“You killed my brother,” Caius said accusingly.
The soldier’s expression did not change as he spoke a single word, likely to be his last.
“Good,” he said.
The anger of insult coupled with the grief of loss flooded through Caius. He raised the bow a fraction of an inch higher, taking the time to be deliberate, to enjoy this moment.
He cocked the crossbow.
There was a flash seemingly behind his eyes as his bolt whizzed harmlessly over the head of his brother’s killer.
Impossible, he thought.
It was his final musing as he fell sideways, a white-feathered arrow skewering his brain through the temples.
Anborn, who had been gritting his teeth and tensing his abdominal muscles in the hope of twitching as little as possible when the arrow pierced him, blinked and pushed himself up with his hands on the table. He stared down at the body on the floor, then looked to his left where the arrow had originated.
Gwydion Navarne stood, still in his archer’s stance, his hand holding the bow trembling slightly. His other hand was still frozen at the anchor point behind his ear.
After a long moment, he turned to meet the gaze of the Lord Marshal, who still remained behind the table, rigid in body and face. Gwydion regarded his mentor seriously.
“I believe you owe me, or rather, my bow, an acknowledgment of your misjudgment,” he said blandly. “I told you, as an archer I merely needed to be sufficiently proficient to penetrate a haybutt.” He walked over to the corpse and turned its head over with his toe, admiring the clean breach of the man’; skull between the temples. “And as you can see, I can.”
Anborn only continued to stare at the crossbowman on the floor. Finalh he shook his head and turned to the future Duke of Navarne.
“Are those the albatross arrows Rhapsody brought you from Yarim?”
“Yes.”
A reluctant smile broke over the General’s face.
“I suppose we have to acknowledge a center shot for both you and my mad Auntie Manwyn. Two miracles have occurred today; you managed to pull of a fine shot, even with a silly longbow, when you weren’t even supposed to be here, and she actually got a prediction correct. I do believe the world is coming to an end.”
Gwydion Navarne smiled. “Or perhaps it is just beginning.”
55
Osten waited in the shadows impatiently, watching with grudging admiration the precision with which the semi-human beasts that were the Bolg he a watch. There was no perfunctory movement, no yawning or evidence that the ritual was rote. The king’s guards took their duty seriously.
All the better.
She would have preferred to slip in and slit their throats but she had take so long and spent to much time setting the trap that she didn’t dare tip he hand now.
So she waited.
It had required painstaking hours to covertly search the general vicinity of the corridor whose general location she had knobbed out of Shaene. But in the end, it was the Bolg king’s meticulous security that gave her the clue she needed. His inner sanctum must lie beyond this most guarded of intersections.
Somewhere in the distance she could hear an uproar, a sound of muster, or something like it, rumbling through the mountain, but the guards did not deviate in their watch. Upon consideration of it, she realized that the noise had been building for the better part of the day, like preparations in the face of a coming storm. This deep inside the mountain, however, little impact could be felt.
In truth, she mused, hearing the three-quarter-hour bells sound, it probably is overkill to trap the king’s bedchamber. The tower had been brilliantly constructed, the subterfuge of the snare was so subtle, so unexpected, that she fully expected to blow the top off of Gurgus, crumbling the rest of the peak in upon itself, burying the king and all the Bolg he allowed to be present at the inauguration of the tower with it.
But it never hurt to have a backup plan. And she wanted to be certain that the Bolg king paid for his incursion into her guild, for the loss of her tunnel into the artery below Entudenin.
She wanted him to suffer horribly before he died. If her timing was good, he would be enjoying the full effects of the exposure before he was crushed to death.
The last communique she had sent to Dranth had included the general directions she had knobbed out of Shaene. The memory of riding his shapeless body, his pathetic wheezing beneath her, gave her a chill of disgust that she shook off, wanting to be ready when the watch changed. As long as the idiot’s information was good, the Raven’s Guild would have detailed maps and schematics to the most sensitive areas of the inner Teeth, she knew, along with the intelligence she had gathered and passed along previously.
Her opportunity presented itself just as the soldiers crossed in front of the triple pass, a juncture where three major tunnels met in the dark basalt walls of the inner sanctum. Esten had been timing the dead space, the moments in between when one shift of soldiers had left and the next arrived; it was never more than a matter of seconds. When she saw it, she slipped around the corner of the corridor and down the left-hand hallway, blending into the shades of dim light and fuzzy darkness, running her hands along the veined walls, until she was standing before what could only be the doorway to the king’s own bedchamber.
Like everything else about the king, the doorway was concealed, hidden amid the striations that marbled the stone of the walls. Esten marveled at the masterly hiding of such a large aperture; had she not known that this was the right corridor, in a labyrinth that contained hundreds of corridors, even she. with her extensive training and experience in ferreting out the hidden, never would have found it.
That disgusting tumble was worth it after all, she thought.
The catch that served as a handhold to the door was locked.
With the speed born of years of practice, she took her thin picks from hei mouth where she carried them and set about opening the lock; it was a puzzle lock of ancient design, with an undoubtedly obscure code, but she did not need to know what it was to pick it. Instead, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small vial of quicksilver mixed with filings of lead; a drop applied to the shaft of the pick formed an impression of the inner works of the lock. With the lightest of touches, she turned the makeshift key.
The door opened silently.
Esten slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind her.
Her bright, dark eyes, raven’s eyes, scanned the room.
The king’s bedchamber was a surprising mix of austere decor and lush linens. The walls, the sheets, the wooden canopy over the bed draped in satin, were all in black; the marble desk, the wooden chairs, the enormous chest at the foot of the bed, everything formed of dark materials. It was a place of deep quiet; there was a sense of thick, solid softness evoked in the room, a place where someone with much on his mind could sleep restfully.
Esten smiled.
Quickly she set about searching the chamber, opening each small chest, each drawer, examining the nooks in the wardrobes and finding very little. The Bolg king might be lord of the ruins of one of the richest empires in history, but he had taken little material wealth for himself.
Methodically she continued her search, finding nothing of note, until she pulled back an area of the silk tapestry on the floor and discovered a tin) irregularity that would have been unnoticeable to any but the sensitive fingen of the mistress of a guild of professional thieves.
She ran her finger around the outline, checking for traps and finding none, then carefully sprang the locking mechanism.
A small reliquary in the slate of the floor opened, in which a rectangular box the length of two of her hands rested, swathed in a velvet covering.
Esten stared into the hole for a moment, then reached in and took the box: when she opened it, her brows drew together.