Location: The Reading Room, Fubar Palace
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Summer
Holms looked up from his chair with the particular expression of a man who has spent the last several minutes imagining every possible way his evening might end, and has just watched the worst of them come crashing through the door. His eyes went from Emcorae’s drawn blade to the half-dressed, silk-gagged woman being hauled in behind him, and whatever color remained in his face drained out of it entirely.
“You brought—” His voice cracked into a whisper. “Her?—”
“Sit still and stay quiet,” Emcorae snapped, already dragging a second chair from beside the cold hearth and forcing Monnik down into it. The courtesan fought him every inch of the way, thrashing against his grip with a fury that seemed, if anything, to sharpen rather than dull as the rope went around her wrists. She showed no panic at all, Nathily noted with some unease, only rage, cold and calculating even as her beautiful body strained against the binding.
The door had barely latched behind them before the first shouts rose from the gallery beyond — muffled, distant still, but multiplying by the second. Boots. Orders. The particular controlled chaos of a palace guard mobilizing in earnest.
Nathily threw an iron bolt across the door and dragged a heavy reading table in front of it for good measure, her breath coming hard from the effort and stress. “That buys us mere moments. Not much more.”
“Then we use them.” Emcorae was already moving toward the door they’d come first through when Holms had guided them here earlier. “If we can get into the palace proper, we can surely find a way out.” Yet even as he spoke the words, the sounds of soldiers approaching from that corridor became clear. Frustrated, he turned back towards Nathily. “Ugh! Diked’s still out there somewhere with Kaoz — the time spend here, gives him time to escape! “
“Emcorae, stop.” Nathily planted herself in front of him, and something in her voice made even Holms go still in his chair. “Even with a three day lead, we can catch him. Remember, we are Azoras! But before we can track him down, e have to deal with our current problem!”
“Finding Diked is the only plan that matters—”
“No!” The elfess interrupted. “We’ll get the king. But we have another duty too.”
“What are you talking about?” Emcorae was genuinely confused – and the sounds of banging and yelling didn’t help.
Nathily spoke urgently. “There is a Drokka in this palace’s dungeon right now who’s done nothing but be loyal to a warband that got itself slaughtered doing exactly what we do — fighting Diked’s rot. Do you want to leave a fellow warrior down there to rot with it?” She stepped closer, close enough that he had to actually look at her instead of past her toward the doors. “El-Janus didn’t raise you to hunt one man across a continent while an ally starves in chains a hundred feet below your boots. That’s not the Way. You know that’s not the Way.”
Something flickered behind Emcorae’s eyes — not agreement, not yet, but the specific, uncomfortable hesitation of a man who has just heard his own oath quoted back at him by someone who actually believes it. “But Diked is gone, Nathily. We’re so close. Surel—”
“We have time to catch Diked. But that Drokka doesn’t have time. He has whatever’s left before Ramssee decides he’s more useful dead than alive.” Her jaw tightened. “You want vengeance. I understand that. I took an oath to help you. But before either of us took an oath for revenge, we both took an oath to The Glade – and you are not following The Path!”
In the chair by the hearth, bound and gagged, Monnik watched this entire exchange with open, glittering interest — the particular delight of a woman who has just realized her captors are far more divided than they’d like her to know.
The argument between the Azoras might have run longer, might have cracked open into something neither of them could easily walk back from, but the palace made the decision for them. Another fist hammered against a door somewhere down the gallery — not this one, not yet, but close, and closer than it had been a moment before.
“Check every room,” a voice barked, muffled through stone but unmistakable in its authority. “Steward’s orders — they don’t leave this wing alive.”
Emcorae’s head snapped toward the sound. Whatever remained of the argument died in his throat, replaced by the flat, immediate calculation of a soldier assessing a battlefield that had just shrunk to the size of one small, dusty room.
“There’s no passage out from here that doesn’t cross the gallery,” Nathily said quietly, already testing the shuttered window and finding it, as she’d feared, sealed behind old iron bars set into the stone itself. “We’re boxed in.”
Holms made a small, strangled sound from his chair, testing his bindings with an urgency he hadn’t shown since Emcorae first pinned him to the sewer wall, but the warriors ignored his struggles.
Emcorae threw his shoulder against the reading table, wedging it harder beneath the main door’s handle, then dragged a second, heavier bookshelf across to brace it further. Ancient volumes toppled in a cascade of brittle pages and dust. “If we’re stuck here, then we hold the room. However many come through that door, they come through one at a time.”
“That’s not a plan, Emcorae, that’s a death—”
The pounding came again, this time directly against their own door, hard enough to rattle the hinges in their frame. A voice shouted something about a locked reading room, about fetching a battering ram from the guardhouse. Boots multiplied in the corridor beyond — three, five, more, the unmistakable sound of a search narrowing to its conclusion.
To make matters worse, Monnik began to laugh. It came muffled through the gag at first, a low, throaty sound that built steadily into something with genuine delight behind it — the laugh of a woman watching two increasingly desperate strangers realize precisely how thoroughly they had trapped themselves.
“Something’s funny?” Emcorae rounded on her, and for a moment Nathily thought he might strike her.
“Let her speak,” Nathily barked, some old instinct telling her that whatever the woman knew might be worth more than her silence. She stepped forward and, with a sharp tug, pulled the silk free from Monnik’s mouth.
Monnik worked her jaw once, twice, testing it, and then smiled — a slow, satisfied expression that had nothing whatsoever of a captive about it. “Oh, this is delicious,” she said, her voice honeyed and utterly without fear. “The great heroes from Arbola, come all this way to kill a king who isn’t even here, hiding behind a bookshelf while Ramssee’s finest break down the door. Do you know what happens to people who threaten the Steward’s household? They don’t get quick deaths. He’s creative, my Ramssee. You’ll wish you’d let that dwarf rot.”
“You’ll be the first thing that dies in this room if you don’t lower your voice,” Emcorae warned.
“Will I?” Monnik tilted her head, studying him with the frank, appraising calm of a woman who had built an entire life out of reading exactly how far a man’s threats could be trusted. “No. I don’t think you will. You need me. A hostage’s worth exactly as much as she’s alive to bargain with — and you.” Her eyes slid to Nathily. “You’ve spent this whole conversation trying to talk him out of murder. You won’t let him start with me.”
“You are gravely mistaken about how much patience either of us has left,” Nathily shot back.
“Am I?” Monnik laughed again, low and delighted, utterly unbothered by the blade or the pounding at the door or the rope biting into her wrists. You’ll recall that she had clawed her way up from a hovel in the lower wards to a courtesan’s silk and a Steward’s bed through nothing but nerve and calculation, and she wore that history now like armor — mistaken, though neither Azora had time to appreciate quite how badly, in believing it would protect her here as thoroughly as it always had before. “I have survived worse men than either of you in worse rooms than this one. I’ve survived Ramssee himself, and believe me, that took considerably more cunning than dodging two lost warriors and a sniveling clerk.”
The door shuddered under a fresh assault — something heavier now, the beginnings of a small ram finding its rhythm.
“They’re going to break through,” Nathily said, low and urgent, casting one more look at the barred window, the barricaded door, the narrowing options collapsing around them like a fist closing.
Monnik heard it too, and rather than fear, something bright and cruel lit behind her eyes. “Mere moments,” she agreed, savoring the word. “How wonderful. I do hope I’m still breathing to watch what they do to you both.”
The Breaking Point
It was the scream that did it — sudden, deliberate, aimed not at her captors but past them, toward the door and whatever ears waited beyond it. “IN HERE!” Monnik suddenly shrieked, wrenching against her bindings with a strength that belied her earlier composure. “THE LIBRARY — HURRY, THEY’RE—”
Emcorae’s dagger was at her throat before the next word had finished leaving her mouth, his hand fisted in her hair, the calm restraint of moments before burned away entirely. “Enough.“
“Kill me, then!” Monnik’s voice cracked with wild, reckless triumph even with stone blade pressed to her skin. “Go on! You’ll have soldiers through that door before my blood’s even cooled, and they’ll cut you both to—”
Just then the flat of Nathily’s hand struck her full across the jaw! It as a single vicious blow that snapped Monnik’s head sideways and sent her, chair and all, crashing backward onto the floor in a heap of tangled limbs…and silence. Monnik’s eyes rolled back, her body gone slack against the fallen chair, out cold before she’d finished falling.
For a moment neither Azora moved. Nathily stared down at her own hand as though it belonged to someone else, her chest heaving, some small, mortified part of her already recoiling from what she’d just done — this wasn’t her, wasn’t the measured, careful violence she’d trained a lifetime to control, this was something raw and unthinking that had simply happened, faster than her own better judgment could intervene. [Personally I found the scene delightful].
“That,” Emcorae said, lowering his blade with something almost like awe in his voice, “was extremely well done.”
“I didn’t— I wasn’t trying to—” Nathily’s voice faltered, color rising in her cheeks despite everything hammering at the door behind them.
“Whatever, Nat, just take the win.”
The guards struck the door again, harder, wood splintering audibly along the frame despite the table and bookshelf braced against it. Voices multiplied in the corridor beyond, no longer searching but certain, closing on their exact location with the terrible resolve of men who knew their quarry had nowhere left to run.
Nathily’s eyes swept the room one last time, searching for anything she might have missed — a second door, a gap in the barred window, some forgotten mercy the architecture owed them — and found nothing. Stone on every side. A single door, failing by the second. There was no version of this room that ended with them walking out the way they’d come in.
She drew her falchia fully and planted her feet, angling herself so that whoever broke through first would have to come at her before they reached Emcorae’s blind side. It was, she thought with a strange, distant clarity, exactly the stance El-Janus had drilled into her a thousand times on the high boughs of Arbola — when the ground gives out beneath you, you do not fall, you choose where you land. She had never expected to test it in a dust-choked reading room a hundred leagues from anything she loved, against men who would not care in the slightest that she’d once been a promising pupil, only that she stood between them and their orders.
Beside her, Emcorae had gone quiet in a different way than before — not the coiled, hungry stillness of a man waiting for a target, but something heavier, more final. He was doing the same arithmetic, she realized. Counting swords against the sound of boots, and finding the number came up short every time he ran it. For the first time since she’d known him — since the boy who used to whine about wooden practice blades had become the man standing beside her now — she watched him stop calculating how to win, and start, instead, quietly making his peace with how he meant to die.
The wood gave another inch on the main door facing Emcorae, just as someone behind the portal on Nathily’s side shouted for more hands to break that opening too. The end was certain.
Emcorae looked at Nathily then — really looked at her, in a way he hadn’t managed since long before the sewers, since long before Monthaven, since perhaps further back than either of them cared to measure — and something in his face cracked open, just for a moment, beneath all that carefully banked fury. “I’m sorry,” he said, quiet enough that it nearly vanished beneath the splintering wood. “For all of this. For dragging you into a dead man’s war that isn’t even yours to fight.”
“It became mine the day I chose to ride beside you,” Nathily said, and for one suspended heartbeat — absurd, impossible, given the door now visibly buckling on its hinges — something passed between them that had nothing to do with kings or dwarves or dungeons at all.
The door gave a final, shrieking groan, the bookshelf sliding an inch across the floor under the ram’s next blow.
“There is another way.” It as Holms – his voice, thin and shaking, as it cut through the touching moment. In the recent chaos the small man had somehow freed himself and in the wavering candlelight, he revealed the unmistakable seam of a hidden frame behind one of the bookshelves.
“Behind here,” Holms gasped, words tumbling faster now, urgency overriding whatever fear had kept him silent this long. “A service stair — goes down to the old dungeon levels. Nobody uses it, hasn’t in years, not since Ramssee’s people took over the Ninth Ward. It’s — it’s the one place in this whole palace nobody will think to look, because no one wants to go down there.”
For a moment Emcorae was confused as to how the man had escaped his knots, but Nathily’s caution forced him to consider the more pressing concern. “It could be a trap. A dead end. We’d be sealing ourselves into a hole with no way out but past whatever’s already down there.”
“It could,” Holms agreed, helping Emcorae move the bookshelf aside to reveal a narrow, black stairwell dropping away into absolute dark. “But it’s the only hole in this palace that isn’t already full of soldiers. My lady, with respect — I don’t think you have a better choice left to weigh it against.”
He was right, and the door’s next shuddering blow made the truth of it entirely unnecessary to state aloud. Wood cracked along the frame’s full length. Another strike, maybe two, and the room would be theirs no longer.
Emcorae was already moving, “Hurry, Nat”. He snatched a torch from its wall bracket, its flame guttering low but holding, and then entered through the gap.
“Here.” Holms pressed something into Nathily’s hand as she followed Emcorae — a small, folded scrap of parchment: a rough map of corridors and stairwells, the Ninth Ward marked with a shaking cross. “I drew it when I still thought I might need to run from this place myself. Never had the nerve. Perhaps you’ll have better use for it than I ever did.”
“Come with us,” Nathily said, some instinct insisting the offer needed making even now, even with the door screaming on its hinges behind them.
Holms shook his head, already moving the bookcase back into place to hide their escape and thankful to be rid of them. “Someone has to be found here when they break through, or they’ll tear this whole wing apart looking for you. Better it’s a clerk with a plausible excuse than nothing at all.” A thin, exhausted smile. “Go. Quickly. And may whatever gods you pray to actually be listening tonight.”
Not wasting any time, Emcorae and Nathily quickly descended into the black stairwell together, and behind them the bookshelf groaned back into place, sealing away the last flicker of candlelight from the reading room above. The stairs spiraled down into a cold that had nothing to do with the summer night they’d left behind on the ridge above Fubar — a deep, old cold, the particular chill of stone that had never once felt sunlight, that had absorbed instead dedaces of screams and had long since stopped being troubled by them.
Somewhere above, muffled through stone and distance, they heard the reading room door finally give way entirely — a great splintering crash, shouted orders, Holms’s own voice raised in some hastily improvised explanation that Nathily prayed, with every fiber of her Amorosi soul, would be enough to buy them the time they needed.
Neither of them spoke as they went deeper. There was nothing left to argue over now, only the narrow black stair and the torch’s small, trembling light and the growing certainty, unspoken between them, that whatever waited at the bottom of these steps might prove very much worse than the soldiers they’d just left behind.
Do pray to Alyssa, if that is your custom, I might have told them, had I been so foolish as tread that stairwell. Though I confess I’ve never found her particularly inclined to answer prayers spoken from her pawns when they are in trouble. Very few gods are.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 