Masques (Sianim #1)(71)

"Aralorn, you're going the wrong way if you want to find the dungeons.'" If it had been anyone else, she'd have thought that his voice was meek.

She followed him through the twists and turns of the castle halts that were almost as convoluted as the secret tunnels. The dimly lit passages that had seemed threatening and huge when she had gone through them alone were not as intimidating as she remembered them.

Apparently there were no humans in the castle this late at night; at least they didn't see any. The Uriah standing at guard here and there paid them no heed. Aralorn was careful to keep her eyes from their faces, but she recognized Talor's boots anyway. Wolf's grip was steady on her shoulder as they went by it.

When they passed the entrance to the great hall, she couldn't resist the opportunity to look inside. The black bars of the cage were discernible in the moonlight, but the light wasn't good enough to see if it were occupied.

The stairway that led down to the lower levels was well lit and smelled of grain and alcohol. Each storage room on the first sublevel was carefully labeled as to contents. Most of them contained foodstuffs, but other labels read things like weapons, fabric, and old accounting records.

The second sublevel was only under one part of the castle. Here there were several small sleeping quarters intended for the use of apprentices; at least so Aralorn judged them by the traditional sparseness of the cells. The only other rooms were obviously intended for labs, but judging from the dust that coated the tables they hadn't seen use for some time.

The dungeon was on the third sublevel, deep below the earth's surface. Like the caves, the temperature was consistently chilly, but not cold. The smell was overpowering.

Aralorn felt the hair on her arms move with the magic impregnated in the walls of the castle at this level. Countless magicians had bespelled the stones of the castle here to prevent the escape of the inmates, and the half of Aralorn that wasn't human told her that the spells had been strong enough to keep in some of its prisoners even after they died. It occurred to her that they were lucky that neither of them were full-blooded shapeshifters - they could sense the dead almost as clearly as the living. A shapeshifter wouldn't keep his sanity for very long in a place such as this.

Without the fever that kept her from shielding herself from the human-twisted magic, she could block out enough of the emanations that the pain was nominal. She ignored the discomfort that was left and kept close to Wolf.

The guardroom was empty. By prearranged plan, and it took a strong argument to convince Wolf, she entered the dungeons first - because it was unexpected, and the more off-base they could throw the ae'Magi, the better off they were.

The first thing that she noticed was the lack of sound. There had never been a cessation of the moaning and coughing - sometimes the noise had driven her crazy. Now it was still and silent. The light was dim; Wolf's staff had stayed in the guardroom with him, so she couldn't see inside the cells. She crept carefully down one side of the path and hid in the shadows.

It wasn't hard to tell when Wolf entered the dungeon. His staff bounced daylight throughout the room. Aralorn saw then what she hadn't noticed before. The ae'Magi stood at the far end of the room. He, too, carried a staff, massive and elaborately carved, which he tilted as if it were a lance, it wasn't aimed at Wolf, but at her. She dropped instantly to the floor, which vibrated with the force of the explosion of the wall behind her. She was so distracted that she almost missed the Wolf's countermove, designed to force the ae'Magi to deal with him.

As planned, it caused the ae'Magi to turn to Wolf. While he was watching his son, Aralorn pulled one of her knives and threw it at the ae'Magi. She hit him in the chest. She only had a moment to congratulate herself before the knife passed through him without effect and clattered harmlessly to the floor behind him. The ae'Magi didn't even glance her way.

With a philosophical shrug she stayed on the floor where she was and prepared to watch the fight. It would have looked odd to someone who was not sensitive to magic and could only see two men gesturing wildly at each other. Aralorn could feel the currents of magic moving back and forth, gaining momentum and power with each countermove, but the only gesture that her limited experience with human magic allowed her to recognize was the deceptively simple spell that Wolf had been working on. She was also the first one to understand what would be the results of an anti-magic spell let loose in the dungeon of the ancient seat of the master magicians. A dungeon seeped in magic of centuries of spells.

Since she was already on the floor, all that she had to do was flatten herself tighter and hope that it was enough. Then the spell hit and chaos reigned.

She didn't know if it knocked her out, or just blinded her: either way she lost track of time. The first thing that she saw clearly was Wolf sitting on the floor and leaning awkwardly against a wall, his staff clenched in his right hand. She scurried to him on hands and knees.

"Are you all right?" she queried anxiously.

"Yes," he said, holding his staff out to her, as if he needed both hands to get to his feet.

Aralorn heard the noise behind her and twisted her head to see the ae'Magi getting to his feet even as she reached for the staff. She turned back to Wolf to warn him and noticed something she would have noticed right away if she hadn't been so dazed - she'd been in enough rights to know a broken back when she saw it. She saw the same knowledge in his face. He smiled at her with a haunting sweetness as she touched the staff. He said something that might have been, "I love you too," but a jolt of magic traveled up her arm and she blacked out.