Krunzle the Quick Read Online Free PDF Page A

ending in a downward-leading staircase lit from below. He crept to the top of the stairs and listened, hearing a faint bustle of kitchen noises and beneath it a female voice half-raised in a monotonous chant.
    He went down to the ground floor. The clatter of pots and pans grew louder; it came from somewhere to the rear of the building and down another level. The chanting also increased in volume; it originated from behind a pair of large, ornate doors that must lead into a room that took up all of the ground floor’s front. A wizard would have his study there, he thought. Or perhaps a witch.
    Krunzle looked about. So far he had seen nothing worth stealing, even if this had been a burglary of his own devising. It was possible the apprentice’s eye, whatever it was, was in the front chamber, being chanted over right this minute. If not, it would be somewhere it could be kept safe and perhaps guarded. Again, experience told him that somewhere would probably be below ground, behind layers of defense.
    He searched his memory for the image of the map Baalariot had provided. He recalled the symbols for more downward-leading steps and soon found them, through they were behind a double-locked door, strongly made, itself concealed behind a wall hanging that depicted a decidedly female person making an intimate though unlikely connection with a snake at least twice her length. Krunzle swiftly picked the locks, opened the door, and stepped through to a small landing above a set of narrow stone steps that circled down into darkness.
    “So this is the apprentice’s eye.”
    A rank smell wafted up from the stairwell. Krunzle didn’t recognize the odor, but some part of him decided that it was the kind of reek that ought to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. Cautiously, ears straining the silent darkness, he began to descend.
    He counted fifty steps before his outstretched hand encountered a barrier: another door, also well locked. He again deployed his picks and with small effort soon had the way clear. Beyond was yet more darkness, but here the acrid stench was far stronger.
    Krunzle put his head through the doorway and looked to either side. There was a dim glow, enough to show him that the door opened onto a vaulted subterranean passage. The source of the illumination was a thin bar of yellow light that he took to be a leak of lamplight from under a door at one end of the corridor. The other end was unlit and ended in a blank wall with what seemed to be a pool of stygian black at its foot. The pit, Krunzle thought. The stench came from there.
    Krunzle went on silent feet to the source of the light. It was definitely another door, but there were no locks, only a thick iron bar that slid into a slot in the stone wall. And, his fingers told him, another peephole.
    The thief peeped, and saw a windowless cell not much bigger than the one in which he had spent part of the day, but with a good carpet on the floor, a three-wick oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, a narrow cot (though with pillow and quilt), and a table and chair.
    Seated on the chair, back turned to the door, was a small figure in a plain white shift—by the narrowness of the shoulders and the fineness of the golden, collar-length hair, either a young woman or an older child. She (or he) was concentrating on something in her (or his) lap.
    Krunzle studied the scene, angling to look through the peephole into the corners of the room. He saw no intimations of danger. After one last visual sweep, he slid the latch and eased open the door.
    The figure in the chair turned and looked up at him over one shoulder—a girl on the cusp of becoming a woman, startled in the act of reading poetry from the small book now visible in her grasp. Then surprise turned to excitement tinged with pleasure. “Did he send you,” she said, “to rescue me?”
    Krunzle ignored the girl’s question. You will recognize it when you see it, Baalariot’s note had said. And now, as the thief