Even now, even free, she wasn’t sure how to hope.
She somehow made it back to the fork in the tunnels, the last place she’d seen Eithan. She dove down the dark tunnel he’d been taken down. She had to find him.
* * *
Admittedly, Nicce wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do when she found Eithan. They would talk. They would decide. If he wanted her to, she could help him use crystals on the bars, trying to stay out of sight. Or she could leave crystals with him and try to go on ahead, maybe get the other knights to come back and help break him out. Maybe he’d be faster with scraping his bars. Maybe he’d be out by the time she came back.
She knew she should have a better plan, but what was most important was seeing him.
Part of her knew that it might be better for her to get out without going to him. She could not break him out of his cell easily, after all, and wandering around only increased the chance that she would be captured again. But she couldn’t abandon him. She had to let him know that she was out. She had to give him hope. And to speak to him, look at him, touch him…
Eithan was all that was important.
And it was strange, because she had not allowed herself to think of him much during all the years inside the cell. Thinking about Eithan was too painful, and she had done whatever she could to block the pain. It was only recently, after the success with the crystals, that she’d thought of him again with any lingering thoughts, and it still hurt. Every thought of Eithan was an icy stab of longing. Agonizing.
Here in this corridor, it was much the same as in the one she’d come from. Cells lined the walls, some empty, some filled. She squinted at each huddled pile of rags, trying to see if the occupant looked like Eithan, but so far, none of them did.
At one point, she looked into a cell, and the person inside met her gaze. She was an old woman in the ratty remnants of a black dress. Her gray hair was long, tangled, and matted, a rat’s nest of a halo around the woman’s face.
“Well, well,” said the woman.
Nicce swallowed. No one had really noticed her thus far, or if they had, they had only spit nonsense at her, their own private ramblings of their solitary brains—probably like the stories she’d told herself, she thought. She didn’t want to speak to the woman, so she averted her gaze and turned to look at the cell across from hers.
“Wait,” said the woman. “I can help you.”
Nicce turned back to her. “Help me with what? You don’t even know what I’m trying to do.”
“To get out, right?” said the woman. “I know the way. Let me out, too. I’ll help you.”
Nicce shook her head. “Sorry. It took me a long time to get out. I had to scrape down the bars.” She ran her fingers over them. “I can’t help you.” She was sorry. She felt an odd twinge in her chest. It was so strange to be speaking to someone besides herself. It was a good feeling, but it hurt too.
“Scraped them with what?” said the woman. She touched her chest. “My name is Jala, by the way.”
Nicce winced. Maybe it was knowing the woman’s name, but she showed her the crystals she’d brought. “With these, but I can’t give them to you. They’re for someone else. My…” Why didn’t she have a word for what she and Eithan were to each other? It didn’t matter. “I have to find him. I can’t stay here and talk to you.”
“Where did you get those?” said Jala.
“I made them,” said Nicce.
Jala’s eyes widened. “You’re a god.”
“I’m not. My father is a god, but I’m—”
“Here.” Jala moved quickly, especially for someone of her age. She touched the lock on her cell. “You have light? Pour your light into the lock.”
Nicce furrowed her brow. “That won’t work. It takes time to—”
“Do it,” said Jala. “Please?”
Maybe it was the please that got to her. Nicce didn’t know. But she found herself stepping closer and picking up the lock in one hand. The inside of the corridor lit up brightly with her light, but no one seemed to notice or care. She poured her liquid light into the lock.
Jala thrust her hand through the bars. “Cut me.”
“Do you have light too?” said Nicce.
“No,” said Jala. “Do it.”
Nicce did, using one of her crystals.
Jala squeezed her hand around the wound, whispering in a harsh, guttural language that Nicce didn’t know. Jala dripped her blood onto the lock, the lock went cold, very cold.
Her liquid light hardened quickly, crystallizing.
The lock cracked.
Nicce smashed the lock against the bars and it broke in two. She stepped back, shaking her head. “Blood magic? You know blood magic.”
Jala smiled. “Not enough to get out on my own, unfortunately. But the two of us together, well… who knows?” She pushed open the door to her cell and joined Nicce.
Nicce was glad that she’d stopped for this woman after all. “I’m Nicce.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Jala. She pointed. “This is the way out.”
“I’m looking for someone,” said Nicce. “Come with me, please? If we could do that together on his lock, we could get him out.”
“Of course,” said Jala. “Lead the way.” She gestured.
The two took off together down the corridor, and Nicce resumed looking into each and every cell she came to, hoping to find Eithan.
But he wasn’t there. Each time they rounded a bend, she hoped anew.
Still nothing.
Then, they rounded a bend and nearly smacked into one of the headless dirt creatures.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The creature lumbered toward them, reaching out with all of its four arms. Nicce stumbled backward, but she only ran into the wall.
The creature seized her arm and yanked her against itself. It pulled her, dragging her feet against the floor as she struggled, and Nicce could see that it was going to throw her in an empty cell up ahead.
But then Jala was rushing at the thing, picking at the scab that had formed on her wrist, and speaking in that strange harsh language. She slapped her palm onto the creature, and it shuddered once, several clods of dirt shaking free when it did.
Then it went still, its grip on Nicce loosening.
“How did you do that?” said Nicce.
“Another will be along in a moment,” said Jala. “Help me.”
Together, they rolled the creature into the empty cell, shutting the door on it.
“Come, let’s go.” Jala took Nicce by the hand and they hurried down the corridor, away from the creature.
They hurried off, frightened of being seen by another of the creatures.
After rounding two bends, they heard the noise of something approaching. Jala stopped, looking about.
Nicce spied a cell and tried to tug the old woman into it with her. They could hide here. The creature would assume they belonged there, and ignore them.
“Not in the same cell,” said Jala, shaking her head, pointing at another empty cell next to it.
Nicce let go of her and headed towards it.
They removed the locks on both cell doors, hoping the creatures wouldn’t notice. Could they see if they had no heads? If they couldn’t, it wouldn’t matter if they were both in one cell, would it?
Seconds later, a creature appeared to spray the cells and they were silent as the water rushed at them, a punishing and frigid spray.
Finally, the creature moved on, and Nicce shook herself, wringing the wetness from her hair. She shivered against the wall. “Another will be by with food? That is the way of it where I was imprisoned.”
“Yes,” said Jala. “We must wait and then we should be free of the jailers entirely for the day. Why were you locked up here?”
“I was trying to kill the gods,” said Nicce.
Jala laughed in delight. “How marvelous.”
“And you?”
“Theft,” said Jala.
“What did you
steal?”
“I don’t even remember anymore,” said Jala. “I’ve been here a long time. I haven’t been thinking about myself, not in many years. I think about other things to pass the time. I tell myself stories.”
“Me too,” said Nicce, feeling a kinship with the woman. “What kind of stories? Stories you make up?”
“No, stories I remember,” said Jala. “Stories about the gods.”
“Ah,” said Nicce. She knew many of the stories about the gods.
“Stories about the creatures before the gods,” said Jala. “The ones who made the gods.”
“Wait, what?” said Nicce. “I haven’t heard this story. What creatures made the gods?”
“Creatures too horrible for human comprehension,” said Jala. “Creatures that are indescribable. To be in their presence, to see them, is so much as to stretch the human mind to its breaking point. The old things. The ageless ones. Things with no names and matchless strength and power. Things that come from elsewhere, from other realms, from beyond the confines of our own world.”
Nicce shivered again, but she wasn’t sure if it was entirely because of the cold. She thought of the way she had felt once, gazing into the gaping maw of a nightmare in the dark forest. “Do you know of the nightmares?”
“They are not the same thing,” said Jala. “The nightmares are nothing but dumb beasts with no real power. They are of the same place, but they are to old ones as rats are to humans.”
“But they are both from that other realm,” said Nicce. “It’s only… I don’t understand. The gods seem so human. How are they from another realm?”
“It is only a story,” said Jala. “I can’t verify its truthfulness. But in the story, the gods come from humans.”
“How? You just said that the old ones were from another world.”
“In the story, some humans found their way into the old ones’ world. Many of them died. Some were eaten by the things in that other world. And some were changed by the old ones. Irrevocably changed, turned to strange monstrous things.”
“And those were the gods?” said Nicce.
“No,” said Jala. “The power of the old ones, it was too much for those humans. They were killed by the power. All but Oea, who was frightfully strong, who survived.
“Mother Earth,” whispered Nicce. “The Mother of us all.”
“Yes,” said Jala. “She and the others, the mutated ones, they survived the power tearing them apart for long enough in order to mate with humans, and their offspring are the gods we know. Maliatha. Aitho. Yanna. Phir. Sullo.”
Ciaska was third generation, then. Nicce remembered Feteran saying this, that Nicce’s mother had been Maliatha, the goddess of death, who had ceased to be. Her father, Phir, was also dead.
“The gods banded together. They killed the old ones. And when the old ones died, the other realm was practically destroyed. It was left as a wasteland where nothing grows and the sun is covered by the dark mists, where everything is death,” said Jala.
“Yes,” said Nicce. “The nightmare realm.”
“It’s only a story,” said Jala.
And then they fell quiet, because another creature had come by with what passed for food in the dungeons. That didn’t stop Nicce from eating it, however.
When that creature was gone, she let herself out of her cell and found that Jala was already out, her white hair hanging wetly around her face.
“If the power the old ones put into the first generation of gods was too much for them,” said Nicce, “could it be that the power that resides in the gods now is also too much? Maybe that’s why they have to make the crystals. Maybe if they don’t let the power out, it kills them from within.”
“You’re taking my story very seriously,” said Jala.
“If so,” said Nicce, “then we’d only have to prevent them from making their crystals. If we could put them to sleep somehow, drug them for long enough that their own power would destroy them, we could be free of them all.”
“I see that you’re still intent on trying to finish what got you thrown in here in the first place.” Jala was amused.
Nicce didn’t answer. She thought about it, and she didn’t know. She remembered being on the boat with Eithan, simply happy to have him alive, sure that she had pushed too hard, too fast. But she also remembered being worried about what Eithan had suggested, that they live, just live, nothing else. And it was all so long ago. What she most remembered was the way she’d finally gotten out of her cell.
She’d given up so many times. If she hadn’t given up so often, mightn’t she have gotten out of the cell earlier?
Maybe she wasn’t ready to give up.
She gave Jala a nod. “Yes. I’ve always known I was meant for greatness. I feel it, and I have to do this, for the good of the realm. The gods will meet their end, if I have to die in the attempt.”
* * *
Eithan thought he knew about monotony and sameness, living on and on and never aging. He thought that he would be able to handle the time in the cell. Of course, at first, he tried not to think about the fact that the gods had decided to throw him in here and let him rot. There had been talk of letting Nicce out of her cell after half a century, but there was no reprieve for him.
At first, he was primarily concerned with surviving, and he knew that he had survived a hundred years with Ciaska, so he thought he could survive this.
But with Ciaska, it had been different. It had been torture, but it had been something.
This was nothing.
So, he started thinking about the endlessness of it sooner than he would have liked. And he wasn’t sure how soon it was, because he quickly lost all sense of time. He didn’t have to sleep, but he did, for the release. It was only that he couldn’t be sure how long he slept and he never knew when to sleep. He didn’t feel tired. He would attempt to coax himself to sleep often. Only rarely was he successful.
That was part of the endlessness, of course.
The lack of any sense of routine. The lack of his body giving him a cycle to follow. The lack of anything at all.
He spent some time at the beginning trying to figure out a way out of the cell, and he gave up on that shockingly quickly, because there seemed to be no way out. He assumed that Nicce couldn’t find a way out either, and so he would have to wait for fifty years until she was released, and then she’d find a way to get him out.
But then he began to doubt that.
What did he have with Nicce, anyway? A handful of days, truly? How long had it been from the first time they kissed until the day they’d been separated and thrown in this dungeon?
Weeks.
Only weeks.
All told, they’d only known each other for less than a year. And he could count the times they’d made love on his fingers.
It was nothing, not really. By the time she was released, she would have completely forgotten him. She hadn’t wanted to marry him, had she? She was young, so young. While he hadn’t been threatened by the idea of her having previous lovers before him, he began to see himself as one in a line of others.
That fisherman of hers?
She had been planning on leaving him when Eithan found her on his boat.
No, he had a faulty idea of whatever it was that had passed between them, and she was more important to him than he was to her.
Except…
Well, sometimes, he thought of things she’d said to him, like the time they were trapped in Ciaska’s dungeon, fighting the nightmares. (It was a bitter knowledge that they’d been able to break free of that place so easily and that this place was impenetrable.) She had said to him something about other men not being enough compared to him. He couldn’t even remember her exact words, though, no matter how he tried.
He clung to that, though, tried to cling to it.
More often than not, the other thoughts drowned it out.
Eithan wasn’t used to being helpless or counting on other people for help. He was the one who
acted. He was the one who sacrificed. He was the one who protected.
And there was nothing to do in this dungeon.
He went mad.
That happened shockingly quickly as well.
Sometimes, he had moments of sanity when he would survey himself as if from outside and he would have a string of rational thoughts, but they were quickly obliterated by despair and by other thoughts of defeat.
He was surprised how much the thoughts still hurt. He thought he would have come to some kind of numb acceptance of it all at this point, but he hadn’t. He was broken. When he was a young man, he’d been taught to hide his tears, because it wasn’t the sort of thing a soldier did. Soldiers didn’t cry.
But here, in this endless prison of nothingness, he sobbed.
He sobbed and talked to people who weren’t there.
He made deals with Ciaska, telling her what she could do with him if she would just let him out. He would picture her mocking him, picture her screaming at him. But always, always, he would remember stabbing her with that crystal blade, the taste of her still on his mouth, stabbing her, her blood on his hands, the look of betrayal on her face.
Ciaska never helped him, anyway.
The deals he made with her always favored her.
He’d had no power when he was with the goddess and he had no power now.
Sometimes, he tried to talk to Absalom or Jonas or Septimus. The worst were the times when he spoke to Zeffir. He would get stuck back there, in that memory, Zeffir’s blood sticky and black and clinging to his skin.
And he would sob then, again, sob at the horror and the pain and the betrayal.
“I’m sorry, Zeffir,” he said. “But you knew, you knew, you knew. And you did it anyway. It’s not me that does it, but her. It’s her, with my hands.”
Sometimes, it was the brides, all of them, one after another, the nights in that room on top of the fortress replaying on an endless loop, and he had to bleed each of them out again and again, and no matter what he did or said, he couldn’t stop. He would sob then, too, and apologize, tell them it wasn’t him that wanted their blood.
But he was lying, because the thought of drinking blood still made his mouth water.
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