Masques (Sianim #1)(45)

Gently he picked her up, ignoring the smell of dungeon that clung to her. He stepped over the huddled bodies of her fellow inmates with no more attention than if they had been bundles of straw. Although he had no hands free to carry it, the staff followed him like an obedient dog.

As he closed the cell door and locked it again, he heard voices in the main guardroom. Swearing softly under his breath, he moved back into the shadows. The secret door he'd entered through was a crawl space, too narrow to get through quickly with Aralorn unable to move on her own.

He touched the mask with his staff and it disappeared. A brief moment of concentration, and the scars followed.

Trying to avoid causing her any further hurt, he positioned Aralorn on his shoulder, holding her in place with one hand and letting the other hang carelessly free. The staff disappeared, leaving only its light behind.

The sound of the inner door opening left the guards scrambling for their weapons, until they saw who it was that stood there.

Wolf carelessly tossed the keys on the rough-hewn table, where they left a track in the greasy build-up as they slid. When he spoke, it was with the ae'Magi's hated voice, soft and warm with music.

"I think that it would be wiser from now on for the guard in charge to keep the keys on his person. It is too easy for someone to enter the dungeon by other paths. There is no reason that we should make it any easier to get into the cells than it already is."

Without looking at the men again he walked to the far door, which obediently opened to let him through and closed after him. The wide staircase that led to the upper floors stretched in front of him, leaving but a narrow space against the wall, supposedly to allow access to the area under the stairs that was sometimes used for storage. It was this path that he took, ducking as he moved under the stairway.

He needed no light; most wizards see well in the dark and he better than most. Unerringly he touched the exact spot that triggered the hidden door. As he stepped through he whispered a soft spell, and the dust under the stairs rearranged itself until it looked as it had before he had walked there.

With the stone door shut behind him, the passage was as dark as pitch, and there was little light for even his eyes to pick out. Tiny flecks of illumination that found their way through openings in the mortar made the towering walls glitter like the night sky. Their presence gave ample warning against lighting the way - lest someone in a dark room on the other side of the wall witness the same phenomenon.

Wolf kept one hand against a wall and the other securely around Aralorn and felt the ground ahead with his feet. He slowed his progress when a pile of refuse he kicked with his foot bounced down an unseen stairway. With a grim smile that no one could see, he started blindly down the stairs.

There were shuffling noises as rats and other less savory creatures scrambled anonymously out of his way. Once he almost lost his footing as he stepped on something not long dead. A growling hiss protested his encroachment on dinner.

Only when they reached the last of the long flight of steps did he decide they were far enough down that he dared a light. The floor was thick with dust; only faint outlines showed where he had disturbed the dust the last time he'd been here several years before, raiding one of the hidden libraries.

Content that the passage had remained undiscovered, Wolf walked to a blank wall and sketched symbols in the air before it. The symbols hung glowing orange in the shadows until he was finished; then they shimmered and moved until they were touching the wall. The wall glittered in its turn before abruptly disappearing - opening the way to still another obscure passage, deep in the rock under the castle. He continued for some time, twisting his way this way and that through passages once discovered by a lonely boy seeking sanctuary.

Twice he had to change his route because the way he remembered was too small for him to take carrying Aralorn. Once the passage was blocked by a recent cave-in. Several of the corridors showed signs of recent use, and he avoided them as well. They surfaced finally from the labyrinth, several miles east and well out of easy view of the castle.

He shifted her from his shoulder then, cradling her in his arms though she was harder to carry that way. There was nothing that he could do until they reached safer ground, so he trod swift of foot through the night-dark forest, listening intently for sounds that shouldn't he there.

He wished that he hadn't had to show himself, because now, after all of his caution, it was going to be obvious that he was mixed up with Myr's group. The ae'Magi had been seeking him for a long time. Now the attacks on Myr's camp were going to intensify. There was no way that they could withstand the ae'Magi's direct attention.

It was possible that the guards wouldn't mention the incident to the ae'Magi - but it was always better to be prepared for the worst. He was going to have to stage his confrontation with the Archmage soon. He hoped now that he had the name of the apprentice, he could find the way to dispel the magic.

He wasn't looking forward to the coming battle. Old stories of the Wizard Wars, Aralorn could tell them by the hour, spoke of battles of pure power between one magician and another - the great glass desert, over a hundred square miles of blackened glass, gave mute evidence of the costs of such battles. If he, with his strange mutations of magic, ever got involved in a battle on those terms, the results could be far worse.

It might be far better to let the magician extend his power. Even the best magicians live only three to four hundred years, and the ae'Magi was well into his second century. Expending his power the way that he was now, even taking into account the energy he stole, would take years off his life. A hundred years of tyranny was better than the destruction of the earth.