from the smoldering coals in the raised hearth in the center of the cells.
There was no light in the dungeon other than Wolf's staff, but it was sufficient. The ring of keys was still kept on its holder near the guardroom door for convenience's sake.
He slid the nearest door open and stepped in. The prisoners watched him with fear, hatred, or indifference. He took wolfshape because of the wolf's sharper senses and immediately regretted the necessity. The smells of a dungeon were bad enough to a human nose, but the Wolf's eyes were watering as he backed out of the eel!. She wasn't in there. He found the same at the second and third cells.
In the last cell, chained corpses littered the floor and hung on the wall like broken dolls, but they moaned and breathed with the pseudo-life that animated Uriah, They watched him with glittering eyes as he shifted again to wolfshape to sample the air. She was here. Back in human form again, he waded through the corpses, indifferently pulling free when one caught at his foot.
He found her at last. Her skin was darker and her face was different, but she was muttering to herself, and it was her voice; her scent under the filth. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, breaking into heavy coughing when he shifted her against him to take off the irons. He swore softly at the wounds they left on her ankles and wrists.
Gently he picked her up, ignoring the smell of dungeon that clung to her. He stepped over the huddled bodies of her fellow inmates with no more attention than if they had been bundles of straw. Although he had no hands free to carry it, the staff followed him like an obedient dog.
As he closed the cell door and locked it again, he heard voices in the main guardroom. Swearing softly under his breath, he moved back into the shadows. The secret door he'd entered through was a crawl space, too narrow to get through quickly with Aralorn unable to move on her own.
He touched the mask with his staff and it disappeared. A brief moment of concentration, and the scars followed.
Trying to avoid causing her any further hurt, he positioned Aralorn on his shoulder, holding her in place with one hand and letting the other hang carelessly free. The staff disappeared, leaving only its light behind.
The sound of the inner door opening left the guards scrambling for their weapons, until they saw who it was that stood there.
Wolf carelessly tossed the keys on the rough-hewn table, where they left a track in the greasy build-up as they slid. When he spoke, it was with the ae'Magi's hated voice, soft and warm with music.
"I think that it would be wiser from now on for the guard in charge to keep the keys on his person. It is too easy for someone to enter the dungeon by other paths. There is no reason that we should make it any easier to get into the cells than it already is."
Without looking at the men again he walked to the far door, which obediently opened to let him through and closed after him. The wide staircase that led to the upper floors stretched in front of him, leaving but a narrow space against the wall, supposedly to allow access to the area under the stairs that was sometimes used for storage. It was this path that he took, ducking as he moved under the stairway.
He needed no light; most wizards see well in the dark and he better than most. Unerringly he touched the exact spot that triggered the hidden door. As he stepped through he whispered a soft spell, and the dust under the stairs rearranged itself until it looked as it had before he had walked there.
With the stone door shut behind him, the passage was as dark as pitch, and there was little light for even his eyes to pick out. Tiny flecks of illumination that found their way through openings in the mortar made the towering walls glitter like the night sky. Their presence gave ample warning against lighting the way - lest someone in a dark room on the other side of the wall witness the same phenomenon.
Wolf kept one hand against a wall and the other securely around Aralorn and felt the ground ahead with his feet. He slowed his progress when a pile of refuse he kicked with his foot bounced down an unseen