Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [89]
Riltana darted into the guard room. She pressed her eyes to the nearest aperture. Demascus, Carmenere—and there was Chant too—remained secure in their cages. Don’t worry, she silently promised. I’ll get you out.
Wooden trenchers scabbed with dried food tumbled from the stack on a high shelf. Several sealed casks of lamp oil hunkered along the opposite wall, competing for space with two larger barrels, both open, one filled with brackish water, the other with rancid stew. Three wide chests were pushed up against the wall beneath the slits.
Riltana flipped open the lid of the nearest chest.
Yes! She extricated her leather armor from the jumble. She slipped on the black one-piece and reveled in the comforting weight of her secreted daggers and tools. Even the snowflake-inscribed short sword she’d bought from Chant remained in its scabbard.
She recognized Carmenere’s bulky armor and her mace, and Demascus’s noble’s jacket. The other weapons, armor, and bits of equipment were probably theirs as well. Too much to carry in one trip.
She grasped a handle on the chest’s long side and pulled. The chest scraped along the ground easily enough, and the sound of metal on stone was drowned out by the pit.
Riltana checked to make certain the exit tunnel was still clear, then hauled the chest out of the guard chamber. She dragged it into the chamber of the pit until it was positioned beneath Carmenere’s dangling cell.
She closed the lid, stood on the top, and slid the bolt in the cell door. Not particularly well secured, she thought. She flipped up and into the cell, and set to work freeing the unconscious Carmenere from her manacles with her set of picks and wires.
“Lady! Lady! Lady!” screamed her insane cellmate over and over. She gritted her teeth and finished the job, promising to kick the crazy man until he stopped babbling.
Carmenere slid to the floor of the cell, still limp.
Riltana produced the curative draft she’d purchased from Chant. She gave the contents to the lolling silverstar.
The earthsoul opened her eyes. Riltana’s heart felt light as a feather in an updraft. She smiled down at her friend, but put a finger to the woman’s lips. Carmenere took a moment to take in her situation. She rubbed her wrists.
“I’ve come to save you,” Riltana whispered.
“Thank you,” replied the earthsoul. “Thanks for coming back for me.”
“As if I’d leave you!”
Carmenere smiled, and Riltana felt her heart become lost at sea all over again.
“Greetings, Scour,” came a voice ripped straight from Riltana’s nightmares.
Murmur was in the chamber!
It was standing at the edge of the pit, gazing into it as if the cavity were a reflecting pool. The strobing flickers of the firefly radiance gave the demon’s already ghastly silhouette a guttering, crawling texture.
A wave of fearful cries and whimpers swept the room.
Murmur said to the mass of scurrying bugs, “Can you hear me?”
Carmenere looked at Riltana. The woman didn’t dare speak, but the desperate question in the silverstar’s eyes was clear: What should we do?
Riltana draped a placating hand on Carmenere’s shoulder even as she tried to control her own howling fear.
The demon had failed to notice Riltana had gotten loose and into a different cell than the one she’d been put in. Or that someone had dragged a chest out of the guard room and positioned it beneath a hanging cage. If her luck held, maybe the thing would return whence it had come when it finished playing with the bugs in the floor. Please, she thought, just turn around and leave, and don’t look this way.
“Murmur!” yelled Demascus, as if to spite her hope not to draw the demon’s attention. “I can hear you! What do you want with me? How do you know me?”
That pig-straddling leech fondler! What was the deva doing? Not all of us get reincarnated when we do something stupid!
Murmur’s crystal-veined bulk turned so that its gaze fell on the deva. Its eyes swirled like whirlpools, light and dark red crystal, down to a vanishing point. Riltana shuddered, but the nightmarish regard flicked past her and Carmenere.