PART I Chapter 10

Ashanta waited silently for the guards outside her door to fall asleep. She suspected that they did that nearly every night, and Sharra had assured her that she had slipped something into their bottle of wine so that tonight their sleep might be assured. She need only ensure that they were asleep, and that nothing happened to make them call on other guards for help. There had not been enough of the drug to treat all of the wine that was consumed that night. So she listened, ear pressed against the the oak door of her chamber to their talking and laughing. The castle was in a state of great excitement since the letter she had read yesterday, and the guards were telling jokes and singing ribald songs outside her door. Hardly the sort of behavior that one wished in a queen's guardsman she thought. Perhaps she should complain to Firth? But then, she thought, they supposed that she was asleep, for she had been in bed for nearly two hours. Were they even drinking the wine, she wondered? Surely it should be having an effect by now? She left her post at the door and paced around the room, pausing to listen each time she passed by the door. After what seemed like hours she noticed that the guards speech was beginning to slur, and they were no longer laughing.

At last, it seemed they were asleep. She waited for some time, long enough to recite the list of all the kings thrice, as Sharra had directed, before cautiously opening the door to her chamber. The guards were asleep, sprawled snoring on the floor, and Ashanta gently pushed the door open just enough to allow her slender body to slip out through it. One of the guards was lying in such a way that she could open the door no further without waking him, and Ashanta was grateful that her pregnancy was no further advanced, or she would have waked him in her escape. Slipping away down the corridor, Ashanta headed for the rear staircase that led directly to the dungeons.

Ashanta carried with her a candle from her room, but she dared not light it until she had reached the safe darkness of the staircase lest the pinprick of light alert someone who was awake to her presence. She slipped along, keeping close to the walls and stopping in the shadows whenever she heard a noise. Only three doorways left to pass, and then she would be in the staircase, she thought to herself. Now only two. Ashanta froze. Were those voices she heard, mounting the steps to the dungeon even now? She pressed her body hard against the wall, slithering behind a tapestry as best she could and waited. She hardly dared to breath. She recognized the voice of Firth as we went past, muttering something about priestesses who wanted to muck about in the dungeons and needed doors opened for them in the dead of night. He was heading directly for the place where the guards were lying, asleep on the floor outside her chamber door. Had she remembered to close it? A yell now, and curses. Apparently he had found the sleeping guard and used his booted feet to arouse them. It sounded as if the door was properly locked though, for he was merely chewing them out for falling asleep on guard, and not for allowing someone in to, or out of, the queen's chamber.

Ashanta waited, perfectly still, until she heard the voices stop and the feet go tramping away down the hallway in the opposite direction. Then she slipped quietly out from behind the tapestry and headed back toward the stairs. Surely she need not fear meeting someone else in the time before she gained the stairs? She eased their heavy door open as carefully as possible, and slipped through, pulling the door to behind her. Safe in the darkness of the stairway, Ashanta struck a match and carefully lit the candle in her hand. The light blazed up, and the stairs seemed strangely light to her dark accustomed eyes. Carefully, she began the trip down the steps to the dungeon.

Once she reached the bottom of the steps, Ashanta listened carefully. She did not remember whether there were prisoners in the dungeons right now, though, she thought ruefully, I probably should. What kind of a queen does not know whether her castle holds prisoners, and how they were being treated. She would have to look into that, but for now she would just go as silently as possible, guarding the light from her candle so that it did not shine out and alert a prison guard, or even a hapless prisoner, to her presence. Lingqui had told her that she must go to the right at the bottom of the steps, and straight ahead until the passage ended in a wall. To her left she would find a small opening, perhaps high enough for a five year old child to walk through, which led to the deepest of the dungeons, which had been used only for the worst prisoners. They were not used at all any more, and the memory of them had, he thought almost disappeared from memory. She should slip through that opening and she would find herself in a room, and there she should wait for Lingqui and Sharra to arrive.

Ashanta did as Lingqui had directed, wondering how he knew so much about the workings of the dungeons. Surely he had not spent time there? After a moment of revulsion when she saw that the floors of the dungeon were crawling with vermin at the end of the passage, she slipped quickly through the opening and found herself in a surprisingly spacious room. Around the edges were doors, made out of wood, and with small openings in the bottom through which, Ashanta supposed, the guards had once been wont to slip food and water to the prisoners. On one end were two smaller rooms, one clearly contained the moldering remains of beds and mattresses, while the table and chairs in the other seemed little the worse for their long sojourn under the earth. She listened carefully. Surely Lingqui and Sharra would be here soon, especially as she had heard Firth complaining about having to open the dungeons at night? Were those footfalls she heard? She held her breath. They were, and coming closer, too. In a flash, Ashanta flew across the room and slipped into the small room with the table and chairs, pressing her body against the wall beside the door. She knew that she could not be seen from there, which was good. The problem was that she also could not see anything. She forced herself to stand perfectly still and listen, though every fiber of her being wanted to look around the edge and out through the doorway. If it was Sharra and Lingqui, she would recognize their voices when they spoke. If not, it was best that she remain hidden as long as possible. She wished now that she had brought along the little knife that King Rafe had given her. Surely she should be permitted to defend herself down here.

"Where is Highness, do you suppose?" Lingqui's voice spoke low and very near. "She should be here, I think, if the potion that you slipped into the guards' wine was of any value whatever."

"The potion was of value," Sharra assured him, "but I can only put it into the wine. I cannot make them drink it, and perhaps that drank slowly. We can but wait for her to arrive."

Ashanta heard them walking quietly around the edge of the room, and she slipped out quietly, holding her candle carefully in her hand. "Sharra, Lingqui," she whispered, "I am here. I hid when I heard footsteps for I did not wish to be discovered by persons other than yourselves. What do we do now?"

Lingqui bowed slightly, "I do not know precisely Highness. There is nothing in the castle maps in the library that hints at where the Dragon King's exit may have been. I believe that it is more likely to be in this part of the dungeon than the other, for that part is still in regular use, and it seems that an exit might well have been discovered from there. Nay, I believe the exit to be from this chamber and its connecting rooms and corridors, for this room itself is only on the oldest of the castle maps. The state of the guards' rooms show that it has long been abandoned."

Sharra cleared her throat, "Then, I suggest that we begin. Shall we begin here and work in a clockwise manner, hunting for anything that seems likely?"


Ashanta nodded her assent and the three of them began the search. "What are we looking for, exactly?" she asked Lingqui. "It seems clear that there isn't a huge gaping hole leading to a secret tunnel anywhere in here."

"Look for something that seems wrong or out of place," Lingqui replied, "like stones that have tumbled down where the rest of the wall is intact, or a door that seems to be out of place."

They began with the wall to the left of the opening they had entered the chamber from. Lingqui directed Sharra to tap gently on the wall with her staff in case there was an empty space behind it, but the wall all sounded much the same. When they reached the first door, Ashanta reached out to pull it open, but Lingqui pushed her hand away. She looked at him in shock. How dare he push her away like that. Lingqui smiled apologetically and said, "My apologies Highness, but we do not know what is behind that door. You should not open it."

Ashanta looked at him in shock, "If we do not open the doors from this room, how will we ever hope to find the escape route? Or are you confident that the entrance lies inside of this room." Her face was mocking in the light.

"Nay Highness, I do not mean to avoid opening the doors. I mean that you should not open the doors. I should not like to have to explain to Firth how you happened to come down here, from a room that was guarded, and then be killed in a part of the dungeon whose existence is known only to a scant handful of living men. I value your life, and my own, too much for that." Lingqui reached into the pack that he wore on his back, and pulled out a stick. He then proceeded to pull on the ends of the stick so that the stick became longer and longer. Attaching a loop of wire to the end of this stick, he motioned for the women to step back away from the door. Lingqui looped the wire around the door's handle and walked back, holding the stick, to the greatest distance from the door that he could achieve without letting go the stick. "Now," he muttered, if the door is unlocked, we should be able to pull it open from here, and to run for the exit should something come after us."

Ashanta decided not to ask what they would do if the creature that came out of the door happened to be faster than they. Or to breath fire or spit poison or…. She forced herself to stop thinking about it. Surely there was nothing living in this part of the dungeon, seeing as it had seemingly been abandoned for centuries. A tug on the end of the stick pulled the door open, and after waiting a minute to see if something would come out, they cautiously approached the doorway. Lingqui held the lantern that he carried high, and shone it into the room.

"It seems to be a fairly ordinary prison cell," he called to the others, "but we should investigate it anyway." They entered. Ashanta shuddered when she saw the iron rings built into the walls, designed, she was fairly certain, for chaining a prisoner to. They searched the cell inch by inch, Sharra tapping on the walls in search of a spot that sounded differently. Ashanta and Lingqui searched through the detritus that was left on the cell floor in hopes that they might find a trapdoor, all in vain. Finally Lingqui stood up, "where ever the escape route may be," he said, "it does not seem to be in this cell. I suggest that we leave it and repeat the process with the next cell over."

They did so, the women standing back while Lingqui looped the wire around the door and yanked it open from a distance, and then waiting to see if anything might come out. When nothing did they repeated their previous explorations, finding nothing except a pile of bones. Ashanta thought that she might be sick. She turned to Lingqui, "Do you mean to tell me that people were left down here until they died? And then no one even bothered to remove their bodies and prepare them for burial? How barbaric were the early kings anyway?"

Lingqui shrugged. "Perhaps things are not as they seem, Highness, I know not. We cannot change the things that have been. We must focus on changing the what-may-bes so as to safeguard the kingdom. There were, perhaps, cruel kings in the history of the kingdom. That has been true in every civilization to the beginning of time. Shall we go to the next door now?"

"I suppose," Ashanta replied, "though I hope not to find any more skeletons."

The next three cells proved to be much the same as the first two cells, and they passed through them quickly, with neither wall tapping nor floor searching yielding any clues. The sixth door proved impossible to open using Lingqui's tool, and they chose to save it for the end, along with the two guards' rooms that adjoined it. All of the remaining cell doors opened readily but proved to be empty of anything of interest.

"Well," said Sharra, "all that remains now are the two guards' rooms and the door to the cell that won't open. Which do we try first?"

Ashanta replied without thinking, "Oh, let's us do the guards' rooms first. We can see straight into them and there isn't anything scary about them, or surely it would have come out by now, we've been wandering about in here for so long."

Lingqui nodded, "I think that Highness is right. We should investigate the guards' rooms first, paying especial attention to the space that is under the collapsed beds in the right hand room."

A thorough inspection of the two rooms led the three to conclude that if there was indeed an escape route from the dungeons, then it must be behind the final door. Lingqui walked over and inspected it closely. "I think that the door is locked," he announced, "but the wood is old. It may be that I can break the lock free from the door using a pocket knife." He slipped his knife between the door frame and the lock and prised inwards. The lock fell away from the door, and the door opened a crack.