by Джеффри Лорд
He gently took her chin in one hand. «Slow down, Neena. Don't let your hopes run ahead of what we know.»
«But what do you know?»
He told her, leaving out nothing, including all the uncertainties that remained. «The ashes are dropped into a hole in the center of the hearth. The hole is covered with an iron grating, with bars set wide enough apart to let a man pass through easily.
«The hole leads to an underground pit. I don't know for certain how large or deep it is. But all the ashes and debris from the hearth are thrown into it. That is part of the ritual — 'returning the ashes to the womb of the Earth Mistress,' they call it.»
«And the tunnel leads into that pit?»
«It must, or we wouldn't be able to see the light of the fires in the hearth through it. The problem is, I don't know how far down in the pit the tunnel enters it.
«I will find out for sure when it comes my turn to be a pit slave. They are lowered through the grating into the pit, with scoops to spread the ashes evenly. It is the dirtiest and most painful job in tending the hearth, so I am sure I will get more than my share of chances to do it.»
«And then?»
«If the tunnel is in the right place, I will see about hiding a rope in its mouth. That shouldn't be too hard, with the darkness and all the clouds of ashes down there.»
«I see,» said Neena. «Then when I leap across the gap I simply run down to the mouth of the tunnel, bring the rope back, and-«
«Haul me across,» finished Blade, with a grin. «Exactly. It will take a lot of muscle and a lot of luck, but I think it's our best way out.»
«Well, Blade, I think we have already had much luck. We have found each other, and we can trust each other. Is that not more luck than we could have expected to come our way?»
Blade had to admit she was right. His arms went around her, and they sat there in the darkness for some time. There was more comfort than passion in their embrace. Finally they rose and returned to the prison chamber to sleep.
Blade found himself on pit duty the very next day. All that he'd heard about its being the hardest job in the service of Tiga was perfectly true. It was dark and airless in the pit. The ashes poured down and rose up around him in stifling clouds. They got in his mouth and his nose, his hair and his eyes. He coughed and gasped and choked, his eyes watered continuously, and even his ears seemed to be clogged by ashes and soot. The rope around his waist jerked and twisted constantly, and at times it seemed about to cut him in two. It took all his concentration and toughness to keep alert and keep going. He succeeded, and by the end of the day he'd found out what he needed to know.
«We can do it,» he said to Neena that night. They were in the tunnel, and she was combing his hair and beard with her fingernails, trying to get out at least some of the ashes and grit. «The tunnel enters the pit only about ten feet below the iron grating.»
Neena didn't ask him how he was going to solve the last problem-finding a rope and getting it into the right place. Blade himself wasn't quite sure. The ropes used to lower and raise the pit slaves would be more than long enough. How to get hold of one? Just as important, how to get hold of one fast? King Furzun wouldn't wait forever before having Neena taken out of the prison and moved into his harem.
Blade was given no pit work during the next two days. Instead he was given a taste of just about every other job involved in tending the Hearth of Tiga, from mortaring up cracks in the stone blocks to piling up logs for the next ritual fires. Each day was fourteen hours or more of grim, sweating, filthy work, making demands on even Blade's enormous strength.
As tired as he became, Blade's ceaseless watch for an opportunity to snatch and hide a rope went on. Nothing could make him abandon that watch. The whole thing would have been far easier if Blade could have simply waited several weeks, until the guards had him tagged as a docile, harmless lout, a slave they hardly needed to watch. Then he could have a fair hope of getting away, if not with murder, at least with the rope he needed.
He also kept an eye open for any clues to other possible escape routes. Unfortunately nothing came of that. He saw no prospect of any other way out of both the prison and the palace, except the tunnel. Simply getting out of the prison would leave him and Neena inside the palace walls, surrounded by more guards than they could possibly hope to fight.
Outside the palace, on the other hand, they would have all of Trawnom-Driba to give them room for running and fighting. They would have to get over the city's ramshackle wall, of course, but beyond that lay the endless forests of Gleor. In those forests Neena at least was far more at home than the warriors of Trawn, made slow and clumsy by too many years of relying on the stolofs in any tight spot. Lord Desgo was considered a mighty warrior among the men of Trawn, yet Blade knew he could fight two or three men as good as the nobleman and have them all dead or down in a few minutes.
It was the stolofs that were the heart of Trawn's power. Neena had said so many times. The more Blade saw, the more he believed her. The great spider-creatures, the regular green ones and the golden ones from the royal stables, were monstrous and deadly fighting machines.
They were not so fast that a swift-footed man could not outrun them. But anyone who stayed to fight was almost certainly doomed. The eyes were vulnerable, so were the uppermost joints of the lehs, and so was a small spot under the belly. Otherwise every square inch of a stolof was covered with the scales and plates of armor that would turn the sharpest sword blade or spear point in Gleor.
«Warriors of Draad have slain stolofs in battle,» Neena had said. «But only a few, and not all of those have lived through their victories. It is a rare man who can strike at one of the vital spots and move away before the stolof or the men with it attack. Stolofs alone would be formidable, but we could learn to meet them. The men of Trawn alone would give us a stout fight, for they greatly outnumber us, and few of our own warriors are your equal. Together, the stolofs and the warriors of Trawn may some day rule all of Gleor.» Her face clouded and her eyes closed in pain as she said that.
So Blade knew that he would fight Draad's battles if he ever had a chance. He also knew that he would never have that chance unless he and Neena found a way out of the city. His fate and hers hung, if not quite by a thread, at least by a rope.
Chapter 11
Blade worked on everything except pit duty for eight maddening days. At times he wondered if his plans and hopes had been discovered. Perhaps Lord Demo knew every detail of what Blade was planning, and these work assignments were one more way of tormenting him.
On the ninth day Blade went back into the pits. He went down there every other day from then on. The days were also becoming warmer, for the season was moving onward, toward a stifling tropical summer.
Blade now knew the best way of snatching and hiding the indispensable rope. He was only waiting for the best possible chance, knowing that he could count on only one. A single incident could probably be written off as an accident. A second incident would probably arouse suspicion, a third would be condemning himself to death.
The day of Blade's fifth turn in the pits dawned even hotter and more stifling than usual. As the slaves were led out to the Hearth of Tiga, the guards were already streaming with sweat and trying to stay in the shade as much as they could. In fact, they seemed more interested in finding shade than in keeping an eye on the slaves.
The long rope, more than fifty feet of it, was tied around Blade's waist. Three of his fellow slaves grabbed it as Blade walked to the grating and looked down into the pit. The glare of the sun above made the darkness below look even deeper than usual.
Blade lowered himself down through the grating and hung from one of the bars. The three slaves holding the rope tightened their grip, and the leader nodded. Blade let go of the bar and felt himself sliding down into the dusty darkness below.
The usual cloud of ashes and soot rose around him as he landed. A moment later the wooden scoop thumped down beside him. He picked it up and went to work
. He wanted to work normally for a while, to get the people on the surface nicely off their guard.
Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty. By now Blade moved about in a continuous choking fog of ashes. He was working half-blindly, shoving ashes steadily down the slopes of the great piles, deeper into the darkness. He'd seen those slopes before. He'd also seen the body of a pit slave who died when one of those slopes gave way under him. The slave had died in the darkness, suffocated under tons of ashes.
Blade worked still harder for another five minutes. Now he looked like a mud-covered statue as his sweat mixed with the ashes and soot all over him. His eyes, his nose, his mouth, every inch of his skin prickled and burned and itched.
He threw a quick look upward. Nobody was visible through the grating. The rope from above drooped slackly down over the bars of the grating, as though the three slaves on the other end were half-asleep.
There would never come a better moment. Blade dropped his scoop, reached up, clamped both hands tightly on the rope, then heaved with all his strength. As he did he threw himself backward with all his weight, and simultaneously let out a long, agonizing yell of total dreadful fear.
As he went over backward into the ashes, he felt a jerk on the rope as it flew out of the hands of the slaves. Then he heard it hissing over the bars and plopping down all around him. At the same time the ashes rose up even more thickly than before, in a blinding dark gray fog. For a moment Blade was completely unable to see anything in any direction. He had to hold his breath to keep from choking to death on the ashes.
If he couldn't see anything, that meant anyone looking down from above couldn't see anything either. Working by touch alone, Blade wound the rope into a tight coil, then untied it from around his waist. As the cloud of ashes slowly settled, he let out another convincing yell. He also raised his head, searching for the mouth of the tunnel.
There it was, just visible enough to make a decent target. Blade drew back his arm, held his breath, and threw. He knew he would have only one sure chance to get the rope into the right place. If he missed, the rope would fall back down into the ashes. He would never find it quickly enough.
Blade's eye was good. So was his throwing arm. The rope sailed straight to its target, vanishing into the tunnel with a faint thud. Blade coughed as loudly as he could, thrashing his arms and legs around to make the ashes rise up around him again. Occasionally he stopped coughing to yell frantically for help. All in all, he gave a remarkably good imitation of a man struggling desperately not to fall down one of the great ash slopes to certain death.
Eventually Blade's flounderings and shoutings stirred the heat-drugged men above to help him. Another rope came snaking down through the grating, this one with a large loop tied in one end. Blade drew the loop over his head and shoulders and gave three tugs on the rope. The loop tightened around Blade's chest, and he rose out of the ashes and the pit into the daylight.
His head banged against one of the bars as he rose through the grating. Then the slaves and one of the guards were grabbing him by whatever came to hand, including his hair, and pulling him onto solid ground. He lay there, head swimming and chest heaving, until somebody dashed a bucket of water into his face.
Blade staggered to his feet, spluttering and gasping convincingly. Two of the slaves held him up until he was sure that he could stand by himself.
«Slope fall?» asked one of them.
Blade only nodded. Nobody would be expecting him to give a speech minutes after he had narrowly escaped being buried alive in ashes!
«All right, all right!» shouted one of the guards. «Stop playing around! You've had your bath. Now get back down there and get back to work!» A long whip cracked out, and the metal-weighted tip caught Blade across the hip. He gritted his teeth, felt the blood flowing, but also felt immensely relieved.
None of the guards seemed to have noticed anything wrong. To them it was just another near-accident to a slave. Why should that hold up the day's work any more than necessary?
The guards kept Blade an hour later than usual that day, to make up for the time he'd lost during the accident. After fifteen hours in the heat and the ashes and the darkness Blade was beginning to feel unsteady on his legs. The water they poured over him had never felt better, and the water they gave him to drink tasted like nectar from the gods. He was clearheaded and walking straight by the time the guards led him back to his prison.
The guards threw him down into the chamber as usual, and Neena ran to help him to his feet, also as usual.
«You look-«She shook her head, unable to find words. «What happened?»
«A slope collapsed under me in the pit,» Blade said aloud. Ignoring the raucous laughter of the guards, he took her in his arms and held her, his mouth half-muffled in her hair, close to one ear. They stood that way until the guards' laughter died away and the door slammed shut.
«You did it?» she whispered.
«I did. The rope is in place.»
She shivered.
«Is something wrong?» he asked.
«The day after tomorrow-they come for me-they take me to King Furzun. The guards said it.»
«Then we escape tonight.»
«No, Blade-you must have a day to become strong again.»
Blade shook his head. «That won't help, and tomorrow night will be more dangerous. They'll be expecting you to do something desperate. Tonight they'll be thinking you're paralyzed with fear.»
«But-«
«It will be tonight, Neena. If it is not tonight, it may not be at all.»
Neena shivered, then forced a faint, wavering smile onto her face.
«Very well, Blade, it shall be tonight.»
Chapter 12
Darkness came to the world outside their prison. Blade and Neena ate dinner, then rested, gathering as much strength as they could for their escape.
Blade had a grimly accurate notion of their chances. This whole escape was a thoroughly improvised affair, full of gambles, with little equipment and less margin for error. They would have no weapons, no clothing, no footwear. They would have practically nothing except a grim determination not to die helplessly in Trawn. How far that determination could carry them remained to be seen.
Beside him, Neena was drifting off to sleep. It was a good sign that she was calm enough to sleep. Blade remained awake and watched the tunnel. He did not expect to see the orange glow of a fire in the Hearth of Tiga. No wood had come in for one during the day. That was also good. The fire that had helped them before by showing them the gap could now trap them in the tunnel.
Neena slept peacefully, and her low, regular breathing even lulled Blade into a few minutes' doze. He jerked himself awake, shook his head to clear it, then gently awakened Neena.
«It is time.»
She sat up, brushed the hair out of her eyes, shook herself, stretched like a cat, loosening every muscle, and nodded.
As silently as prowling animals they crept across the floor toward the grating and opened it. Blade took two of the wooden bars with him. Win or lose, they would not be back here.
They moved down the tunnel, Neena leading. Blade found himself fighting not to hold his breath. He accidentally put a hand down on Neena's ankle, and heard her give a small «yip» of surprise and fright. She was obviously just as nervous as he was.
The tunnel seemed to go on forever. At last Blade felt Neena stopping in front of him and reaching out with one hand to probe the darkness ahead.
«We're there.»
Blade crawled forward, until he sensed that he was on the edge of the gap. Slowly he stood up, arms probing on either side, then above him. He was standing where he'd intended to, far enough from the edge to have firm ground underfoot, yet close enough to have a high ceiling overhead. A good starting point, but that was all. Neena would literally have to make a leap in the dark, with a three-hundred foot drop to certain death below her if she missed.
Blade turned to Neena, sensing her rather than seeing her standing in the da
rkness beside him. She was breathing deeply.
«Are you ready?»
«Yes.»
She stepped in front of him and he knelt down and caught her about the waist. Blade told himself that they'd rehearsed the positions half a dozen times, that everything should go right.
You haven't rehearsed going through with it, a voice in his head reminded him. He told the voice to shut up. In his arms he felt Neena tensing, crouching down for her leap. Blade dug in his heels to get a firmer footing, then squeezed Neena's thigh.
«Now?»
«Now.»
All of Blade's muscles and all of Neena's uncoiled in a split second surge of controlled power, as the man and the woman shot up from their crouch. Blade felt Neena leave his arms, felt his toes come down on the very edge of the gap, felt earth start to crumble beneath him, and threw himself backward. He landed with a thud and his head smashed into the packed earth of the tunnel floor hard enough to half stun him. His head still spinning, he sat up and looked out across the invisible gap to the equally invisible far side.
He hadn't heard the sound of a safe landing, but he hadn't heard the dreadful death-scream of someone plunging down three hundred feet either. Then from the darkness he heard a faint «Ouch!»
«Neena? Are you all right?» Blade had intended to whisper. His voice came out in a roaring bellow that went echoing away up and down the tunnel.
The words he'd been hoping to hear came out of the darkness. «Yes, I've landed all right. Just a moment-«Another «Ouch!»
«I think I've sprained a finger and a couple of toes. That's all. I'm going to crawl down and get the rope now.»
«Good.»
There was the sound of bare feet and hands scrabbling away down the tunnel, fading away into a new silence. Blade waited. If the rope wasn't where Neena could get to it, the escape was doomed and Neena herself would be trapped in the tunnel, unable to return across the gap or climb upward to freedom.
