Free Lady Of Regret (Book 2) by James A. West Page B

escaped, save a strong boggy odor, and the faint wail of wind.
    She edged closer, peeked inside. Instead of a cobwebbed corpse wrapped in grave clothes, she saw another set of stone steps leading down into darkness so thick that even the Eye of Nami-Ja could not penetrate it. She took a fearful step back before halting herself.
    Instead of abandoning the quest, Nesaea visualized her father, a man she had not seen in two decades. She remembered his laughter, always quick and easy, even when things went wrong for him, which they almost always did. For the first time in all her travels, there was a better than good chance he waited just ahead. And if he was locked in some musty dungeon, no matter what he might have done to earn imprisonment, he needed her help.
    She took a deep breath, climbed onto the edge of the sepulcher, and started down. The deeper she went into the earth, the cooler and damper the air became. Where the walls started off as dressed stone, they soon became roughhewn rock, slicked by dripping moisture, and knobby with pale fungus.
    At the bottom, she came to a wide cave with a low ceiling. Mud squished under her riding boots. In places where her light did not shine, vermin chattered. When she raised the orb overhead, stealthy shapes slithered out of sight. Here and there, small eyes reflected light, blinking with more curiosity than fear.
    After casting about and finding nothing of interest beyond a rotten barrel and a yellowed skeleton that might have belonged to a cat, Nesaea struck off at a quick clip.
    The passage ran straight and true for a long time. With each step, the sound of wind grew louder. A little farther on, she discovered not wind, but a stream rushing through a crack in one wall, and vanishing into another crack in the opposite wall.
    After leaping across it, she pressed on until coming to a door of iron bars. When she brushed a finger against one, rust flaked off, but the remaining iron was thick as her wrist. A lock and a coil of heavy chain secured the door.
    Nesaea tried to get at the lock with her picks, but it was on the wrong side of the bars. She withdrew a small vial from a pocket sewn inside her cloak. The fluid within the container was not magical, but to anyone unlearned in alchemy, the results would appear so.
    With the utmost care, she pried off the cork stopper, dribbled a few drops into the lock’s keyhole. Her elbow struck an iron bar, jostling a few more drops in. Nesaea caught her breath. Too much of any good thing could go bad in a hurry. With a sharp hiss, tendrils of smoke began drifting out of the aperture. As an acrid stench filled the cave, the round body of the iron lock started glowing, as if heated in a forge fire. A few seconds more, and it began to deform, slowly elongating and stretching to the floor. More smoke billowed, and glowing drops of molten iron began dripping to sizzle and hiss in the mud.
    Nesaea backed away, trying to remember if the alchemist she had bought the concoction from had mentioned anything to be wary of. Nothing came to mind, but that did not mean much, as many practitioners of the arcane were never exactly sure how their creations worked. Other than the pungent smoke, which burned her eyes and throat, the fluid was working as presented. In short order, she would be able to knock the lock loose and—
    The explosion came without warning, hurling her back the way she had come. Twisted iron bars rained down around her, and she wrapped her arms around her head. The smell of scorched metal filled her nostrils.
    After a few seconds, Nesaea sat up and wiped the mud off her face. A terrible ringing filled her ears. When she blinked, she saw the blinding white afterimage of the eruption.
    In the glow of the Eye of Nami-Ja, she quickly checked herself for wounds, but only found tender spots on her forehead and chest. By the following dawn, she expected numerous bruises.
    If I live so long , she thought, peering down the rocky passage. It seemed