepy dudes in dress-up seriously?

His family had found him two days later by the side of the road, beaten to a bloody pulp, with his head laid against the belly of the body of his favorite horse. When he’d recovered, he’d been as much angry as terrified, but there was no one to strike back against and no clues to their identity no matter how hard he’d searched. The second time they showed up with a list of demands, he’d still refused to obey, not believing that they would go so far as to kill a noble as important as him.

The next day the servants had come wailing back to the house, bearing the ravaged body of his younger brother. It had been made to look like a beast attack, but Nas̆ru wasn’t stupid. When the lords of Wēdīnīnu contacted him again, he’d had no choice but to bend the knee.

Since then they’d given him occasional demands. Some were criminal - simple monster-killing requests - while others had seemed downright nonsensical. They’d even forced him to break off his engagement for some reason and denounce the poor girl as a whore. That one he suspected had been personal, their way of punishing him for his previous obstinance after he’d made the mistake of developing actual feelings for her.

But he’d done it. Nas̆ru was a decent warrior and a skilled equestrian, but he had no great powers with which to fight off the unknown foe. Whoever they were, they were beyond him.

That didn’t mean he’d completely rolled over. He resisted them in whatever little ways he could find: purposefully misunderstanding instructions, failing to notify them promptly, flippant behavior. His main focus, though, had been his attempts to draw suspicion to himself. It was unfortunate that their informants in the military command had worked so hard to clear him of any suspicion, but fortunately Gūla wasn’t stupid. He’d done his best to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, and all he could do now was hope she followed them in time.

“Are you listening?” An angry voice interrupted his drifting thoughts. Nas̆ru started to shake his head but froze as shooting pain lanced through his forehead.

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“Sorry, I’m having a hard time thinking after you slammed me into a wall,” he replied wryly. He half expected the short-tempered S̆addu’â - for the disguise couldn’t hide the fact that the stone mage was almost certainly a S̆addu’â - to repeat the trick, but another one of the lords raised his hand in warning.

“Leave him be. He’s no use to us if his brains are addled.”

His lackluster savior turned to the lord sitting beside him. “Stay with him until he’s recovered, and make sure he understands his new instruction.”

The masked head bobbed in acceptance, and began to file out of the room, leaving him alone with the last mage. No longer feeling any need to put on a show, Nas̆ru collapsed across the bench, his eyes closing as he tried to reign in the throbbing in his head, while the lord watched impassively. They could have just healed him. A simple potion could have fixed him right up, but they didn’t want that.

The pain was the point.

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The first tunnel they’d explored had not been the right one. Sure, Jasper had known that was a possibility, but he’d hoped they’d realize it before committing a little light breaking-and-entering. Instead, they’d followed the tunnel until it dead-ended in a cramped, forgotten corner of a dark cellar they’d been forced to explore.

Through the floor above them, they’d heard the muffled sound of sonorous male voices engaged in unintelligible chanting, and Jasper had felt certain they’d found their target. They’d crept up the stairs cautiously and burst through the door expecting a fight. Instead, they’d stumbled into a room full of men in white robes kneeling before a shiny copper statue of Lord S̆ams̆a and chanting hymns of praise.

As it turned out, the manor’s lord was so devoted to the sun god that he’d built a private chapel in his home and paid the local priests to perform services there three times a week.

He’d been hard-pressed to keep the lord from calling the guard, and he reckoned it was only due to the colors of the Royal House on his armor that he’d been able to persuade him not to.

That and the gold. Ihra had nearly wept as she counted out the 100 gold coins the lord had demanded for his silence. It really wasn’t that much money to them, not any longer, but poverty is not a condition quickly forgotten.

After escaping from the wrong manor, they’d been forced to once again circle around the city, though before doing so, Erin had spent more time examining the exact spacing of the tunnel's supports inside the walls.

“Are you certain this is the right one,” Jasper asked as they stood outside the new hole they’d uncovered.

“‘Certain’ is an awfully big word,” Erin replied evasively. “But I think we’re in the right place this time.”

“Good enough.” Jasper hesitated only a moment before jumping in. Despite the mistake Erin had made, he didn’t want the dude to get discouraged. He was just beginning to get a grip on his powers, after all.

The tunnel proved nearly indistinguishable from the first one, and Jasper realized how easy it was for the mage to have mixed them up. “What is there - one ‘emergency tunnel’ contractor for all the nobles in town?” He joked.

“Actually, yes,” Ihra replied, pointing to the corner of one of the support beams. “This wood is stamped with the same craftsman’s sigil as the other. In the gloom of the tunnel, Jasper couldn’t see the sign, but he believed her.

“Let’s just hope there isn’t a third identical tunnel. Twins are fine, but triplets are too much,” he quipped back.

“I don’t know about triplets,” Ihra replied, “but somebody’s been through here recently.” Her keen eyes picked out the tracks in the darkness, pointing at the soft, slightly muddy ground beneath their feet. “I’m not sure how many were in the group, but there were more than us.”

Jasper slowed his pace, glancing back in concern. “Coming or going? Think we’re walking into a trap?”

Kneeling in the dirt, she examined the tracks more carefully. “The tracks go both directions, but the ones on top are leaving. I don’t think they were here for us.”

He nodded in relief, but the three continued more slowly, just in case.

As it happened, the tunnel proved to be shorter than the last one, and even with their slow pace, it took barely ten minutes before they reached its end. Rather than opening up directly into a cellar, the tunnel appeared to end in a solid stone wall. There was no obvious lever with which to open it, but after some fumbling around Erin managed to hit it by pure accident, and the wall slid open.

What they stepped into was no mere cellar. They had come in about ten feet above the floor, with a narrow flight of steps that wound down to the bottom, but the ceiling was still a good ten feet above them. Thin, narrow pillars, lit by bronze braziers, supported the distant ceiling, and a large pool of water occupied one side of the room. “They must have built this over a natural grotto,” Jasper realized.

A thick layer of moss and mushroom grew beside the still pond and in its crystal depths, he could see pale white fish darting in and out of view, along with certain more exotic breeds he recognized from the palace gardens.

“It’s pretty,” Erin bent down and dipped a finger into the water. “God, that’s cold,” he exclaimed, yanking it out a second later. “That’s like glacier water.”

A faint noise echoed from somewhere down the corridor, and the three fell silent, straining to hear. It didn’t repeat itself, and Jasper turned to Ihra. “Any chance you heard that better than me?”

“It sounded like crying,” Ihra replied.

The light of the bronze braziers cast long shadows along the cavern walls as the crying sound echoed again, and Jasper couldn’t help but feel like he’d inadvertently stepped onto the stage of a cut-rate slasher flick. “We sure that's a real person crying and not some spooky demon-child?” He quipped.

“Pretty sure it’s a man,” Ihra replied seriously, not understanding what he'd meant, but he didn't bother to explain.

He was pretty sure she was right - it was the sound of a man crying, but that worried him a little bit. Maybe he’d just been unlucky thus far, but he had yet to stumble on one of his enemies crying. Sure, it would make the fight a whole lot easier, but after accidentally taking the wrong tunnel the last time, he feared they might have once again intruded on an innocent bystander. “Well, I guess let’s go see if somebody needs a little comfort. Fortunately, I haven’t done my good deed for the day yet.”