Read Sianim 01 - Masques for Free Online Page A

doorway that she could find, hoping that it was one of the two that traversed the outer wall of the castle.
    She bent low, occasionally putting a hand on the ground to help keep her balance. It was awkward, but people generally look at eye level, so from her lower vantage point she should be able to see any guards before they saw her. Her position also had the secondary benefit of making her a smaller target if she was seen.
    The corridor was lighter than the great hall had been, although not by much. The stone of the floor was dry and cool, and she ran a hand lightly over the walls. It took her longer than she thought that it should to find the small opening she was searching for.
    Panic clawed at her, and the temptation to run blindly down the hallway was almost overwhelming. This, she thought with wry humor, must be how a pheasant feels just before it jumps out of hiding and into the path of the arrow. She bottled up the panic and stored it away where it wouldn’t get out until this was all over.
    She had almost decided to look for another way to leave when she found what she was looking for. Just above the bottom row of blocks, her fingers scraped over one end of a pipe cut flush with the wall. Silently, Aralorn blessed the old man she’d met at a bar one night who told her the story.
    Centuries ago, an apprentice to one of the ae’Magis discovered an old rain spell in a book he was reading while the master was away. Three weeks later, when the Archmage came back, the castle was flooded, and the apprentice was camped outside. The Archmage drained the castle expediently by placing a drainpipe every sixteen stones in the outer corridors.
    One such drainage pipe was under her fingers. It was bigger than she’d hoped for; being about four fingers in diameter. It cut directly through the thick stone wall of the castle to the outside. The air coming through it smelled like a moat. Like freedom.
    She took a deep breath and concentrated. The familiar tingle spread though her body until it was all the sensation she could absorb, leaving no room for any of her other senses. Unable to see or feel, Aralorn focused on each part of her body shifting into one part of the mouse at a time; nose first, then whiskers. It took her only as long as it took to breathe deeply three times before a very small mouse crouched where she had stood.
    The mouse who was Aralorn shrank against the wall underneath the pipe for a minute and waited for the ae’Magi to investigate the magic she’d used—but he didn’t come. Human magicians weren’t usually sensitive enough to detect someone else using magic, but the ae’Magi was a law unto himself.
    The mouse shook herself briskly, twitched her whiskers, and scratched an itchy spot where the tingle hadn’t quite worn off yet; then she climbed up into the pipe.
    It was dark, which didn’t bother her much, and smelly, which did. Centuries of sludge had built up in the opening, and if several other bold rodents hadn’t foraged through (perhaps to escape a castle cat), she wouldn’t have made it. As it was, she was belly deep in slimy stuff. Busy not thinking about the composition of the muck, she almost fell out of the pipe and into the moat some distance below—only saving herself by some ungraceful but highly athletic scrambling.
    Poised on the edge of the old copper pipe, Aralorn shivered with nervous energy. Almost. Almost out. Just this one hurdle, and she would be away.
    The little slime-coated mouse leapt. The air blurred, and a white goose flapped awkwardly over the water, one wing dripping goo from the moat. There were plenty of birds who could fly better than a domestic goose—most birds, actually, since the goose could manage little better than a rough glide. But the goose was the only bird Aralorn knew how to become.
    Hampered by the wet wing, Aralorn was unable to gain any altitude and came to a flapping halt several hundred yards beyond the moat, in front of the bushes that signaled