The Fickle Winds of Autumn

67. A Thief Makes her Move

The humid sweat clung to Kira as she peered out from the dark of the tunnel, through the ornate grille, at the flickering orange shadows which lit the room beyond.

Two huge, bowl-shaped oil lamps stood on trestles directly opposite her low hiding place, guarding either side of the chamber's entrance. Two more stood sentry just in front of her vantage point, their dancing flames glistened white across the dense rows of skulls which lined the rough interior.

The damp, stinking mire of the surrounding swamps still infected her clothes, but the fierce, sweltering bite of nauseating sulphur that stabbed out at her from the room, threatened to overwhelm her senses.

She winced and held her breath, desperate not to cough and betray her position, as the stench attacked the back of her throat.

Her legs and back ached from the cramped, motionlessness nights beneath Aldwyn's spells, and her mind still raced with the fears of what the Reevers would do to them if they were caught - from the stories she had been told, it did not seem that even the three soldiers who had travelled with her, Aldwyn and Ellis, would not be enough to protect them if those horrifying-looking creatures returned unexpectedly.

"Well, at least we know the Librarian's charts were accurate," Aldwyn whispered. "This is definitely the relic chamber."

"Now's our chance, while the room is empty," Beris whispered as he pushed past her. "Let me just make a start on this grille."

Kira's heart churned to the rhythm of every sound as Beris's eager knife scratched at the wall around the opening.

They had risked everything to make it this far - would his blade ruin it all now with such a clumsy noise?

They must succeed, they must accomplish their goal - they must defeat the witches.

She stared out again.

The floor before her was solid rock, but away to her left, a large, seething pool of molten lava covered the rest of the chamber and splashed and gurgled along the far wall. Its viscous churning oranges and yellows threw a confusion of shifting shadows across a narrow arc of rock which jutted up from the solid floor and curved across the blistering vapours of the angry magma, but stopped short of the far wall, blocked by two large slabs of stone from above and below.

The intense, aggressive heat of this steaming, murmuring pit stung her skin even from the distant shelter of the tunnel - but at least its pervasive blast was drying out her boots and clothes.

"But if this is the relic-room," she whispered, "where's the relic - where's the thing we came for?"

Aldwyn leaned past her shoulder.

"You see the barriers that come down across the far end of the bridge?" he asked. "It's protecting a recess in the wall. That's the direction the Reevers kept looking - so my guess is the Quillon will be a dagger-shaped object somewhere behind that mechanism."

"So we'll have to cross the lava to get to it," said Kira. "But how will we get past those barriers?"

"Look closely," Aldwyn said, "the top and bottom halves don't quite join in the middle - someone small and nimble enough could just about squeeze through."

Ellis pushed past from the tunnel behind them.

"Once this grille is off, I'll sneak out and get it," he said.

"No," said Kira, "I didn't trudge through all those sludgy swamps just to hide back here - I came to help."

"I think it would be better if Ellis went," Aldwyn intervened. "The Quillon is a very powerful object - it might try to protect itself or even weave its own destiny, if some of the more fanciful the scrolls are to be believed."