door. A dim yellow light shone out into the alleyway. Motioning for them to wait, he slipped inside.
“Remember, we’re not here to pick fights. The quicker and quieter we go, the better our chances of reaching Geran and getting out again,” Mirya told Brun and the rest of her band as they waited on the halfling. “When the time comes to withdraw, we’ll try to find our way back to this door and retreat into buried Hulburg. It’s our best chance to lose any who chase after us.”
“We’ll give away the secret of the buried ways,” Lodharrun muttered.
“By tomorrow night we’ll have won or lost, and we’ll be done with sneaking through cellars,” Mirya replied. “If we give it away, we give it away.”
“Remember, the runehelms speak to one another,” Sarth added. “From the moment we meet one, all the runehelms in the city will know of our presence, and likely Rhovann as well. We must not be delayed.”
Hamil reappeared at the door, and motioned for quiet.
Mirya thought for a moment, and looked at her band of rebels. “What if we shoot a few arrows or bolts at the guards by the front door?” she asked. “Either they’ll come out and give chase, or they’ll close the doors and fort up, but they’d be out of our way.”
Hamil considered it, and nodded. Mirya turned to Senna and Halla; the fletcher was a skilled archer, as one might expect, and Halla was nearly as good with her sling. “I think that’ll be work for you two,” she said. “Stay well back in the shadows, and move between your shots. If they come out after you, you know what to do. We’ll give you a two-hundred count to let you get into position.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Senna replied. Halla bit her lip, but nodded. Together the old fletcher and the young woman hurried down the alley into the rain. Mirya said a silent prayer to the gods of mercy and good fortune that she hadn’t just sent the two women to their deaths. She waited with the others for a short time in the alleyway, silently counting off. Inside the Council Hall she could hear occasional footsteps, the sound of voices, the creaking of doors as they opened and shut, but none sounded very close by. Then Hamil motioned to the small band and led the way as they crept in from the rain.
They were in a large kitchen, currently unoccupied. For a moment Mirya wondered what in the world the Merchant Council needed with a kitchen, but then she realized that the prisoners in the cells below and the guards who watched them had to have their meals fixed somewhere. For that matter, the Merchant Council likely hosted banquets here when the occasion demanded. They quietly filed through the room to a servant’s hall on the far side, proceeding past several doors opening on either side until they reached a door at the end of the hall.
Here Hamil paused.
Carefully, he opened the door a finger’s width to peer out. The voices and movements of the soldiers outside grew louder, and Mirya steeled herself for violence. But then a sharp scream sounded from a short distance away. Cries of alarm and angry curses echoed from outside. Hamil gave them all a quick wink, and darted out from his hiding place. Sarth, Brun, and Lodharrun followed; Mirya brought up the rear, after the dwarf. She risked a single glimpse to her right as they crossed a wide, open hallway. Several Council Guards clustered around the building’s front door, some peering outside, others tending to one of their fellows, who was on the ground with an arrow in his stomach. Then they clattered down the stairs leading to the dungeons below the great hall.
Ahead of her Hamil vanished around a bend in the stairs, knives gleaming in his hands. An instant later another cry of alarm echoed from the room at the bottom of the stairs, followed by the sudden clash of steel on steel. Sarth rounded the bend after Hamil, and she heard the tiefling’s rough voice snarling words of magic; Brun and Lodharrun leaped into the fray after the two heroes. With a quick glance back up the stairs behind her, Mirya turned the corner after her friends, crossbow ready for a shot.
The violence of the scene appalled her. One guard was on the floor, vainly trying to staunch the blood pumping out of a murderous stab wound in his upper thigh, and Hamil was systematically slashing and stabbing his way through a second guard whose weak efforts to defend himself couldn’t last more than another moment or two. On the other side of the room, another pair of guards sprawled in frozen gore, pierced through by a blast of icicles that riddled them and the wall behind them. Brun Osting and the dwarf Lodharrun attacked the remaining two guards, the big brewer using his axe with his hand choked halfway up the haft, the dwarf fencing with his opponent. From her vantage on the stairs, Mirya had a clear shot at the smith’s foe, and before she could second-guess herself, she leveled her crossbow and took it. The thick quarrel suddenly sprouted in the fellow’s right shoulder, spinning him half around; the dwarf stepped forward and ran him through while he was distracted. In moments, the room was still again.
Brun Osting looked up from the man he’d felled, and grinned. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” he said.
“It’s not the breaking in that’s difficult,” Hamil told him. “It’s breaking out again.” With that, he seized the keys clipped to the guard-sergeant’s belt and hurried over to unlock the door leading to the row of cells beyond.
The Council Hall prison was not a very large one, no more than a pair of intersecting corridors, with perhaps a total of a dozen or so cells. Reaching the intersection, they saw Geran-naked except for his smallclothes-in the cell at the far end of the rightmost passage, slumped unconscious with one hand shackled to the wall. Two runehelms stood watch over him. The powerful constructs flowed into motion as soon as the loyalist band came into sight, drawing short-hafted maces from their harnesses since there was little space to wield their massive halberds.
“They do not feel pain, and they do not bleed,” Sarth warned the others. “But they are knitted together with bone and sinew, and these can be destroyed. Break bones and sever limbs until they can fight no more.”
“I think I brought a knife to an axe fight,” Hamil muttered. But he threw himself forward, rolling neatly under one powerful mace swing and attacking the construct’s knee. Brun and Lodharrun joined in, while Sarth turned on the second monster and blasted at it with a jet of roaring green flames. For a moment the loyalists’ assault seemed like it might actually overpower the creatures, as steel bit and clods of claylike flesh flew. But a backhand slap staggered Brun in his tracks, and before the brewer could resume his place at Lodharrun’s side, the left-hand runehelm wheeled away from Sarth’s fire to hammer its mace down on the dwarf. It missed the smith’s head, but crushed shoulder, collarbone, and ribs with an awful sound of crunching bone, smashing Lodharrun to the floor. The smith writhed on the ground with a thin, wet scream before he fell still.
Mirya sighted and shot with her crossbow in the sudden space opened in the fight; the weapon was the wrong tool for the job, but maybe it would distract the creature for a moment. Her quarrel took the first runehelm square in the middle of its visor, and actually punched through the armor. To her surprise, the monster staggered, drops of thick black blood streaming from beneath its steel-plated face. It reached up to try and dislodge the quarrel-and Brun Osting leaped in with a snarl of pure rage, hewing off its weapon arm at the shoulder. As the creature crumpled, the brewer went to work on its neck, and managed to take off its head with several vicious chops.
“The visor protects a weak point!” Hamil called. “Good shooting, Mirya! Do the same to the other one!”
As quickly as she could, Mirya worked the mechanism of her crossbow, and laid in another bolt for the second runehelm. This one advanced remorselessly on Sarth, shrugging off everything the sorcerer could throw at him until Sarth melted its iron visor with another intense blast of flame. The creature flailed blindly until Hamil climbed up its back and surgically planted his dagger between its skull and its spine. The runehelm crumpled to the ground without a sound.
Mirya set down her crossbow and hurried over to Geran’s side. He was slumped in an awkward position, crumpled over his right arm, his left arm still stretched out above his head by the fetters. “Geran, wake up!” she cried, kneeling beside him. “We’re here to get you away from this place.” She gently turned his face up to peer into his eyes; he groaned, his eyes fluttering open. His right arm fell away from his chest as he stirred.
His right hand was missing.
Mirya recoiled in horror, covering her mouth to stifle a scream. “Oh, no,” she moaned. A simple dressing covered the stump, and around its edges small patches of blackened skin showed around the wound. She couldn’t bear to look at it. This is what I’ve done to the man I love? she berated herself. He trusted you, Mirya Erstenwold, and look what it’s cost him! You put him in the power of his enemies, and they’ve maimed him!
“By Bane’s black heart,” Hamil swore viciously. “The bastards!” His face dark with fury, the halfling threw
