Page 134

“A bit much, don’t you think?” Sorasa said to her guards. “He’s a puppy dog.”

Dom scoffed, struggling with the chain around his throat.

The guards did not respond, opening her own cell with the grate of metal on metal, jamming a key in the snarling lock. They shoved her in, wrists still bound, and slammed the cell door before marching back into the passage.

Their footsteps died away, leaving the five of them in the quiet dark, the only light coming from a single torch. Between the empty cells and the long aisle, no one could brush fingertips, let alone help each other. And with Dom bound as he was, there was little hope of smashing their way out. Their brooding battering ram was no more.

“This is less than ideal,” Dom growled to the ceiling.

Corayne kicked up a spray of dirt, exasperated. “That’s one way to put it,” she snapped. “You trusted the bounty hunter.”

Sorasa took the accusation in stride. She paced her cell, examining the bars for any flaw. “Charlie’s still on the outside.”

Andry’s scoff echoed. “Oh yes, he’ll certainly come back for us.”

“He could draw something up,” Corayne offered, looking between them. “A writ or a diplomatic letter to buy us some time?”

“He won’t get anything past Sigil.” Sorasa kept up her inspection. The bars were dug in, hammered into the ceiling and the dirt floor. She scuffed at the bottom, trying to make a hole. The iron reached too deep. “She’s going to drag us all the way back to Ascal.”Another voyage across hostile seas, to die on the executioner’s block or in the maw of a sea serpent. Exhausting.“Unless we do something about it.”

“We’re forty feet underground, Sarn,” Dom said in a flat voice. He strained again, his pale face going red with exertion. The bonds didn’t budge.

“Locked in cages. Chained,” Corayne added, waving a hand at the Elder. “I doubt even you can do something about that.”

“You’re right,” Sorasa said. Then, with a huff of breath, she jumped straight up, tucking her knees, drawing her bound wrists around her feet. When she landed on her toes, her hands were in front. It was an old trick, taught to every acolyte at the citadel. “Ibalets are just jailors but Taltora is a bitch of a dungeon. The air shafts are too small even for a child. Trust me, I’ve seen it tried.”

She began to move her wrists over themselves, pulling with each pass of skin on skin. The restraints were good rope, braided and tight, but the knots needed work. Inch by inch, she made room against her flesh. The rhythm was slow, steady, even hypnotic. She sank into it as easily as a warm pool.

“The only way out is the way we came in. Down the cells, four turns through four rows. Then the guardrooms, the antechamber, and up the gut of the citadel itself. Where you have to charge through the courtyard of the barracks and garrison offices before reaching the street. Then it’s a race to the desert, which few can survive on foot, if they manage to not get run down by mounted cavalry before they hit the dunes.” The others winced as she listed each obstacle, but Sorasa only shrugged, her wrists turning. “Be grateful we’re not in a Treckish prison pit, half-buried in our own refuse. Or Ascal, for that matter, at the mercy of pig-idiot guards who forget to feed their prisoners. No, Taltora is kind compared to those.”

Her right hand loosed first, squeezing between the bindings. The left followed with a slip, and she tossed the rope around her neck. It would come in handy later, should she need to strangle someone.

The others watched, wide-eyed.

“You’ve been in prison before,” Andry said in a flat voice.

“I’ve been inthisprison before,” Sorasa replied. With her hands free, she rolled up the sleeve of her left arm, exposing an intricate tattoo of a bird’s wing.

“Well?” Corayne leaned her forehead against the bars. Hope flared in her eyes. It was so easy to coax the girl into flame, Sorasa was almost jealous.The ability to hope was driven from me long ago.“We don’t exactly have time to waste. It’s been hours already.”

Sorasa drummed along the feathers, feeling the flesh of her arm. She stopped at the wing tip and put her teeth to her own skin. “The guards are wise to my ways by now,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

After a moment, she felt the metal nub of the pin and latched on. It slid from her skin easily, the steel of the thick needle shining crimson. It wasn’t long, the length of a single finger joint. She ignored the sting and the single drop of blood marring her tattoo.

“But they still can’t figure out how to check a body properly,” she added, triumphant, the needle in her teeth.

Dom stared in disgust. “Are you going to fix a hole in a shirt?”

Sorasa didn’t answer, pulling a second pin from another spot in the bird’s wing.

“Oh, well done,” Andry said, gasping in fascination.

“Thank you, Trelland. It’s nice to be appreciated,” she answered as she set to picking the cell lock with her bloody pins.

Her heart pounded as the door swung open, the hinges mercifully silent.Now what, now what, now whatdrummed to a crescendo in her head. The guards hadn’t taken her lockpicks, but they had taken everything else. Her gear, Dom’s Elder sword, theSpindleblade. Not to mention there were probably a hundred soldiers between themselves and the street, one of them Sigil of the Temurijon. Sorasa gritted her teeth, trying to remember a more precarious position she had been in and escaped.

Well, I’ve never tried to save the realm before, so nothing comes to mind.

Dom’s voice grated in her ears. “What’s next, Sarn?”