Elantris - Brandon Sanderson [82]
“Iadon is a paranoid sleeper,” Raoden explained, crawling through the small space between ground and wall. “He had this passage installed to give him one last means of escape should someone attack his palace.”
Karata snorted as she followed him through the hole. “I thought things like this only existed in children’s tales.”
“Iadon likes those tales quite a bit,” Raoden said.
The passage widened after a dozen feet, and Raoden felt along the wall until he found a lantern, complete with flint and steel. He kept the shield mostly closed, releasing only a sliver of light, but it was enough to reveal the narrow, dust-filled passage.
“You seem to have quite an extensive knowledge of the palace,” Karata observed.
Raoden didn’t answer, unable to think of a response that wasn’t too revealing. His father had shown the passage to Raoden when he had barely been into his teenage years, and Raoden and his friends had found it an instant and irresistible attraction. Ignoring cautions that the passage was only for emergencies, Raoden and Lukel had spent hours playing inside of it.
The passage seemed smaller now, of course. There was barely enough room for Raoden and Karata to maneuver. “Come,” he said, holding the lantern aloft and inching sideways through the passageway. The trip to Iadon’s rooms took less time than he remembered; it really wasn’t much of a passage, despite what his imagination had claimed. It slanted upward to the second floor at a steep angle, heading straight to Iadon’s room.
“This is it,” Raoden said as they reached the end. “Iadon should be in bed by now, and—despite his paranoia—he is a deep sleeper. Perhaps the one causes the other.” He slid open the door, which was hidden behind a tapestry in the royal sleeping chamber. Iadon’s massive bed was dark and quiet, though the open window provided enough starlight to see that the king was, in fact, present.
Raoden grew tense, eyeing Karata. The woman, however, held to her word: she barely gave the slumbering king a passing glance as she moved through the room and into the outer hallway. Raoden sighed in quiet relief, following her with a less practiced gait of stealth.
The darkened outer hallway connected Iadon’s rooms with those of his guards. The right path led toward the guard barracks; the left led to a guard post, then the rest of the palace. Karata turned away from this option, continuing down the right hallway to the barrack annex, her bare feet making no sound on the stone floor.
Raoden followed her into the barracks, his nervousness returning. She had decided not to kill his father, but now she was sneaking into the most dangerous part of the palace. A single misplaced sound would wake dozens of soldiers.
Fortunately, sneaking down a stone hallway didn’t require much skill. Karata quietly opened any doors in their path, leaving them open enough that Raoden didn’t even have to move them to slip through.
The dark hallway joined with another, this one lined with doors—the quarters of the lesser officers, as well as those guards allowed room to raise a family. Karata picked a door. Inside was the single room allotted to a married guard’s family; starlight illuminated a bed by one wall and a dresser beside the other.
Raoden fidgeted anxiously, wondering if all this had been so Karata could procure herself a sleeping guard’s weapons. If so, she was insane. Of course, sneaking into a paranoid king’s palace wasn’t exactly a sign of mental stability.
As Karata moved into the room, Raoden realized that she couldn’t have come to steal the guard’s accouterments—he wasn’t there. The bed was empty, its sheets wrinkled with a slept-in look. Karata stooped beside something that Raoden hadn’t noticed at first: a mattress on the floor, occupied by a small lump that could only have been a sleeping child, its features and sex lost to Raoden in the darkness. Karata knelt beside the child for a quiet moment.
Then she was done, motioning Raoden out of the room and closing the door behind her. Raoden raised his eyebrows