by Ellyn, Court
Across the cavern, a shriek echoed hers, long and hysterical. An emaciated figure, matted hair, matted beard, crouched beneath one of the torches and threw grimy hands over his ears and rocked, rocked, screaming and striking his head against the wall with dull, meaty thucks.
Carah swallowed her outcry fast.
The ogre tugged her chain sharply. “ ‘Vedra in de abyss now. Here to stay.” With that, the warden waddled away on thick, stunted legs. A rough stair led the way into a dark tunnel where the ogre vanished.
Carah slid down the wall beside her alcove and hugged her knees to her chest. You’re wrong, monster. Uncle Thorn will come for me, for all of us. He’ll throw you down in your pit of bones. She lowered her forehead to her knees and wept quietly. The thickness of her tears and the taste of rot gagged her.
A small voice squeaked, soft as a mouse. “M’ lady.”
Carah lifted her head to listen, but the voice scampered all around her. The two sentries circling below paid it no mind. Why should they? With chains like these, the prisoners weren’t going anywhere.
“M’ lady!”
For an instant, Carah thought Saffron had come, that her uncle must be only steps behind. Then she remembered that even the fay had been unable to find this accursed place.
The whisper swirled again. “M’ lady, over here!”
“Give it up, kid,” said another. This second voice, gruff, worn, like once-sharp steel corroded along the edges, came from Carah’s right. A man reclined glumly inside the neighboring alcove, in a robe of frayed red silk and gold embroidery. He must’ve been there all along. Hiding in shadows, perhaps? Waiting for the warden to leave? His skin was the darkest Carah had ever seen, like cloves. Gold clasps pinched his hair into dozens of thick ropes. A full, unkempt beard had gone to gray. When he noticed Carah peering at him, he leveled a stunning violet eye on her; the other was masked in darkness. “They seem to think you’re something special,” he said. “You’re not.” Unimpressed, he turned away.
“She is so!” defended the mouse’s voice. Further along the wall, a little boy waved both hands vigorously. His chains danced in unison.
Under all the grime was a familiar face, and a surcoat of Aralorri blue.
“Jaedren!” Carah cried. Surely the unsteady torchlight was tricking her eyes. He was a ghost. His beautiful face had grown gaunt and pale, his flaxen hair lusterless. His teeth had grown too large, and black rings circled his eyes. But he still had the strength to leap in joy.
Carah crawled toward him, to the end of her chains, and he met her, stretching out his hand. The length of the chains allowed their fingers to touch. His were cold, caked in grime, and so fragile. “We’d given you up for dead.”
“I knew it was you!” he declared. “I knew it. How did they get you? Where? Huh? Have you seen my da? Does he know where I am?”
“Kid!” shouted the foreign man stuck between them. They crouched in front of his alcove, Jaedren nearly crawling over his legs. “Snap it shut. By the Father, you’re breaking my ears.” His accent was sharp, the consonants leaping over the vowels as if vowels were best left ignored. He flapped a hand. “Woman, out of my space.”
Carah released Jaedren’s hand and scuttled back a few feet.
The foreign man moaned. “God, you smell like the outside. The sea. You smell of the sea.”
“I was at the seaside when that bastard took me.”
The man waved his arms emphatically. “I don’t care. Go! I don’t want to talk to you. To either of you.”
Jaedren climbed to his feet and loomed over him. “Don’t be a grouch, Doc.” He grinned at Carah. “This is Doc. He’s from Ixaka, all the way around the world. He’s been here even longer than me. And that ogre who just left is Frogtongue. At least, that’s what we call her. We think she’s a girl.”
“You think,” Doc said blandly. “I don’t care what it is.”
“She brings us our food every day.”
“And takes us away to be butchered,” said Doc. “We’re pigs to them.”
“I know what they think of us,” Carah said. “I’ve just come from fighting them.”
Jaedren squirmed excitedly. “The War Commander has an army?”
Carah nodded. Such as it is.
“We’re needed out there, Doc!” Jaedren exclaimed.
The Ixakan rolled his eyes. “And how you going to leave, eh?”
“Doc?” Carah said, pondering. “You’re a healer?”
The man wasn’t interested in friendly blather. He turned his face to the deep shadow inside his alcove.
Jaedren answered for him. “Chief physician to the royal family in Itasa. I tricked it out of him.”
“Itsaso, kid! And you didn’t trick it out of me. I told you to shut you up.”
“Why are you always so grouchy?”
Doc’s eyes bulged white in his dark face. “Because you talk too much! And now look what you’ve done. You’ve made me think of what can never be. I will never again stand atop the pyramids smelling the jasmine, or suck the sugar broken fresh from the cane. But now, thanks to you, I won’t stop thinking about it for an intolerable count of hours.”
“You mustn’t give up hope,” Carah insisted. “We’ll get out of here, somehow.”
“Yes, yes, we will,” said Doc. “Just like them.” He gestured at the ring of skulls. “Hope does not live in a hell like this. Speak of it no more, girl.”
Jaedren swung a foot into the Ixakan’s thigh. “She’s ‘lady’ to you. She’s the War Commander’s daughter, cousin of the king—”
“I don’t bloody care if she’s the Father’s concubine! Nobody gets out of here alive, not without selling his soul to that Elari first.”
“Sell your soul?” Carah asked.
Doc nodded begrudgingly. “Whenever the Captain comes, he asks us the same question. ‘Will you serve me?’ ” He inclined his head toward Jaedren. “Where the boy is now, there was a man before. He said he was from Valrosk. Bloody cold place. It didn’t take the Valroi long to make up his mind. He knelt at the Captain’s feet, and the Captain took him away. He knew how to play the winning game, curse his unscrupulous hide.” Doc spat, though he hadn’t much spit to spare.
“Dashka,” Carah murmured.
“I never knew his name,” Doc said. “I don’t want to know yours either. I only know the boy’s, because he wouldn’t not tell me. I’ve tried to forget it since. You’re going to die in here, and I’d rather not like you before you do.”
Carah wanted to shake him, shout that her uncle was coming, that he would free them from this abominable place, that Doc would soon chew the cane and breathe the spice-laden wind of the Ixakan rainforests.
But what if he was right? What if this hellish cavern was so deep underground, so deep in the Drakhans, or so far across the Great Fire Sea that Uncle Thorn could never find it? Even if he learned the Pit’s location, how long would it take him to reach it?
“Might that not be a way out?” she said, inspiration sparking. “Might not one of us swear allegiance to Lothiar, then once free, run for help?”
Doc shook his matted ropes. “There’s always someone willing to try.”
Jaedren sank down beside him, looking nauseous.
“Only a few weeks ago,” Doc said, gesturing across the cavern, “a man from that alcove there got the same idea into his stupid head. The ogres caught him trying to flee into some wetland or other and dragged him back here. They strung him from the ceiling where we could all see him, then they skinned him alive. You understand? They butchered him before he was dead. Remember that.”
Carah felt herself shaking and pressed herself against the wall, trying not to imagine the man’s screams filling every cranny of the cavern.
Doc made small hesitant noises. “I will kick myself for asking, but … how is it going out there? We hear naught but rumor from these creatures.”
“And they’re lying!” Jaedren declared. One of the sentries blinked his direction, saw him sit
ting on his haunches, decided he was no threat and moved on. “Frogtongue says there’s no humans left. She says her clan has eaten them all. She’s lying, right, m’ lady?”
Carah steadied herself enough to answer. “Of course she’s lying.” She gave a haughty toss of her head. “But if I tell you things are going well for us, I might inadvertently give you hope.”
The Ixakan grinned despite himself.
“Besides, as long as Uncle Thorn is out there, Lothiar is the one without hope.”
Jaedren rocked backward, holding his knees and laughing a high-pitched child’s laugh. For an instant, the sound pealed back the darkness. “That’s what Rhian said.”
“Rhian?” Carah asked, facing the boy abruptly. “Jaedren, where?”
The cavern was shaped like an elongated oval, an egg maybe. Chisel marks patterned the wall with crosshatch, hastily done. Moisture clung to the stone, like sweat beads. The shelf upon which the avedrin sat encircled the whole, and alcoves lined the wall, twenty or thirty of them, a grim parade of eyeless sockets. Near the back of the cavern, a woman in a ragged dress lay curled before the mouth of her alcove, shivering. Two more further along the curve huddled together for warmth. The madman rocked pitifully. Altogether, Carah counted twelve prisoners. None were Rhian.
“What have they done with him?”
“I thought you were ignoring him like you always do,” Jaedren said.
“Ignoring?” Ah, yes, in her jealousy, she had despised Rhian once. How long ago that seemed.
Jaedren pointed across the mountain of bones, to an alcove Carah had disregarded as empty. But upon closer examination, she saw that the chains, bolted to the column of rock that separated alcoves, curved taut around the entrance and disappeared into the dark.
“Rhian?” Carah called. The name echoed against the ceiling. “Please, I must see you.”
After a while, one of the chains slackened. A hand emerged and set down on the floor, just within the torchlight. Then, nothing. Is that all he meant to give her? He would deny her sight of his face?
She looked to Jaedren, to Doc for answers. The Ixakan’s eyes were fixed on Rhian’s alcove. “He is ashamed.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s the reason you’re here. The boy here was asleep, he didn’t see. It was that elf who brought you, the same one who brought Jaedren and half the others. He came to the Pit alone one day. Had your friend there pinned down, so he could sit with him and work some kind of avë. A long time it went on. Then to top it off, the elf took his clothes, put them on. When the elf left, he was your friend’s twin, in everything but kindness.”
“I missed that?” Jaedren cried. “Aw, Doc, why didn’t you wake me?”
The Ixakan ignored the outburst, observed keenly the sorrow aching across Carah’s face. “Next time the elf returns, he drops you right there, returns the clothes and is cruel enough to thank your friend for his cooperation.”
Jaedren slapped the stone. “So that’s what he meant. I was awake for that part. Ruvion is such a pig’s ass.”
Carah dried a cheek with the heel of her hand. “Rhian? Please, it’s not your fault. Please.”
The madman took up the cry. “Pleeeeease!” The wail punctured the shadows, assaulted the torchlight. “Pleeeeeease!”
Carah smashed her hands over her ringing ears and watched the madman shake his head like a dog tormented by fleas. He slapped his own face and shrieked through clenched teeth. “Eeeeeeee! Eeeee!”
The two sentries snarled, their bat-like ears far more sensitive than a human’s.
“Shut up, stupid,” Jaedren pleaded.
Doc grabbed the boy’s wrist, tugged him close, and clamped a hand over his mouth.
Taking the hint, Carah ducked her head and eased back into the darkness of her own alcove.
“Eeeeee!”
The sentries leveled long spears. The points were black iron and nastily barbed, like a mantis’s forelegs. One sentry rushed the madman, while the other turned, aiming a silent threat at the rest of the prisoners.
The two avedrin huddling for warmth separated and scurried on hands and knees into their alcoves. The shivering woman, watched dully, then closed her eyes and rolled away.
The madman’s fevered glance locked onto the point of the spear. He howled with the terror of realization and went for the wall, climbing, sliding, fingernails scraping, breaking, leaving bloody streaks on the stone. The ogre’s spear caught him as he slid down, raised him high. His body went rigid and the shrieking peaked, then broke off, like the snap of a twig.
The ogre scraped the corpse off the spearhead as though it were dung on a boot sole. The other sentry plodded to the dark tunnel and called a name in garbled syllables, something like Nurgalurk or Nuganurk.
Frogtongue waddled into the cavern and followed the sentry along the shelf. The three ogres stood over the body. One prodded it disdainfully with the butt of his spear. “Dis meat no good. Make naeni crazy.”
They argued for some moments before Frogtongue swept a hand, silencing the sentries. From a broad belt she unlatched a shiny baernavë ring from which swung a single key. She unlocked the shackles from the madman’s wrists, then hefted the body over her shoulder, as if he weighed no more than a sack of flour. With the head and arms dangling down her back, she waddled out again.
“Poor bastard,” Doc muttered. “Like as not, he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t waking up from this nightmare and cracked his head once too often. Most have no idea, you know? Why they’re here. The Captain doesn’t bother telling them. They must think they’re here merely to feed these monsters, monsters that belong only in bedtime tales.”
Jaedren now sat on his knees beside the Ixakan, subdued.
Even Rhian had emerged to observe the madman’s fate. He watched Frogtongue pass his alcove with the corpse, watched until the ogre disappeared into the lightless tunnel, then he turned to gaze across forty feet of oily torchlight and a mountain of putrescence at Carah.
They would be forced to watch one another waste away and at last be reduced to bones, discarded as refuse.
Carah opened her mind to him, to extend encouragement, but her avedra ears were as deaf as if plugged by stone. She tried conveying her hope through the most tender of smiles, but even to herself it felt thin, false.
Rhian replied with a slight shake of his head. Carah didn’t know what it meant. Regret? Despair? Without a sound or further gesture, Rhian scooted back into the abyssal shadow of his alcove and dragged his chains in behind him.
“What’s wrong with him?” Jaedren asked.
“Let it be, kid,” Doc muttered.
“But Rhian is always the one encouraging us,” the boy persisted. “Is he sick, Doc? Is he got the dysentery like the others? Huh?”
“He’s sick, kid!” the Ixakan snapped. “Let him be.”
Jaedren cast a questioning look on Carah. She shaped a false smile for him too, then slid back into her own alcove. She was afraid to test how deep the darkness went, so she clung to the edge of the torchlight, drew her knees to her chest, and clamped her teeth on her forearm so Rhian wouldn’t hear her weeping.
~~~~
20
Alyster ran into the Evaronnan camp and doubled over, breathless. He refused to ride the splendid black horse when he scouted, which confounded Kethlyn. “A horse can’t hide in a hole, can it?” was the highlander’s excuse. Overblown pride, Kethlyn suspected. What could he do but shrug and hope Alyster’s stamina held out. His duties kept him running everywhere, ahead with the vanguard, behind with the rearguard, ranging out to each side of the column where hills might conceal enemies.
Somewhere along the road, the brothers had made amends, or near enough. Two evenings ago, Kethlyn had caught Alyster sitting crosslegged on the edge of camp, brooding like a thundercloud. From his fingers dangled a delicate silver charm. It had taken Kethlyn a moment to recognize Carah’s fairy pendant. He’d lunged for it. “That’s my sister’s!”
; Alyster snatched the pendant away and drove the heel of his hand into Kethlyn’s chest. “She gave it to me to wear.”
Why in hell would she do that? “She never takes it off.”
“Aye, she shouldn’ta. Maybe then she wouldn’ta been stole away.”
The highlander shared Kethlyn’s shame? He found it hard to believe. Harder still was the knowledge that Carah had accepted her bastard brother when she had every reason to scorn him. Fear him, even. That’s why Alyster had followed her to Windhaven, Kethlyn realized, not because he wanted to inspect the riches he might inherit. “You … you really feel that way about her?”
Alyster had said nothing, only fixed the delicate chain about his neck and glared out across the overgrown fields and the deepening twilight.
Kethlyn had gestured at the great red silk pavilion. “You can dine with me if you want. I won’t make you change clothes.”
Despondent, Alyster shook his head in refusal. But after a moment he ducked through the flap anyway.
The column had escaped the tragic shadow of the ruined forest. A torturously circuitous route through the Aralorri countryside had taken the army past the husk of Lanwyk Manor. Countless farms and hamlets had been torched and abandoned. The humped backs of the Barren Heights had slipped past the day before, and now at Alyster’s direction, the column had drawn up outside a town called Upton Mill. Apparently the War Commander’s host had camped in the same fields before freeing Tírandon.
Tírandon lay a mere eight miles to the south. So close. Kethlyn tried not to think about the hostility awaiting him there. He was ready. His fear had exhausted him, and exhaustion had pushed him beyond despair, leaving him numb, resolved. Is that what courage was? He didn’t know anymore. All he knew was that he’d grown sick of waiting. He was prepared to accept whatever judgment his parents hurled at him.
Still, he delayed. Before dawn he had sent scouts ranging toward Tírandon and east toward Bramoran. Alyster insisted he deploy scouts west toward the Gloamheath as well, but Kethlyn hadn’t understood the point. “The bogles attack most often from the ‘Heath, not Bramoran,” he’d explained, as heatedly and impertinently as ever. And so Kethlyn had sent Alyster himself west.
