no guards or wards down here making sure they stayed.
No one said it. We all knew it.
This had trap written all over it.
Just because armed-to-the-teeth guards weren’t there to meet us didn’t mean something worse wasn’t about to jump us if we so much as twitched. I shot a glance at Mychael. There had to be defenses and they had to be magic ones. It had to be magic, the bad kind. I couldn’t sense it, but I knew he’d be able to.
He shook his head once. Slowly.
Crap.
I looked to Tam. His lips were pulled back from his fangs in a snarl. That was answer enough. He knew there was something here, but he couldn’t see, sense, or smell it.
No sounds from any potential occupants of the cells. A dozen doors stretched down the corridor on either side of us. No hands were between the bars; no shouting came from inside the cells. It wasn’t like any dungeon I’d ever been in. Then again, Sarad Nukpana wasn’t just any jailer. Silence meant surprises awaited anyone who came down here with the intent of breaking anyone out.
I’d been in a warded cell recently. It had been blocked with Level Twelve wards, which were the strongest that could be conjured. The soldier who had been standing guard outside didn’t dare get closer than arm’s length from the red wards that crackled only an inch beyond the bars. Anyone could see Level Twelve wards, mage or mundane. There’d be a lot of fried mundane guards otherwise. If there were wards in front of those dozen cells, I couldn’t see them. And if neither Mychael or nor Tam could tell what was out there, then Sarad Nukpana had planned it that way.
The silence was absolute. Whatever kept the prisoners in those cells also kept any sound from getting out.
Imala’s voice came from directly behind me. “A plan?”
“You’ve never seen anything like this?” Mychael asked her.
“Never.”
“Tam?”
“No.”
About half of the cells were solid iron doors with a barred window at eye level and a slot at the foot of the door for passing food to prisoners. The rest were iron bars. I looked in the one closest to me. Pitch-dark and seemingly empty. While I waited for something to lunge out of that darkness, tear through those bars, and start killing us, my stomach entertained itself by tying itself in knots.
Normally any place where people were regularly held prisoner had odors. None pleasant and all were easily identifiable. I could easily identify them now. There were people down here—a lot of them. A ward that kept prisoners away from the iron bars, smothered sound, but smells made it through. Nasty work.
Torches were mounted in the wall between each cell and the next.
No lightglobes.
The guards had used fire to light the corridor, not magic. Interesting, and not in a good way. Why wouldn’t they use lightglobes down here?
Tam strode to the first cell door that was only bars, then quickly went to the next.
And froze.
We didn’t know the reason for it, but he did. We ran to Tam and stopped.
It was Cyran Nathrach. He’d been beaten, he was bloody, and he was also holding out both hands, eyes wide with terror, silently screaming, “Stop!” and pointing desperately at the floor. Behind him, the cell was packed with goblin prisoners, men and women. The cell appeared to be huge, and it was full. It looked like all the prisoners had been crammed into one cell. But why?
There was only a pair of torches burning in the cell. When Tam had taken a step closer, the torches had dimmed, and the prisoners had started to panic. Only one thing dimmed fire.
Air. Or, more precisely, a lack of air.
When Tam came close to the cell, the air was somehow taken out of the cell. The torches in the hall didn’t flicker one bit, so the hall wasn’t booby-trapped, but the cell was. And the prisoners in that cell were emphatic that trap had something to do with the floor.
Tam growled, a full-throated snarl.
“Step back,” Mychael told him.
Tam didn’t like it, but he did it.
The torches resumed flickering as if they had all the air in the world. Cyran and the other prisoners took relieved gulps of air. Mychael took one step forward, and the torches flickered. Mychael immediately stepped back and they resumed burning normally.
A prisoner from the back of the cell was quickly making his way to the front.
Count Jash Masloc.
Jash held up both hands, telling us to stay where we were. He then pointed to Tam and Mychael, and made a sharp shooing motion. Then he pointed to me and crooked his finger. He wanted Mychael and Tam to back off, and me to come closer.
I knew why.
Suddenly the prisoners in that cell weren’t the only ones short of breath, but my breathing problems weren’t due to deadly magic, just terror of what only I was apparently able to do. I stepped up to the cell bars despite the panicked look of Cyran Nathrach and the frantic waving of two mages behind him. Jash said a few words to them and they stopped, their expressions stunned.
Cyran and the other prisoners thought I was the Saghred’s bond servant with tons of magic. Jash Masloc knew differently. When I stepped up to the door, nothing had happened.
Tam went very still. “Magic-activated trap.”
“You got it,” I said. “The sensors in the city walls didn’t detect me, and the Magh’Sceadu didn’t acknowledge my existence. Neither does whatever this trap is.” My bound and gagged magic was about to come in handy. “Looks like this one’s mine, boys.”
Jash calmly pointed down at the floor just outside the cell door. I looked down at the stones beneath my boots, careful not to inadvertently shuffle my feet one inch closer.
Now, if Sarad Nukpana had really wanted to be a son of a bitch, he would have rigged a trap for that cell that only a mundane could approach, but only a mage could disarm. I was hoping our psychotic nemesis had enough on his plate preparing for a combination of wedding and slaughter to waste too much creativity on one cell door. I’d learned a lot about Sarad Nukpana since he’d slithered out from under a rock and into my life, but I didn’t know whether he was a stickler for detail.
I was about to find out.
I squatted down to get a closer look at the stones. There it was. It looked like the stone the floor was made of, but a dull gleam betrayed it as something else. I knelt to get an even better look at the thing.
It was a lidded metal box with a small handle set into the top. The handle would either be to lift it out or open it up. I gingerly reached out to touch the handle. No reaction from it, no pained screams from me, and the prisoners were still breathing. Though just because I didn’t hear any alarm being given didn’t mean that one hadn’t been. Without magic, the only way I could tell would be the sound of boot-shod Khrynsani pounding down the stairs.
Whatever was in that box was made to keep any magic users out by killing those inside. If you’d risked life and hide to break someone out of prison, you didn’t want your meticulously planned jailbreak to kill the people you’d gone to all the trouble to save.
Jash was gesturing for me to lift the box out of its hole in the floor and to open the lid. I raised my eyebrows to ask if he was sure about that. He nodded once.
This could work, or it could just as easily suffocate the prisoners or fry me.
As far as magic was concerned, I’d never been what you could call a cautious student. It was a wonder that I had all of my parts and pieces in the right places. Some magical risks were fun. Opening a box that could suck the air out of a room and suffocate a dungeon cell full of mages and military officers wasn’t one of them. My mind helpfully treated me to a flashback of Sarad Nukpana reaching through that Gate to grab me and the Saghred. The smell of frying flesh wasn’t something you got the luxury of forgetting. How come you couldn’t remember the fun
