“They will notice he’s missing eventually,” Ulena whispered, checking their prisoner’s bonds.
“That doesn’t matter. We only have a few days remaining to find Artemi, anyway.” Four days before the pain began...
Her brows knitted together in confusion.
“Perhaps I owe you some more honesty. Artemi is... ah - she’s my... wife.”
Ulena stared, unblinking for a good few minutes.
“Only recently... it was just... she came to visit my family and ah, she proposed a marriage without really knowing what she was doing, and so... it happened.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Oh, light of Achellon, you slept with her?! And she permitted it?”
Morghiad was beginning to feel
very uncomfortable. “It was... an accident.”
“An accident.”
“Yes.”
“So you just... fell on top of her and she said, ‘Oh, you can stay there’?”
“Not exactly. Anyway, the details are hardly any of your business. We have to find her soon.”
“But she hates you!” Ulena started pacing. “Well, all this devotion to finding her makes a lot more sense now. You want to save your own sorry self! What a mess!”
Morghiad folded his arms.
Perhaps Artemi did hate him, and perhaps she had a reason to. But he did not hate her. None of that mattered anymore. None of it. “We have to find her soon.”
It was hot, very hot in this new building. The ceilings were made of dried reeds and wooden struts instead of stone, and the only ventilation was
through the gaps between those reeds. There were no windows and no furniture, just bare adobe walls lined with the odd crack. Artemi had tried kicking at them several times, but they were not as feeble as they appeared.
She tugged at her chains again, though quite why she was no longer sure. They were deeply anchored in what must surely have been the toughest cement ever poured. How long had she been here? A few days? A week? Her captors seemed to prefer her unconscious, which made keeping track of time very difficult indeed.
A new use for you, and a
profitable one at that, Gilkore had said. With your power, we will make enough money to buy out the king, his wife and their children!
At first she had thought they wanted her to wield for them, perhaps destroy bank vaults or threaten to burn down the palace in Deva, but she had been mistaken. Gilkore and his crony sword masters were trading something very valuable, but quite what it was had not been revealed to her. It did not matter, of course. In a few more days she would be dead, and there would be no money to be made from a wielder corpse. At least, she hoped there would not be.
Another drop of sweat departed from the tip of her nose, and landed with a plap on the mud floor. Blazes, but when had she last had a drink of water? “I’m thirsty!” she shouted at the door. No one had answered her calls yet, and whether anyone was actually out there remained to be seen. There were some noises that came periodically from the distance, however. She was not quite sure, but they sounded like disturbed whisperings and murmurs. There were also occasional shrieks and cries. She assumed those came from other
prisoners.
Just then, the door opened a fraction, and a bowl of water was pushed into the room by a booted foot. Its owner’s face was too shrouded in shadows to be recognisable, but the body shape was female. She slammed the door behind her.
It took Artemi several goes to hook the bowl with one of her feet and bring it close enough to drink from, but soon she was crouched and slurping eagerly from it like a dog. How Morghiad would have laughed to see her like that! She could hear his insults now, and she deeply wished he was
there to give them. It had been a hard thing to admit, but she missed his pouting, arrogant face and his superior sneers.
Her visit to Haeron had revealed another side to him. Yes, he was still a foul-mooded, unsociable lizard’s dropping of a man, but he had shown... something. The kiss had been rather pleasant. He could have done more of that in their time together, certainly.
The water was stale and tasted wrong, but Artemi licked the bowl dry and immediately felt much better for it. After that, she curled up on the floor
and slept. There was not much more that she could do with her time here but sleep and dream.
When she awoke, a sharp, deep pain echoed from the core of her body, down through her limbs and outward, forcing her fingers to curl into fists. It hurt like being thrown off a tall building and then having one’s muscles ripped open, and it left her gasping for breath for minutes afterward. Fire of fires, it had started.
The shops were closing down for another night, and already the air had grown much colder in the absence of the sun. Morghiad pulled his coat tighter around himself. He was becoming more than a little frustrated. Zandrin had given them nothing over the last three days, and he seemed strong-willed enough to hold out for longer. It had turned out that the man
they had chosen for their investigation was likely the worst one of them all. He cackled at his tortures, he hummed through his pain and he frequently shouted obscenities about Artemi. It had not taken him long to understand Morghiad’s affection for her, and he had exploited that to his advantage. Morghiad seated himself on a bench at the side of Hestavos’ high street, and tried to think of what to do next. He had to do something, but quite what that should be was unknown to him. He had considered taking another blade master to torture, but extracting information from a fresh body could
take days. And going after Gilkore with threats would get him nothing. Blazes, where were they keeping her? And how far would he have to travel to find her? She could already be too distant for him to catch up with her.
He missed her. Her smell, the stubborn set to her jaw that no man could ever soften with reason, her hair... Morghiad reached inside his pocket and pulled out the solitary hair fibre. It was cold in his hand now, completely devoid of any of the fires that had once flowed through it. Just an ordinary, red-gold hair.
The sound of horses trotting in
time prompted him to raise his head. It was Gilkore and two of the blade masters. Where would they be going at this time of night? Morghiad kept his head down, but someone slid onto the bench next to him.
“They’re going somewhere, Mor.” It was Ulena. “Somewhere important.”
“Then we had better make sure they are properly guarded.” He checked that his sword and daggers were all readily available to him before he rose, and padded quietly behind the column. At the rear was a covered cart, which appeared to be mostly empty.
They kept pace with it, then Morghiad lifted the canvas and ushered Ulena in. He clambered in behind her. “I hope this is going somewhere useful,” he muttered.
“I overheard them talking about The Farm,” Ulena replied.
Farm? One of the symbols in the mysterious ledgers had looked like the Sunidaran for farm. The only farms that Morghiad knew of in this area were in the Tavos Canyons. Even that was too arid to have a river, and all of the irrigation water was pumped up from the ground with great difficulty. If they were headed there, the journey
would be over an hour and bumpy.
It was very rough, and too long. When the cart finally stopped, his bones were still shaking from the experience. Carefully, he peered out from under the canvas of the cart. All he could see was a wall, blackened by the darkness of the night. Gilkore’s voice was distant, and those of the other blade masters were growing more so. “We move,” he whispered.
In total silence, they slid from the back of the wagon and onto the ground beneath. It was too dark to see much of the area around them, and there were no burning lamps to show
the way. As he stooped to crouch, something shot through his muscles with agonizing pain. He grunted loudly, and gripped the bed of the cart to support himself, but it rolled forward under his weight. The wheels squealed noisily, and the horse that had been left tethered to it whinnied.
“Blazes!�
�� Ulena hissed, grabbing his arm and hauling him to another area of... wherever it was they were. Lights soon appeared from a building to their left, and they marched toward the source of the noise. With the flames progressing along a path, it became clear that they were in a walled
enclosure. A broad, low-level house lay at one end, its windows and doors black holes to whatever lay beyond. There was a peculiar noise coming from there. It sounded like... whispering.
The blade masters who had come to investigate the cart were Masters Rollow and Terkari. They grumbled a little as they checked over the horse but eventually departed, satisfied that nothing was amiss.
“What excuse do you have for that spectacular show of clumsiness, Hirrahan?” Ulena did not sound impressed.
“I think it was nalka.” Blood of his fathers, but it had hurt!
“Let’s hope we’re in the right place, then.”
...So that he could save his wife by making himself into a horrible creature of legend, hopefully. It was a strange thing to hope for, alright. “The building entrance is dark now. Let’s
go.”
They crept in through the doorway, but found themselves in another dark courtyard. It was filled with objects that were about waisthigh, thousands of them.
“They’re barrels.” Ulena pushed at one of them. “There’s something in them.”
“Careful!”
There was the sound of wood scuffing against wood, and then a pop. She had removed one of the lids. Morghiad came to stand next to her. It was hard to see what was inside, especially when everything was black, and the contents looked black. While it was wonderful that their presence was hidden, it made it impossible to see anything properly. Where were the blasted stars?! He looked up, and saw that the sky was obscured by something. What was...?
“Oh light!” Ulena started coughing and spluttering.
“Shh!” Morghiad pulled her down amongst the barrels. “You put that stuff in your mouth?”
There was the brief sound of her hawking spit onto the ground, and then a pause while she caught her breath. “It’s pinh. Barrels of pinh poison.”
“But are they buying or selling?” If there was one thing Morghiad knew about better than any Sunidaran, it was trade. Hirrahans were the true masters of it. Gilkore had to sell something to make his money, and so far it looked like he was making and selling eisiels.
The sound of the murmuring whispers came to him again. But the pinh... was that to keep them under control? “Are you alright?”
“I feel sick.”
“We need to keep going.” Morghiad hooked an arm around her and led her to the end of the corridor of barrels. There were two buildings ahead of them now. One shone with the dim light of torches, and the other was pitch dark. “We’ll try the empty one first.”
As Morghiad moved forward, he felt something change in the air. It fizzed like a Blaze form of some kind,
though for some reason he could not see it clearly. What he needed was a wielder. In any case, they passed through it unhurt.
The building they entered was completely devoid of light, and that was more than a little unnerving. Morghiad’s feet kept touching things as he walked, and that strange sound was growing louder with each step he took. They continued through the structure, having no idea of where they were going. They needed a light! A match, a lamp, anything! Abruptly, his wish was answered. Illumination filtered in through the windows. Someone was
coming.
He and Ulena crouched down behind... something... and waited patiently. The man’s face was not visible, but he strode toward them with strong, purposeful paces. The torchlight he brought with him revealed that they were in a surprisingly large room.
There were figures inside it, lying on their backs. They weren’t moving. Morghiad’s breath caught. Dead wielders?
Instinctively he checked on Artemi’s stream. She was still alive, still burning through his consciousness. He permitted himself to breathe once
more. More light filtered into the room, moving more sharply past the items that obstructed it. He could see the bodies better now, and they were... hollow. The orange glow shone right through their shells and into the air beyond; they looked like the empty spider egg casings he’d seen glued to Fate’s ceilings. But there was something else different about these bodies – something about their teeth.
“They were eisiels,” Ulena whispered. “Sucked dry.”
Could that be where all those barrels of poisonous liquid had come from? It was an intuitive leap to make,
but he knew that eisiels were often described as blackened and oily in legend. Wielders to make eisiels, eisiels to make pinh and pinh to sell. If the poison was that tricky to obtain, it could command a very high price, and it was apparently being produced in very large quantities here. The Sunidaran army rarely used it, but he knew the Hirrahans certainly did. Was his father involved in this trade? Morghiad made a mental note: if he escaped from here alive and found Artemi, he would write to his family with the truth. Blazes, he would write to every king and queen that lived with
that truth! He ducked his head as the soldier walked past. There was a waft of cigar smoke that followed him, and that meant it had to be Gilkore.
They stepped out from their hiding place once he had moved into the next room, and followed him at the periphery of the area his torch illuminated. It did make finding their way much easier, but it also demanded that their feet be quieter. Gilkore was not an unobservant man, and most cadets had learned to their cost that he had the ears of an owl.
They crept through long, winding corridors and small, narrow
stairs. On the way they passed some peculiar machinery, arranged with tubes, needles and pumps. Much of it looked like instruments of torture. They also passed through more barriers of Blaze that Morghiad could not identify. He tried to think of what they might be for, since he already knew what sound barriers and partitions looked like. What would Gilkore wish to keep from moving between the barriers? Certain people? Eisiels? Morghiad had read that Blaze did not work upon eisiels, though just how reliable that information had been was another problem.
Ulena paused ahead of him. So had the light. With haste, they each secreted themselves in a dark corner of the room, and waited. Morghiad was the first to move when nothing came back toward them. Slowly, he peered around the edge of the door and into the chamber that Gilkore now occupied. It was broad, with about ten sturdy-looking doors leading from it. Candle sconces hung all along the adobe walls, and Gilkore had seen to igniting several of them. One of the heavy doors was open, and a light shone from inside.
From within came the sounds of chains rattling, and low voices. One of them was female. Morghiad crossed over to Ulena’s hiding place as quickly as he dared. “I think this is where they’re keeping Artemi, and maybe the others.” If they were still alive after all these years. Blazes, years of making eisiels. What would that do to a person?
“What do we do, attack Gilkore?”
“Not yet. He’ll call for help and we’ll be trapped...” Morghiad considered using Artemi’s power, but she could be unconscious or worse, quenched. If there were more wielders
here, Gilkore would certainly have seen to getting them quenched. “We wait until he’s gone, then we get them out safely.”
Gilkore dallied amongst his pets, or wrens as he liked to call them, for some time before he decided he had done enough. If anything, it meant they weren’t currently making eisiels. That was something to be glad for. Morghiad did not want to think of how men were obtained as candidates to become eisiels, or why they would want to. Perhaps they did not know their fate.
At length, a door slammed shut and the captain’s long, heavy strides
moved out into the corridor before them. His sphere of torchlight went with him, but their hiding place did not descend into complete darkness. Several of the candles in the nearby room had been left lit. “Let’s set some wielders free,” Morghiad said quietly, before moving
into the door-filled chamber.
It was not empty. A grizzled man, about four feet wide and twice as tall leapt from the corner, bellowing alarm. There was little time to act, but Morghiad dodged the initial attack and thrust a fist into the side of the guard’s head. He stumbled, and Ulena wrapped a rag around his mouth to bring him down. It was impressive, given that she was barely five feet tall herself.
The guard did some violent thrashing as he was held to the ground, but together both he and Ulena succeeded in knocking him unconscious and tying him up. Once done, they waited for the approach of anyone who had heard the man’s yell. No one came.
“Time to open those doors.”
When they opened the first one, a surprisingly pleasant smell greeted them, and so did the gaunt face of a woman. She was naked, thin and
chained to the wall, but she was unexpectedly clean for a prisoner. Her cell was immaculate, populated with wool rugs, soft hangings and a bed. It was at odds with the rest of the building. Morghiad grabbed the clutch of keys from the dozing guard and began undoing her bonds. “What is your name?” Her eyes had some years to them.
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