I just wanted to stand there and bask in the rolling waves of scrumptious sound, but I had work to do. It was my job to see if Sarad Nukpana had stopped listening because he couldn’t keep his eyes open. I felt the Saghred begin to waver. The soft light illuminating the stone never changed, but what I sensed from it definitely did. It was working.
Then it wasn’t. Something or, more to the point, someone, was fighting back.
I’d give Mychael and Ronan three guesses and the first two didn’t count.
I saw Sarad Nukpana with others I had only seen through silver mist—his new friends, his allies. Only now they were just as solid as Nukpana himself. There were goblins and elves and humans, with a couple of creatures whose race or species I didn’t recognize. The evil inside the Saghred didn’t restrict itself to Sarad Nukpana. They were down, but they weren’t going out. I heard laughter, muffled but still mocking.
I didn’t want my voice to possibly disrupt what Mychael and Ronan were doing, but I made sure my expression spoke volumes. They knew as well as I did what was happening—and what was not happening. They were getting the message without my help. Professionals that they were, their spellduet never faltered.
Suddenly, a disembodied voice floated in the air around us, a voice of staggering strength and power, a baritone like Mychael. It was deep, vibrant, and impossible to ignore.
It was Piaras.
Maintaining one particularly glorious low note while Cayle’s tenor danced above it, Mychael indicated a small square opening, almost hidden in shadow near the ceiling. Of course, an air vent. I thought the containment rooms were sealed, but that was ridiculous. If they’d been sealed, we wouldn’t have been able to breathe. I assumed that like in most large buildings, the vent led to a network of tiny tunnels running throughout the citadel. Piaras was practicing on the citadel’s main floor in the music room. I recognized it as one of his sleepsongs. But unlike Mychael and Ronan, Piaras wasn’t singing a lullaby for one. The kid was trying to knock out a platoon. It was a sleepsong for use on a battlefield—and if we could hear it down here, so could the rest of the citadel.
Oh shit.
Magnified by the ducts, his voice was as hypnotic as Mychael’s—and as sleep inducing. I heard what sounded like a sigh of smug, sensual contentment from Sarad Nukpana. If the Saghred had been a cat, it would have been purring. I didn’t want the rock belligerent, but I didn’t want it happy, either. Piaras’s singing made it just a little too happy.
Then the Saghred simply drifted off to sleep. I felt like a lead weight had been lifted from the center of my chest. All sense of the Saghred was gone. I hadn’t felt this good in a long time.
Piaras’s voice went silent with the end of the spellsong. I didn’t know how he’d done it, but I couldn’t deny what he had done.
An untrained teenage spellsinger had just put the Saghred to sleep.
Chapter 5
We ran up the stairs in what must have been record time. The wards on the containment levels had protected the Guardians there, but once the three of us reached the citadel’s main floor, Piaras’s handiwork was sprawled all around us.
Dammit.
Piaras knew to shield his voice when he practiced. More important, he knew how. I didn’t know what had happened here, but it couldn’t have been Piaras’s fault. I’d never seen Mychael that angry, and Ronan Cayle looked like he’d skipped angry and gone straight to enraged.
Dammit to hell.
We saw three kinds of Guardians on the way to the music room: asleep, stunned, and mostly awake. The asleep ones had been caught completely unawares. The stunned ones had probably heard a couple of notes before they could get their shields up. The mostly awake ones were the experienced Guardians who knew what they heard and immediately protected themselves.
There were way too few of those.
This morning I’d thought I was in trouble. I knew Piaras was in trouble.
The corridor in front of the music room looked like the aftermath of a bad bar fight or a good night out—some of the Guardians were snoring; some were happily curled on their sides; and one had slid down the closed music room doors. He wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t quite with us, either.
Mychael stepped over the Guardians on the floor, pushed the dazed one aside, and flung open the doors. Piaras was there and, surprisingly, so was Phaelan.
Piaras looked up from his music stand, his big brown eyes like a deer caught in torchlight. He knew from the looks on our faces that something was deathly wrong, and it was his fault. Then he saw the Guardians on the floor behind Mychael, and every bit of color drained from his face.
Phaelan was sprawled in a chair reading a book— completely conscious and utterly clueless.
I jerked the book out of his lap. He plucked the plugs out of his ears, and sat up indignantly.
“What?”
I pointed to the pile of Guardians outside the open door. One Guardian staggered by, leaning on the wall for support.
Phaelan whistled. “Damn, looks like my crew on shore leave. Did the kid do that?”
“Apparently.”
Phaelan grinned at Piaras and gave him a thumbs up. “Good work, kid.” He stopped and took in everyone’s expressions, including Piaras’s. The grin vanished, and the thumb wilted. “Not good work?”
Mychael pushed past Piaras and went to the air vent near the ceiling. Apparently that was how Piaras’s voice had traveled throughout the citadel, so that’s where Mychael aimed his. He took a deep breath and sang. The spellsong was loud; it was discordant; and it commanded every sleeping Guardian to wake up. Now. When he finished, he turned on Piaras, his eyes blazing.
“Did you disable the shields on this room?” he demanded.
“No!” Piaras was horrified. “The shields were down?”
"We could hear you in the containment rooms, through the air vent.”
“I checked the shields before I started,” Piaras protested. “They were up the entire time.”
From the moment he came through the door, Ronan Cayle had been stalking around the edge of the room like a hound on a fresh scent. “Not for your last song, they weren’t.” He never took his eyes off the walls. “And the shields on this room weren’t disabled. They were cut.” Cayle stopped in front of a section of wall near the air vent. “A careful, surgical cut,” he said, sliding his hand up the wall. His hand stopped. “A cut that started right here.” He quickly pulled a chair over, stood on it, and moved his hand slowly over the metal grille of the vent, careful not to touch it. “And it extended right into the air vent.”
Piaras looked like he had stopped breathing or had forgotten how. “A cut? But I would have known if someone slashed the shields.”
“Not if someone very talented didn’t want you to know,” Cayle said, never taking his eyes off the vent. He carefully placed his fingertips on the grille. “And that someone took great care so you would not know—and chose the air vent so your song would reach the most people.” Cayle sounded like he almost admired the bastard’s work.
“Where could they have cut the shields from?” I asked.
“Since they were cut while Piaras was singing, it wasn’t from inside this room,” Mychael said. “They would have worked from the other side of the wall.”
“What’s back there?”
“Two rooms. The reception area for visitors and a common room where the men relax when they’re not on duty.”
“So it was guests or Guardians.”
Mychael’s eyes were blue frost. “None of my men would have done this,” he said quietly.
“Then one of your guests was up to no good,” I told him.
“Who’d want all the Guardians to take a nap?” Phaelan asked.
Mychael and I looked at each other. Nightshades or Khrynsani. Take your pick. The Nightshades wanted to kill Mychael. The Khrynsani wanted me alive. Both would love to get the Saghred. Sleeping Guardians would make getting any of the above a whole lot easier.
Mychael glared at the wall. “Whoever did it simply walked out through sleeping Guardians.”
“Or has blended back into the woodwork,” I said. A lot of things didn’t make sense to me right now, but two questions demanded asking. “Well, whoever it was, how would they’ve known Piaras would be in here, and what spellsongs he’d be practicing?”
Piaras cleared his throat. “I reserved the room last night, and I had to give a reason.” He paused apologetically. “I wrote ‘sleepsongs.’ ”
“The logbook is on a desk down the hall,” Mychael told me.
I was incredulous. “Anyone could have seen it?”
“It’s a book to reserve time in a music room, Raine. A spellsinger practicing is hardly a state secret.” Mychael looked at the air vent. “Is it still asleep?”
I didn’t need to ask who “it” was. There was no pressure in the center of my chest from the Saghred. I still hesitated before answering. “Yes.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“I’m sure it’s asleep. I just don’t trust it.”
Cayle spoke. “If it is asleep, the king’s ransom question is how long will it stay that way.”
“A century or two would be nice,” I muttered.
Piaras looked from one of us to the other, now scared and confused.
“Should we tell Piaras what he just did?” I asked Mychael.
“He needs to know.”
Out in the corridor, Guardians were getting to their feet in response to their paladin’s voice; some of them had thrown an arm over a brother’s shoulder for support. It was starting to look less like nap time and more like the morning after a night out.
“You mean that?” Piaras asked. He sounded a little sick.
“I’m afraid you did more than that,” I told him.
“I did more?”
“Mychael and Maestro Cayle were spellsinging the Saghred to sleep, but you beat them to it.”
