43. FORTY-THREE #3
Long moments passed. Calver endured the spike of pressure and panic until it lulled. Then he slid back to the door and signaled for Dex to join. When the boy sidled into the room and threw the lock behind him, he stole a glance around.
Yes. Too easy was the description for the creeping sensation in the pit of Calver’s stomach.
They wound their way up several spiraling flights of stairs, ascending to a trap door.
Muted voices echoed in the room above. A light sifted through the cracks around its rim in a square of gold against the pitch.
Calver squeezed his eyes shut. Of course the enemy wouldn’t leave the tower—where the remote activator was supposedly located—vacant.
This was a good thing. This meant they were still ahead… didn’t it?
Dex asked.
The boy swallowed. The part of Calver still clinging to consciousness understood. He nearly suggested that he didn’t wet his blade. That he stay back if he wanted. But he had warned Dex going in. Calver had not been given time to mull over the decision of taking his first life.
A sudden pressure spiked outward from the center of his head. Calver gasped, knees nearly buckling.
Dex suggested, his voice giving Calver an anchor to cling to.
Calver shook his head to clear it. An Azadonian in Tera’thian uniform in a fully-lit room might buy them ten seconds before those with half a brain recognized it for the trap it was.
Luck…
Dex unhinged the door and passed through, leaving it open behind him.
There was a pregnant pause in the voices above. Then a question posed in Tera’thian. “What are you doing here?”
Dex spoke calmly in Nelfinden. “Three.”
Three opponents.
Calver burst through the opening, dowaga unlatched, and let the Survivor do what it did best.
The confusion ripped an opening in the soldiers’ defense.
Calver moved like an awl through leather.
Two rapid slashes met with a soldier to his side before the man had even stood from his chair.
By the time he hit the ground, the remaining men had raised dowagas—one bearded and tall, the other clean-shaven and squat.
Both came towards him at once, the squat one high, the bearded one low.
Calver swerved as far sideways as he could in the tight space, the rush of the first’s blade whisking past him.
He lashed at the bearded man with a backhanded swipe.
It sliced across his neck and dropped him to the stone.
Then Calver caught the squat man’s overhead strike with the dowaga’s claw.
He flipped the pommel to clip him in the chin.
That sent him stumbling back before Calver sent his dowaga through his gut. The Survivor purred in satisfaction.
Dex’s mouth opened and then shut. “Glad I could help,” he managed, before his face took on a yellow hue.
He turned from the bodies and sat, gaze determinedly out the window.
Vomit was the appropriate reaction, wasn’t it?
When you weren’t a seasoned killer. When you weren’t possessed by a mind djinn.
{It would be your blood soaking into the stone without me.}
Calver searched the room. A small glass sphere sat in a metal stand. That would be the activator.
He approached and palmed it. It wouldn’t move. It had been welded into the stand, which had been set into the floor.
“That’s it?” Dex asked. The simple question from the usually pragmatic boy revealed his state of shock.
They wouldn’t be able to take it with them. Until Calver located the new stratum and disabled it, they were stuck in this tower like fish in a barrel.
The faint green glow of morning sat on the skyline. Calver set to work.
NIKLAUS
Chill spray off the Casowhatan was a welcome change from the desert, though the glare off the ocean wasn’t so different from the glare off the Jiradeshi sands.
Niklaus shaded his eyes with a hand, staring over bottle-green waters toward the cliffs of the shrinking coastline. The skiff had begun to drift.
Mefeeb sat at the bow, toes dangling over the edge. “Nudge the tiller to port,” she called over the buffeting wind, a stray curl from beneath her turban pulled into a line.
Niklaus prodded the tiller toward the mid-low sun.
Mefeeb flashed him a crooked smile. “You’ll be a sailor soon enough!”
That he had ended up under the charge of this young girl still baffled him.
He’d wanted to be a teacher for twenty years without ever having a pupil.
Since leaving Seraphinden, he’d had two young companions, and both had only schooled him.
The girl was smart, with a mind as fast-moving as her tongue.
She would have made a marvelous politician.
“When did you learn to sail?” he called back.
Mefeeb hopped down and sidled over to him to sit where she didn’t need to yell. “I left Shrokan three years ago. I was indentured with the Thaligan dock. Until I could afford my own skiff.”
“By your parents?”
She shrugged. “Never had any. Mitek rescued me and set me up with them.”
That sounded like a con if ever he’d heard one. “Rescued you from what?”
The girl’s mouth pressed into a line. “From doing what most girls end up doing in Shrokan to stay alive?”
Niklaus was an idiot.
He cleared his throat. “You mean, of course, breathing, sleeping, and sourcing acceptable sustenance.”
Her nose scrunched. “Yeah, that.”
Niklaus tried to change the conversation. “This is your skiff, then?”
Her chest puffed with pride. “Yep.”
“Are you getting paid to ferry me?”
“No.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because it’s dangerous. The brave ones get a better shot.”
“At what?”
The girl’s mouth closed tighter than a cork.
“I’ve been thinking…” He didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep.
Especially not with a future so uncertain.
“When my campaign ends, I’ll return home.
There are many rooms in my house. And I have resources that could use a little bit of spreading.
If you’re agreeable, I’ll send someone to bring you north, to Seraphinden.
You can stay as long as you like. Leave whenever you like.
Eat as much food as you like. You won’t have to work. ”
“You mean Seraphinden proper?”
“Yes.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “Sounds like a trap. But even if I trusted you, I won’t place my bets where there ain’t a race.”
“What do you mean?”
“You probably ent going to make it back to Seraphinden. Mitek has a good feel for these things. He had ‘dead’ written all over his face looking at you.”
Niklaus replayed his conversation with the raider in his mind, trying to understand what that might mean. Each possibility seemed worse than the one before. “Why would he have you ferry me to Steila if he assumed I would be killed?”
She gave him a hard look. “You were sent to capture somebody, weren’t you? Why do you think?”
Either he wanted Niklaus killed, or he would risk Niklaus’s life for the unlikely chance he did capture Calver. “Sounds like your friend’s placing his own bets.”
“He’s been known to take his chances.”
Night fell on the second day. When the pinpricks of light shone in the distance from Steila’s wharf, Mefeeb pulled the boat into a beachless cove, tucked into the Thaligan cliffs. The boat knocked into the stone with the rise and fall of the waves.
“That’s as far as I go,” she said over the echo of ocean in the tight space.
“I don’t blame you,” Niklaus admitted.
Skeptical as he had been about the safety of the child-piloted skiff over the Casowhatan, climbing those looming cliffs, slick with seawater, into an enemy-occupied city hardly seemed the better option.
She squinted an eye at him. “You’re really doing this? Is it true then? Is there a war going on?”
Niklaus’s hand found the back of his neck. “I’m not really sure.”