Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [99]
Cauvin had gotten his fingers wedged around the brick when sensations that were both hot and cold shot up his arms. His hands shook so badly he couldn’t keep them pressed into the mortar. Then the sensations passed from his shoulders to his neck. He opened his mouth and would have been horrified, but not froggin’ surprised, if a hive of bees had swarmed out of his throat, except—suddenly—the sensations ended as if they’d never begun.
Warding, he told himself. Cauvin knew a bit about warding, the expensive sorcery that rich people bought for their treasure chests and real thieves bought amulets to counter. He’d have wagered his last froggin’ padpol that there wasn’t anything in Sanctuary worth warding—out at Land’s End, perhaps, but nothing inside Sanctuary’s walls.
Needless to say, the froggin’ geezer hadn’t mentioned warding. Cauvin stared at the froggin’ square brick a good long time before touching it gingerly with the fourth finger of his left hand.
Nothing. No chills, no sweats, no tingling. Nothing at all.
Cauvin dug deep into his stock of oaths and insults. There wasn’t one that satisfied. The froggin’ brick hadn’t been warded; warding strong enough to numb a man’s flesh didn’t disappear after a single touch—he’d learned that from the Hand. No, someone—the froggin’ Torch—had anchored a one-time spell on the brick, a spell which had gone to ground in Cauvin’s flesh.
“You better froggin’ well be dead tomorrow morning, you froggin’ bastard!” Cauvin hoped the old pud could hear him; he didn’t care who else did. “‘Cause I’m going to smash every froggin’ bone in your froggin’ body.”
Cauvin yanked the brick from the wall—his own choice, at least he thought it was. He’d come too far, risked too froggin’ much to turn back without the gods-all-be-damned blue mask. The lever took two hands and all his strength before it budged. In his mind’s eye, Cauvin saw the atrium transformed into a vast chamber with smoky lamps and pillars and Lord Molin Torchholder waiting for him atop a massive throne, but in the Maze nothing changed.
The paving stone remained as Cauvin had left it. From his knees, he pried it loose, revealing not the mask-filled cache he’d hoped for, but the rising end of a steep, ladderlike stairway. The Torch hadn’t mentioned that either. Muttering and cursing himself for froggin’ foolishness as heartily as he cursed Molin Torchholder for deception, Cauvin dragged the paving stone to the center of the atrium and covered it with rubbish—little as he liked the prospect of leaving the froggin’ hole open behind him, he liked the notion of someone else closing it even less.
With a stone-worker’s professional eye, Cauvin admired the stairway. Each of the steps was steep and narrow, befitting the paving-stone entry, but they were made from shaped stone and bore his weight without shifting. The tunnel at the foot of the stairs was stone-faced, solid, and drier than the atrium above it. There wasn’t a froggin’ cobweb or slime streak to be seen. The air was stale, but not foul, which reassured Cauvin as he made his way toward what he thought was a dead end but proved to be a dogleg turn to the right.
Once he’d turned the corner Cauvin conceded that the Torch hadn’t sent him on a fool’s errand and almost forgave him for the warded brick. In front of him the tunnel widened into a chamber large enough that the light from Cauvin’s torch didn’t reach the walls. What the torch did reveal was racks of armor and benches covered with weapons, all bright and shimmering beneath layers of protective oil.
Drawn by curiosity too strong to resist, Cauvin entered the chamber. It wasn’t occupied—at least not by anything larger than a mouse or lizard. He thought the torch flared when he raised it toward the chamber’s higher ceiling; more likely, it wasn’t the torch, but his eyes going wide with awe. Off to one side, in an alcove fit for a froggin’ god, a suit of armor like nothing Cauvin had seen before hung on a stone torso. The breastplate was burnished bronze and shaped in a style that