Page 50 of The Summer Pass

“You have a spy in here?” He addressed the two guards on their feet.

“Yeah,” said the guard who’d laughed. “The Boar caught him sneaking around. What’s it to you? Who are you?”

“Shit,” said the other guard suddenly. He took a step back and laid his sword down on the table without looking at it. “I know who you are.”

“Yeah?” his companion sneered. “I don’t care.”

He leapt forward and swung at Vanu, who dodged contemptuously.

“Where is he?” Vanu demanded, looking at the guard who had recognized him.

“The spy? I dunno. In the river chamber, maybe? Maybe dead. You want him, though, my lord—you can have him.”

Vanu blocked another attack from the guard with the sword.

“Heart of the Blue Heaven!” the man on the floor wailed. “He’s the Lion! Stop fucking fighting him!”

“Cowards!” Vanu’s opponent scoffed and attacked again.

Vanu gave his full attention to the fight for a moment, met the man’s sword with a crash that jarred his opponent’s whole body, and followed that up with an attack of his own, slashing through the man’s wide-open guard to give him a long cut across the ribs.

“Really don’t want to kill you,” he told the man. “Drop the sword.”

Panting and clutching his side, the man finally complied. The guard who had put his sword on the table already had his keys out and was unlocking the inner door for Vanu.

“In here, my lord,” he said, beckoning.

Vanu looked at the man he had thrown at the wall.

“Deal with him,” he said, pointing to the injured man. “So he can’t raise the alarm.”

“Absolutely, my lord.”

Out of the corner of his eye as he ran out the door, Vanu saw the first guard gleefully snatching up the injured man’s dropped sword and thought, That wasn’t what I meant by “deal with.” He didn’t care nearly enough to turn back.

“Know my way,” he said, brushing past the guard who had unlocked the door.

There was a crooked flight of stairs, almost pitch black without a torch, and a series of damp, cold rooms with locked doors opening off them to cells. Vanu ran through them, stopping only once, for a moment, to shove another startled guard hard against a wall to get him out of the way. Up ahead he could hear sounds of running water and laughter.

He reached the river chamber, coming out onto the upper gallery. A wave of nausea rolled over him before he’d even taken in the scene. The sound of the water, the smell of death that hung in the air—it was all lodged in some dark place in his memory.

The chamber was half natural cave, the ceiling high overhead made of dark, wet, unworked stone. The galleries were built of wood, slimy and rotted in places from constant contact with water. There were half a dozen men on the lower gallery, above the channel where the underground stream ran through the dungeon. Chains were strung across the channel from the galleries to rusty hooks set into the cave wall.

The men on the lower gallery had bows. One of them was running back from the grate at the far end of the chamber where the stream escaped, waving a handful of wet arrows that he had managed to gather up. They were preparing for another round of target practice.

Their target, suspended by his hands from one of the chains strung across the chamber, waist-deep in the icy water of the stream, was Lill.

Chapter 20

Never Make a Noise

Lill had been drifting mercifully into unconsciousness. He’d stopped shivering, and the pain in his arms and shoulders was just a fact, just a thing that was happening, it didn’t matter anymore. Then something stung him, a bright slash across his ribs. He forced his eyes open and looked across the water. There was a man with a bow. Several men with bows. A bowstring twanged. An arrow hissed past his face and splashed in the water.

You could … do something … under these circumstances. Twist sideways … make yourself a smaller target. If his feet weren’t dangling in the water, maybe.

He seemed to be seeing only half of what they were doing on the pier. Not a pier … whatever it was, he’d forgotten where they were. His eyes kept slipping closed, though he felt he should watch. See it when it came.

There it was, that one would hit him. His hands clutched on the chain above him, and he swung himself backward—it worked surprisingly well—and the arrow went wide … but then his vision dissolved into blackness.