The First Champion

by Sandell Wall

  Saredon turned on Kaiser just in time to see him lowering his throwing hand.

  “She would have killed you without a second thought,” Kaiser said.

  “Because you held her family hostage!” Saredon said. Tears were streaming down his face now.

  “None of that matters now,” Kaiser said. “You’ve failed this test. You won’t get another chance.”

  Kaiser moved to the wall and put his hand on a specific stone. The hidden door swung open on silent hinges.

  “Come with me,” Kaiser said. “It’s time you suffered the consequences of your disgraceful behavior.”

  Saredon could not believe what was happening. He had done everything asked of him, up until they wanted him to murder his only friend. How could his parents demand such a thing? Saredon glanced back at Thyria. She was slumped against the wall. Her wound was not fatal, but she was in obvious pain.

  “She’s no longer your concern,” Kaiser said. “You won’t see her again.”

  Thyria did not open her eyes to look at Saredon. His heart felt numb, like it had stopped beating. Kaiser beckoned him again, and Saredon’s feet moved automatically. He followed his father through the secret doorway into the shadowy passage beyond.

  To Saredon, it felt like his world had ended, but even in his despair, there was one truth he could find solace in.

  Whatever happened to him, Saredon would not be a reaver.

  Chapter 46

  SORRELL STARED IN DISBELIEF at the bloody stump on the end of her sword arm. Mazareem’s sudden attack had distracted Morricant, but in so doing, it caused the ribbons restraining Sorrell to go crazy. In their maddened frenzy, they had sliced straight through the wrist of her right hand. Sorrell’s mind struggled to process this new reality. At her feet, her dismembered hand lay on the floor.

  Blood gushed from the wound, and Sorrell’s military training took over. If she did not tourniquet her arm, she would die from blood loss. But as she cast about for something to tie around her forearm, Sorrell realized it would be impossible to tie the tourniquet with one hand. She tried to apply pressure with her good hand. It was hopeless. Blood spurted through her fingers.

  Desperate now, and starting to panic, Sorrell tried the only option remaining. She tapped into the power inside her and encased the wound in solid ice. The ice turned red immediately, but the blood stopped pumping out of her arm. She did not know how long she could maintain a constant connection with her power. It would have to hold until she could get help with her injury.

  In the doorway, Mazareem stirred. It was the first sign of life since he collapsed after attacking Morricant. Morricant was still slumped against the wall. Her enchanted ribbons were gathered around her, each one coiled on the floor with its head swaying in the air like a protective serpent.

  Sorrell crawled to where Mazareem lay. He rolled himself onto his back. His face was twisted in pain. When Sorrell appeared above him, he blinked as if he was having trouble focusing on her.

  “You’ve got to get outta here ‘fore she wakes up,” Mazareem said. His words were slurred, and one side of his face seemed slack.

  “Where am I supposed to go?” Sorrell said.

  “Slavers’ quarter,” Mazareem said. “Find Lacrael. Tell ‘er to get—to get in position. Don’t have much time. Morricant is sure to flay my hide when she wakes up.”

  “How do I find it?”

  “East side of the city. Biggest building, behind a gate and wall. Now, go.”

  “Shouldn’t we kill her while she’s unconscious?”

  “You’re welcome to try.”

  Mazareem closed his eyes and lay his head back. It was obvious that just those few words had taken most of his strength. Sorrell stood on unsteady legs. She was still naked. Morricant had slaughtered the servants tending to Sorrell while she had still been in the bath. On the wall next to the door, several plain dresses hung on wooden pegs.

  Sorrell grabbed one of these dresses and slid it over her head. She kept trying to use her missing fingers and cursing when they were not there. Should she take her severed hand? It seemed a strange thing to be preoccupied by, but somehow it seemed very wrong to leave a part of herself behind.

  Feeling silly, and a little sick, Sorrell picked up her hand and put it in the pocket of her pilfered dress. She would figure out what to do with it later. This done, Sorrell turned her attention to Morricant. The empress still had not moved. Screwing up her courage, Sorrell took a tentative step in that direction. The ribbons never stopped their hideous swaying.

  There were no weapons in the bath house, and Sorrell had nothing with which she might harm Morricant. If she could drag the woman’s body to one of the big tubs, she could heave Morricant over the side and drown her. However, to do that, Sorrell needed to get close.

  Sorrell stopped ten feet from the nearest coiled ribbon. It did not seem to be aware of her presence. That changed when she took another step. The ribbon twisted in the air with an audible snap, and it launched itself at Sorrell. She tripped over herself in her haste to get away. The ribbon slashed at where she had been, air hissing at its passing. Sorrell lay on the floor, scarcely daring to breathe. Slowly, the enchanted fabric wound back in on itself and resumed its defensive posture.

  This was enough to convince Sorrell to give up trying to reach Morricant. The weight of the hand in her pocket served as a gruesome reminder of how sharp those ribbons were, and Sorrell had no desire to feel their edge again. For the hundredth time, Sorrell lamented the loss of her powers. Without them, Morricant was too powerful an enemy to face.

  Frustrated to leave the enemy helpless but alive, Sorrell forced herself to let it go. Mazareem was right. She needed to get out of here before Morricant woke up. After making sure her ice-covered stump was hidden in her sleeve, Sorrell moved to the door and stepped over Mazareem into the hallway beyond.

  She did her best to find her way out from memory. The compound was huge, and Sorrell had only been guided through it once. After encountering her second dead end, she decided to follow the corpses. Morricant had left a grisly trail that marked her vengeful path through the estate. Those who had not been fast enough to get out of her way had paid the price. The Lady of Pain did not simply kill her victims—she ripped them apart.

  Sorrell had seen blood-soaked decks after a broadside covered in less gore than these walls. Finally, she reached the courtyard. Here, Sorrell found Morricant’s murderous masterpiece. Heaped in the center of the courtyard, the ghastly remains of Dezerath and her tomb keepers baked beneath the noonday sun. Heads and limbs had been separated from torsos and piled together like the random parts of a messy doll maker.

  The sight proved too much for Sorrell. She turned away and retched. After her stomach emptied itself, she hurried through the courtyard, skirting the middle and looking anywhere but at the dismembered corpses.

  Sorrell hesitated at the gate. It was one thing to say she intended to navigate through the city to find the slavers’ quarter; it was quite another to actually do it. Sorrell knew to head east, and she had a vague idea of where to find the others, thanks to Lacrael, but beyond that, she was lost.

  Something Lacrael had said popped into Sorrell’s head, and she looked around her for something to use as a disguise. As long as she looked like she was on an errand, maybe Sorrell could wander the streets unnoticed.

  She found a rough spun sack in the gatehouse. Hurrying now, Sorrell stuffed a few random items inside: a leather hat she found hanging on a peg, the ledger that recorded visitors, and a smaller pouch that jingled like it was full of coins. With her good hand, she swung this load over her shoulder and tested the weight. It would do.

  Caution told Sorrell to scan the street before simply striding out the gate and across the moat. Morricant’s reinforcements could not be far behind, and the empress passing through the streets would have certainly drawn onlookers. Even with her disguise, a single servant leaving the compound now would look highly suspicious. Careful to keep herself out
of sight, Sorrell peered around the corner.

  Her prudence paid off. Not far from the gate, a squad of tomb keepers was approaching fast. And gawkers filled the street. Sorrell pulled her head back inside. The compound was surrounded with a moat, but there had to be another way out. No one would design defensive fortifications without an alternate method of escape.

  Sorrell was no stranger to castles. She might have been a naval officer, but that had not stopped her from devouring every scrap of literature on siege warfare. And in a city like this, the builders would not be concerned about a besieging army. That meant a tunnel would be short.

  All these thoughts raced through Sorrell’s mind as she backed away from the gate. She reached a conclusion an instant later: if there was a hidden tunnel, it had to go under the moat; which meant she needed to find stairs that led down.

  Shouts rang out in the street outside the walls. Sorrell turned and sprinted towards the nearest door on the perimeter of the courtyard. The sack bounced on her back as she ran. She reached her free hand to open the door, but the ice-covered stump glanced off the handle and slid across the wooden planks. Sorrell gasped at the pain of the impact.

  With only seconds to spare, Sorrell used her chin to pin the sack to her shoulder and flung the door open with her good hand. On the other side, she slammed it shut and pressed her back against it. She was almost certain she had not been seen.

  Sorrell lunged away from the door and ran down the narrow passage. She kept the outer wall on her right to ensure she never strayed too far from the moat. Any escape tunnel entrance would be built as close to the moat as possible. Sorrell kicked in several doors and gave the rooms behind them a cursory search, but nothing jumped out at her as a possible hidden escape route. If the tunnel was too well hidden, she was doomed.

  The third door she checked opened into a privy. It was nothing more than a closet containing a bench with a single hole in the center. Sorrell turned away in disgust, starting to worry she had been wrong about a way out. But before continuing down the hallway, she paused. She sniffed the air. What sort of privy did not stink?

  Sorrell dropped her sack and grabbed the oily torch that burned on the wall next to the door. Back inside the tiny room, she stuck the torch in an empty hook and searched the bench. It shifted beneath her hand, and she pulled it away from the wall. Beneath the bench was a dark hole big enough for a man to fit through. The surrounding stone was suspiciously clean.

  Excited, Sorrell took the torch and dropped it down the hole. It only fell a few feet before landing on a flat ledge below. The faint torchlight revealed the entrance to a tunnel just tall enough to crawl through. It took some work with only one hand, but Sorrell was able to lower her sack into the hole and then follow it down. That done, she stood to her full height and pulled the bench back into place.

  Confident that the secret tunnel was hidden again, Sorrell started crawling. She grasped the mouth of the sack and the torch in the same hand. Her injury forced her to crawl on the forearm of her right arm, which slowed her down and made her hiss in pain every time she bumped her bloody stump against the ground.

  Soon, Sorrell reached stairs that descended steeply downward. These were easier to navigate than the low tunnel. At the bottom of the stairs, the passage was high enough for her to walk as long as she crouched. It ran in a straight line for a hundred paces, and Sorrell knew she was passing underneath the moat.

  After climbing another set of stairs on the other side of the moat, Sorrell crawled through a second tunnel until she reached a wooden barrier. There was no handle on this side, and when she put her weight against it, it did not budge. Suppressing a sudden surge of panic, Sorrell forced herself to slow down and carefully search the walls next to the exit. No one would build an escape tunnel without a way to open the door.

  Her fingers found a stone that protruded from the wall and she pushed on it. It sank into the wall with an audible ‘click,’ and the barrier in front of her slid away. Sorrell took hold of her sack and torch, and she scrambled out of the tunnel. When she stood, she found herself in a large room filled with shelves. They were laden with various supplies, none of which looked useful to Sorrell. She turned and checked behind her—the secret entrance was a wooden shelf like the rest that had slid out of the way.

  Sorrell did not waste time trying to find the switch to close the tunnel. If Morricant’s tomb keepers discovered that someone came this way, it would not matter as long as Sorrell was far away by the time they did. Using the torch to light her path, Sorrell worked her way through the crowded room as she searched for the way out.

  Finally, she found what had to be an exit. She extinguished and discarded the torch, hid her wounded arm in her sleeve, and pushed through the door into the city outside. She found herself standing in a dank alleyway. On her right, the alley terminated in a dead end, and to her left, it opened up to the nearest street. But between her and her goal sat the ugliest, meanest looking hound Sorrell had ever seen.

  The canine was chained to the wall and clearly used as a sentry for the storehouse behind Sorrell. The dog noticed her immediately, and it stalked towards her, only stopping when it reached the limit of its leash. It bared its teeth and let out a menacing growl. Unless she wanted to brave those drooling jaws, Sorrell was stuck. There was no room in the narrow alley to get around the animal.

  Sorrell tested the heft of her sack in her good hand. Maybe she could swing it like a cudgel to force the hound back. She only needed to distract the dog for a few seconds to dash by, and the sack had a good weight to it. But she discarded the idea. She did not want to risk losing her disguise.

  As she edged closer to the hound, an idea came to Sorrell. The thought made her sick, but she knew it was her best chance. Revolted by what she was about to do, she dropped her sack and reached into her pocket. The fingers of her severed hand were curled up like the legs of some fleshy spider. Sorrell pulled the dismembered hand out, and before she lost her nerve, flung it at the wall behind the dog.

  The hound tracked the grotesque projectile, and the scent must have been too curious to ignore, because the animal turned to investigate when the hand struck the wall and dropped to the ground. As soon as the animal turned its haunches to her, Sorrell sprinted for the street. The dog whirled, barking, and tried to snap at her, but Sorrell was out of reach.

  To her relief, the animal did not make a racket at her escape. Its attention was preoccupied by something else. She shut out the image of the dog gnawing on her dead hand from her mind.

  Sorrell had been right about the escape tunnel: it had not been very long. She emerged only two blocks from the House Gorvan compound. Tomb keepers were swarming through the gate, and the street was filled with curious onlookers. Sorrell had escaped without a moment to spare.

  Before anyone noticed the strange appearance of a single servant, Sorrell set out through the city. The noonday sun burned hot overhead, which made it a simple matter to travel eastward. Her mind switched into combat readiness. She felt the familiar surge of adrenaline as her heightened senses reached out and identified every person she encountered as a possible enemy combatant. The phantom fingers on her missing hand itched for her cutlass.

  Her disguise must have been convincing, because no one gave Sorrell a second look as she hurried on her imaginary errand. Within the hour, she stood outside the high walls of what she was certain must be the slavers’ quarter. It was the biggest compound on the east side of the city, and as she lingered around the gate, Sorrell watched a steady flow of foot-traffic come and go.

  A pair of relaxed tomb keepers stood guard at the gate, and Sorrell spent a few long minutes working up her courage to walk between them. She observed the other servants and slaves, trying to determine how to act. It seemed that the others completely ignored the guards. Sorrell decided to do the same.

  Scarcely daring to breathe, she approached the gate. One of the tomb keepers glanced at her, and then the woman’s gaze slid away. Nothing about Sorrell
warranted further inspection. A few seconds later, she slipped inside the compound. She dare not risk stopping to get her bearings—she was supposed to know where she was going, but Sorrell slowed her pace.

  The main entrance of the massive building reared up in front of Sorrell. Stone steps led up to ornate double doors of polished wood. A complex arrangement of stained-glass windows surrounded these doors, the riot of colors glowing in the afternoon sun. Giant, flowing banners hung from the roof of the structure, each one covering the wall between the evenly spaced windows of each floor.

  Lacrael had said to use the servants’ entrance. Thankfully, Sorrell was not the only slave entering the compound. She followed another woman around the left side of the building and through a narrow door set into the wall.

  Sorrell counted three floors as she ascended the stairs, and at the fourth door, she entered the building. The hallway stretched away to the left and right, empty except for the solid wooden doors separated by intervals of ten paces. Sorrell turned right. Following Lacrael’s instructions, she stopped outside the sixth door and rapped lightly against it with her knuckles. The sack sat next to her feet on the floor.

  After a moment, the door swung open. Sorrell stared at the gray mask of a forsaken. Her heart skipped a beat. Was this the right apartment? Had she made a mistake? Before her doubt got the better of her, the forsaken lifted a hand and raised her mask. It was Lacrael. The look of complete surprise on her face would have been comical in different circumstances.

  Sorrell had never been happier to see a familiar face. Lacrael stepped aside and beckoned Sorrell to enter the room.

  “How did you get here?” Lacrael asked after closing the door. “What’s happened?”

  “We’re out of time,” Sorrell said. “If we’re going to act, we have to do it now.”