"I don't know! How would I? It's not like I've been here before." She peered down both halls looking for any sign of light and found none. "But we've got to start moving. After all, they're going to come after us sooner or later and we can't stay here. In fact, I'm wondering why they haven't come after us already. You take a guess," she said indicating the two different passages.
"No, no. You only tell me to guess so that you can blame me when we wind up hopelessly lost. So you guess, and then I can blame you. Which seems fair since this is all your fault anyway."
"How do you figure?"
"Because all I wanted to do was make love. A painless, enjoyable pleasure, but no—you just had to go kill something."
They started walking. And walking. The longer they went without running into anyone the more worried she became. This wasn't right. Their captors should have come to get them and torture them to death way before this. They should have at the very least noticed they were missing by now, and how hard was it to find people in a tunnel? You could run down one way or the other, but that was about it. So far they hadn't come to anything jutting off from the main tunnel, although she was fairly sure such exits and entrances existed.
She was an excellent swordswoman—without a sword. She was experienced with an axe—though the "three men with one blow" was mostly a lie—but she had no axe, either. She was most probably the best horsewoman in all of Sanctuary, if not the world. But she was in a tunnel, and her horse was the gods only knew where above her.
She had a candle and a charisma talisman and a couple of table legs, and she was lost underground with possibly hundreds of Bloody Hand Dyareelans and of course Kay tin, who just kept praying to some gods even though he insisted he was S'danzo, and she constantly pointed out how useless it was.
She hadn't felt this helpless since her parents split up. Her father had chosen to take her with him while her mother had stayed behind with her younger siblings—she'd had no choice and no control then, either.
Her father had been a minor member of Nadalya's entourage, and she had grown up in the palace as basically his personal slave and housekeeper. But being in the palace gave her the chance to watch as Nadalya's guards trained, and they had taught her much. She became a skilled fighter because her father took her to live among fighters, and she became untrusting and uncaring because he took her away from the people she loved and who loved her.
Her father had disowned her when at the age of sixteen she left his service to become a mercenary. However, everyone knew whose daughter she was and she knew her father was occasionally asked to pay restitution for damage she'd done either while drunk, in a fight or both. It didn't bother her, if he chose to pay that was his problem not hers.
The mercenary life was a good one for someone like her, someone who had no ties and no commitments except to herself. Kadasah certainly never considered joining any war band. She might very well be good at giving orders—she certainly believed she was—but she sure as hell wasn't any good at all at taking them.
That one event that happened when she was only nine, had shaped her whole life—changed it totally from its original course. And here she was again with no control, basically helpless. Except that now she had a lifetime of experience behind her, and she wasn't a little kid that people could kick around. She made her own decisions now, and her destiny was in her own hands. All she had to do was use her head. This time her weapons skill wasn't going to be enough, though. She couldn't fight herself out of this one; she was going to have to think and think quickly.
Damn that creepy almost dead guy! He ruined my routine! Nothing is right! It's all his fault. I swear, if I get out of this one, I'm going to get that creep!
Suddenly she heard voices, and she threw herself and Kaytin against the wall and blew out the candle.
"What the…" Kaytin started in a whisper, but quieted down when he also heard the sound of voices getting closer. He seemed to be trying to actually crawl into the tunnel wall behind them and wasn't doing a half-bad job. Kaytin was of course a natural hider, just as she was a natural fighter.
From the tone of their voices it was obvious that they were agi-tated and unhappy. She thought at first it must be because they had discovered that she and Kaytin were missing, but gradually it became clear that this wasn't the case.
Kadasah spoke both Wrigglie as well as Irrune, but these two seemed to be speaking in a tongue which was as foreign to her as the prayers Kaytin had been mumbling earlier. It was only as they got closer that she realized that they were speaking Wrigglie, just a slower more deliberate version than she was used to. Some people told her she talked too fast, and sometimes when she did this, she knew she stuck Irrune words in, making it impossible for people to understand her. As she listened to these two obviously agitated people, she wondered what they must sound like when they weren't excited.
"—cause she is an Irrune woman, a mercenary from her attire. Kopal swears he has seen her in the palace, that he recognizes her from Arizak's court. He thinks that Arizak may realize that we have infiltrated his court. That he may have sent her here to spy on us—to find out who our spies are," the woman was saying.
"Nonsense, how could they know? How would they? We have captured ourselves a couple of sacrifices. Nothing less and nothing more. I will talk to Kopal and calm him down. He worries too much…"
"But he wishes to question her before we sacrifice her."
"That shouldn't be too hard. We can use her little friend to get the information from her."
As she listened to them she was a little amused, and a whole lot of ashamed. She had been sure that they had been carefully hunting her, having figured out that she was the one killing them. Instead she and Kaytin had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had been picked up as sacrifices. It was more than a little embarrassing considering her profession, and she hoped that Kaytin couldn't understand what they were saying, or at least wouldn't come to the same conclusion that she just had.
They came into view then. They were covered in scars and tattoos, and all else was forgotten as the mercenary in Kadasah saw money— enough to buy new weapons.
She lay very still, barely breathing, and noticed that Kaytin did the same. When the pair were almost abreast of them she jumped out and plowed her table leg into the man's nose hard enough to bury it in his brain. Then she caught the stunned woman on the backswing, effectively and permanently silencing her as well. She grabbed their candle before it could go out and handed it to Kaytin. He took the candle and held it for her so that she could see to search their bodies, taking a long dirk from a sheath on the man's side, and collecting a trophy from each of the bodies. She then started walking in the direction the two cultists had been coming from, now carrying both the table leg and the dead man's knife. Part of her really wanted to search around and see if she couldn't find her own weapons, but she knew the chances of finding them were slim and staying in the tunnels one more second than they had to was just flat insane.
"But…" Kaytin scratched his head, as he followed her. "We were going that way." He pointed behind them.
"Yes, and so were they. Since they were going to meet with more of their kind."
"Back this way. But why didn't they notice we were gone?"
It was a good question, and she thought about it for a minute. "There has to be another tunnel that we missed, and that one will get us out of this hole. Hopefully to the surface."
It took them about an hour to find Kaytin's mule, and another to catch him. They were about to mount up when Kaytin turned to look at Kadasah. "So, let's see this enchanted talisman you use to confound men."
Kadasah went to pull the cord up out of the front of her shirt and found it missing.