Reuben stepped out of the keep door into the sunlight and came face to face with Captain Linhart. The soldier was standing at the bottom of the steps, staring up at him with a searching gaze in his eyes.
“Ah, Captain.” Reuben nodded.
“Where is Lady Ayla?” the Captain asked somewhat belligerently.
“She’s taking a moment to be alone with Sir Isenbard, Captain.”
“Is she, now?”
“Yes. I had to leave her. There is something important I have to check. But before I go—tell me what the patrols on the wall say.”
Reuben's tone of voice left no doubt that this was a command. He studied Linhart carefully—the man who commanded Ayla's troops now. The man who still did not and could never know who he, Reuben, really was. Would this man bow to his authority, or would he have to make him?
The Captain hesitated for a long moment. Then he said, “All reports are negative. There were no further attempts to storm the castle last night. No breaches of the wall anywhere.”
Reuben's muscles relaxed. Slowly, his hand, which had been drifting toward the hilt of his sword, started to move the other way again.
Listening, he turned his head from side to side.
“And the clanking and moaning has stopped, too.”
“Apparently.” Linhart hesitated once again. “Do you know why they stopped?” he inquired. “If they tried this again, they could probably wear us down completely and storm the castle.”
Again, with a grim smile on his face, Reuben nodded. “Yes. But you see, the point is not whether they could, the point is whether their commander can convince his men of that fact. He tried his plan, and it failed, and men died in the attempt. It takes a very good soldier to attempt a second time a plan which has failed once already. And these are not good soldiers. These are hired cutthroats. They will look for something else to try. But make no mistake—whatever it is, they will find a way.”
The Captain nodded. “I see. It seems you know what you are talking about.”
Reuben knew it was as much a question as a statement.
“No,” he said. “I do not only know what I'm talking about. I know what I'm doing.”
“And what will you do next?”
Reuben considered for a moment whether to punch the man for his nosy, interfering questions or simply stab him in the gut. But then…he did seem a capable Captain. Such men were not to be wasted.
“Now,” he said, the threat unmistakable in his voice, “I'm going somewhere to check on something I've been wondering about for a couple of days. That's all you need to know.”
In a second he was down the stairs and past Linhart.
“That wouldn't have anything to do with a certain change in the patrol duties of the guards, would it?” Linhart called after him. “A change that said, from now on, three guards have to always patrol together. For some strange reason, nobody was willing to tell me who had given that particular order.”
Reuben stopped in his tracks.
“Go to the wall, Captain of the Guard, and guard it,” he said. “Asking too many questions can be hazardous to your health.”
Then he strode away.
His path took him around the keep, to the back of the stone fortress. There, a separate entrance led to the castle dungeons. Reuben nodded in appreciation of the cleverness behind the layout of the castle. This way, if the prisoners escaped, they could not seize control of the keep and its inhabitants immediately. They would be stuck in the open, between the keep and the outer wall, with no defenses against attacks from both sides.
However, it didn't look like this clever layout had been of any use in recent years. Reuben unwillingly smiled as he entered through the rusty gate, which stood wide open. Was Luntberg normally such a peaceful place that its dungeons were used for storing old, broken cartwheels and moth-eaten rugs? Or had Lady Ayla just had as much luck with catching other robbers as she'd had with him?
He supposed the former was more likely. Luntberg looked like a peaceful place. Well, before the Margrave's army had come, anyway. That black thought reminded him of why he was here.
Taking a torch from the wall, he lit it with a flint and proceeded down the stairs, past cobwebs and broken odds and ends down, down into the depth below Luntberg Castle, even further down than the cellars.
Why had they stored the object down here? he asked himself. Maybe they had instinctively sensed its dangerous nature.
The deeper he ventured into the bowels of the Luntberg, the darker it became. The darkness seemed to eat up the light of his torch and got ever hungrier the further he progressed. The steps of the stone staircase became more and more uneven. Why not? This was a dungeon, after all. The kind of people that were brought down here were probably meant to break their necks at the earliest opportunity.
This is where I might have ended up, shot a thought through his head. If everything had not worked out just the way it did, and Ayla had known who I was from the very beginning, I would have been brought down here and locked in some dark cell, only to leave it again to die, dangling from a rope.
He banished the thought from his mind. Things had worked out just fine. He was not and would never be Ayla's prisoner—at least, not the kind she would need iron bars to keep in her castle. He was bound to her by other ties. Far stronger ones.
The last few steps, and he stood at the very bottom of Luntberg Castle, deep inside the mountain. He crossed the tiny room and finally came to a halt in front of a large door made of bars of iron. This was the place. This was where the guards had told him they had stored the object he was looking for. Now he was going to have to check his suspicion. What if he was wrong? Well, that would be bad, very bad indeed. But then…what if he was right? That would be even worse. For him, for everybody else in this castle, and especially for Ayla.
Pain shot through his heart as he remembered the few whispered words he had exchanged with her in the chapel—the only kind of pain he ever felt. Ayla's pain.
“Ayla…I'm so sorry.”
He felt her soft body quivering in his arms.
“Wasn't your fault, Reuben… I…”
“Shh. Don't say anything. I know. I know.”
“Oh, Reuben!”
“Ayla.”
“Hold me.”
“I am.”
“Tighter.”
And he had. For a long time. Then he had plucked up his courage, which wasn't easy because there was quite a lot of it, and had said the five words he wanted to say least of all in the world.
“Ayla…I have to go.”
“Reuben…no, please!”
“I don't want to. It's just…there's something I have to check. A suspicion I've had for some time now, and I have to find out whether or not I'm right. I have to make you safe.”
“I'm safe while you hold me!”
He had swallowed then and admitted the truth, for once in his life. “I wish that were true, Ayla. But it isn't.”
“Where do you…” Her words broke off in a sob, but he knew what she meant.
“The castle dungeon. I won't be long, I promise.”
She nodded against his chest. She felt so vulnerable, so small in his grasp. His arms around her felt so much like the safest place for her to be. He just wanted to stand here and never let her go. That, however, he knew to be slightly impractical. Even if he did not have to go to ensure the safety of everyone in the castle, he would have to go to the lavatory sooner or later.
Slowly, he helped her down to the floor, where she knelt before the body of Isenbard. At least like this, she was closer to her lost friend and in less danger of falling. Then he tortuously released his grip and stood up.
“I'll be back soon.”
He had left. And now he stood before the dungeon door to see what he had come to see. Slowly, his hand extended and pushed open the iron door in front of him. The creak it gave as it swung inwards was all too familiar to Reuben. He had seen enough of places like these to last him a lifetime. But, nevertheless, he entered. Holding the torch high above his head, he let his eyes wander around the windowless stone chamber, searching. They did not have to look for long.
On a battered old table in the corner lay the huge iron grappling hook, the same grappling hook that had hung from the castle wall only a short while ago, making it possible for the fat mercenary and his companions to get over the wall and nearly kidnap Ayla. His guts clenched at the memory.
Slowly walking over there, Reuben stuck his torch into a bracket on the wall and bent over to examine the hook more closely. It hadn't begun to rust yet. Obviously, it was made out of good steel. Gripping it with both hands, he carefully weighed it. Quite heavy. Very heavy, in fact. Just as he had suspected. Now there only remained one thing that could confirm his suspicion or prove him wrong.
His hands wandered to the very back of the long shaft that was part of the metal hook. There, he felt the end, searching for some indentation, something, anything.
But there was nothing.
His fingers clenched into a fist.
“So I was right!” he hissed. “Satan’s hairy ass, I was right!”