Chapter 11: The Dumbwaiter Gambit
The silence in the dumbwaiter was absolute, thick with the taste of dust and defeat. Cole’s palms stung from pressing against the unyielding wood.
Ivia let out a slow, pained breath. “Well. This is suboptimal.”
The medic, a young beta named Torin, shifted nervously, making the whole box sway. “We can go back down. Retreat.”
“No,” Cole and Kaelen said in unison.
Kaelen’s voice was a low rumble in the dark. “Retreat is a funnel. They’d pick us off in the shaft or the hall. Lysander knows we’re inside.” His arm was still locked around Cole, a band of steady heat. “There is always another way. In a keep this old, there are always forgotten passages.”
Cole’s mind, sharpened by panic, clawed through the memories. The secondary access panel. He’d seen it as a child, a curiosity. A square cut into the shaft’s side, behind a section of loose boarding, used by carpenters to repair the pulley. It led not to a room, but to the space between the walls. A service corridor for servants to move unseen.
“There’s a panel,” Cole whispered. “About two feet down, on the west wall. It’s boarded over. It leads into the walls.”
“Can you reach it?” Kaelen asked.
“If you lower us just a little.”
Kaelen eased his grip on the rope. The box descended with a jarring lurch, eliciting a sharp inhale from Ivia. Cole ran his hands over the rough, splintered wood of the shaft wall, counting the vertical beams. His fingers caught on a uneven seam. “Here.”
It was a square outline, barely visible. The boarding was nailed shut, but the wood was old and damp-soft at the edges. “I need leverage.”
Kaelen adjusted his grip, freeing one hand. He drove his fist against the center of the panel. The sound was a thunder-crack in the confined space. The wood splintered inward. Two more blows, controlled and devastating, and the panel gave way, collapsing into a black cavity that exhaled a breath of frigid, dead air.
The opening was narrow. Cole went first, wriggling through shoulders-first, feeling the tear of old nails on his tunic. He emerged into a space so tight he could only crouch. The service corridor was a slit of darkness, the floor a lattice of ancient joists covered in a century of filth.
One by one, they squeezed out of the dumbwaiter. Ivia came last, jaw clenched against the pain in her shoulder. Torin helped steady her.
“Charming,” Ivia muttered, wiping cobwebs from her face. “My favorite part of any siege: crawling through rat highways.”
“Quiet,” Kaelen said, his voice barely a breath. He was a massive shadow in the non-light, his golden eyes the only points of illumination, glowing faintly like banked coals. He listened. “The hall is to our left. The wall is thin here. Move slowly.”
They inched forward, the joists groaning under their weight. The darkness was textured with sounds: the scuttle of vermin, the drip of distant water, and now, the muffled murmur of voices and the clank of armor from the other side of the lathe and plaster wall.
After twenty feet of painful progress, Cole saw it: a vertical slit of dim light ahead. A spy-hole, or more likely, a warped seam in the woodwork hidden behind a tapestry in the hall. He pressed his eye to it.
The main hall stretched out, lit by guttering torches. It was a tableau of grim preparation. A dozen serpent-guards, their scale armor glinting dully, were barricading the enormous double doors that led to the inner keep stairs with a monstrous oak bench and rubble. These were not the panicked remnants from the courtyard; these were fresh, disciplined, Lysander’s personal cohort. Their captain, a man with a scar bisecting his lips, was barking orders.
“...the king says they’ll try the stairs. They won’t. They’re dragons. They’ll burn through the door eventually. Our job is to make that ‘eventually’ take all night. The diversion will be ready by dawn. Once it’s done, we fall back to the tower. Understood?”
A chorus of grim affirmations.
Diversion. The word again. Cole pulled back from the spy-hole, his heart hammering against his ribs. He met Kaelen’s luminous gaze in the dark and mouthed the word.
Kaelen’s expression hardened. He pointed to the wall, then made a breaking motion with his hands. He held up three fingers, then pointed to himself, Cole, Ivia, and Torin. A simple plan. Brutal and direct.
Cole nodded. He understood. Surprise was their only advantage.
Kaelen positioned himself before the weak section of wall, bracing his hands against the joists. He took a deep, silent breath, the muscles in his back and shoulders coiling. Ivia drew her short sword left-handed, her movements stiff but determined. Torin readied a hatchet. Cole unsheathed the dagger Kaelen had given him a lifetime ago in a sun-drenched meadow, its weight familiar and comforting.
For a second, there was only the sound of their breathing, syncopated with the murmurs from the hall.
Then Kaelen struck.
He didn’t shove. He exploded forward, a battering ram of flesh and fury. The old wall disintegrated. Plaster and lath erupted outward in a cloud of dust and splinters. The tapestry that concealed it ripped from its rods with a sound like tearing flesh.
Kaelen landed in a crouch amidst the debris, already moving. A serpent-guard spun, his eyes wide with shock. He never got his sword up. Kaelen’s own blade took him in the throat, a spray of black blood arcing through the torchlight.
Chaosis was a living thing. It erupted with the dust.
Ivia was through next, lunging at a guard fumbling with a crossbow. Her short sword sank into the gap between his breastplate and pauldron. He screamed, and she yanked it free with a brutal twist, already turning to parry a blow from his comrade. Torin followed, his hatchet finding a knee with a sickening crunch.
Cole burst from the hole, his eyes stinging from dust. His world narrowed to motion and threat. A guard, younger than the others, charged him, sword high. Cole didn’t try to match strength. He dropped low, under the wild swing, and drove his dagger upward, beneath the man’s ribcage. The feeling was awful, a hot, grating resistance that gave way. The guard gasped, his breath reeking of sour wine, and collapsed.
There was no time for remorse. It flooded him anyway, a cold wave he instantly shoved aside. Never a victim again.
“Rear guard! On me!” the scarred captain was shouting, his unit’s discipline overcoming their shock. They formed a rough line, shields locking.
Kaelen didn’t let them set. He roared, a sound that was more dragon than man, and charged the shield wall head-on. He didn’t try to break it; he simply hit it. The impact was monstrous. Two men went down under his charge, their shields splintering. The line buckled.
It became a vicious, close-quarters brawl. The hall echoed with the clash of steel, grunts of pain, shouted curses. Ivia fought like a demon, her injured shoulder clearly agony but her movements precise and deadly. She fought beside Torin, the medic using his hatchet to hook shields, creating openings for her blade.
Cole stayed on the periphery, a silver-haired ghost using his speed and the chaos. He ducked a swing, jammed his dagger into an exposed thigh, and danced away as the man fell. He was a distraction, a sting, keeping them off balance.
He saw the captain break from the fray, sprinting for a heavy iron bell rope by the stair door. To sound an alarm. To summon more guards from the upper floors.
“Kaelen!” Cole shouted, but the king was surrounded, a whirlwind of lethal motion holding three men at bay.
Cole moved on instinct. He snatched a fallen dagger from the floor, weighed it in his hand for a heartbeat, and threw. It was not a warrior’s throw. It was clumsy, end-over-end. But it was enough. The spinning hilt struck the captain hard in the temple, not killing him, but staggering him. His grasp on the bell rope faltered.
It was the opening Ivia needed. She broke from her own fight, closed the distance in two strides, and slammed her sword point through the back of the captain’s neck. He dropped, silent.
The fight left the remaining guards with their leader fallen. One was cut down by Torin. Another tried to flee toward the stairs and met Kaelen’s sword. The last threw down his weapon, falling to his knees.
“Mercy! I yield!”
Kaelen stood over him, chest heaving, his blade dripping. His golden eyes held no pity. “The diversion. What is it?”
The guard trembled. “I don’t know! Only the king and his mage know! They said… they said it would break the siege. That we just had to hold until dawn!”
Kaelen’s gaze flicked to the barricaded stair door. “What’s behind that door?”
“The inner stair. It’s… it’s been soaked in oil. From the top. They have archers at every landing. It’s a death funnel.”
Ivia leaned against a shattered bench, pressing a hand to her freshly bleeding shoulder. “Lovely. So we can’t go up the stairs, and the secret passage is a dead end. Any other hidden doors you remember, Cole?”
Cole was staring at the yielding guard, a cold suspicion crystallizing. “The diversion isn’t inside the keep.” He looked at Kaelen, dread turning his voice hollow. “He said ‘break the siege.’ Your forces are all inside the walls now. The courtyard, the barracks. What if the diversion isn’t about killing us here? What if it’s about killing them out there?”
Kaelen’s eyes went wide. Understanding was a lightning strike. If Lysander collapsed the gatehouse, or unleashed some stored magic on the crowded courtyard… it would be a slaughter. His dragons, trapped.
The King’s head snapped toward the barred door. The path to the tower, to Lysander, was a fortified nightmare. But the way back to the courtyard, to warn his people, was now clear… and rapidly running out of time.
He looked at Cole, at Ivia, at the impossible choice written in the set of his jaw. The blood oath to protect Cole warred with the duty to his kingdom.
The guard on the floor chose that moment to move. He lunged, not for a weapon, but for a small, horn whistle on the dead captain’s belt. He blew a single, piercing note.
From high above, beyond the barred door, came an answering roar—not of a dragon, but of heavy machinery grinding to life. The deep, seismic thud of a portcullis somewhere slamming down. A new, acrid scent began to seep under the stair door, cutting through the smell of blood and dust.
The smell of smoke.
Lysander wasn’t just waiting. He was burning his own stairs, sealing the tower.
And outside, in the courtyard, Kaelen’s unsuspecting army waited for a dawn that might bring hell with it.