Read Balanced on the Blades Edge #2 Deathmaker for Free Online Page B

the wall to feel her way along. She tried not to feel uneasy about the fact that she would be lost down here without him. Usually, she had a good sense of direction, but they had taken a few turns, and the darkness made it hard to note landmarks.
    “Right turn,” Tolemek said, “and a tight squeeze.”
    She found the gap in the wall, using both hands to get a feel for the opening. It wasn’t tight by her standards, more like the width of a closet door rather than a wide corridor. But as soon as she turned after him and bumped into his back, she understood what he meant. Maybe it was a closet.
    “You can pick your hole,” Tolemek said, shifting to the side, “though my understanding from the blueprint I studied is that they all come together into a single vertical shaft that drops eighty feet before joining with the current sewage removal system.”
    Cas stuck her foot forward, trying to find whatever hole—or holes—he was talking about. But she smacked her toe on a wall. No, the base of a shelf or bench. It took a moment for her to realize where they were. Not quite a closet. “Is this a latrine?”
    “Yes. A centuries-old one. There shouldn’t be any biological contaminants left, if you’re concerned about cleanliness.”
    Cleanliness? Please. “The eighty-foot-drop you mentioned is more problematic for me. Unless you’ve got a coil of rope hidden in that little pouch of yours.” She was beginning to see why he’d arranged to have himself captured instead of simply using his concoctions to infiltrate the ruins from below.
    “Rope would have been impractical for someone to throw across the courtyard to my window.”
    “Maybe so, but it would have made a much bigger target to aim at with a rock.”
    He snorted. “The walls are somewhat slippery, making climbing up the shaft difficult, but I think we’ll be able to slow ourselves down enough to land on the bottom at a reasonable, unlikely-to-break-bones speed.”
    How comforting. “I’m going to refrain from making sarcastic comments or telling you to stuff your head in a latrine, but only because I could be stuck back in that cell and waiting for my next beating right now.”
    “And because I will be stuffing my head in a latrine?”
    Huh, her pirate had a sense of humor. How odd for someone named Deathmaker. “Yeah, that too.”
    Tolemek lit a match. “So we can see what we’re getting into.”
    Between his description and her time feeling around, Cas already had an image of the place in her head, and it proved fairly accurate. Three holes in a sandstone shelf were all that remained of the latrine. The rims of the openings had crumbled away, so they were larger than they would have originally been. She could squeeze through one, yes, and he probably could, too, though it would be a tight fit.
    When he held the match over one of the holes, she peered inside. If there was an opening at the bottom, it was too far down to see. He dropped the match inside, and for a moment, she had a good view of those walls before the flame went out, long before it got close to the bottom. The important thing was that the shaft appeared narrow enough for her to climb slowly down, bracing herself with her arms and legs. The stone was stained with time—or something more visceral—but wasn’t cloaked in algae and hadn’t appeared that slick in the light.
    “I’ll go first,” Tolemek said.
    “All right, but do me a favor, will you?”
    “Such as?”
    “If you slip and fall to your death, try to crash down in a way that won’t leave those spiky bracers pointing up for me to land on.”
    “I’ll keep your request in mind.” He climbed into one of the holes, grunting as flesh smacked against stone.
    Cas waited for the curses, scrapes, and bumps to fade away before she stuck the pouch of throwing stars into her mouth and climbed onto the shelf. She almost left the rifle there, but thought she could make something of a lap as she descended, her legs out and her