Sianim 01 - Masques

chained to the wall were too far gone to notice him. He took wolf shape because of the wolf’s sharper senses and regretted the necessity. The smells of a dungeon were bad enough to the human nose, but the wolf’s eyes were watering as he backed out of the cell. Returning to his human form, he closed the cell back up. She wasn’t in there. He found the same at the second cell.
    In the third cell, chained corpses littered the floor and hung on the wall like broken dolls, but they moaned and breathed with the pseudolife that animated Uriah. They watched him with glittering eyes as he shifted again to wolf shape to sample the air. But they were too new, too heavily controlled by the ae’Magi’s spells, to give alarm.
    More people in the fourth cell. When he’d lived here, there had seldom been more than one or two people in the whole dungeon. He shifted to wolf, took a breath—and stopped breathing altogether.
    She’s here.
    He pushed the fierce joy of that aside. Time enough to celebrate when he had her safe.
    He found her in the corner of the cell. Her face was different, but she was muttering to herself, and it was her voice, her scent under the filth. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, breaking into heavy coughing when he shifted her against him to take off the irons—the dungeons held so much magic that short of melting the stone, the ae’Magi wouldn’t feel what he did unless he was in the next room. That didn’t mean they could afford to stay here long. Wolf swore at the wounds the cuffs left on her ankles and wrists.
    No time to look for further wounds. He had to get out of here.
    Gently, he picked her up, ignoring the smell of dungeon that clung to her. He stepped over the huddled bodies of her fellow inmates with no more attention than if they had been bundles of straw. Although he had no hands free to carry it, the staff followed him like an obedient dog.
    It wasn’t until he stood outside the cell that he realized he had a problem. The secret door he’d entered through was a crawl space, too narrow to get through with Aralorn unable to move on her own.
    He didn’t have time to dawdle.
    A touch to the mask with his staff and both disappeared. A brief moment of concentration, and the scars followed. He was no shapeshifter. The face he wore beneath the scars was the one he was born with: It was his as much as the scars were also his.
    Trying to avoid causing her any further hurt, he positioned Aralorn on his shoulder, holding her in place with one hand and letting the other hang carelessly free. A ball of light formed over his left shoulder and followed him to the guardroom door.
    As he opened the door, the guards scrambled for their weapons until they saw his face. Wolf carelessly tossed the keys on the rough-hewn table, where they left a track in the greasy buildup as they slid. When he spoke, it was with the ae’Magi’s hated voice, soft and warm with music. The illusion was simple—he didn’t need much to make his face look so near to the ae’Magi’s that in the dark they would not be able to tell him from his father.
    “I think that it would be wiser from now on,” he told them, “for the guard in charge to keep the keys on his person. It is too easy for someone to enter the dungeon by other paths. There is no reason that we should make it any easier to get into the cells than it already is.”
    Without looking at the men again, he walked to the far door, which obediently opened to let him through and closed after him. The wide staircase that led to the upper floors stretched in front of him, leaving but a narrow space against the wall, supposedly to allow access to the area under the stairs that was sometimes used for storage. It was this path that he took, ducking as he moved under the stairway.
    Unerringly, he touched the exact spot that triggered the hidden door. As he stepped through, he whispered a soft spell, and the dust under the stairs rearranged itself until it looked as it had before he walked there.
    He put out the light as the stone door shut behind him. The passage was as dark as pitch, and there was little light for even his mage-sensitive eyes to pick out. Tiny flecks of illumination that found their way through openings in the mortar made the towering walls glitter like the night sky. Their presence was the reason he’d put out the light—lest someone in a dark room on the other side of the wall witness the same phenomenon.
    Wolf kept one hand against a wall