Siren followed her nose. The scent of freshly toasted bread wafted
along the corridor towards as if it were an invitation, as if she were
expected, and so her feet seemed to move of her own accord and the gas lamps
went past one by one.
Of course she wasn't walking along in a dream,
unaware of her surroundings, nor the situation which had brought her there and
she certainly wasn't oblivious to the traps which were placed at irregular
intervals along the corridor. The first,
a simple pendulum blade mechanism triggered by a trip wire, was easy to avoid. The wire remained un touched and it was only
curiosity which had her lean in to the wall and examine the edge of the blade
in its slot. The second trap was
activated by a pressure pad almost immediately after that and though Siren
wasn't quick enough to avoid triggering it, she was able to duck out of the way
of the barbed mace which swung down from the ceiling towards her, rolling
forwards so as not to be hit on the return.
That was where she triggered the third trap, which she heard with a
click and then a sudden pop of air as a cloud of darts shot out of the
wall. She went prone, then crawled
forwards until the darts stopped.
There were many more, and not all were so easily
dodged. Siren was slightly singed, not
badly bruised and had a very small cut on her cheek by the time she made it to
the simple wooden doorway at the end of the corridor. And there, as she leaned against the wall to
catch her breath, she triggered the final trap.
The walls shifted, started to close in on each other and it was only by
barging the door with her already bruised shoulder, forcing it open and
stumbling through into the dimly lit room beyond that she managed to escape
becoming a Siren sandwich. The walls
sealed so tightly behind her that when she turned and checked the doorway a
split second later she could not see the join.
"Ah, Siren, sweetheart," came a soft,
elderly voice behind her, "we wondered if you would make it here."
Siren turned around and there, standing in the
middle of the room, stood Miss. Felicity Barkcastle. Suddenly there were tears forming in her
eyes.
"Oh, Miss. Barkcastle, it's so good to see you
again after all this time! Are the
others here, at all? And did you really
need to put in all those traps in the corridor?" she added with a bit more
of her usual attitude, but that fell apart a moment later as she said, "Oh, I'm so sorry, but I think I may
have inadvertently destroyed your house... Just a little bit..."
"That's okay, dear," Miss Barkcastle said,
smiling gently, "we never intended the house to survive your arrival. It'll buy us a bit of time. Now, would you like some toast? The others are already eating!" She pointed over to a dim corner where Siren
at last noticed her old friends. They
were, in fact, not eating at all, but staring at her with looks ranging from
mild curiosity (the Former Baron) to complete shock (Gulliver and Ellis), with
Rockspark doing his best impression of a granite cliff face somewhere in the
unreadable middle.
"Uh, hi," Siren managed.
"As Miss Barkcastle there has already stated,
it is indeed quite delightful to see you again, Siren, my dear," the
Former Baron said, "I hope the traps weren't too much trouble for
you. We had to pitch the difficulty
levels quite high, but I was sure you would be able to make it through. You have greater skill and tenacity than my
second cousin Eckhardt's pet Nematopod, and after it had won a chess match you
couldn't prise the pieces from its tentacles with a crowbar!"
"Thank you, I think..."
"We didn't think we was ever goin' to see you
again!" Gulliver interjected, finally rising from his seat, "I was
sure Lakhma would get the Ebon Crest
and that would be it!"
"Well, the Crest
is impounded in Searingsands, but it made it there in one piece..."
She glanced at Ellis, wondering if he was going to
say anything, but now the shock was fading from his face he seemed to have lost
interest and was instead staring at the piece of buttered toast on the plate
before him as if it held some revelatory information.
"We can catch up later, I think," Miss
Barkcastle said as she bustled past with another plate of toast, "for now
we need to eat and then make a move.
This safe house wont remain so for very much longer."
Siren followed her to the table, sat down and discovered
that she had a greater appetite for toast than she could have imagined and didn’t
say another word until ever crumb was eaten.
When she looked up she realised that Ellis was staring at her.
“Aren’t you going to say, ‘Hi’, Ellis?” she asked,
feeling a bit put out by his silence. It
certainly wasn’t what she had been expecting in all the months they had been
apart.
“He doesn’t say very much these days,” the Former Baron
said sadly.
“‘E’s been like this ever since we escaped Shadedstreams,”
Gulliver added.
Ellis stared at her a little longer, then looked away
suddenly, staring off at the wall instead.
“He listens to us and he follows,” Rockspark said, “but
he just doesn’t seem to want to speak or engage with us at all.”
“What is it?” Siren asked, a chill forming down her
spine, “Is he in some kind of shock?”
The Former Baron shrugged. “We’ve all experience a fair bit of trauma in
the last few months, of that there can be no doubt, but this seems different
somehow. It’s like he’s not really here
anymore, or like he simply doesn’t want to be.”
“We can all sympathise with that,” Gulliver chipped in.
“I had hoped that he would come back to his sense when
you returned, but clearly it’s not going to be that simple.”
Miss Barkcastle stood up and began clearing away the
plates, an oddly domestic gesture in that dungeon space, especially considering
they were planning on abandoning it shortly anwyay.
“That was lovely, Felicity, as ever,” Rockspark commented
as she took his plate, before turning towards the Former Baron and asking, “so,
where do we go from here?”
“I think I’ll pass that question on to Siren, actually,”
Von Spektr replied with a smile.
“Me? Don’t you
have a plan of your own?”
“Our plan, my dear, was to wait it out here until we got
some assistance. You were the logical
one to assume would find us first and so we set up the hypostatick circuit and
the traps in such a way that you would be able to access this place with
relative ease, but we also knew that when you did so all the attention of
Lakhma and his/her minions would fall upon us in short order and that we’d have
to leave here pretty sharpish. But we’ve
had time to rest and to recuperate and we knew that you would have the
resources we don’t. You’ll have some
other safe house and a crew and be well versed in avoiding too much attention.
“You are, in fact, the ideal person to lead us out
of here, my dear.”
Siren stared at him open-mouthed for a second, then
realised, horribly, that the spindly old man was right. She did have a plan of sorts. She just wasn’t expecting to need it right
away.
“Very well, she said. Once we’re out of here, follow me and I’ll
take you to the others.”
“Others!” the Former Baron exclaimed with glee. “You see!
I knew there’d be others!”
“But first, someone else has to take charge. I don’t know how to get out of here. Once we’re back on the streets I’m fine, but
here, I’m at your mercy.”
“Not a problem,” Miss. Barkcastle said as she stood
beside a neat stack of wiped-clean plates, “I can show you to the back door
right now, if you want. We can leave any
time.”
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