by C. K. Rieke
They headed down the hallway toward the eastern door.
“Hey, take me with you,” the man in the second room said.
As they made their way down the stone corridor illuminated in torchlight, the prisoners started to speak louder and louder. Soon all of the inmates on the floor were yelling. Then came the clacking of metal on metal as the guards met Tilda and Gogenanth at the bottom of the stairs.
“Drop your weapons!” an armed guard yelled at them. Four guards were with him, holding out swords.
Gogenanth pretended to put down his sword, but then brought it up to knock one of the guard’s swords away, and then another. He rushed at the main guard who’d yelled at them and put his shoulder into the guard’s face. It knocked the guard’s helmet off, and Gogenanth fell hard on top of him with his shoulder still pressed into him.
Tilda went after the other two guards and, with her sword and dagger, pushed their swords out to the sides. She plunged her dagger into the neck of one of them, and blood spewed from the wound.
The other guard dropped his spear and lunged with a sword at her, slicing into the lower part of her arm. She winced in pain and slashed wildly but methodically back at him. Their swords met, and they battled back and forth. Her blades danced through the air, and she seemed patient as she drew the guard toward her. She found an opening amongst his wild and angry attacks and knocked his sword away with hers, then thrust her dagger into his heart. He died almost instantly.
She turned to see Gogenanth pulling the short sword from a guard’s chest. The last remaining guard, who had the look of a scared child in his eyes, began to run. Tilda ran after him, quickly catching him and spattering the walls with his blood. They moved past the downed guards toward a door to the outside, but they heard more guards coming from behind them.
“Halt!” they heard repeatedly.
They came to the east gate door and unlocked it using keys they’d taken from one of the guards. Gogenanth pushed the door open to find Astor in a sword fight with four guards, two already lying on the ground. Tilda held the door shut to keep the soldiers behind from entering the fray.
Astor’s sword moved swiftly and silently through the air, and he struck a soldier in the leg, who then went down screaming wildly. Gogenanth attacked the other soldier from behind, knocking the sword from his hand and lifting him up above his head, grunting loudly as he threw him to the ground. The guard hit with a clash of metal hitting stone, and he didn’t get back up. Now all four soldiers were down.
From behind, Tilda yelled, “I can’t hold the door much longer.”
Astor pulled a soft-looking wedge from his pouch and put it into the side of the door. Tilda moved away and the wedge held the door tight, even with the soldiers on the other side rushing into it.
“They’ll be coming from the sides of the building and from the barracks. We need to flee,” Astor said.
Gogenanth murmured a quiet chant, and blue wisps of smoke and light swirled up around them, enveloping them in an orb of blue, and they disappeared from sight.
They ran to the nearest building and climbed the back stairwell. They headed north, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Tilda and Astor were as silent as the wind, and Gogenanth tried to land as softly as he could.
The city soon was a ruckus of soldiers shouting, dogs barking, and fires being lit. Gogenanth used his Azulūz to hide them as they jumped from rooftop to rooftop. Eventually, they made their way back to Gildur’s Armory.
“This is where we separate,” Tilda said.
“Thank you, and you,” Gogenanth said to them, and shook their hands.
“Where will you go?” Astor asked him.
“The mines. I must rescue Zaan,” he replied.
“Zaan! Where is he?” Tilda asked.
“I heard the captain talking about a place to the east of the Cascades, a place where he would never see the sun again,” he said. “I’ll find him.”
“And I’ll accompany you,” said Astor.
“Good. I must stay here, as to not draw suspicion upon Gildur and the group,” Tilda replied.
Gogenanth and Astor started off, as a glowing orb of blue majesty began encircling them, and they drifted into invisibility as they crept through a gate to exit the city. They moved quickly and quietly through the fields and made it into the forest in short time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ZAAN hit the wall hard, again and again. The pain in his hands had become duller over the last few days. Hard calluses had formed, and it was the reopening of scabs each day that became the most troubling issues. His head and body had recovered from his beating, but the muscles he’d gained from working at the armory were beginning to diminish. He was starving, and the lack of water was wearing on him.
Two days prior, they had lost one from their group in the night. She’d fallen ill and was taken away by the guards, hardly crying. She was a young girl, but Zaan didn’t know her name because the slaves in these mines did not share personal things with each other. They all felt names formed emotional attachments within the group, and with death so common, it wasn’t worth it to them.
The constant darkness in their cell, where they sat up to twelve hours at a time, was another issue. It drove many mad. Zaan guessed it was just a part of this cruel punishment, to deprive everyone from sunlight. He thought about how close the exit was to where they were held. How many footsteps to see the light of the sun? He thought about the guards walking in the sun to come to the caves, smiling as they did so.
Zaan was not completely devoid of hope. He had not been in the mines long enough to have forgotten about his life, and the others who were thinking about him. He did suffer, though. The thought of his family living on, and their not hearing from him ever again, or not hearing any of what had happened to him, was the worst. The one consolation he had was the thought that if he did die, he would be with his sister. He thought about Emilisa a lot in the dark of his cell with his fellow prisoners. The group hardly ever talked to each other except to utter warnings amongst themselves. So he would have conversations with Emilisa to himself. They started in the second week or so.
“Remember when Oscar was young? He would run as fast as he could after a stick, then bring it back and not let go of it, no matter how hard we tried. He was so proud to show it off and growl, but he wouldn’t let go,” he said, and he laughed.
“You know that Mom and Dad are watching him, I bet it’s good for them to be with Oscar. He can keep them company. You know how Mom is: she’s always moving around, like a busy bee collecting pollen. I bet Dad and Oscar just hang out all day, Dad smoking his pipe and Oscar lying in the sunlight in the kitchen. I can almost smell that vanilla pipe smoke.” Zaan smiled, but it soon faded. He knew it was crazy talking to her, and it made him even sadder. Dropping his head into his arms, he cried.
“I’m going to see you someday, Emilisa. Hopefully I’ll survive this, and if I do I promise to take care of Mom and Dad. Maybe I’ll even have kids of my own. I’ll name one Emilisa after her aunt, so you’ll be remembered. I need to get out of this place. I can’t die here. Please don’t let me die here.”
The footsteps came again, two pairs. The slave’s backs tightened up as the guards approached. “Get back!” the red-haired guard said with his long sword held out.
Everyone got their backs up against the wall and put their heads down. No one would argue with the man with the sword.
“You,” he said as he pointed to the oldest of Zaan’s group. “Come over here.” The old man didn’t move.
“I said get over here!” The guard’s face turned red as he yelled this, and drool fell from his mouth. His snarling yellow teeth showed.
The old man dropped to his knees. “Please, don’t hurt me,” he said in a most pathetic tone. He was like a mouse pleading to a fat cat.
The bald guard was standing next to the red-haired one. “Ha, like we would waste our time . . .” he began. But before he finishe
d, the red-haired guard started toward the old man and with one large sweep hit him in the temple with his powerful fist. The old man’s body fell to the floor.
“When I tell you to do something, you . . .” The guard began as he let out a puff of air. He brushed his long red hair out of his face. Taking a step back, he stood there looking at the elder shaking on the cold rocks. The old man shook for less than a minute, then stopped and lay still on the ground.
The bald guard went over and nudged the old man with his foot. “Well, he ain’t going nowheres now.”
The red-haired guard walked out of the room, his body tense and shoulders hunched.
The bald man stood over the dead man and tried to figure out what to do next. “Hmm. Oh well, he was shit with an axe anyways.” He turned his back, locked the gate, and left Zaan and the group in the dark with the corpse. Everyone wept in the darkness, softly, so that the guards wouldn’t hear them and return.
***
Over the next couple of days, Zaan tried to figure out ways to keep his sanity. The work was so hard, some would give up and get whipped. When they couldn’t lift their arms over their head, they would cry and be punished and be made to work harder. If they refused, they were taken away. Their corpses would be put on display in one of the passageways of the cave until the stench grew too bad for the guards. This was surely a deterrent to anyone considering putting their pickax down. When it came to staying alive, the key was to keep a steady pace. It was all endurance, and overexertion was the enemy.
Water was the biggest worry, and the most important key to survival. When water was brought into the cell, everyone would forget everything—their own names, the fact that they were people. They became animals, clawing, biting and growling at each other. For the brief moments that there was water to be had, it was survival of the fittest. The newcomers who came and sat at the sides and watched soon became animals themselves.
So to keep his sanity and pass the time, Zaan would pick at his fingernails, in a specific pattern. He would clean the underneath of his nails from his left to right hand, one by one, getting each nail ten times. He would do this one hundred times. If he lost count, he would have to start over. When he completed this, then he would do his feet. He enjoyed making it to his feet, because his toenails were thicker and made a louder clicking sound. While he did this he would try to remember the colors of leaves on trees or the feel of grass between his toes. He continued to have conversations with Emilisa.
“Things would have been so different if you hadn’t died. You probably would have gotten married young, like the others in town. By now you’d have a couple of rugrats calling me uncle. Maybe I would have even stayed in Fur-lol, to be closer to the kids,” he said.
“Mom and Dad would be different too. Dad aged a lot after you died. I think you were their favorite. I’m not sure I ever made them proud, but by the way that we still talk about you, you can just tell. Ugh, I don’t know if I’m ever going to get out of this place, Emilisa. I’m afraid I’m going to go crazy. How can anyone live through this? I’m always hungry. I’m always thirsty. What did I do to deserve this? What could anyone do to deserve this? I don’t even understand what this Azulūz is! Why do they do this to people who have it? Why did this happen to me? I would give anything to look into the light of the sun and feel it on my skin. But look at me. I don’t have anything. I am nothing. I feel like if something doesn’t happen soon, Emilisa, I’m going to die, but at least we can be together then.” Zaan put his head down, his shoulders sank, and he tried to remember Emilisa’s smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE early-morning sun crept up over the high exterior walls of Auracity. Long streaks of golden light touched the door of the prison at the city center and shone off the silver armor and red fur mane of the captain of the king’s guard. Erolos knelt down and removed the wedge Astor had placed in the door a few hours before. Holding it up into the light of the sun, he examined it. “Curious.”
Behind him, soldiers watched him and walked around, waiting for someone to give them direction, as an escape like this had never been so brazen.
“It’s a doortrap,” Angela Dragus the Righteous said as she walked up behind Erolos. He turned to see her. She was wearing an elegant ivory-and-crimson-colored gown that exposed her shoulders and one of her pale legs. “They’re produced in the south, a trade secret from the Worforgon, rare in this part of the world.”
Erolos held up the doortrap to Angela, and she took it into her hand, examining it. “I’ve never seen one of these before. What about whatever they used to melt iron bars up there? Any ideas how they did that?” he asked.
“That, Erolos, I do not know exactly,” she said as she looked up at the bar-less windowsill above. “Tell me how you think the king is feeling right now about a heretic escaping the day before he was to be publicly executed.”
Erolos glared at her. “This is your damned fault. You didn’t tell me the big man knew magic, or whatever the hell they used to get out.”
She took a casual step to his side and slowly walked around him. “You think the king is going to blame a woman for this mess? No, no, no. He is going to be furious, probably kill any man who was here last night. He may even kill most of these prisoners, but I doubt you will be able to walk away from this unscathed. At least after I have a discussion with him about it.”
“You damned witch!” he said. He unsheathed his long sword and swung it at her in a large arc. Her arm moved quickly to her side, and with a violet glow with red wisps, she caught the sword in her hand.
Erolos’s eyes grew wide, and he did not move. The purple and red wisps crawled up his blade toward his hands, and he suddenly dropped his sword on the stones. All the surrounding guards watched in awe and fear.
Then his sword rose from the ground and hovered in the air, all the while dancing in the wafting wisps of purple haze. It turned end over end to point itself at him, and he took a slight step back. “What in the devil are you?!”
“Where is the boy you caught with the foreign man Gogenanth?” she asked as the sword inched closer to Erolos. She took a step forward, her face beginning to show her anger. “Where is the boy from Fur-lol?”
“I . . . I told you, we killed him out in the woods, and buried him in an unmarked grave.”
“Your king told you I wanted that boy.”
“He, he told me he wanted him dead, so that’s what we did. We killed him,” he said, his eyes fixated on his sword spinning in place.
“My lord wanted that boy. I swear if I find out you sold him to one of those slave traders on the black market . . .”
“What? I would never . . . slavery is illegal.”
“I know what you do on the side, Erolos, and I care not,” she said, her eyes narrowing as she grabbed the sword, “until it gets in the way of what I want!”
Erolos stood there frozen, watching her hold the sword out, the tip was a mere inch from his eye.
“Here’s what’s going to happen. The next time you are ordered to find someone for me, I want them whole and breathing, do you understand?”
“Yes ma’am, I understand you.”
“Good,” she said as she held up the sword in the early morning sunlight, examining it. “This is a good sword. I wouldn’t recommend you give it away so easily again.” She flipped it in her hand, holding onto the sharp end and holding the hilt out to him. He grabbed it, and the soldiers around watched in awe.
She started walking back in the direction she’d come from, the long white tail of her dress dancing delicately along the ground as she disappeared around the corner of the prison.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE sky was lit with ribbons of auburn reds and streaks of heavenly golds. Gogenanth walked along a deer path in the Yelden Forest, Astor trailing behind him. The stars began to appear, scattered throughout the tops of the trees. A chill came in through the forest, as most of the leaves had already fallen. Tonight would be
cold, Astor thought to himself. He knew shelter would be needed. Gogenanth was thinking the same thing and was now a fugitive, wanted by the Crown for escaping death. He was sure there was a generous bounty placed on his head. There would be no fire tonight.
Astor hadn’t planned on such an impromptu journey, but he was a survivalist and had grown up in the woods. Elindrill was his aunt, sister of Astor’s father, Valor. Valor Delasius was a member of a guard unit for a lord in Vallenhalen, a castle in the southeast where the Rangk River met the Elden Sea. It was a magnificent castle that had stood for thousands of years, serving as one of the major trade ports in the east, its many bridges traversing the scattered delta’s islands. The bridges stretched out like a spider’s web and all converged on the Tower of Lūr, a beacon that could be seen from many points on the Elden Sea.
As Valor’s eldest son, Astor was kept at the family farm northwest of the castle; but came to the castle frequently to learn archery and swordplay. Astor hadn’t been the tallest or strongest kid, but he was fast. He was naturally skilled at archery, but he truly excelled with a blade. Fencing taught him that the sword follows the mind until the arm can be trained to move faster than the mind—a powerful skill indeed.
“Do you think Zaan is still alive?” Astor asked Gogenanth, whose brow furrowed.
Gogenanth was descended from people in the far east, in the land of the Arr. From there he’d traveled to the continent to the south, the Worforgon, where he spent years working for various organizations before coming to this continent, Essill. He was two full heads taller than Astor, with a black widow’s peak and a large broad nose. His strong chin and jaw and clear white skin were unusual for people from the east. It was rumored among their group in Auracity that he was a general in an army of the Worforgon. He was generally a man of few words, so people didn’t know much about him other than that he was a skilled warrior and hunter.
