“It has to be the twelvth floor.” Tsua places that map on top. “I doubt the stone is common knowledge, even among the guards, and the floor we’re on seems to be their shared space. There’d be too much foot traffic here to keep anything secret or safe, but they could easily restrict access to the top floor. It’s also the only level not open to the rest of the prison.”
“It’s where I’d put something I wanted to hide,” Sanii agrees.
“Then that’s where we’ll start.” Chio looks up to meet Tsua’s eyes. “Is it worth the risk to take this map with us?”
“Yes. If we put everything else back the way we found it, there’s a chance the officer won’t notice for a long time. Or will think they misplaced this page.” Tsua rolls up the map. “It’s what we’ll hope for, at least.”
It doesn’t take much work to set it right, so we’re soon moving back to the stairwell. Tessen said it was a lesser used path; that makes it the safest travel option we have.
I’m back in the middle of the group, wards up. Keeping them that way is like having a staring contest with eyes painted on a wall. Eventually I’m going to lose the fight, but for now I can do it. Even if everything else around me gets pushed to the periphery. I would probably walk straight into a wall if Natani didn’t stay so close.
Hand in mine, his movements guide me. When he climbs, so do I. When he stops, it pulls me to a halt. When he turns, I follow. We stop. We backtrack. We start again. We turn. I’m barely aware of the stone walls or the symbols carved into them. I hear voices. I see flashes of light. None of it matters so long as I can keep the protections strong enough to hide us, but my wardstones are nearly empty. I’m pulling more from Natani, too. How long before I drain him?
We stop, and Tessen appears. Lines of worry ring his eyes and his mouth, but he doesn’t ask if I’m okay. All he asks is, “Do you still carry lockpicks, Khya?”
“You know I do.” He made sure I put them in my pack.
“I can try to do it, but you’re better.” He looks over his shoulder; only then do I realize we’re standing in front of a wide door.
I hold his eyes, forcing myself to focus. “If I do this, we’ll lose the wards.”
“I’ll warn you before anyone shows up.” He gets the lockpicks out of my pack and presses them into my hand. “You can do this, Nyshin-pa.”
When I nod, he steps away, leaving space for me to work.
I take a long breath and release my wards on the exhale. My body aches and my fingers are so stiff that holding the lockpicks hurts. Yorri made them years ago, and he taught me how to use them. Without the weight of the wards, my head is clearing a little. Enough for me to feel steady when I kneel in front of the door and focus on the lock. Thankfully, it isn’t too different from the ones we had in Itagami. A little more complicated and a lot heavier, but based on the same design. It takes several minutes to get the small pieces of iron in the right place, and longer for my fumbling fingers to keep them there, but then there’s a click.
Tessen helps me up, his concern etched even deeper. Chio takes my place and opens the door, letting us into a long, narrow room. It only seems to be ten feet from the door to the opposite wall, but it’s more than twenty feet from end to end. Raised stone platforms run in a line down the center of the room. Iron cages sit in each corner. Shackles are attached to the walls at either end of the chamber. Stains that might be dried blood are splattered across the stone. Opposite the main door is another door, but I only glance at that; my gaze is drawn by what’s fixed to the stone on either side of it. Shelves of jars and books and boxes, and lots of weapons—daggers, arrows, whips, spears, and things I don’t even have names for.
In a way, this room reminds me of Imaku, reminds me of the moment I found Yorri and the others trapped on black stone platforms. In a way, this room feels so much worse than Imaku.
“They were running experiments.” Chio’s words are infused with my own horror.
“Experiments on what?” Sanii seems to dread the answer.
“Mages. The prisoners.” Tsua’s hand hovers over the weapons mounted on the wall. “If I had to guess, they were trying to see if they could use a stone that brought down the bobasu against mortal mages, too.”
I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want the meaning of her words to sink into my head because it’s too much, and it’s too close, and it’s not impossible that Varan is using my brother and the rest of his prisoners for the same kind of torment. But it would be so much worse for Yorri and the others; they’re trapped in their own minds and in life itself.
Shivering, I head across the room to the second door. It’s locked, and this one isn’t anything like the mechanisms I saw in Itagami. This one doesn’t need a key. Instead it seems like I’ll have to solve some kind of puzzle before it will open. Yorri would crack this open in minutes, but I don’t have his mind for these things.
Sanii steps up beside me, eir head barely reaching high enough to catch my peripheral vision. Without turning away from the door, I ask, “I don’t suppose you share Yorri’s love of puzzles, do you?”
“He taught me to love them.” Ey kneels to get a better look at the circular lock.
The rings are concentric, six surrounding the center solid circle—almost like it’s a reflection of Mushokeiji itself. Markings line the edges of all seven circles, and each rotates, its directionality opposed to the circle preceeding it. Only the center circle doesn’t move, but there are markings on it, too. Neither of us recognize the marks themselves, so we call Osshi over.
He whistles, his eyebrows rising. “These pre-date the omikia characters. These are older than the written language Varan and your andofume knew.”
The translation happens slowly, and even after he tells us what each mark represents, we’re still not sure what any of it really means. Frustration pulls Sanii’s eyebrows low and makes my fists clench, but we keep working.
Ey turns the circles one by one, listening to the clicks coming from within the mechanism. In our murmured conversations, we decide the center circle will be the one that unlocks the door, but only after the outer rings are precisely aligned. And that alignment might have to happen in a specific order. The number of combinations is impossible for me to calculate.
Then Osshi remembers a scrap of paper he’d found hidden inside a book in the commander’s office, something with similar symbols written on it. “I thought it might be a code to one of the pages we stole, a way to decipher a hidden message. Maybe it’s for this, instead.”
“It reads like a reminder,” Tsua says, showing the scrap to Chio. “It sounds like clues someone might leave for themselves if they were worried they’d forget the pattern.”
It’s just enough to lead us in the right direction.
Several minutes later, Sanii presses hard on the center circle. It sinks. It clicks. Something inside the door grinds. I hold my breath until the massive metal door opens outward an inch. I fall back, landing on my butt and scooting out of the way as Sanii and Etaro grip the handles in the center of the heavy door and pull it open. What they reveal is worth the effort of getting here.
Shelves upon shelves of black stone.
The room is about as wide as the one we’re in, and maybe as long—I can’t see either end from where I’m sitting. Boulder-sized pieces lay in the middle of the space, set in a row like the tables in the main room. The walls are full of shelves, floor to ceiling, and each shelf is packed with Imaku rock. Some are pebbles, others are as large as my head. There’s more than we can possibly carry. Knowing what they’re doing with it, though, I want to take it all away from them.
“Use these.” Tyrroh’s order makes me look up, and I watch as he tosses bags at the others. “Move quick and pack as much as you can carry.”
Tsua and Chio are with Osshi, riffling through papers and books. Everyone else hurries into the vault. I try to get up to join them, but Tyrroh shakes his head and orders me to rest. Five minutes of sitting on cold stone won’
t do much to revive me, but I don’t say that. Five minutes is the only time we have. So I sit and wait.
My squad carefully places black rocks into the bags while Osshi, Tsua, and Chio remove pages from stacks or tear them out of books and pack them away. Tessen is the only person not moving; he’s near the main door, listening for incoming danger. I stand and join him. If I stay sitting much longer, I might fall asleep.
Talking to Tessen or touching him isn’t a good idea when he’s hyper-focused on his senses like this—it overloads and distracts him—but I lean nearby, watching his expression change minutely in reaction to whatever he’s hearing on the other side of the door.
When the rest of the squad leaves the vault, closing the heavy door behind themselves and rearranging the rings of the lock, Tessen moves. “It’s clear,” he says, voice hoarse. “Are we ready?”
“Lead us out, basaku,” Chio orders from the rear of the squad.
“Are you ready?” He brushes his thumb along my cheekbone. “Can we help?”
I shake my head as I straighten from the wall. “Just get us out of here.”
Determination hardens his features. He reaches for the door, checking for movement one more time before leading us out.
Hallways. Staircases. Lights. Voices. We move faster this time; Tessen’s already sure of the path we need to take. Soon we’re back at the fifth level landing, waiting for him to make sure the last part of our route is clear.
“There’s someone moving, but only one, I think,” Tessen whispers, looking to Tyrroh for confirmation.
Of course the one guard we encounter is standing between us and our escape. Of course. Our luck has held too well until now. They’ve had enough time by now for the first wave of excitement over the fresh supplies to wane, for them to remember they have jobs to do.
“If Khya can hold the ward, we should be able to pass him. It’s worth the risk to get out of here sooner,” Tyrroh says.
“Sooner is better.” My stomach is churning and my limbs feel heavy. If we don’t finish soon, I won’t be able to trust my grip on the mountain as we escape. I’m shaking and exhausted.
“When you’re ready then,” Tsua says.
I hold out my hand, and Natani takes it. His hand trembles—he’s probably as exhausted as I am—but his grip doesn’t falter. At least the desosa I’m pulling through him is from his wardstones; it should make it easier for him to bear up under the drain. Mine is empty. His is beginning to flicker. If we don’t get out of here soon, I’m going to have to steal someone else’s protections to keep this magic running.
We move out of the safety of the stairwell and onto the open ledge. The guard Tessen warned us about is there, slowly approaching from the right—the direction we need to travel. I dismiss him as soon as I spot him. It’s one guard, and he hasn’t noticed the fourteen people joining him on the floor. If he becomes a problem, someone else will handle him.
Mostly because, if the guard is a problem, I’m probably unconscious.
We move slowly, and I look out over the empty center of Mushokeiji, spotting at least one guard on every level now. They weren’t there the first time we walked this level, but now they’re spread throughout the prison. Two dozen of them at least. And on some of the levels, pairs of guards are pushing frames on wheels suspending something that looks like a massive, round shield.
Then Sanii whispers, “What is that on his head?”
I look at the guard closest to us, but I can’t begin to guess. A thick strap of something that could be either metal or hard leather rests on top of his head, holding two thick, round somethings over his ears. Those seem even more pointless than the shields hanging on frames.
He’s strolling across the ledge, absently swinging a small open-sided lamp at the end of a length of rope as he peers into the cells he passes. We move closer to the open center to avoid running into him. He stops in front of one of the cells and says something to whoever’s inside. I can’t make out the words—they were spoken too quickly and too accented—but whatever it was makes Tessen stop.
Turning, Tessen looks at the guard. Then at the others spread throughout the prison. Then toward the framed shields.
Just as the guards standing next to those circles of metal simultaneously strike them with massive mallets.
Piercing, ringing, echoing noise reverberates through the prison.
Tessen collapses. Tyrroh drops against the wall. My concentration shatters, and so do my wards.
The guard is screaming, shouting a warning as he tosses his lamp toward the ledge. It lands in a groove, and something catches fire. In seconds, the fire spreads, shooting along the whole level. More shouts. Guards running in our direction.
Then Chio grabs the guard by the throat and orders, “Run!”
Chapter
Fifteen
Natani yanks me along by the hand, sprinting toward our exit. The narrow hallway is as empty as it was earlier, and we pass through it faster. Everything after is excruciating.
My body feels weighted. My lungs can’t seem to find air. My reactions are slow. My joints ache. My energy is drained and my wardstones are empty, and now I’ve got to carry my bodyweight in stone up a ventilation shaft and down the side of a mountain.
And apparently our luck is well and truly gone.
Behind us are shouts and thudding boots, harbingers of pursuit. Miari can collapse the shaft once we’re through, but the guards have other ways out of Mushokeiji, and this is their territory. No one will be better at tracking us across this wasteland than them.
I count to keep my breathing even and move faster.
By the time I reach the end of the hall, several of the squad are already clambering up the shaft, all of them moving faster than I expected. Only after Etaro lifts me the six feet to the bottom of the shaft do I see how—Miari left us handholds, all of them so deep it’s practically as easy as climbing a ladder. I hope she’ll do the same thing to the stone on the mountain.
Miari is waiting when I climb out of the shaft. She points down the mountain, an order implicit. There are handholds, but if she’s still here, there’s no way the extra help will last the whole climb; she’s our only ishiji—she has to stay to collapse the vent behind us.
I descend. Steadily, not fast. My lungs burn in the cold air. My arms shake. My fingers are going numb. If I move too quickly, I might miss a grip and drop. A hundred-foot fall onto solid stone would be hard to survive even when my wards are at full power.
Hand by hand. Foot by foot. I don’t look up or down or sideways. I don’t look for friends or enemies. Only rock.
Hand. Hand. Foot. Foot. Right. Left. Right. Left. Down and left, inch by inch, until my next step is on solid ground and someone is pulling me away from the edge. They release me before I can flinch away at the unexpected contact. But they were right to pull me aside. No one else can fit on the narrow ledge with me standing in the way.
“Khya?” Tyrroh’s dark eyes narrow as he scans my face. “Condition report, Nyshin-pa.”
“I’ll make it to camp, but…” I shiver and pull my hood up over my head. “Food should help. I’ll eat as we go.”
“But sleep will help more?” His gaze travels to the mountain, checking on the progress of the others. Then he returns his focus to me. “Hold on for me as long as you can, but you tell someone if you need to be carried the rest of the way. Understood?”
“Yes, Nyshin-ma.” But I won’t ask for that unless I can’t walk another step. Especially since Chio brought the guard he grabbed with us. Everyone will have enough to worry about carrying the stones, evading pursuit, and keeping the guard from giving us away. I don’t want them to be worrying about me, too.
Miari and Tsua are the last down, and Tsua is wearing an expression I don’t know how to describe. Chio demands, “What happened?”
“I… We needed more time, so I opened the cells.” Tsua casts one look back at the vent, her eyes troubled. “All of the cells.”
“Kaisubeh sa
ve them,” Chio breathes, eyes closed.
As we run toward our camp, I can barely stop myself from asking which “them” Chio means: The guards or the prisoners?
…
I push myself to keep up. I’m fine when we grab our stowed gear, but we can’t stay there. We need to run. Problem is that hidden, defensible campsites aren’t easy to find near Mushokeiji—possibly by design. We run for two hours and no one finds a safe place to rest. Two hours, though, is all I have in me.
“Tessen.” My call is weak, but Tessen hears.
He turns back and slings my arm over his shoulders, his face pinched with frustration. “I thought you were better at following orders than this, Nyshin-pa. Tyrroh told you to warn us before you were on the edge of collapse.”
“I thought we’d find somewhere to stop by now.” My mouth feels dry, and my tongue sluggish, so I don’t try talking again. Not even when Tessen passes me to Etaro when he has to run back to the front of the line to help find a place to stop.
The landscape becomes a blur of dark rock, and I quit paying attention fast, pouring all my focus into keeping myself on my feet.
By the time we do stop, the sun has set. I can’t see much of wherever we’ve ended up. It’s a secure enough spot that Tessen and Tyrroh tell Rai and Nairo to light a fire. They wouldn’t risk it if the light could be spotted at a distance. A couple hours ago, Etaro caught the small animal unlucky enough to cross paths with us. Now it’s being cooked over the flames as everyone huddles close to the warmth. Everyone. Including the guard Chio grabbed inside Mushokeiji, who’s now being closely watched by our elder andofume.
Sanii catches my eye from across the fire, a relieved smile spreading across eir face. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you so happy to be sitting down, Khya.”
“Me neither.” I look at Rai, and when she nods permission I lean against her to rest my head on her shoulder. Then I breathe deep, testing my body and the air.
We must still be within the boundaries of Suakizu, because the desosa is thin and weak, but it’s there. It’s stronger than it was near Mushokeiji, and I can finally replenish some of the energy I lost. My joints still ache, but the hollowed-out nausea has ebbed. “Are we being followed?”
Sea of Strangers Page 24
