The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [116]
The girl thought for a moment. “They’re filling the dungeons in,” she said.
Alis nodded wearily. She already knew that, too.
“Go on,” Alis told her. “Find your way out.”
Ellen stood and took a few trembling steps, then ran. Alis listened to her skittering footfalls recede, knowing she should have killed the girl—and glad she hadn’t.
Then she turned her attention to the Nightstrider’s things.
He didn’t have much; after all, he hadn’t come down there to stay. It was more luck than anything else that he’d had a kerchief with a piece of hard bread and cheese wrapped in it and greater luck still that he’d brought a wineskin. She took those items, his knife, a leather strap from his baldric, the lamp, and his tinderbox.
Alis had a little bread and wine, then hauled herself up and returned to the relative safety of the ancient passageway.
When she felt she was far enough away, she stopped and dressed her arm again. The wound wasn’t as bad as she feared; the knife had been forced into the two bones of her forearm and had lodged there until she tore free. That was why he hadn’t been able to stab her again and again, as she had him, or turn the knife in the wound.
Yes, this had been, all things considered, a lucky day. Or night. She no longer had the faintest sense of when it was.
She reckoned it had been more than a nineday that she’d been trapped down there. But it might be more than twice that, since she had gone there to free Leovigild Ackenzal.
It was probably best that he had refused to accompany her. On her way back out of the dungeons she’d found that the passage was heavily guarded. That wasn’t good, because it meant her presence had been detected, and it was the only sure way she knew to get out.
Even so, the labyrinth of passages obvious and obscure was so baroque that there had to be another point of egress. She wondered how they knew she had entered the dungeons, but Prince Robert wasn’t stupid. And due to his…condition…he was able to remember the hidden ways. He must have posted guards or set up some sort of alarm. Possibly Hespero or some other churchman had helped with that, but it may have been as simple as flour on the floor to record her tracks. She had been moving in darkness, after all, and wouldn’t have seen it.
For the last nine days the usurper had been finding the passages and blocking them up. The dungeons shuddered with the work of royal engineers, mining and sapping.
There were plenty of passages that he hadn’t found, but none of them seemed to go anywhere except back to the dungeon. And the dungeon was being systematically filled in and closed off, at least those sections which might allow her access to the castle. One whole section—complete with prisoners—had been sealed off already. Those trapped there weren’t dead yet; sometimes she could still hear them pleading for food and water. Their cries were getting weaker, though. She wondered what they had done to end up in the dungeon in the first place and whether they deserved their fate.
Feeling a little better as the food dissolved in her belly, she headed back into the depths. There was one area of the dungeons she had avoided, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t have to brave it, even though it was one place Robert dare not cut off entirely. But she could no longer bow to that fear; the food she’d just taken was probably the last she would get. Whether Ellen said anything or not, a Nightstrider was dead, and Robert doubtless would increase the size of his patrols.
She had lived until now by taking scraps from prisoners, and she’d had a fresh source of water up until two days before, when the walls had blocked it off. Now the only water she had access to was dirty and diseased. She knew that mixing the wine with it would allow her to drink it for a while, but the wine would last only for a few days at best.
From here on out, she would only get weaker.
So she turned toward the whispering.
It wasn’t like the voices of the prisoners. At first she’d thought it was her own thoughts, talking