The Rebel Assassin

Chapter 51: Through the Dark

Letting go of the rope, I rolled across the floor, sprang to my feet, and sprinted out of the hall. I didn't even have to look back to know there were guards on my tail, but that didn't matter. This castle had been my playground, home, and school since I was eight years old. They wouldn't be able to catch me here.

I rounded a corner, boots sliding on the slick marble so that I almost knocked into the opposite wall. This was the long, mirror-lined hallway nobles paraded down on their way to the audience hall, to show off to each other.

Wall-mounted candelabras ran the whole corridor. When lit, they created endless repeated reflections of light and shining silver accents and polished white marble. With all the nobles packed inside the hall for the Day of Prosperity speech, they had been allowed to burn low, and now the corridor was dim and gray and echoing with the many rapidly approaching footsteps behind me.

If the guards rounded the corner before I reached the end of the hall, it would be a clear shot for their crossbows to my back. But they wouldn't catch me sprinting the hall.

I gripped the middle arm of the nearest candelabra and pulled it down. It hadn't been used in ages, and moved grudgingly, with an aching squeal. But the panel next to it lurched open. I stuffed myself inside and forced the panel closed behind me.

The passage was dark as the entrance to hell and at least a thousand times dustier. I crawled forward, shoulders hunched, sneezing helplessly. How could I have ever believed I was the Thief? This had been easy enough as a child, but now I could barely squeeze through. My mind and hands had learned thieving, but my body wasn't exactly built for it. Nemia, a foot shorter than me and far slimmer, wouldn't be having this much trouble. And without my allergies, she probably wouldn't be sneezing like a beacon for any guards who might be listening.

There was nothing for it, though. I had to be the one to interrupt Magali's speech. As the castle nuisance well-known for swiping nobles' jewelry, I was the one they would most recognize. In the city, where few people knew what the Guardians looked like, we needed someone with the Mark to prove their identity to interrupt the speech. I could no longer provide that.

I moved as quickly as possible. If there were any guards aware of the Mirrored Hall's secret passage, I needed a head start. But crawling through dust and dead spiders and their living brethren left me plenty of room for my mind to wander.

I wondered how Joshua's "resurrection" was going. The idea that the Assassin, as the Healer's Dark counterpart, might be able to raise the dead, was an extreme one. But it had been mentioned as a rumored power of the Assassin in Ari's book, and given that we had a man who was supposed to be dead in our midst, we had decided it was time to spread the rumor to the castle. It helped that Tobias, who had authorized Joshua's fake execution, was dead, and probably hadn't informed many people it was fake.

Joshua hadn't exactly been pleased to hear his part in the plan ("It shouldn't be hard. You just have to act like you've been dead for a month and are angry to be back," I told him. "And that's how you normally act."). But from the glimpse I caught before hauling my ass out of the hall, he seemed to be doing fine. He'd broken open Lucien's modified dais at the perfect time. And despite his complaints that morning before climbing into the dais to be delivered, I doubted anyone was going to stop and ask how he had risen from the dead in the middle of the audience hall. Not in that chaos.

I just hoped he managed to get out of there. We were counting on everyone being too terrified or conflicted about re-killing their Captain to hinder his escape too much. And that was a lot to expect. We'd spent hours last night going over passageways like this one that he might use to escape. Strange how I once never thought I'd spill my secret escape routes to the Auxiliary Captain.