The Element of Fire, Martha Wells [books for new readers .txt] 📗

was kept safe by being hidden away among the hundreds of other warding stones. Dubell was the only one who would know its exact location.

After carefully examining the dull-colored egg-shaped warding stone, Dubell replaced it in its wall niche and sealed it up with clay, handing the bucket back to the unwilling servant boy who had been drafted for the task.

“Driven by what?” Thomas asked, though he wasn’t sure why he was pursuing the subject. Though if it provided no insight into Grandier, it might reveal something about the way Dubell thought.

“By his convictions.” Dubell climbed to his feet awkwardly and they started toward the pillars in the center of the cavernous room, the boy trailing behind.

The cellar was damp, but the air was neither too hot nor too cold, and not at all stale, as if the airshafts within the thick walls of the Old Palace overhead might have openings somewhere in the cellar’s ceiling.

Thomas had followed Dubell down here to ask him what he had found out about Gambin’s death, but Dubell hadn’t been able to discover what the spy had been killed with or how it had been done. Now that Thomas was down here, he might as well wait until Dubell was finished; the old sorcerer might be helpful during Dontane’s questioning. Thomas said, “I don’t understand why his convictions would lead him against us. This isn’t Bisra. If a sorcerer steals or kills his neighbor, he’s hanged just like anyone else, but not for practicing magic.”

Dubell gestured with his trowel. “That, of course, is the difficult point. Why is he here at all? In Lodun we believe he has never been across our borders before, even though his father was from Ile-Rien. He has certainly never been accused of a crime, justly or unjustly, by our crown. Which leads me unfortunately to believe that his grudge against this land or this city is ideological, in which case there is little that can be done to deter him.”

Thomas shook his head. “I can’t agree with that. There’s a member of the city Philosophers’ Academy who has invented some kind of clockwork that can add figures when he turns the knobs on the outside. The Inquisitors General in Bisra heard about it and have declared him a devil’s servant, and if he ever crosses their border they’ll kill him. If Grandier considers himself such a scholar, why isn’t he still over the border giving hell to the Bisran crown?”

“It would certainly seem more sensible of him. Unless,” Dubell paused as the idea occurred to him, “he has been offered money by someone to persecute us.”

“That’s been considered.” In Bisra, mobs surrounded the churches where the Inquisition held court, accusing each other of witchcraft and seeing demons under every bush. If it came out that the Bisran crown had employed a man who had escaped the death sentence for black magic, there would be riots it would take them weeks to put down. Thomas kicked a pillar thoughtfully. He would have to consider ways to let the appropriate rumors slip across the border. “Grandier might do it, if they offered him something he wanted badly enough.”

Dubell shook his head, brow furrowed. “If I were him, I think my quarrel against them would run too deeply.”

“There are several possibilities as to who could have hired him.” Thomas had no wish to discuss the possibilities who were nearer at hand than Bisra; not with Galen Dubell, at any rate. “And you have never heard of this man Dontane?”

“Not in connection with Urbain Grandier. Not at all, in fact. The poison that the poor fellow Lestrac was given tends to cause hallucinations and delusions before the sleep that soon turns to death. He might have accused the man falsely.”

Thomas didn’t think it had been a delusion. Lestrac had been too certain, too angry in his betrayal. “Kade seemed sure that he was the one in the room with Lestrac. She made his likeness form in a pool of wine.”

“That is not entirely a tried-and-true method. Kade is,” Dubell hesitated, “quite brilliant in a peculiar way. But she also tends to let her imagination get the best of her.”

Thomas, who also thought of Dubell as brilliant in a peculiar way, didn’t comment.

Dubell stopped at one of the huge pillars and pointed to a square section near the base that had been carved out and refilled with clay. “This is where the keystone is buried. I’ve already prepared the new location for it, and it will only take me a short time to convey it there. Not long enough to cause any degeneration in the wards.”

Frowning, Thomas knelt to look at the clay seal more closely. “This is recent. Have you looked at it before?”

“No.” Dubell stooped anxiously, and started to pry out the clay. “Perhaps Dr. Surete… God, if it’s been this all along…”

The explosion was like a cannon going off directly over their heads. The stone pillars trembled with the shock of it, releasing a rain of dust and rock chips from above. Thomas stood, then staggered as the floor slipped suddenly under his feet. Deafened by the noise, he waited for the thousands of tons of stone to come crashing down on top of them.

The walls shuddered back into stillness.

For a moment Thomas and the other guards stared at each other. “What…” whispered Baserat.

Dubell had rocked back on his heels with the concussion but he kept digging away at the clay seal. It broke under the pressure and he shoved his hand back into the niche. “It’s empty,” he said, and began to curse Grandier.

Thomas hauled Dubell to his feet. “Come on,” he said and led them at a run toward the stairs. It might have been the city armories, he thought. The two long stone buildings housed stores of gunpowder and stood on the opposite side of the inner wall from the Gallery Wing. But even if both had gone up at once… No, there was no accidental cause for an explosion like that; the palace was under attack, from outside or from within. He tried to remember who had been on duty in the building overhead, and where Ravenna was likely to be at this time.

They reached the staircase at the far end of the shadowy darkness. Thomas took the lamp from the guard who had had the presence of mind to bring it and held it up. The narrow stairs spiraled upward, unblocked as far as the light reached.

Thomas said, “Load your pistols.”

Dubell took the lamp and moved to peer uneasily up into the stairway as the guards loaded their weapons with the swiftness of long practice. By the time Thomas closed the cover over the priming pan of his second wheellock and tucked it back into his sash, he had calmed himself enough to think clearly. If the few of them were going to do any good, there could be no mistakes.

He started up the stairs, the others following behind him. The four-story climb might have stretched to infinity.

They had reached the second flight when there was a yell from behind and Thomas turned back. Treville was slumped on the stairs, clutching his side. The figure standing over him was nightmarish; it looked like a man, but its skin was gray and foul, its clothes in brown tatters, its hair a torn greasy mop. It seemed as though they froze there, staring at the apparition, for moments, but it must have been only half a heartbeat because the creature never had another chance to move. On the stairs below, Baserat struck upward at the same time that Martin fell on it from above, almost succeeding in impaling himself on the other guard’s sword.

Dubell flattened himself back against the wall so Thomas could get past. The two guards were standing back from the creature now, looking down in shock. Thomas had to put a hand on Martin’s shoulder and move him out of the way before he could see it.

Its narrow features twisted in death, it looked like a man who had been held prisoner in a dark place for a very long time and starved. The wound in its chest where the point of Baserat’s rapier had emerged was bloody but also burned, as if the metal blade had been red-hot.

Dubell had edged down past them and was helping Treville to sit up. Thomas picked up the weapon the creature had used. It was a bronze short sword, with a narrow blade and wickedly sharp edges. Not much protection against a steel weapon, but it did its job well enough on human flesh.

“It was up above us, perched there, Captain,” Baserat said, his voice a little unsteady.

“What is it?” Thomas asked Dubell.

“Fay, but I don’t recognize what sort.” He finished staunching Treville’s wound and looked up at them. “With the keystone removed from the matrix for more than a few hours, the wards would begin drifting away from the outer walls of the newer sections of the palace. The creatures must have been waiting for a large enough opening.”

Thomas felt everyone’s eyes on him. He had known it must be an attack, but he had assumed the enemy was human. Ignoring the cold dread creeping up his spine, he looked down at Treville. “Can you walk?”

“Out of here I could run.” The man grinned weakly.

“Good.” Thomas looked at the others. “Let’s go, gentlemen.”

Dubell helped Treville to his feet, then reached back to collar the servant boy and pull him further up the stairs. “Here, boy, carry the lamp, and don’t fall behind.”

The boy took the lamp in a shaking hand and whispered, “Yes, Sir.”

The air in the stairwell was growing warmer. It might mean the entrance above them was blocked, or the building overhead had caught fire, or collapsed entirely. It might have been Kade. It might have been her plan all along, Thomas was thinking. He had no idea why that thought made him so angry. She had never promised him anything.

The final turn brought Thomas to face the wooden doorway at the top of the stairs, which still stood open as they had left it earlier. The darkened corridor was blocked by the collapse of its wood and plaster ceiling. Dim lamplight shone down from the resulting gap in the passage above.

Thomas climbed the debris and took a cautious look through the opening in the ceiling. Above them was a passageway, its floor and one wall wood while the rest was the original stone. The source of the light was hidden around a corner further up the way. He thought about the layout of the Old Palace and decided they were near the lower kitchens and storerooms. There were many ways leading out into the rest of the structure from here; some would have to be unblocked.

“All right,” he said to the others, “this is our way.”

It took some moments to get Treville up into the passage, his wound making their efforts to help difficult and painful for him. Just as Thomas gave Dubell a hand up, Baserat signaled them hastily for silence. “Hear that?” he whispered.

In another moment they all did. There were people further down the passageway. For a moment Thomas found it a relief that they were not the only survivors of some immense disaster, then the faint sound turned into a tumult as shouts and a woman’s scream echoed down to them.

“Save your pistols,” Thomas told them. The unspoken thought was on all their faces. Because we don’t know what we’ll find upstairs…

Thomas ran down the passage and burst through an archway into a large low-ceilinged storeroom. A group of men and women dressed as servants was trapped in a