Malden looked around him in a panic, searching for a place to hide. There was none whatsoever. He had dropped into a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling—a ceiling from which hung sundry articles of iron, many of them with sharp points, others made of heavy chain. The tools of a torturer. The shaft’s opening was just a square of darkness on the ceiling, the spikes inconspicuous among so much hardware. Arches led away in four directions, with light coming from cressets set between each arch. Beyond one arch lay a flight of stairs heading up—surely the normal method for accessing this underground hell. The echoing footsteps came from another arch. He could have gone left or right and hoped the torturer was slow enough in chasing him—but he saw a better idea and took it. Jumping to his feet, he ran backward up the stairs until he reached the first landing, then walked back down them at a more leisurely rate.

As the torturer ducked through the arch, the man would only see him coming down the stairs as if he had just arrived.

“Who the blazes’re you?” the torturer asked when they came face-to-face. He was an enormous man, though not overly tall, his body bloated and lumpy, his hair falling out in clumps. He looked half like an ogre and half like something that should not have been able to crawl out of its sickbed.

“The new kitchen boy,” Malden said. “I was sent down to fetch you. Fire’s broken out above, and they need every man to help put it out. Hurry, you must get up there at once! Are there any others down here who can also help?”

“Just me.” The torturer’s mouth fell open and his eyes turned to slits. Malden had the impression he was squinting at him. The big man already had a massive wen over his left eye, so it was hard to tell. Other purplish growths adorned his chin and one side of his neck, like a grotesque beard half shaved. “Fire, you say? No great concern of mine, that. Naught to burn down here.”

“Nor any other way out but these stairs,” Malden insisted, hoping very much this was not true. “If the palace falls down on top of us—”

“Oh,” the torturer said, his right eye opening wide. “Oh! Fire! I’d best get up there, see what I can do to help!”

He rushed past Malden on his way up the stairs, nearly knocking him down. Malden cheered him on as he thundered up the risers. Then he darted through the arch the torturer had just vacated, intent on finding another way out before the brutish man thought to wonder why a man of his age was working as a kitchen boy.

He had not gotten more than a dozen strides into the dungeon, however, before someone called out to him.