Kitai's head jerked up, lifting the leather satchel. Her voice was muffled. "Aleran?"
"I'm here," he said.
"You are all right?"
"Got a headache I'm going to remember for a while," he responded. "You?"
She made a spitting sound from inside the hood. "A bad taste in my mouth. Who were those men?"
"They were talking about trying to kill my aunt Isana," Tavi said. "They probably work for Lord Kalare."
"Why did they take us?"
"I'm not sure," he said. "Maybe because getting rid of me will make Gaius look weak. Maybe to use me to try to lure Aunt Isana into a trap. Either way, they aren't going to let us go after this is over."
"They will kill us," she said.
"Yes."
"Then we must escape."
"That would follow, yes," Tavi said. He tensed up, testing his bonds again, but they were secure. "It's going to take me hours to get out of these. Can you get loose?"
She shifted her weight back and forth, and Tavi heard the wood of her chair creaking under the strain. "Perhaps," she said, after a moment. "But it will be loud. Are we guarded?"
"The guard left the building, but there might be furies watching us. And the men who took us won't be far away."
The satchel tilted suddenly, and Kitai said, "Aleran, someone comes."
Tavi dropped his head forward again, as it had been when he awoke, and a second later the bolt rattled and the door opened. Tavi caught a quick glimpse of Turk and another, taller man entering the warehouse.
"… sure you can see that we'll have her before sunrise, my lord," Turk was saying in an unctuous tone. "You can't listen to everything Rook has to say."
The other man spoke, and Tavi had to force himself not to move. "No?" asked Lord Kalare. "Turk, Turk, Turk. If Rook had not asked me to give you a second chance, I'd have killed you when we came through the door."
"Oh," Turk mumbled. "Yes, my lord."
"Where is he?" Kalare asked. Turk must have answered with a gesture, because a moment later, footsteps approached. From a few feet in front of him, Tavi heard Kalare say, "He's unconscious."
"Rook rang his bells pretty good," Turk replied. "But there shouldn't be any lasting damage, my lord. He'll be awake in the morning."
"And this?" Kalare asked.
"Barbarian," said Turk. "She was with the other one."
Kalare grunted. "Why is she hooded?"
"She put up a fight before we got her bound. She bit Cardis's nose off."
"Off?" asked Kalare.
"Yes, my lord."
Kalare chuckled. "Amusing. The spirited ones always are."
"Rook said to ask you what you wanted done with them, my lord. Shall I detach them?"
"Turk," Kalare said, his tone pleased. "You've employed a euphemism. Next thing you know, you'll be showing signs of sagacity."
Turk was silent for a blank second, then said, "Thank you?"
Kalare sighed. "Do nothing yet," he said. "Live bait will do us more good than a corpse."
"And the barbarian?"
"Her too. There's a chance she's the result of some kind of fosterage agreement between the barbarians and Count Calderon, and until there is leisure to extract the information from them, there's little point in making myself a blood enemy of the Marat. Not until it will profit me."
Suddenly fingers tangled in Tavi's hair, painfully strong, and jerked his face up. Tavi managed to keep himself totally limp.
"This little beast," Kalare said. "If the woman wasn't a greater threat, I think I would enjoy seeing him flayed and thrown into a pit of slives. That such a waste of a life could have dared to lay a finger on my heir." His voice shook with anger and disdain, and he released Tavi's hair with a flick of his wrist that made the muscles in Tavi's neck scream.
"Shall I arrange for his transport, my lord?"
Kalare exhaled. "No," he decided. "No. There's no point in giving him a chance to survive, given what I have planned for his family. Even something like this could grow into a threat, given time. We'll throw them all into the same hole."
His boots thudded on the floor as he walked back to the door. Turk's heavier, clumsier steps followed, and the door opened and closed again, the bolt fastening.
Tavi checked to make sure that they were alone, then said, to Kitai, "You bit off his nose?"
Her voice was muffled by the satchel as she replied. "I couldn't reach his eyes."
"Thank you for the warning."
"No," she said. "I said someone was coming. I didn't mean through the door."
"What?"
"The floor," she said. "I felt a vibration. There, again," she murmured.
Tavi could hardly feel his feet, but he heard a faint, scraping noise from somewhere behind him. He twisted his head enough to see a floorboard a few feet away quiver and then suddenly bow upward, as if made from supple, living willow rather than dried oak. He saw someone beneath the floor work the floorboard free and draw it down out of sight. Two more floorboards followed it, and then a head covered with a shock of tousled and dusty hair emerged from the hole in the floorboards and blinked owlishly around.
"Ehren," Tavi said, and he had to labor to control his excitement and keep his voice down. "What are you doing?"
"I think I'm rescuing you," Ehren replied.
"There are guards here," Tavi told his friend. "They'll sense what you've done to get in here."
"I don't think so," Ehren said. He gave Tavi a shaky smile. "For once it's a good thing my furies are so weak, huh? They don't make much noise." He winced and began to wriggle up through the hole in the floor.
"How did you find us?" Tavi asked.
Ehren looked wounded. "Tavi. I've been training to be a Cursor as long as you have, after all."
Tavi flashed him a fierce grin, which Ehren struggled to return as he gave up on crawling up through the hole, and lowered himself to start passing a hand steadily over another of the boards, which quivered and slowly began to bend. "I was out asking questions, and I noticed that a man was following me. It stood to reason that whoever took your aunt might have an interest in following me around. So I went back up to the Citadel, turned around once I was out of his sight-"
"And tailed him back here," Tavi said.
Ehren coaxed the board into bending still more. "I swam out under the pier and listened to a couple of men talking about the prisoners. I thought maybe it could have been your aunt, so I decided to take a look."
"Well done, Ehren," Tavi said.
Ehren smiled. "Well. It was sort of a happy accident, wasn't it. Here, almost got it."
The board creaked and began to move, when Kitai hissed, "The door."
The bolt on the warehouse door rattled, and the door opened.
Ehren hissed and dropped down into the hole and out of sight, except for the white-knuckled fingers of one hand, holding the warped board flat against the floor with his weight.
Tavi licked his lips, thinking furiously. If he remained inert, the guards would have nothing better to do than notice the missing boards.
He lifted his head to face Turk. The broad-chested man wore a curved Kalaran gutting knife on his belt, and his eyes were stormy. Behind him walked a lean, skinny man in the same river sailor's clothing, and another curved knife rode on his belt. He was bald and looked as though he had been made from lengths of knotted rawhide-and his nose was missing. Watercrafting had left what remained a shade of fresh pink, but it gave him a skeletal look, his naval cavities reduced to a pair of oblong slits in his face. Cardis, then.
"Well," Turk said. "Look at that. Kid's awake."
"So what," Cardis snarled, stalking over to the bound and hooded Kitai. He tore off the leather hood, took a fistful of the girl's hair, and savagely tore it out of her scalp. "I don't give a bloody crow about the boy."