Pool of Radiance_ Ruins of Myth Drannor - Carrie Bebris [2]
Kestrel, however, came and went with perfect ease. The thief had grown up in the streets of a dozen cities, and it took more than a ruined castle to scare her. She’d never encountered trouble there and found the deserted cavern a convenient hideout. Though cutthroats and a few common creatures also enjoyed the isolation from time to time, generally the once-menacing cavern was safer than most city streets.
Safe enough, at least, that she had hollowed out a cavity beneath a pile of fallen rocks to use as a cache for the coins and other items she acquired. As she thought of the small hoard that waited for her within the castle, her fingers drifted to the nobleman’s money pouch at her side. Her stash of treasure was growing steadily-just yesterday she’d added a walnut-sized ruby to the hoard, courtesy of a quintet of sixes in a game of Traitors’ Heads. She wouldn’t use those dice anymore, however, until she left Phlan. She’d never live to roll them again if anyone discovered they were weighted.
It wouldn’t be too much longer before she could leave petty thievery behind, and the dangerous, seedy lifestyle that went with it. When she had enough coin she’d live and travel in style, supplementing her savings with an occasional high-profit, low-risk heist. No more dockside inns with flat ale and lumpy mattresses, no more tramping from city to city on foot, no more risking her neck for a few measly coppers, no more wearing the same clothes until she itched. She’d secretly ply her trade among a better class of people while enjoying the easy life. The one she and Quinn had always imagined.
She entered the castle bailey and negotiated its once-formidable hedge maze. When Tyranthraxus had been defeated, a wide swath had been cut through several rows of the sawlike leaves, black flowers, and poisonous six-inch thorns, but in the years since then the hedges had grown back enough to warrant caution. She ducked and sidled her way through, careful to avoid even the slightest brush with the menacing vegetation.
Once past the maze, she relaxed her guard. She approached the white marble tower, half-ruined and defaced with sinister-looking but now impotent runes, and circled to an ebony door marked with an intricate carving of a dragon. Standing in the spot she’d marked twenty-five yards from the door, she withdrew a dagger from one of her boots and gripped it in her left hand. Though she could throw a dagger accurately with either hand, her dominant left provided more force and deadly aim.
She hurled the blade at the entrance. The dagger stuck in the door with a solid thunk, landing dead center between the dragon’s eyes. Foul-smelling yellow mist issued from the dragon’s mouth-another lesson she’d learned the hard way. If not for the potion of neutralization she’d happened to carry on her first visit, she’d never have lived to return.
After waiting ten minutes for the poisonous cloud to disperse, she retrieved her dagger and opened the door onto a landing in the main room of the ruined tower, which lay open to the sky all the way down to the subterranean cavern. Birds, bugs, and spiders made their homes in the nooks and crevices of the interior tower walls. Despite the fact that rain could fall freely inside, the pool basin below had always remained dry.
She nimbly padded down the black iron