Breaker of Chains I

Synopsis

They went the last of the way at night with a cart, horses of doubtful ownership and a guide who had seen the place once. Aldo had sat the whole previous night on watch, so Koa bought a pot of coffee on the road for a copper and handed him a wineskin of it. Mikhail turned over what Gwenivere had told him and could dredge up only one name for anything like it: mana burn, the wasting that takes a mage never taught to cast properly. Hers is not that, and that is as far as he got.

Koa and Malik rode ahead to scout, and Malik overshot his own marked tree. Koa found the entrance anyway: a stand of shrubs growing where shrubs had been made to grow, and in front of them a single owlbear track, too shallow and wrong for the season, pressed there to turn travelers around. A real one will end a war-band, so it works.

Back at the cart Edrick was putting down a quarrel about pay among his four. Mikhail did not like the look of two of them, and questioning them turned up something more useful than loyalty: one had once been paid a whole gold to haul cargo blindfolded, near a creek, by some ruins, which is how they learned of a second way in. The man used the next huddle to slip off and sell them, Aldo caught him at it, and Edrick clubbed him unconscious; a second admitted the creek job and was judged no better. Both were manacled, gagged and left in the cart. Malik chose that moment to confess that he had seen the place drunk and on a date, and that his count of about twelve was a guess.

The creek-side site was two wagons (one of them a windowed carriage built to carry people) and worked stone veined with Mól metal. They settled it: Edrick and the rest would hold the cave as a stopper on anyone running out of it, and the three of them would go in the back. Malik would not go in at all. He had come to show them where things were, he said, not to be inside them. He put a blessing on Koa instead, and Edrick lent Koa his club (a hollowed length of wood with an iron rod through it, called Lucille) so the guards could be taken alive.

On the walk back Aldo said out loud that he did not know why he was doing this. He should be on a boat. He does not risk his life like this, and his feet keep moving anyway. Koa told him he trusted him, and talked about the first man he ever killed in the woods, about losing Phil, and about leaving the Free Folk to find something worth dying for. His speech before the door asked Snaga to bless the blades and Thalindra for luck; Edrick was audibly unmoved. Mikhail tried to give one of his own and could not.

The back entrance was a rubble archway and a door onto worked stone going down. Aldo found the bell rigged to it, left ajar and therefore already useless, and they slipped into a dim storage chamber above a double stair. Below them, two merchants, a foreman and a guard asleep on his feet were discussing goods to be moved to Meshtes. Seven blindfolded laborers, a gold apiece for asking nothing, loaded the wagons and left with them, and the room emptied out.

They went back in (Aldo disarmed the bell a second time) and took the compound a man at a time. Koa dislodged a stack of crates climbing and Aldo talked over the noise. The guard went down under Lucille and was arranged to look asleep; his short sword went to Mikhail, who would rather not blunt the rapier he has feelings about. A viper came out of the water basin, bit Mikhail, and survived the decision by about a second. Aldo borrowed a voice through a wall and drew the second guard round the corner into Koa. Then a rattle of chain turned out to be a dog fetching a thrown bone, which meant somebody had thrown it.

Aldo shouted that a man had been bitten by the snake, and it worked far better than intended: a whole cluster came, and the dog with them. Mikhail put three down in one breath. One guard broke out of the scrum and ran shouting that they were under attack and there was a mage; Koa killed the dog; the party set about knocking the rest senseless rather than killing them. Koa put his head down the newly opened tunnel and called for Edrick to come, and Edrick heard him. A man on the floor was beginning to stir.