Chapter Eleven The Crucible #2
“No doubt my cell is enchanted,” the Prince said. “Bloodmages could have placed enchantments around the door and the lock.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” the girl hissed.
“I didn’t know you were coming!” the Prince retorted venomously.
There was the sound of a key scraping in the lock, and the Prince fell silent.
The girl and Tomaz switched places, the girl taking position beside the door in the shadows, and Tomaz approaching the Prince, grabbing the chains that were holding him in place.
Clenching them in his enormous fist, Tomaz threw his full weight against the restraints.
With a screech like a dying animal, the chains came out of the wall in a shower of powdered stone and mortar.
The door opened and three guards entered with swords already half drawn.
Tomaz and the Prince, still in chains but no longer tethered to the wall, kept a safe distance away.
The guards saw them and immediately spread out in formation, coming further into the room. They never even saw the Exile girl.
There was a blurred series of movements, and then all three men lay motionless on the floor, the girl standing calmly over them as she sheathed her daggers.
Shadows and light, she’s good.
There was a strange tugging sensation on the Prince’s arms, and he turned to see Tomaz pulling apart the links of the chains with fingers the size of sausages, once again accompanied by the tortured scream of metal.
Not two seconds later, the Prince was left only with the manacles and a bit of chain hanging from each.
“Shadows and light,” he whispered, astonished.
“You’re welcome,” Tomaz responded.
“We need to leave very quickly,” the girl said, looking into the corridor. “There are going to be a lot of people here very soon.”
Tomaz grabbed the Prince by the scruff of the neck and pulled him toward the door until the Prince began to walk on his own.
Once in the hallway—a short stone corridor lined with torches in wall brackets—they turned right, the Prince following the lead of the Exiles, as he had no idea where they were.
Both Tomaz and the girl had pulled their hoods and masks back on, though the Prince was unsure what help that would be since he, the top security prisoner, was with them.
They rounded a corner and were presented with a set of iron bars that spanned ceiling to floor.
“Shadows and fire, this wasn’t here before,” the girl cursed.
Tomaz motioned the Prince and the girl out of the way, obviously ready to attempt to break through the bars.
“Wait!” the Prince said. He stepped forward.
“We don’t have time to wait, princeling,” the girl said with exasperation.
The Prince ignored her and continued examining the bars. Near the top of the farthest right bar, he saw what he was looking for.
“There,” he said, pointing.
It was a small mark most people would have missed, but one the Prince had been trained to notice on all things. It was a red tear-shaped droplet of blood. The sign of the Bloodmages.
With an awkward, jerky movement, trying to avoid hitting the bars with the manacles still dangling from his wrists, he reached up and touched the symbol with his thumb. The bars shot up into the ceiling, leaving the hallway clear. The Prince motioned for them to follow him through.
“How did you do that?” the girl asked.
“Bloodmages draw their power from all seven Talismans,” he said.
“As long as I’m connected to the Raven, nothing they make can keep me out, even if the entire Empire is hunting me.
That’s why Tomaz could break my chains—they were just metal.
If they had been enchanted, they wouldn’t have been able to hold me. Now, don’t we have somewhere to be?”
The girl brushed past him, Tomaz following quickly behind.
They rounded another corner as a group of guards came into the corridor twenty yards farther up.
Luckily, they hadn’t spotted them, or else they thought that they were all Lesser Seekers, the Prince hiding behind Tomaz’s conveniently large bulk.
The Prince and the Exiles rounded another corner, and came to a small staircase, leading upwards.
Two guards were stationed at the bottom, and they caught sight of the three immediately.
“Stay where you are!” one of them called, but it was too late.
The Prince and the girl, side by side, hurtled forward, taking the guards by surprise.
Falling back on his training again, the Prince used the same joint-locking technique he had used on the Death Watch soldier what seemed so long ago now.
The man fell in a heap at the Prince’s feet, but as the Prince turned away, the man reached up and pulled his foot out from under him.
He fell flat on his face, slapping his hands against the ground to absorb the shock of the blow.
Stars winked at the edges of his vision, but as he looked up, he saw a dagger sticking out of the Exile girl’s boot.
He lunged for it, caught the handle, and spun, slicing the guard’s bicep, rendering his arm useless.
The Prince rolled to his feet, crouching over the guard, staring into the man’s frightened eyes. This was good—now he would be stronger and faster. He raised the dagger high.
His mind flashed back to the Death Watch soldier in the mountains.
With a growl of anger, he flipped the dagger up into air, grabbed it dexterously by the blade guard, and smashed the end of the hilt into the man’s temple, knocking him out cold but leaving him alive.
He rose, dagger still in hand, and turned to see the Exiles staring at him.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” the girl asked.
The Prince, nerves considerably on edge after his imprisonment, responded so viciously he was nearly snarling. “I don’t kill unless I have to, remember? That’s an Exile’s job.”
If he had expected her to look hurt or stung or affected at all, he was sorely disappointed. She simply stared at him, her face cold and dispassionate.
Tomaz muttered something to her that he couldn’t hear, something that sounded like “worth the trouble.”
Before he could ask, there was a sound behind him, and they all whirled to face it. A number of men rounded the corner, some dressed in the black of the Searchers. One pointed at them and gave a cry.
“Quickly,” Tomaz said, “up the stairs!”
The Prince held out the dagger to the girl, offering it back, but she shook her head.
“Keep it—you’ll need it.”
The three of them made their way up the stone staircase, disappearing around the first curve. They continued to climb for ages, going around and around and always upward.
The Prince, kept in confinement for a week, tied to a wall, and fed little more than starvation rations, felt his strength ebbing away as his feet began to drag like lead weights.
The Exiles began to pull ahead of him. Gasping, he hurried to catch up, hearing the alarm bells still ringing in the distance, knowing that this was his only chance to escape.
Through one final door, and he found himself out in chill night air.
He looked around, confused, and realized they were high up on one of the towers spaced along the wall of the Inner City.
He remembered that he had entered the lair through the Cathedral…
the Seeker’s headquarters must be enormous.
It might expand out underneath the entire city of Banelyn, and if this was a way out as well, then who was to say there weren’t multiple entrances and exits throughout the city?
He looked over the wall and found he could see across Banelyn City proper, all the way to the Black Wall.
Making his way to the side, he looked down over into the courtyard, and saw guards running back and forth, the entire city of the Most High in an uproar.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Along the wall,” Tomaz said, motioning behind him.
The Prince turned. The tower was connected to the top of the wall by a long battlement running toward the main gate and another door. There were guards stationed every few yards.
“How are we going to do that?” the Prince asked incredulously. Tomaz just smiled at him wickedly. He reached down and picked up a long piece of wood from a large pile that the Prince assumed was for making signal fires. Tomaz motioned to the girl.
“Ready?” he asked her.
“Catch me if you can,” she said with a grin, and shot off down the runway.
“What—what in the name of the Empress is she doing?”
Tomaz didn’t respond but instead took off after her.
The Prince, not knowing what else to do, ran as fast as he could behind them, the metal chains of his manacles striking his sides.
The first guard turned just in time to see the girl make her way past him, and he turned and ran after her, though how he thought he’d catch her wearing full armor, the Prince didn’t know.
The second guard, altered to the presence of the Exile girl, turned and drew his sword, ready for her to attack, but once more she blew right past him, and he turned to follow as well, not even noticing the hulking shape of Tomaz and the smaller shape of the Prince making their way down the battlements after them.
There were a dozen guards in all, and the girl dodged each of them, as if she were in a foot race that only she knew about.
She reached the door at the end of the battlement, turned back, and threw up her hands in surrender.
The guards slowed, confused and wary, all watching her and standing in a clump.
Tomaz came up behind them, wielding the large piece of wood.
Two of the guards went down before they even knew what was happening, the hard wood smashing into the sides of their helmets and knocking them out.
The others turned in alarm and drew their swords, only to be attacked by the girl behind them.
In a matter of seconds, all twelve were down, unconscious.
The Prince was at a loss for words. It took him a moment to realize that the girl had turned to the door but couldn’t get it open. He stepped forward and shouldered her out of the way, recognizing the Mage’s Knot, one of the simple puzzle-combination locks popular with the Most High this year.
“A three-year-old could open this, you know that?” he said to the girl. He twisted the wooden pegs around in the socket so that they formed a triangle, and then pushed. The door swung open, showing another spiral stone staircase, this one leading down.
“Well, I’m so grateful we have you around to open the tricky doors,” the girl said, elbowing her way past him. She turned back before descending. “I’ll just take care of all the guards. And the rescuing. You know,” she smiled sweetly at him, “the manly things.”
She turned and disappeared down the staircase. Tomaz followed her quickly, chuckling to himself.
“Bloody Exiles,” the Prince muttered under his breath.
At the base of the tower, they emerged in the same gatehouse the Prince had made his way through on the Path of Light. This time it was free of guards, but contained instead two Searchers, and, in a ridiculous coincidence, the Lord Seeker himself.
The two trios stood staring at each other for a long moment, stunned by the others’ presence.
“Bar the doors,” the Seeker said.
“I think not,” Tomaz responded. He strode forward and grabbed the man, pulling him away from the other two.
Time seemed to slow down, and the Prince felt himself swept forward.
He didn’t know what he intended to do, but the rage that had festered in him in that dungeon had taken control, and he was simply acting.
The girl had moved toward the other two, but he went straight for the Lord Seeker.
He drew his hand back and punched the man full in the face.
Tomaz released the Seeker in surprise, and the man went reeling backward, nose crushed flat, before he fell to the floor, bloody and unconscious.
There was a stunned silence from all parties, even the Exile girl, and then both Searchers simply turned and fled. Both of the Exiles turned to him with wary looks. He realized he was flushed and breathing heavily.
“He threw me in a dungeon,” he said by way of explanation.
The girl looked at Tomaz.
“Okay. We can keep him.”
An arrow shot past the Prince’s nose, and he jumped back with a very un-princely yelp. It thudded into the wooden wall behind him, and he felt a small trickle of blood well up on the bridge of his nose. The shot had been terrific—and fired through the open door to their right.
“Time to go,” the girl said. She disappeared through the door on the left, the one that led back into Banelyn City proper, and the Prince followed quickly behind, with Tomaz right behind him in turn.
They ran quickly through the shadows, sounds of alarm ringing out all around them.
Members of the High Blood began emerging from their houses, some with looks of outrage on their faces, others scared and alarmed.
The streetlamps, which had been dimmed for the night, were suddenly flaring into unnaturally bright light, and the Prince felt a familiar dread creep through him.
His hands began to tingle, and his stride became slightly erratic.
“Bloodmages are here,” he told the Exiles as they moved through the shadows of a garden. “We need to leave. If I stay close, they’ll be able to feel me the way I can feel people, and they’ll follow me like bloodhounds.”
“We came in over the wall, the way I followed you,” the Exile girl said. The memory of that night came back to the Prince—how scared he had been of her, how certain he had been that she was coming to kill him or stop him from reaching the Seeker.
“Were you following me to stop me or to see what I did?”
She did not respond.
“Now is not the time,” Tomaz said. “We came in over the wall, is that way still safe?”
The Prince paused, then nodded. “No one should know about it but the Seekers. Chances are the guards don’t even know there’s anything more than an abandoned guardhouse up there. I would bet that way is much easier to get through than the gates.”
Immediately, both Exiles turned and ran for the stables, trusting him completely, just as if he’d never betrayed them. For a brief instant, he couldn’t catch his breath, but then he was running just as hard as they were.