The silence was absolute. Whatever kept the prisoners in those cells also kept any sound from getting out.
Imala’s voice came from directly behind me. “A plan?”
“You’ve never seen anything like this?” Mychael asked her.
“Never.”
“Tam?”
“No.”
About half of the cells were solid iron doors with a barred window at eye level and a slot at the foot of the door for passing food to prisoners. The rest were iron bars. I looked in the one closest to me. Pitch-dark and seemingly empty. While I waited for something to lunge out of that darkness, tear through those bars, and start killing us, my stomach entertained itself by tying itself in knots.
Normally any place where people were regularly held prisoner had odors. None pleasant and all were easily identifiable. I could easily identify them now. There were people down here—a lot of them. A ward that kept prisoners away from the iron bars, smothered sound, but smells made it through. Nasty work.
Torches were mounted in the wall between each cell and the next.
No lightglobes.
The guards had used fire to light the corridor, not magic. Interesting, and not in a good way. Why wouldn’t they use lightglobes down here?
Tam strode to the first cell door that was only bars, then quickly went to the next.
And froze.
We didn’t know the reason for it, but he did. We ran to Tam and stopped.
It was Cyran Nathrach. He’d been beaten, he was bloody, and he was also holding out both hands, eyes wide with terror, silently screaming, “Stop!” and pointing desperately at the floor. Behind him, the cell was packed with goblin prisoners, men and women. The cell appeared to be huge, and it was full. It looked like all the prisoners had been crammed into one cell. But why?
There was only a pair of torches burning in the cell. When Tam had taken a step closer, the torches had dimmed, and the prisoners had started to panic. Only one thing dimmed fire.
Air. Or, more precisely, a lack of air.
When Tam came close to the cell, the air was somehow taken out of the cell. The torches in the hall didn’t flicker one bit, so the hall wasn’t booby-trapped, but the cell was. And the prisoners in that cell were emphatic that trap had something to do with the floor.
Tam growled, a full-throated snarl.
“Step back,” Mychael told him.
Tam didn’t like it, but he did it.
The torches resumed flickering as if they had all the air in the world. Cyran and the other prisoners took relieved gulps of air. Mychael took one step forward, and the torches flickered. Mychael immediately stepped back and they resumed burning normally.
A prisoner from the back of the cell was quickly making his way to the front.
Count Jash Masloc.
Jash held up both hands, telling us to stay where we were. He then pointed to Tam and Mychael, and made a sharp shooing motion. Then he pointed to me and crooked his finger. He wanted Mychael and Tam to back off, and me to come closer.
I knew why.
Suddenly the prisoners in that cell weren’t the only ones short of breath, but my breathing problems weren’t due to deadly magic, just terror of what only I was apparently able to do. I stepped up to the cell bars despite the panicked look of Cyran Nathrach and the frantic waving of two mages behind him. Jash said a few words to them and they stopped, their expressions stunned.
Cyran and the other prisoners thought I was the Saghred’s bond servant with tons of magic. Jash Masloc knew differently. When I stepped up to the door, nothing had happened.
Tam went very still. “Magic-activated trap.”
“You got it,” I said. “The sensors in the city walls didn’t detect me, and the Magh’Sceadu didn’t acknowledge my existence. Neither does whatever this trap is.” My bound and gagged magic was about to come in handy. “Looks like this one’s mine, boys.”
Jash calmly pointed down at the floor just outside the cell door. I looked down at the stones beneath my boots, careful not to inadvertently shuffle my feet one inch closer.
Now, if Sarad Nukpana had really wanted to be a son of a bitch, he would have rigged a trap for that cell that only a mundane could approach, but only a mage could disarm. I was hoping our psychotic nemesis had enough on his plate preparing for a combination of wedding and slaughter to waste too much creativity on one cell door. I’d learned a lot about Sarad Nukpana since he’d slithered out from under a rock and into my life, but I didn’t know whether he was a stickler for detail.
I was about to find out.
I squatted down to get a closer look at the stones. There it was. It looked like the stone the floor was made of, but a dull gleam betrayed it as something else. I knelt to get an even better look at the thing.
It was a lidded metal box with a small handle set into the top. The handle would either be to lift it out or open it up. I gingerly reached out to touch the handle. No reaction from it, no pained screams from me, and the prisoners were still breathing. Though just because I didn’t hear any alarm being given didn’t mean that one hadn’t been. Without magic, the only way I could tell would be the sound of boot-shod Khrynsani pounding down the stairs.
Whatever was in that box was made to keep any magic users out by killing those inside. If you’d risked life and hide to break someone out of prison, you didn’t want your meticulously planned jailbreak to kill the people you’d gone to all the trouble to save.
Jash was gesturing for me to lift the box out of its hole in the floor and to open the lid. I raised my eyebrows to ask if he was sure about that. He nodded once.
This could work, or it could just as easily suffocate the prisoners or fry me.
As far as magic was concerned, I’d never been what you could call a cautious student. It was a wonder that I had all of my parts and pieces in the right places. Some magical risks were fun. Opening a box that could suck the air out of a room and suffocate a dungeon cell full of mages and military officers wasn’t one of them. My mind helpfully treated me to a flashback of Sarad Nukpana reaching through that Gate to grab me and the Saghred. The smell of frying flesh wasn’t something you got the luxury of forgetting. How come you couldn’t remember the fun stuff, but seared meat got top billing?
The goblins locked in that cell obviously knew what we’d just discovered. Sarad Nukpana had probably told them himself just for giggles.
If your rescuer has magic, you all die.
The guards had seen my face on the wanted posters around town. I wondered if the goblins in that cell knew who I was. Judging from the frantic way they’d initially waved me back, they knew full well about me and my pet rock. Those had been the faces of people who knew they had only seconds to live. Now they were confused.
I was confused right along with them. My nose told me there had been Level Twelve wards down here, and they hadn’t been disabled for long. I could still smell the burnt sulfur stench left behind when they’d been deactivated. Granted, something that strong tended to linger awhile, but this had to have been in the past hour—after Chigaru had escaped.
And after we had escaped Tam’s house.
Suddenly this whole setup smelled like a trap made just for me. A mage couldn’t get near it, but I wasn’t a mage right now, and thanks to Carnades, Sarad Nukpana knew it. We were here; there was no backing out now. We had to get this cell door open, and I was the only one who could do it. The guards upstairs had fought, but it had been a little too easy. Nukpana wanted me right where I was.
I could almost hear his sadistically silky voice. “Demoralizing, isn’t it, Seeker?”
He was probably watching right now with scrying crystals hidden in the wall cracks. And if he was watching, he and about a hundred of his Khrynsani goons might be on their way here right now. In fact, I couldn’t imagine Nukpana sitting this one out regardless of who was next on his sacrifice list.
As of now, that could be me. Or maybe he’d want me chained to the side of the altar while he sacrificed life after life to the stone; their souls pulled screaming through me before being dragged into the Saghred. Their life forces being used to take more souls, more lives, more kingdoms, until—
Stop it, Raine! Stop screwing around, get these people out of that cell, and haul your ass out of here.
Time to earn my keep. I lifted the box out and opened it.
It made magic, something only a gifted sentient being should have been able to do, but this was just a box with nothing inside but gears and levers. I had no idea how it could create a ward and sustain or take the air in a stone-walled room. How it did those things didn’t matter. How I could stop it did.
The workings of the device reminded me of the locking mechanism on a Caesolian nobleman’s vault. Emptying that vault hadn’t been my idea; that had been Phaelan. He’d tricked me into coming along because he knew I was better with mechanical gadgets than he was. I hadn’t known that a heavily guarded and warded vault was Phaelan’s planned after-dinner activity. Note to the wise: if my cousin asked you to dinner, enjoy the meal and get out. Sticking around for cognac and cigars would be a mistake.
It stood to reason that if the gears stopped, the ward and air sucking would stop, too. Or maybe stopping it would simply take the air out of the cell faster. The only way to know was to stop the thing. I was lying flat on the floor, my face inches away from one of Sarad Nukpana’s sadistic toys, picklocks out, and tinkering with the insides.
I’d had to do some quick work on that vault in Caesolia, too. The guards that nobleman employed carried what were basically meat hooks on a stick. That the hooks were silver and the pikes inlaid with gold didn’t mean that it would feel any fancier sliding through your guts. I was motivated then and I was motivated now.
I couldn’t see Sarad Nukpana trusting a prison guard not to screw up his trap and suffocate his valuable sacrifices. There had to be an easy way to do—
A key.
Or at least a slot for one. There was a thin slot, on the outside of the box, concealed among the fancy filigree some royal metalworker covered the box in to try to impress Sarad Nukpana or the late king. Knowing Nukpana, he was the picture of politeness and thanked the man for his artistry right before he had him killed so he couldn’t make the same thing for someone else. Probably took the gold right out of his dead hands.