By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald

victor’s self-assurance. The accent was wrong, too. Ochemet opened his eyes again.
    The greyish illumination that accompanied his meals had returned to the cell. In the dim light, Ochemet saw a shadowy figure standing next to his bunk, and recognized the face above the ragged clothing.
    “Master Ransome!”
    “I’m flattered that you remember me,” said the Adept. “But time is short. We must be going.”
    Ochemet sat up and swung his feet down onto the floor of the cell. He looked closer, and saw that the Guild Master’s wrists were torn, the dark blood running down freely across the palms of Ransome’s hands.
    “You’re hurt.”
    “Not badly. Follow me.”
    Ochemet stood. “I hope you’ve got a good idea this time. The last time I followed you someplace, I ended up in here.”
    “What needs to happen, happens,” said Ransome.
    Out in the narrow corridor, they turned to the right; always before, when being led away for a questioning session, Ochemet had gone to the left, and this new route was strange to him. In silence, he and Ransome threaded their way through a maze of low, narrow passages, heading from the core of the ship toward its outer skin, where the lifeboat pods waited in bay after bay.
    There, beside one of the open pods, Ransome halted. “This one will do.”
    Ochemet shook his head. “They’ll shoot us out of the sky.”
    “And take a chance on killing one of their own people by mistake? No—watch.”
    Ransome lifted away an access plate in the bulkhead, revealing a series of switches marked in yellow script. He pulled sharply on one of them; it came out of the socket and dangled at the end of a bundle of colored wires, so that the bare terminals on the reverse were plainly visible. Moving with a deftness that surprised Ochemet—Adepts weren’t supposed to know about tricks like that—Ransome laid the edge of the access plate across two of the terminals.
    All up and down the corridor Ochemet heard a series of snaps and whooshes as vacuum-tight doors slid shut. The deckplates under his feet vibrated with the serial percussion of explosive bolts pushing lifeboats away from the ship. He felt Ransome’s hand pressing against his shoulder blades.
    “Inside!”
    He half-stepped, half-tumbled into the pod with Ransome close on his heels as the door snapped closed. There was the sharp crack of the ejection bolts, thunderous in the enclosed space, and the pod tumbled free. Ochemet lurched sideways, grunting as one of the zero-g handholds slammed into his rib cage, and stumbled into one of the padded seats.
    Automatically, he groped for safety webbing—found it—and worked to fasten it around him while his mind tried to make sense of everything that had happened. In the seat beside him, Master Ransome looked tired but satisfied.
    Ochemet drew a deep breath. “It looks like we’ve escaped,” he said. “Now tell me something—what’s going to keep the Mageworlders from catching us all over again?”
    “The Mageworlders have other problems at the moment,” Ransome said. “They’ve already begun moving their main fleet out of Galcen orbit.”
    “If you say so. But there isn’t anything wrong with their shipboard holding cells, I know that much. So how did you manage to get loose?”
    There was a pause. “It is a cardinal mistake,” said the Adept finally, “to confuse the name of a thing with its essence, and another mistake to think that the power lies in the name.”
    “I suppose you’re going to explain that?”
    “It’s simple enough,” Ransome said. “The Magelords created chains and manacles to hold the Master of the Guild, but in their fear of him they forgot about Errec Ransome.”
    Ochemet stared at him. “But you are the Master of the Guild!”
    Ransome smiled. Ochemet found the expression disquieting on the Guild Master’s bruised and bloodstained face.
    “So the Magelords thought,” said the Adept. “And it will prove their downfall in the end.”
     
    In