by L M Feldt
The King slams the door as he storms out and I am left alone with his Guard, a man who likes to force women to lie with him. If he tries anything I’ll be happy to be the first to say no.
“We are alone now.” He stands near the chair the King has just vacated. “Things might go easier on you if I speak to him on your behalf.” His meaning is clear enough but I have always had an ornery streak.
“I think things are going fine.”
“I am trying to say that if you are nice to me I will help you.” His eyes narrow and he paces, notably out of my reach.
“Really? I didn’t think nice was your thing.” I bite back a laugh and give him a cold stare. I see from his face that he knows I am referring to Zara.
“She should have been happy to be with me. Things don’t have to be difficult.”
“Your right. They don’t.” I pat the seat next to me, invitingly, but something keeps him wary. Good sense probably. Too bad, I was looking forward to getting him within my reach.
“The King is right. Some time alone will do you good.” He strides to the door and pauses. “Don’t bother trying to escape. There will be guards posted at the bottom of the stairs and we are too high up for you to survive the fall.” Then he too leaves, slamming the door behind him.
A lot of drama with these guys.
I wait, encouraged that the guards will be posted below and not right outside the door. Grabbing a couple of links of the iron chain I give an experimental tug. The attachment to the wall is solid enough but the link that attaches to the manacle is poorly crafted. The metal is porous and old, weak at the thin spot that loops through and keeps the two parts of the manacle together. I stand and pull the chain taut. All I have to work with is my wings and aside from driving them through the mavros’s temple, I’ve never directed them. I could easily take my own foot off.
Nervous but determined to be free, I dig down to that volatile place within me. I make a mental picture of Swarez’s face, imagining fending him off, the fear of being held down and forced…. Electric fire whips down my spine. My wings are up and have lifted, flicking out in a swift and angry movement. I flex once and then concentrate the force of the tip into the weak spot of the chain.
The impact is jarring and I have misjudged the amount of force needed. I am free, but I have broken the bench and gouged the inner part of my leg. I growl in anger at my own inept use of the steel wings. They may be a part of me but they are also a weapon and need to be trained with a lot more before I am any good with them.
Limping, now that I have further damaged the leg already cut in my fight with the King’s Champion, I head to the nearest window. I grasp the sill and gaze out hopefully. All I see are stars. I am looking out the second window when the door opens. I see it is Elhier and I relax. He has dinner.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.” Actually both wounds burn more than I’m happy about. I leave the second window and it’s view of the courtyard. Only one left. Perplexed, the guard places my dinner plate on the only piece of solid furniture left in the tower. The King’s chair.
“What are you doing?”
“Come look!” I wave him over. We stand, should to shoulder and look out over the top of the jungle. There, in the distance are twinkling lights.
“What is that?!”
“My friends and I think it is another city, maybe a free city. It is where we were headed when we wound up here by accident.” I tell him. Mutation is accepted here, unlike the city I’d come from, but it is not free. We cannot make our home here.
Thirty Nine
Elhier has agreed to find our confiscated supplies and stash them somewhere easy to get to once I make it down to the dungeons. I am worried for my friends but at least they are all in the same place now. I sense the guard is intrigued by my determination to find the city of lights but in truth I don’t want him to come with us. I don’t think he understands how difficult it is out in the wilds. Also, as far as I can tell, he has no twist. Everyone in our group has some gift from their mutation and without that edge we would never have made it this far. We cannot afford the liability of bringing a norm with us.
I eat well and use a scrap of cloth from the courteously provided napkin, to bind my lower leg. The shallow slash on my thigh I wash with the wine and leave to dry, hoping it will heal on it’s own. I am encouraged. I have seen the lights, no doubt the reason why no one is ever allowed up here. Once we are away from this place we will continue our search.
I am exhausted. Once my belly is full, the shock of still being alive is wearing off. I truly hadn’t expected to walk away from that fight. In some way I think I had accepted that it was my last stand. I wasn’t happy to die but at least it would have been on my terms, fighting, not drowning. I make a pallet from the cushions of the broken bench and lay my head down. I am wrung out emotionally and tears dampen the soft cloth.
I have always dreamed of monsters. The only restful sleep I get is when I am too tired from training or running. Tonight I would have expected a dream free night…..but it isn’t to be. It starts out surprisingly pleasant. I am sitting by a campfire eating roasted vegetables and snake. The meat is a bit greasy so after a few bites I set it aside. The fire warms my skin but isn’t too hot either. In the background I hear Aito telling one of his stories and am comforted. Suddenly, the fire recedes, the voices fade. A great sinuous tail wraps around my middle, squeezing…..I cannot breath.
With a gasp, I jerk upright…..or try to. Something is pinning me to the floor. I feel hot breath on my face and a sharp point at my ribs.
“Imagine my luck finding you asleep, your wings tucked neatly behind you.”
The King’s guard has his weight across my torso, a forearm across my neck and his knife pressed to my side. I sputter and cough until he pulls back enough that I can breath again. Fool. Kill me or stay clear.
With a burst of violence and coldfire, my wings unzip and thrust back against the floor. We are thrown forward and I punch the heel of my palm against the center of his chest, driving him back. I follow with a solid kick to his groin.
We circle each other. The lust in his eyes has cooled significantly, instead, I see his desire to teach me a lesson, spill my blood.
“You are a real bitch. Anyone ever told you that?”
I laugh.
“Usually they just think it quietly to themselves.” I reply.
He growls and lunges at me, his long knife flashing out. I block it easily with a wing and see a spark of real fear in his eyes. My confidence grows. These people are soft. They haven’t trained like I have. They haven’t survived the wilds like I have. He is stronger than me but his weapon is inferior and he lacks any true fighting experience. I land a strike on his overextended forearm and watch him wince. He is good at dishing it out, especially to helpless serving girls but hasn’t expected a true fight from me despite seeing some of what I can do.
Then he smiles and I am trying to figure out his game when the King’s heavy chair crashes into me. I stumble, shocked and feel the searing pain of a new wound on my leg. How had he gotten so close? Where the hell had the chair come from? Staggering backward and out of his reach I am astonished as he holds up his arm. Where is the cut I’d landed on his arm? I get it then and roundly chastise myself for a rookie mistake. I had underestimated him. He has a twist alright, two it seems.
“Usually I just float the King his wine glass. Silly things that amuse him.” We are circling again, both of wary now.
“Can you heal others, not just yourself?” My curiosity gets the better of me. He just looks confused as he tries to adjust to this new direction our conversation has taken.
“I guess. Don’t know.” He shrugs, unable to understand why I would ask such a thing. He is a bully all the way through to his guts. He likes leaving marks, as though the bruises are a badge of some kind. The idea of healing another person has never even occurred to him.
I lash out with the tip of a steel wing, sparks flying
as he parries at the last second. His blade is too long to be truly called a knife and too short to be a sword. It is a weapon designed for flash, no good up close and useless from a distance. He’d landed a score, marking my thigh with a red line, but that was when I’d been distracted by a flying chair. I’m all business now and he knows it. Suddenly, he steps back and tosses down his blade.
“I’m sorry.” His hands are open palms, his face a calm smile I don’t trust.
I stand, wary, waiting for a flying object or a sudden move. Instead he slowly wanders over to the King’s chair, grabs it and rights it. He puts it back in place by the fireplace, his back to me. The legs of the chair screech as they are dragged across the stone flooring. I don’t know what new game this is and I wait, unsure, and unwilling to attack an unarmed man. He senses, I think, that I am not a killer.
“I see you got free from the chains.” His back is still toward me. His shoulders and arms move and I hear a rustling sound as though he is undressing.
The tower door bursts open and I look to see what new opponent is entering the ring….but no one is there. I have fallen for another of his tricks and as the pain blossoms I realize he’d had a knife hidden on him somewhere….my knife, one of the two I’d dropped in the arena….and it is now sticking out of my side.
“This is why you will never be more than a street fighter, mere muscle. You keep trying to play by the rules. How is that working for you now?” He grins wolfishly, so proud of himself for having thrown my own knife at me and scored a hit. The fool.
I grit my teeth and pull out the knife, pressing one hand to my side to staunch the flow. The thrumming power is back, surging and filling me as the pain recedes and the anger takes me. We are back on solid ground. I know this game. I know this knife, it’s precise weight and balance, as familiar to me as my own hand. The power pools, then coils like a snake, ready. One handed I flip the handle and take the point in my fingers, then toss….all in one smooth motion, just like I have a hundred times before. My aim is true.
The guards find us in the morning, no doubt snickering all the way up the spiral stairs, laughing as they take bets on why the King’s own guard hadn’t come back down last night. I am curled in a ball under a window, pale from loss of blood. The King’s man has a two finger wide slit in his throat. It doesn’t look like much, there isn’t a wide smile beneath his chin like I would have preferred, but a perforated spine will do the trick just fine.
There is a lot of yelling. I am aware of it even though most of me has checked out. Everything seems to be happening from very far away. I am carried, down, down. At one point we are stopped and I feel a hand cupping my face. Then it is gone and there is more yelling. Down we go again. It is cooler here and smelly too. Then everything fades.
I wake next whole and healed if a little tired and cramped from sleeping on hard stone. We are back were we’d started, all packed into a tiny cell in the King’s dungeons. Elhier had been true to his word. He'd even gone a step further, getting our supplies to us rather than just hidden somewhere nearby. Fortunate, since I am not sure I would have made it without Aito’s elixir. I sense someone staring at me and roll my eyes.
“Yes, ok, you were right. Stopping at the labs in the marsh was a good idea. Happy now?”
Aito grins and says nothing.
“Did you really ask to see the tower rather than have us set free?” Asks Naoaki, fresh pain in her eyes.
“No,” I reply, “but I would have if I’d been given the option. It is the highest point anywhere around here.”
Understanding slowly lights her face.
“What did you see?” Every member of our group leans forward, eager, nervous, instantly forgiving as they comprehend my thinking. They want to know that our long journey wasn’t for this place, that the City of Lights is still out there somewhere, waiting for us.
“Yes, I saw the lights, brighter than before.” I give them the hope that I know I had craved so badly that I would leave my friends, my family to cool off in the dungeons.
With renewed energy, we redistribute our supplies and hide only necessary items on our bodies. The bags, blankets and camping gear is all left in a pile that we block with our bodies. When the time comes we must be ready to move and quickly. Now we just need a diversion and a plan.
“I had a roommate while you guys were upstairs getting wined and dined. He said that there is a huge underground river where they smelt the iron for their weapons.” Micha suggests.
“It’s a risk. We won’t know if it travels the caverns the whole way or even where it comes out.” Aito counters.
“If Fish were here he’d know.” Naoaki muses. She glances my way and I shrug. It is possible that Ash is still following us, but again, there is no way to know for sure.
“I don’t want to die by drowning. That’s no way for a warrior to go.” Khane grunts and kicks against the iron bars of our cage. They rattle and red dust rains down.
“There isn’t any other way out. We can’t go back out the way we came in and there are at least a hundred of the dungeon guards waddling around down here. We can’t fight them all.” I turn to Micha. “Did your pal tell you how to get to the river?”
“He said to follow the smell.”
“Helpful.” I sigh, irritated.
“Actually, it is.” Aito eyes brighten. “Many cities built their sewers to filter into underground rivers. It was a cost effective way of waste removal.”
“Disgusting!”
“Ug.”
“Wait, now we’re talking about possibly drowning in raw sewage?” Khane’s outrage is understandable. Not my first choice either, but risking the river looks like our only option.
Forty
The distraction works beautifully. Micha’s guess that there might be a few dead down here was well reasoned. We end up with a few more then than is entirely helpful and have to shoulder them aside as we push through the crowd. Khane’s ax had been among the items returned to us and it makes short work of our cage. He opens a few more as well but at first the prisoners can’t seem to decide if they want to join the flood of undead or stay huddled in their cells. Once they realize the remnants pose no threat they burst out and add a nice touch to the chaos. We follow the smell of sewage and find the river, carefully skirting the drainage holes from the city above and runoff spouts from the smelting towers. There are surprisingly few guards here and we wade out into the river proper without having to engage them. They point and clack their beaks but refuse to enter the fetid water. I can’t blame them. It is truly awful and pinching my nose does nothing to alleviate the stench.
It is black out in the water and as the only one who can see in the dark I lead my friends, moving with the current. We squelch forward and try not to think about what is in the water with us. I can see that the canyon ceiling drops lower further on. It isn’t until I hear the crash of falling water that I realize what is coming up.
“There’s a falls ahead!” I yell.
We struggle to stay near the edge and out of the stronger current but the walls are closing in, funneling us toward the drop off. I grab the person nearest me and one by one we form a chain. I don’t want to die by downing in a sewer….but at least, whatever happens, I am with my friends, my family. A clacking beak and waving tentacles sweeps past us. One of the guards, no doubt forced to go after us, has been swept into the current and now rushes toward the waterfall. His distress is palpable and soon he disappears altogether in a very human sounding scream. Next to me Naoaki stumbles and falls, dragging me down with her. We are all linked and now we are just as committed as the guard had been.
“Try not to swallow any water!” Aito screams at us, as though drinking sewer water is the greatest of our problems…..not the final landing.
We plunge over the edge and there is a whooshing feeling and then a sense of weightlessness. I can hear screaming all around me but I take Aito words to heart and take a deep breath. It takes forever and then I am suddenly sucked down,
deep underwater. My least favorite place. Disoriented I panic almost instantly. My wings snap open and I flail, desperate to find my way to the surface. My lungs are burning and I have my eyes squeezed tight to protect them from the water.
Then something bumps me. It is impossible to be any more terrified so I simply choose to swim in the direction I am pushed in. My head is about to explode and I know I don’t have a lot of time left. I pump with my wings, using the last of my oxygen for a final push that launches me forward. I have nearly lost hope when a hand grabs my hair and hauls me out of the water.
I lie panting, sucking in great lungfuls of air. I am spent, without even the strength to pull in my spread wings. The pebbles below me are rounded and smooth to the touch. They press softly against my body and reassure me that I am on solid land. I made it….somewhere.
