“Nollin?” Nedwin called in a loud whisper. “Kerick?”
An inner door opened. Kerick looked out, a crossbow in hand. One side of his face was swelling and darkening. “Nedwin?”
Nedwin hurried to Kerick. “They came for me as well. We have to clear out.”
“You just missed the action,” Kerick said, letting him through the door. The room beyond was in disarray. Four more attackers lay dead on the floor. Nollin leaned against the wall. He was injured, his side slashed, one forearm badly broken.
“Can you move?” Nedwin asked. “We must not linger.”
“I don’t know,” Nollin replied, wincing as he stepped away from the wall.
“Try,” Nedwin said. “If you can’t keep up, we should take your seed. Come with me. I know this castle well.”
“Lead on,” Nollin said.
Kerick helped support Nollin. Nedwin found a loaded crossbow near one of the corpses in the outer room. Stepping back into the hall, he heard commotion off to the left, so he headed right.
After a few turns Nedwin led the seedmen into a conservatory full of musical instruments. “Some of the rooms and halls connect in surprising ways,” Nedwin explained. “The castle also hides many subtler passages. Galloran knew many of them. Nobody knows them all. I doubt anyone alive knows more of them than me.”
Moving aside a huge harp, Nedwin pulled back a heavy drapery to reveal a spiral stairway leading upward. “It would be generous to label this a secret passage, but none use it, and few know about it.”
They walked up the winding stair to a narrow hall. Nedwin passed two doors, then entered the third, revealing a storeroom crammed with art: sculptures, small fountains, urns, rolled tapestries, fine carpets, gaudy candelabras, enameled shields, a child-sized suit of plate armor, and endless painted portraits—some of them covered, more exposed—piled in tall stacks or otherwise wedged wherever they would fit.
As Nedwin started weaving his way across the room, he heard the seedmen behind him bumping into obstacles. He had always possessed excellent eyesight, but after the dungeons and the nervesong, his night vision was nothing short of incredible. He was only unable to see in the complete absence of light.
Pausing, Nedwin removed a strand of seaweed from his satchel, squeezing it to life. The length of kelp began to shed a soft blue radiance. This was his favorite variety of luminous seaweed, because it traveled well. Treated properly, it would still give off light a year after harvest. Whenever possible he tried to keep a few on hand.
On the far side of the crowded storeroom, behind a bell taller than most men, Nedwin opened a camouflaged panel in the wall, and they ducked into a dark, webby passageway. “We should be safe now,” Nedwin said. “At worst we might run into Copernum himself or one of his most trusted conspirators. The secrets of these private corridors are closely guarded.”
“You believe Copernum is behind this?” Nollin asked, his voice strained. The sleeve of the arm pressed to his side was darkly stained.
“I have no proof yet,” Nedwin said. “We will know for certain soon enough. Trensicourt is being claimed for the emperor. Many were involved, but I expect to find Copernum at the root of it.”
Walking along the corridor, Nedwin shielded the seaweed with his hands, letting a feeble glow seep between his fingers. As they rounded corners and descended cramped stairways, Nedwin paused at some of his favorite listening spots. The noise of skirmishes was failing. The guardsmen were not putting up much resistance. Many of them could have been involved.
Nollin mostly made his discomfort known with his labored breathing, along with the occasional sharp intake of breath as some jolt of agony surprised him.
“Where are we going?” Kerick whispered.
“I know five ways that will take us beyond the castle walls,” Nedwin said. “I believe I am the only man alive familiar with two of them. Tonight we will use my favorite. The corridor originates at the same level as the deepest reaches of the dungeon. There is a labyrinth of hidden tunnels down there. I have found the bones of some who lost their way. I will leave the two of you safe in a vault beneath a mausoleum, where the passage lets out. Then I will go to Nicholas.”
“He will be under attack as well,” Kerick said. “He made no secret of his allegiance to us and to Galloran.”
“But he will get away,” Nedwin said. “He was more ready for tonight than any of us. He will have others with him. We need allies.”
“You mean to keep fighting?” Kerick asked.
“I mean to win,” Nedwin replied.
* * *
After checking a pair of other hideouts, Nedwin found Nicholas in his hideaway behind a cheap theater where actors performed mediocre comedies day and night. The theater had been there since Nedwin was a boy. His noble family had not approved of the establishment, but Nedwin had snuck out several times in lowborn attire to drop a copper drooma in the tin and sit through stale jokes, predictable melodrama, and bumbling pratfalls. The actors tended to overplay their roles, and sometimes flubbed their lines, but among the botched romances, foiled swindlers, and peasants disguised as royalty there were always laughs to be had and taunts to be shouted.
Tonight the theater, like the rest of Trensicourt, was silent. When the bulk of your military was away and giants roamed your streets, you extinguished your lights, shuttered your windows, locked your doors, and prayed to be ignored.
The bells had never cried out the emergency. The attack had started and finished in the deepest hours of night. Nedwin figured some people must have slept through the commotion and would awaken to find a new regime in place.
When Nedwin had given the secret knock at the grubby door behind the theater, Minna had answered, a sturdy young woman with shoulders like an oarsman. She was both niece and apprentice to Nicholas, and she seldom left his side. After Nedwin assured her that he was alone and had not been followed, Minna had checked up and down the alley and called to a lookout for approval before granting him admittance.
Dressed in wooly nightclothes, Nicholas lay in a hammock in the corner of a small room. Minna left Nedwin alone with her uncle.
“Forgive me if I do not rise,” Nicholas said. “I seem to have misplaced my legs.”
At home Nicholas moved around in an ingenious harness he had designed that dangled from suspended tracks. At court he was pushed about in a wheeled chair. “You must have left in great haste,” Nedwin said.
“After Galloran reinstated me as a lord, I should have known that within a fortnight my home would be ransacked and I would be left impoverished.”