After that, time dragged, slowed by the pain and anxiety that were gnawing away at him. Finally, he heard footsteps padding along. Just a single pair if he could trust his ears. He waited for them to pass by, then stepped out into the passage.
As he hoped, he was looking at only one creature, a stooped, olive-skinned orc dressed in rags. The marks of multiple floggings, some ridged and old, others raw and recent, showed through the rips in the slave’s shabby tunic.
Aoth didn’t know all the ways Thay had changed since Szass Tam became its sole master-and deeply regretted that he wasn’t being allowed to preserve his ignorance-but in the homeland of his youth, pig-faced brutes like the one before him had mostly been soldiers, not common thralls. Maybe the orc had started out that way but then so disgraced himself that his master reduced him to bondage.
“Turn around slowly,” Aoth growled in his best menacing cutthroat voice, “and don’t cry out.” And as the orc pivoted, Aoth tried to look like the war mage and sellsword captain who’d slain dragons and devils in his time and not like the creeping invalid that fearsome fellow had become.
His superficial appearance might help. He still had his squat, muscular frame, his leveled spear and armor, and luminous blue eyes framed in their mask of tattooing. It might take a keen observer to see past all that to the pain and weakness underneath.
The orc had had his tusks pulled, maybe because he’d been in the habit of biting and goring with them. He glowered at Aoth with a certain caution but no overt fear. It all reinforced the sellsword’s suspicion that the creature had once been a man-at-arms.
Aoth jerked his head toward the little storeroom and tried not to react to the resulting stab of agony in his neck. “In there. Fast.”
The slave obeyed, and Aoth closed the door behind them. “Whose castle is this?” he asked.
“Lord So-Remas.”
The name meant nothing to Aoth. “A Red Wizard?”
“Yes.” The orc’s piggy, bloodshot eyes narrowed. “You don’t even know whose fortress you sneaked into?”
Aoth sighed. “It’s a long story. Does So-Remas have a healer who attends him?”
The orc grunted. “He doesn’t need one. He’s undead.”
Curse it! “Then who tends the members of the household when they fall sick?”
“If it’s somebody So-Remas cares about, he gives him a potion to drink. The rest of us just either get well or die.”
Aoth frowned, considering. Healing elixir was valuable, all the more so in a remote fastness where it was apparently the only magical remedy available. “Where does your lord keep his jewels and talismans and such?”
The orc snorted. “You think he’d tell somebody like me?”
Aoth raised the spear a hair to remind the thrall of the threat it represented. “I think you at least have a guess, and I recommend you share it. As soon as you stop helping me, you become a problem with an obvious solution.”
The orc sneered. “But maybe not an easy one. Not for a human standing funny and sweating rivers even in this cold, a human who tells me straight out that he needs a healer.”
Aoth stared his captive in the face. “If you want to try me, go ahead.”
After a long moment, the orc broke eye contact. “What for? Out of loyalty to the master who treats me so well?” He spit.
“Then stop posturing and tell me where he keeps his treasure.”
“In his chambers, I guess. I don’t know where else it would be.”
“Does he sleep during the day?”
“Mostly. I think. I mean, he doesn’t have to. I’ve seen him when the sun is up. But not very often.”
Aoth frowned. “I guess that will have to do. Take me to his quarters. Choose a route where people won’t see us this time of day.”
As they climbed a steep, narrow set of back stairs, and his neck and back fairly screamed with the punishing exertion, Aoth said through gritted teeth, “Exactly what kind of undead is So-Remas?”
The orc shrugged. “I’m not a necromancer. I don’t know all the different kinds.”
“Is he solid or shadowy? Man-shaped or otherwise? What does he eat or drink?”
“He looks like a white-faced, shriveled-up, dead old man. He eats and drinks the same things as living people do. Just, not much.”
Not a vampire or a specter, then. That was good as far as it went, but it left plenty of other nasty creatures that So-Remas could be.
“Quiet, now,” the orc continued. “We’re almost there.”
They stepped from the stairs onto a landing on one of the uppermost floors of the keep. Ornately carved with scenes of a handsome young wizard slaying cloud giants, raising a tempest, and commanding the obedience of groveling pit fiends-a highly embellished depiction of So-Remas’s early career, most likely-the double doors to the master’s apartments were locked.
Drawing on his dwindling store of arcane power, Aoth inserted the tip of his spear into the keyhole and whispered a charm. The point pulsed with green light, and the lock clicked open.
He cracked the door and peeked in at a chamber with drawn curtains and closed shutters behind them. The space would have been entirely dark if not for the red embers glowing in the hearth. But he didn’t need good light-or any light-to discern the high-backed leather chairs, lanceboard table, and collection of ancient Mulhorandi coins, curios, and sculpture. The air smelled of both dry rot and the floral perfume the undead nobleman apparently used in an effort to mask his stink.
There was a bookshelf built into the wall. It didn’t hold enough volumes to fill it, and that was by design. A square of minute cracks outlined the empty section and a hint of silvery phosphorescence crawled on top of it.
Tiptoeing, Aoth led the orc inside, eased the door shut behind them, and then crossed to the hidden panel. He tried to slide and then push it open, but it wouldn’t budge.
The slave was plainly nervous with his owner sleeping in the next chamber, but even so, curiosity or skepticism prompted him to whisper, “How do you know anything’s there?”
Aoth pointed to his lambent eyes. His truesight would have found a mundane lock as easily as the cracks if there had been one. Unfortunately, though, So-Remas had secured the panel with enchantment. That was the source of the argent glimmer.
MaybeAoth’s charm of unlocking would work as it had before, but maybe not. He’d match his thunderbolts and showers of acid against those of any wizard short of Szass Tam, but the spell of opening wasn’t a part of the potent system of battle magic he’d mastered as a youthful legionnaire. It was just a trick he’d picked up in the years since, and he wasn’t proficient with it.
Still, he’d have to pit it against So-Remas’s ward. He couldn’t simply smash through the panel for fear of waking the mage.
He whispered the words and touched his spear to the surface much as he had before. The panel didn’t move.
Maybe pain was interfering with his concentration. He took several long, slow breaths and tried to exhale it from his body, then focused his will anew and made sure to murmur the words with the exact cadence and pronunciation they required.
The panel still wouldn’t move.
“Come on!” whispered the orc.
Aoth tried again. And thrice more.
Then the double doors to the landing crashed open, and two spearmen in mail and crested helmets rushed into the room. An instant later, So-Remas, withered, bone-white, and milky-eyed, his mostly bald skull sporting white hair like dandelion fluff, stepped to the threshold of his bedchamber. The nightshirt and nightcap lent a grotesque and even comical note to his appearance, but there was nothing funny about the slim ebony wand in his clawlike hand.
Cera felt taut as a bowstring while Sarshethrian stood motionless-well, except for the constant stirring of his ragged corona of shadow-and seemingly entranced. For the moment, eager hope trumped the loathing the demon’s proximity engendered.