'You've wasted enough of my time, then. I hope you aren't this disrespectful with the other guards. I've half a mind to report you.'
'Oh, no, sir. I didn't mean anything. I'm terribly sorry.' He bowed hastily and scuttled away.
Ythnel sighed. She should have known better than to think it was going to be easy. It looked as if she would have to try to bluff her way past the guards after all. Recalling the stairs she had climbed from the palace dungeons on her previous visit, Ythnel moved down the hall to her right until she came to the first door past the entrance to the audience chamber. It opened to a torch-lit corridor that angled to her right and ended in a flight of steps leading under the palace.
At the base of the stairs, she found herself in a large space separated from the rest of the dungeon by walls of bars on two sides. To her left were the cells, one of which she had been kept in. The room itself held a table with a couple of chairs, a desk, and a cot. A guard sat hunched over the desk.
'What do you want?' he asked disinterestedly. Apparently he had heard her coming down the stairs. Uncertain how to answer, Ythnel cleared her throat. The guard stopped whatever he was doing and turned to face her. It was Corporal Urler from before!
'Do I know you?' he asked, squinting at her from his seat.
'Uh, no, I'm normally stationed out on the west wall.'
'What are you doin' here?'
'There have been some fires in the city.' Ythnel's mind scrambled for words, ideas coming each time only as she started to open her mouth. 'One of the fires is at Lord Naeros's tower. His stockpile of witchweed was torched. I was sent over here to guard the palace's storeroom in case it was also a target.'
'There's no way anybody could git past the palace gate, let alone make it down here,' Corporal Urler bragged.
'I'm just following orders,' Ythnel shrugged. 'If you want to vouch for'
'All right. No need fer that.' He got up and moved to the gate that led farther into the dungeon. 'You waitin' fer an invitation? Come on.'
The hallway was lit by a single torch about halfway down its length. They passed a closed door on the right, followed by an open archway that led into a large chamber hidden in shadows. As they neared the end of the hall, a door stood in the left wall. Corporal Urler stopped before it, removed a ring of keys from his belt, and unlocked the door.
'Here you go.'
Ythnel spoke two harsh words born in the depths of the Abyss and struck out with her hand, grabbing a hold of the guard's face. The dark aura of the Power exploded around wherever her flesh touched his, and small gashes began to appear on his exposed skin. With a strangled cry, he stumbled away from Ythnel, but the damage was already done. Blood poured from open wounds as he backpedaled into the wall and slid to the floor. By the time he hit the ground, he had stopped breathing and his eyes were rolled back into his head.
Ythnel dragged Corporal Urler's body into the room. It wouldn't do to have someone come down the hall and notice him there. Grabbing the torch from its place on the wall, Ythnel set to work. When she had several fires going, she closed and locked the door behind herself. On her way out, she tossed the keys into the corner of one of the far cells then headed back up the stairs.
Once more in the great hallway, Ythnel turned to leave the palace but paused. Something nagged at her in the back of her mind. A memory stirred of her standing bound in the audience chamber before Jaerios Karanok. From his robe he withdrew a medallion in the shape of a scourge. It was her medallion, and here was her opportunity to retrieve it.
It was a crazy idea. The likelihood that he even still had it was remote. The chance that she could find it if he did was even smaller. Yet she had to try. It was one more thing the Karanoks had taken from her, and she meant to haye it all back. The servant had said the family lived on the second floor. She would start looking there.
From where she stood, Ythnel could see a stairway that led up just past the protruding corner of the audience chamber. She darted across the hall and ascended.
The stairs ended in another great hall much like the one below. The numerous tapestries hanging along the full length of the hall, however, depicted members of the Karanok family, often in locations Ythnel guessed were somewhere in the city. While she recognized a few faces, there were many she did not. She hoped the unfamiliar ones were from generations past. It was an unsettling thought that this fanatical family might be so prolific that the woven portraits represented numbers in their current ranks.
Even if it were so, there was nothing Ythnel could do about it. It was best to concentrate on the problems at hand, and her largest one was determining which of the many doors lining the hall led to the chambers of Jaerios Karanok. Checking each one would not only take an incredible amount of time she did not have, but it would also greatly increase her risk of discovery. Yet she had no way of knowing otherwise.
Caught by indecision, Ythnel remained rooted at the top of the stairs. There were three doors within twenty feet of her, two to her left at the end of the hall and one straight ahead. While she debated which one to open, a noise at the bottom of the stairwell caught her attention. Someone was coming upstairs, and whoever it was, was moving quickly. Forced to choose before she was discovered, Ythnel moved briskly to the end of the hall and tried the door on her right. It opened, and she stepped inside without looking, just as she heard whoever was behind her reach the top of the stairs. She left the door cracked enough to peer back out into the hall. An older man in a white night robe, his head crowned in a wreath of gray hair, swept around the corner from the stairs and headed down the hall away from Ythnel. At about fifty feet, he turned to his left and disappeared down a passage Ythnel hadn't realized was there. Moments later, she heard the distant echo of someone knocking, and a muffled voice calling for Lord Jaerios. Then there was silence.
While Ythnel waited, crouched behind the door, it occurred to her she didn't know where she was hiding. She turned, half expecting to see the room's occupant glaring at her balefully. Fortunately, there was no one. Moonlight spilled in from a window in the wall to her left, just five feet from the door. It appeared she was in some sort of study. Bookcases lined the right and back walls. A large desk sat in the middle of the room, with a high-backed chair on the far side and a single, nondescript chair on the near wall. A marble bust stood next to an unlit candelabrum, both bathed in the pale luminescence of the moon. The bust looked familiar, but she couldn't quite place who it was supposed to be.
Voices in the hall returned Ythnel's attention to the door.
'The fire in the palace is contained to the dungeon, my lord. However, with at least two other fires burning in the city, I thought it prudent you were notified.'
The older man in the robe she had seen earlier came into view first, talking over his shoulder to someone behind. Before he finished speaking, Ythnel saw who followed. Lord Jaerios's gray-streaked dark curls were tousled, and he wore a silk robe of deep crimson over his night clothes. His current state was a far cry from the regal commander she remembered seeing, but there was no mistaking the man who had condemned Ythnel to death. The pair was trailed by a single guard as they made their way to the stairs. It was all Ythnel could do not to rush out and attack them. Her retribution on Jaerios would have to take another form, however. She could not risk an alarm being raised now.
Once the three passed beyond range of her hearing, Ythnel slipped out of the study and down the hall to Jaerios's chambers. The short passage off the main hall led about twenty feet before turning sharply to the right to end at a closed door. It was the room beyond the open door at the corner of the passage that Ythnel entered. The long, rectangular room had two windows in the far corner, one on each wall. While less ostentatious than his son's room, Jaerios's bedchamber was still richly furnished. The four-poster bed against the wall to the right of the doOr was a dark-stained wood with beautiful grain and lightly gilded trim along the head- and footboards. A matching bureau stood just to the left of the door. In the far corner was a writing desk and chair, positioned so that whoever sat at it would have excellent views of the palace grounds out both windows.
Closing the door to prevent anyone from hearing her search, Ythnel rummaged through the bureau drawers first. She pulled handfuls of neatly folded clothing from their resting places and tossed them to the floor, but her efforts yielded nothing. Her scourge medallion was not tucked beneath a stack of underclothes, nor did any of the drawers have a false bottom in which something could be hidden.
Frustrated, Ythnel stormed over to the writing table. She gave a cursory glance to a freshly inked letter that seemed to be informing an ally or family member that the purging of Luthcheq had finally been accomplished. With a dismissive snort, she set it back down and inspected the other objects that sat on the desktop. A small ceramic jar
