“Anything?” Hadrian asked.
Royce shook his head; then he looked around, concerned. “Where’s Myron and Mauvin?”
“This is the Teshlor Guild,” Alric said. “Mauvin has wanted to explore this since he was ten.”
“And Myron?”
Alric glanced at Gaunt, who looked up painfully, blinking. Then all of them turned to Magnus.
“Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know where he went. He wandered off.”
“I’ll look for him,” Royce said.
“Wait.” Alric stopped him. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“Don’t know,” Royce replied.
Alric slumped against the front wall with a miserable look on his face. “He’s not serious, is he?”
“You’re the king,” Gaunt said. “You tell us. You wanted to be in charge. What does your family heritage and blue-blood breeding say now? What insight has it provided you that we commoners can’t see?”
“Shut it, Gaunt,” Mauvin ordered, trotting down the stairs.
“There you are,” Royce said.
“I’m just saying that he’s the king,” Gaunt went on. “He’s in charge. So far all that he’s managed is to get me bleeding to death and all of us trapped. This is a perfect chance for him to shine and prove his worth. All the other teams that came in here didn’t have a noble king to lead them. Surely he will not leave us to the same fate as they. Isn’t that right, Your Majesty?”
“I said, shut it,” Mauvin repeated in a lower, more threatening voice. “Have you forgotten he just risked his life to help save yours?”
Alric looked at each of them as they sat around the entrance hall in the flickering light of four lanterns, each casting four separate shadows of everything.
“I don’t know,” he said. He peeked back out the window. “You heard the horn and the drums. There could be dozens of goblins out there by now.”
“I doubt that,” Hadrian replied, and Alric looked hopefully at him. “I would say there were hundreds by now. Ghazel prefer uneven battles, the more one-sided, the better, as long as it is in their favor. Those horns and drums are calling all goblins within earshot. Yeah, I would say a couple hundred at least are gathering.”
Alric stared at him, shocked. “But… how are we going to get out, then?”
No one replied.
Even Gaunt gave up his taunting and lay back down. “And I was going to be emperor.”
“The imperial hunts were massive.” They heard Myron’s voice echo as Royce led him back. “You can see by that tapestry. Hundreds participated—thousands of animals must have been killed, and did you see the chariots?”
“He was looking at the art,” Royce told them.
“They were master bronze craftsmen, did you see?” the monk asked. “And this building, this is the guildhall, the knights’ guildhall. This is the very place mentioned in hundreds of books of lore, often thought to be a myth—the Hall of Techylor—and isn’t that amazing—not Teshlor at all.
“It’s astounding, really, in all the years of reading about the Old Empire I never found anything about it, but clearly it was true. Techylor is not a combat discipline or martial art any more than Cenzlyor is a discipline of mystical arts. They’re names. Names! Techylor and Cenzlyor were the names of people who were with Novron at the first battle of the Great Elven War. The Teshlor Knights were literally the knights trained by Teshlor, or actually Techylor.”
“This is hardly the time for studying history!” Alric snapped. “We need to find a way out, before they find a way in!”
“I see a light,” Mauvin announced. “There’s a fire, or a torch, or some—Uh-oh.”
“What?” Gaunt asked.
“Well, two things, really,” the young count Pickering began. “Hadrian was right. I can only see silhouettes but—oh yeah—there’s a lot out there now—a whole lot.”
“Second?” Hadrian asked.
“Second, it looks like they’re setting up for flaming arrows.”
“What good is that?” Alric asked. “This place is stone. There’s nothing to burn.”
“Smoke,” Hadrian replied. “They’ll smoke us out.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Gaunt said.
“Another locked room,” Hadrian said to Royce. “How many is this? I’ve lost track.”
“Too many, really.”
“Ideas?”
“Only one,” the thief said, and then looked directly at Arista.
She watched Hadrian nod.
“No,” she said instantly. She stood up and backed away from them. “I can’t.”
“You have to,” Royce told her.
She was shaking her head so that her hair whipped her face, her breath short and rapid and her stomach tightening, starting to churn. “I can’t,” she insisted.
Hadrian moved toward her slowly, as if he were trying to catch a spooked horse.
Her hands were starting to shake. “You saw—you know what happened last time. I can’t control it.”
“Maybe,” Hadrian told her, “but outside that door are anywhere from, I’m guessing, fifty to a few hundred Ba Ran Ghazel. All the bedtime stories, legends, and fables are true. I know firsthand, and actually, they don’t tell even half the story—no one would dare tell the real stories to children.
“I served as a mercenary for several years in Calis. I fought for warlords in the Gur Em Dal—the jungle on the eastern end of the peninsula that the goblins took back. I’ve never spoken about what happened there, and I won’t now—honestly, I work very hard not to think about it. Those days that I lived under the jungle canopy were a nightmare.
“The Ghazel are stronger than men, faster too, and they can see in the dark. They have sharp teeth and, if they get the chance, will hold you down and rip into the flesh of your throat or stomach. The Ghazel want nothing better than a meal of human meat. Not only are we a delicacy to them, but they also use their victims as part of their religious ceremonies. They will make a ritual out of killing us, take us alive if they can—eat us while we still breathe. They’ll drink their black cups of gurlin bog and smoke tulan leaves while we scream.
“That door is the only way out of here. We can’t sneak out, we can’t create a diversion and hope to catch them off guard, we can’t hope for a rescue. Either you do something or we all die. It’s as simple as that.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking me to do. You don’t know what it’s like. I can’t control it. I—I don’t know what will happen. The power is—it’s—I don’t know how to describe it, but I could kill everyone. It just gets out of control, it just runs away.”
“You can handle it.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”