bit of muffled retching.
'Try not to cough so much,' Karata advised. 'You'll irritate your throat and make your chest sore, and then you'll spend eternity feeling like you have a cold.'
Raoden groaned, pushing himself to his feet. 'We need to get to the west side,' he said, his voice a croak.
Karata nodded. She walked silently and quickly-much more so than Raoden could manage-like a person well acquainted with danger. Several times she put back her hand in warning, halting their progress just before a squad of guards appeared out of the darkness. Her aptitude gained them the western side of Iadon's palace without mishap, despite Raoden's lack of skill.
'Now what?' she asked quietly.
Raoden paused. A question now confronted him. Why did Karata want access to the palace? From what Raoden had heard of her, she didn't seem like the type to exact revenge. She was brutal, but not vindictive. But, what if he were wrong? What if she did want Iadon's blood?
'Well?' Karata asked.
I won't let her kill my father, he decided. No matter how poor a king he is, I won't let her do that. 'You have to answer something for me first.'
'Now?' she asked with annoyance.
Raoden nodded. 'I need to know why you want into the palace.'
She frowned in the darkness. 'You aren't in any position to make demands.' 'Nor are you in any position to refuse them,' Raoden said. 'All I have to do is raise an alarm. and we'll both be taken by the guards.'
Karata waited quietly in the darkness, obviously debating whether or not he would do it.
'Look,' Raoden said. 'Just tell me one thing. Do you intend to harm the king?'
Karata met his eyes, then shook her head. 'My quibble is not with him.' Do I believe her, or not? Raoden thought. Do I have a choice?
He reached over, pulling hack a patch of bushes that abutted the wall: then he threw his weight against one of the stones. The stone sank into the wall with a quiet grinding noise. and a section of ground fell away before them.
Karata raised her eyebrows. 'A secret passage? How quaint.'
'Iadon is a paranoid sleeper,' Raoden explained, crawling through the small space between ground and wall. 'He had this passage installed to give him one last means of escape should someone attack his palace.'
Karata snorted as she followed him through the hole. 'I thought things like this only existed in children's tales.'
'Iadon likes those tales quite a bit,' Raoden said.
The passage widened after a dozen feet. and Raoden felt along the wall until he found a lantern, complete with flint and steel. He kept the shieId mostly closed, releasing only a sliver of light. but it was enough to reveal the narrow, dust-filled passage.
'You seem to have quite an extensive knowledge of the palace,' Karata observed.
Raoden didn't answer, unable to think of a response that wasn't too revealing. His father had shown the passage to Raoden when he had barely been into his teenage years. and Raoden and his friends had found it an instant and irresistible attraction. Ignoring cautions that the passage was only for emergencies, Raoden and Lukel had spent hours playing inside of it.
The passage seemed smaller now, of course. There was barely enough room for Raoden and Karata to maneuver. 'Come,' he said. holding the lantern aloft and inching sideways through the passageway. The trip to Iadon's rooms took less time than he remembered; it really wasn't much of a passage, despite what his imagination had claimed. It slanted upward to the second floor at a steep angle, heading straight to Iadon's room.
'This is it.' Raoden said as they reached the end. 'Iadon should be in bed by now. and-despite his paranoia-he is a deep sleeper. Perhaps the one causes the other.' He slid open the door, which was hidden behind a tapestry in the royal sleeping chamber. Iadon's massive bed was dark and quiet, though the open window provided enough starlight to see that the king was, in fact, present.
Raoden grew tense, eyeing Karata. The woman, however, held to her word: she barely gave the slumbering king a passing glance as she moved through the room and into the outer hallway. Raoden sighed in quiet relief, following her with a less practiced gait of stealth.
The darkened outer hallway connected Iadon's rooms with those of his guards. The right path led toward the guard barracks; the left led to a guard post, then the rest of the palace. Karata turned away from this option, continuing down the right hallway to the barrack annex, her bare feet making no sound on the stone floor.
Raoden followed her into the barracks, his nervousness returning. She had decided not to kill his father, but now she was sneaking into the most dangerous part of the palace. A single misplaced sound would wake dozens of soldiers.
Fortunately. sneaking down a stone hallway didn't require much skill. Karata quietly opened any doors in their path, leaving them open enough that Raoden didn't even have to move them to slip through.
The dark hallway joined with another, this one lined with doors-the quarters of the lesser officers, as well as those guards allowed room to raise a family. Karata picked a door. Inside was the single room allotted to a married guard's family; starlight illuminated a bed by one wall and a dresser beside the other.
Raoden fidgeted anxiously, wondering if all this had been so Karata could procure herself a sleeping guard's weapons. If so, she was insane. Of course, sneaking into a paranoid king's palace wasn't exactly a sign of mental stability.
As Karata moved into the room, Raoden realized that she couldn't have come to steal the guard's accouterments-he wasn't there. The bed was empty, its sheets wrinkled with a slept-in look. Karata stooped beside something that Raoden hadn't noticed at first: a mattress on the floor, occupied by a small lump that could only have been a sleeping child, its features and sex lost to Raoden in the darkness. Karata knelt beside the child for a quiet moment.
Then she was done, motioning Raoden out of the room and closing the door behind her. Raoden raised his eyebrows questioningly, and Karam nodded. They were ready to go.
The escape was accomplished in the reverse order of the incursion. Raoden went first, sliding through the still open doors, and Karata followed, pulling them closed behind her. In all, Raoden was relieved at how easily the night was going-or, at least, he was relieved right up to the moment when he slipped through the door to that final hallway outside Iadon's chamber.
A man stood on the other side of the door, his hand frozen in the act of reaching for the doorknob. He regarded them with a startled expression.
Karata pushed past Raoden. She wrapped her arm around the man's neck, clamping his mouth closed in a smooth motion, then grabbed his wrist as he reached for the sword at his side. The man, however, was larger and stronger than Karata's weakened Elantrian form, and he broke her grip, blocking her leg with his own as she tried to trip him.
'Stop!' Raoden snapped quietly, his hand held before him menacingly.
Both of their eyes flickered at him in annoyance, but then they stopped struggling as they saw what he was doing.
Raoden's finger moved through the air, an illuminated line appearing behind it. Raoden continued to write, curving and tracing until he had finished a single character. Aon Sheo, the symbol for death.
'If you move,' Raoden said quietly, 'you will die.'
The guard's eyes widened in horror. The Aon sat glowing above his chest, casting harsh light on the otherwise caliginous room, throwing shadows across the walls. The character flashed as they always did, then disappeared. However, the light had been enough to illuminate Raoden's black-spotted Elantrian face.
'You know what we are.'
'Merciful Domi.' the man whispered.
'That Aon will remain for the next hour,' Raoden lied. 'It will hang where I drew it, unseen, waiting for you to so much as quiver. If you do, it will destroy you. Do you understand?'
The man didn't move, sweat beading on his terrified face.
Raoden reached down and undid the man's sword belt, then tied the weapon around his own waist.
'Come,' Raoden said to Karata.
