Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Forty: Threat

The dungeons, where his target resided, still presented a problem. He had no disguise and the dungeons were patrolled regularly. He could hear voices in the corridor below as he crouched on the stairwell, out of view of any servants in the corridor above. They sounded far enough away that the guards could be in the office at the end, but there was no way of being sure and it was certainly not going to buy him enough time to question Nerahardt.

He darted back up the stairs, pulling a bottle of smoking belladonna, a firecracker and a smoke bomb out of his pocket. Just past the dungeon stairs the wall jutted out in a corner; Arlen pressed himself into the gap, secured his scarf around his mouth, and threw the smoke bomb into the path of a passing maid.

She shrieked as dark grey smoke billowed from the capsule, and before she had a chance to look up in the brief window before it filled the room, Arlen struck the firecracker to life on the wall and lobbed it after the bomb. Sparks of various vivid colours cracked and whistled through the air.

"Raziel, you amazing, scummy bastard," Arlen murmured as he pulled the cork out of the belladonna. The commotion had brought servants running, including the guards Arlen had wanted to lure away. While the firecracker was still shrieking and pinging shrapnel off skin and armour alike, Arlen rolled the belladonna into the smoke and chaos. A moment later he heard the delicate vial snap under someone's foot.

The laughter and the screaming started when Arlen reached the dungeon corridor. The belladonna wasn't deadly – it was too dilute for that – but it packed a punch as a hallucinogen. Anyone in that corridor would be giggling and seeing things for the next few days, and that was if they didn't pass out and spend the time in a drugged stupor.

"Who's there?"

The Angel was slumped in the corner of his cell, far from the proud and haughty creatures Arlen had seen in the past. Even Anarabelle Novae had more poise and dignity than the winged, stinking lump in the smelly gloom, and she wandered the castle chained and barefoot and wearing little more than a sack with holes in.

"I expected a better show," Arlen said, stepping up to the bars and cocking his head to get a better look. Dark eyes glared at him through a curtain of greasy hair.

"Who are you?"

If he squinted, he could make out that some of the stains on the man's robe were rust-red rather than dark brown; blood. Though the Angel looked cautious, he didn't move. Perhaps he couldn't.

Arlen schooled his emotions. Angels could read them, and he didn't want Nerahardt to detect his boiling irritation, to find an opening to wind him up. Arlen was the one in control here.

"It doesn't matter," Arlen said, picking his words carefully, "who I am. All that matters," and at this he drew a long, thin pipe out of a pouch on his waist, allowing the Angel to see it, "is who you are."

"Where did you get that?" Nerahardt hissed, pressing himself further back against the wall. "They were all burned."

"Not all of them, clearly," Arlen said, and shook the pipe so that the dart inside rattled. It was laced with common weed poison, of course, but he would let Nerahardt think it was the same weapon that had turned the tide on the Angels during the Annexe War; Death venom, difficult to harvest, fast-moving and one of the few poisons no one, even the Angels with their lore and medicine, had found an antidote for. The Unspoken weren't all saints; they had had a dark side during the war that they all liked to pretend hadn't existed. The weed poison would leave Nerahardt in a great deal of pain for a couple of days, but then his Angel blood would fight it off and he would survive. The fear was a much better weapon.

He hadn't rescued the blowpipe from a mass burning, either; he had simply painted a Varthian hunting flute.

"What do you want?" Jeorge asked in a low voice.