Tower & Knife 03 - The Tower Broken by Mazarkis Williams

had gone quiet. ‘You cannot!’ she hissed, looking down the dark corridor. ‘They will kill you.’
    He touched her cheek with a callused finger. ‘Not yet. They need Arigu.’
    ‘I cannot speak to you if you insist upon this foolishness.’ She backed away. She did not think it would be long before the guard returned.
    He let go the bars and backed away into his cell. ‘Look for the slaves,’ he said. ‘You will find them. Then you’ll know.’
    ‘I will.’ Her lips still felt warm from his touch. She turned from him and walked towards the Ways, but then thought of another question and turned back. ‘Will the Fryth duke truly help us?’
    He stood mostly in the shadows now, the edges of his curls lit with gold in the light of her lantern, but then he shifted and she saw his eyes. Always they had reminded her of springtime. ‘Yes. He will.’
    She heard footsteps approaching and covered her lantern. She felt her way along the cells, moving quietly, but when the guard turned the corner and light spilled along the corridor she broke into a run, her sandals slapping against the stone.
    ‘Hey!’ the guard called out.
    She whipped around the corner, hand on the stone, and pulled at the hook-twist for the door.
Hurry, hurry
. The guard’s boots sounded against the floor but he was not as fast as she, even in her dainty sandals. She won through and ran halfway up the wet stairs before covering her lantern. She pressed her back against the wall.
    The guard opened the door and looked into the Ways, holdinghis lantern aloft, but the darkness proved impenetrable. He craned his head towards where she hid and she held her breath as he stood listening. Surely he knew she was close by; it was only his laziness that prevented him climbing the stairs. His prisoner had not escaped; that was his main concern, and at last he grunted and retreated into the dungeon. She heard the bar fall on the other side of the door. That path was now closed to her.
    She let out a breath, wondering what Sarmin would have said if the guard had caught her.
    The Old Wives in the women’s wing gossiped that Nessaket had kept many lovers over the years, but Mesema didn’t see how that could be possible. There were rules for where a royal woman could go and with whom; for coming within the sight of a man, for speaking with him, and for touches both accidental and purposeful. While she knew a man’s punishment was death in almost all cases, she did not know what consequences a woman might face.
    She let her lantern shine over the steps and began her long climb. She would have to speak with many men, census-takers and taxmen and money-counters, for one of them would surely know about an influx of slaves from the north. One of them would have collected a portion of a sale, written down a name or noted the addition of slaves to an important household. She hoped it was so; she did not want to discover that Banreh had lied to her. He had been a traitor, but let him not be a traitor to her.

14

Govnan
    Govnan lowered himself down the last step and faced the tower wall, taking a moment to catch his breath. At some point in the last month going down had become harder than going up. He placed his lantern behind him on a stair; it irked him, even now, that he required such a thing to light the dark. But he had lost Ashanagur that day in Sarmin’s tower, when Sarmin had seen him and his elemental as nothing more than two interlocking patterns and pulled them apart. Though he was old, some experiences were new to him – the sensation of cold, the frustration of conjuring flame like a novice, the touch of a lantern’s handle. The shock at seeing the crack in front of him.
    It had grown since he first saw it two weeks before. Then, it had been about three hairs wide, looking as if someone might have drawn it there, and he had hoped that was the case. But now it had begun to yawn, showing teeth of crumbling stone, its throat a great rent in the Tower wall. He