“Good plan.”
I suppose we could have left a couple of people to slow them down in a rearguard action, but the guards were all piss-scared – this wasn’t their usual kind of work. Now they were getting shot at, and while Pasha and I had grabbed their comrade and spent a few seconds deciding what to do, they’d been legging it as fast as they could.
Being the brave and heroic kind of guy I am, I ran after them. We played cat-and-mouse with the Storad, running between twists in the tunnel, hoping they wouldn’t catch sight of us, or catch us with a bullet before we rounded another corner. Luck held out, mostly. One of the guards got a bullet in the arse, but he managed to stagger on out of sheer terror: mages weren’t the only things lied about in the news-sheets, the Storad had a pretty fearsome reputation as baby eaters and captured-person buggerers, and this time I had no idea how true any of it was. I didn’t want to stop to find out either.
The Storad still weren’t far behind when we got within sight of the entrance, though I’m sure hearing their breathing was just my imagination. The guards were already running for their lives across the close, leaving Halina by the mechanism. She shouted a few choice words after them, but she didn’t run.
I was almost having an apoplexy by the time I made it to the door, and that wasn’t helped by the thought of a score of guns coming round the last twist. Halina didn’t wait until we were fully through before she yanked on the door mechanism, but the damned thing wasn’t built for speed. It glided across the opening like it had all the time in the world.
Too damned slow – the first bullets took a chunk of masonry out, scattering bits of shrapnel all over. More by luck than judgement a cloud of them took out the delicate mechanism, and the whole contraption ground to a halt.
“Fuck,” Pasha muttered as he threw himself through the doorway and around a corner, out of the line of fire.
“You got that right.” I was half a step behind him.
Halina yanked on the mechanism, but the door stayed where it was and laughed at us. More bullets whizzed past, making us all duck for cover.
“There was another lever inside to shut the door,” I said from behind the false safety of a wall.
Halina shook her head. “The whole thing’s jammed – there was a coupling inside it and that got smashed. What about the other ones? That you told me not to touch? Bet your life those do something.”
“Got to be worth a go.”
Only, naturally, getting to them meant crossing the line of sight of the guns that were rapidly approaching. Unless I used my juice.
I slid down the wall and worked as fast as I could. They weren’t big, it shouldn’t take much. A clench of my buggered hand, a quick spike of pain, a call of the black that I could shove back and down, for now, and the first lever moved. Nothing happened except the Storad got closer and I got more desperate. If they got inside the castle, or even if they got back to their camp and told everyone where this tunnel was, we were screwed. Worse than screwed.
How old were these levers? It didn’t matter, all that mattered was whether they worked. Another burst of pain, another surge of juice. I overdid it, and the second lever snapped in two.
Pasha muttering behind me didn’t really help, though I thought I could hear something odd down the tunnel, like two of the Storad had decided to get into a fist fight.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Halina said, twisted her fingers and glared at the third lever as though it was personally thwarting her. It slid down like a dream, trailing a rumbling noise in its wake, followed rapidly by a thud like worlds colliding. A cloud of dust billowed out of the tunnel. Pasha swore violently to one side of me and clutched his head in his hands.
Nobody was shooting any more, which was a relief. Pasha didn’t seem capable of talking – he was moaning fit to bust – as I took my life in my hands and peered into the dust.
“I thought you were going to leave us in there for a moment,” I managed to pant out at Halina.
“Considered it,” Halina said with a grin that could have felled angels. “You’re a pain in the arse, but not that much. I may be tempted if that changes.”
“Thanks. I think.” The dust began to clear, and I began to wish it hadn’t. Pasha’s moans took on a whole new meaning.
I looked back to where the Storad had been about to leap out of the tunnel. “You know what I said about a ten-ton slab of rock?” I said. “I think I was right.” Then I threw up.
Chapter Five
That sneaky old warlord who built the castle and its attendant tunnels knew what he was about all right. Turned out this particular tunnel was constructed, not to be found exactly, but to be just that little bit more findable than the rest. A sort of false hope for anyone looking, to lure them in and kill them with a series of fiendish traps, deadfalls, spikes and other nasty surprises which the Storad had been patiently dismantling or finding ways round. It also turned out that the lever I’d snapped, when fixed, raised the ten-ton slab. What was left underneath wasn’t pretty.