Breaker of Chains II

Synopsis

The fighting resumed where it had broken off, with the alarm long raised and a guard somewhere ahead shouting that there was a mage in the cave. Edrick and the hired men came in from the mouth at Koa’s call, and the two halves of the plan met in the middle of a chasm the slavers had bridged with rope.

Fifteen or sixteen defenders gave ground room by room, archers working from across the chasm while spear-guards held the corridors. Aldo traded shots down the passages until he was counting his last bolts. Mikhail sang, and the sound carried through the stone and put heart into everyone who heard it; when singing was not enough he dropped guards asleep two at a time. A flask of alchemist’s fire set Edrick burning and Edrick charged anyway. Malik took an arrow in the gut, held his casting together long enough to drop the man who shot him, and was not seen again until it was over.

Partway through, Koa saw a man cross the far end of a chamber who did not belong to it: a breastplate buckled over pastel-teal finery, dark hair neatly braided, a filigree sheath at his hip. He was walking away from the noise without hurrying. He turned a corner into a stretch of rock with no exit in it and was not there afterwards.

The cage-hall was barred, and behind the bar the captives had been chained to the seats they were to be sold from. When Aldo called for surrender, the man in the fine coat asked how many the party was willing to let die, answered himself with one, and cut a chained captive’s throat. He did it twice more. One of his own crossbowmen went green at it, and Aldo, who had spent the last hour killing people, talked him into putting the weapon down instead.

The man in the fine coat was Captain Torr, whom they had been chasing by rumor since Loshev. Koa came round the last corner into him, took a bolt in the shoulder for it, and went in with the spear anyway. Torr was already finished when he turned and put his blade into the one captive who had not been chained with the others, Cleven Gemsmith. Koa broke off the killing to get an alchemical dressing onto him, and it held, barely.

Mikhail killed two helpless men where they lay and then stood very still, unsettled by how simple it had been. One of the hired guards had slipped off during the worst of it to load the cart and rob his employers, and was run down and brought back tied; another, Joey, had gone into the burning alchemist’s rooms on Koa’s order and saved most of what was in them. Malik got the weight of the rest: three people had died in that hall, and the mercenaries were blunt about what a second spellcaster might have been worth.

The prisoners gave up the shape of the ring. It numbers ten and no more: a captain marked with nine lashes and nine equals marked with one, each replacement tattooed in turn. Torr was not the name he was born with, only the one he liked for the joke in it. And above him there had been another man, often in the camp and never named to anyone, for whom the whole operation was really run: the man in teal, whom one freed captive thought looked vaguely familiar.

The camp gave up the rest slowly: an alchemist’s laboratory laid out by someone the Congress had never taught, a torched private chamber with a sliding puzzle set into its wall, a blade-trapped hall that explained how guards had appeared out of nothing mid-fight, and behind all of it a dust-choked Mól ruin of collapsed pillars. The carving was planar work (Water, Steam and Salt, with Ice and Slime marked once each), beside the signs of the water-god Luhthar and the near-forgotten d’Ouhb. A fountain there ran thick as syrup and was not water. The door into it had been locked from the ruin’s side, to keep something out.

They bedded down under guard with a dozen freed people, a cart of stolen wealth, and a day to decide what to do about the buyers due the following night.