“Let me try the muscles in my tongue first,” Brydda said.
Elii shrugged. “Call them if you like, but we have tried and they respond to nothing.”
Brydda walked up to the gate and hammered boldly upon it. The sound of his blows was a loud, flat clangor on the still night air, but not a sound came from beyond the wall other than the hoarse barking of dogs.
“Come out, priests! The boats are burned, so there is no going back to Herder Isle,” Brydda bellowed.
Still no response.
He came back to where the rest of us stood. “Don’t bother with the ram. The doors are too heavy. Get ropes and hooks, and we’ll go over the walls.”
“No!” I said, and they both stared at me. “I am sorry but … it’s possible the walls contain tainted stone. If anyone climbs onto them, and the taint is strong enough …”
Brydda nodded. “Very well. Then have someone find two long ladders and lash them together. We’ll construct a bridge that will clear the walls.”
Elii sent a few of his people off to fetch ladders and leather thongs but said he did not think ladders a good idea. “They’ll just as likely shoot arrows into anyone who shows his head above the top,” he said.
“We’ll use shields, but somehow I don’t think anyone will be shot,” the bearded rebel said.
“There may be no soldierguards in there, but the priests will defend themselves,” Wila said. “They don’t fight as a rule, but many of them can.”
“The priests would attack intruders, I know,” Brydda agreed, “if there were any there.”
Elii stared. “Are you saying that you think the cloister is empty of priests?”
“That is exactly what I am saying,” Brydda said grimly.
The ladders came, were fixed together, and then scaled. Elii insisted on being first to mount the makeshift bridge. He carried a small shield of stiffened leather before his face, but not an arrow was fired from beyond the wall.
“I can’t see anyone,” he cried down to us. “Just a couple dogs over by the stable gate.”
Brydda called him to come down, saying he would go over the wall first. But I caught at his arm and suggested I go first. “It’s not a matter of sacrificing myself,” I said. “The dogs can be trouble. I can calm them down and scry out the whole place from the top to make sure this is not some sort of trap. And if there is someone waiting when I climb down, you know I can defend myself.”
He tugged at his beard but finally nodded. “Very well. But take no risk, Elspeth. If you sense anything untoward, come back at once. Enough Misfits have been lost already in this rebellion.”
To satisfy him, I carried a wretchedly awkward shield and nearly fell off the ladder for my pains. Once I topped the wall, the breeze flicked my hair irritatingly into my eyes. The dogs Elii had seen were tied up, and when I beastspoke them, they projected ravenous hunger, saying they had not been fed for days. Bidding them be patient, I turned my mind to the dark buildings connected by stone corridors that formed the main part of the cloister and sent out a broad probe. It did not take me long to discover that there was not a single human mind in the place. I turned to shout my findings, then climbed down into the grounds.
It was even darker under the trees, but I sensed a dog bounding toward me before I had taken two steps. I used both coercion and beastspeaking to stop him from attacking me. He sniffed my leg, then lay on his belly in a sign of respect, addressing me reverently as ElspethInnle. As ever, I wondered how it was that beasts knew me. He promised to let the other dogs know not to attack anyone coming over the wall.
“I will tell them you bring food,” he sent with a hopeful wag of his tail.
Repressing amusement, I agreed that we would certainly provide food while we searched the buildings.
“You seek the funaga-ra who dwell here?” he asked, adding a suffix I had never heard of. I agreed that we were seeking the inhabitants of the cloister.
“Many funaga-ra came. Then some went out the gates. Many more went/were eaten by the ground.”
I asked what he meant, but he could explain it no better. I heard a noise and turned to find Brydda coming down the ladder. He eyed the dog warily, but I assured him it would not attack.
“They’re half starved, especially the ones tied up,” I said, and told him what the dog had said about the priests.
“Maybe he means the cells,” Brydda said. “There is a great network of them beneath the buildings.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Under the ground?” I echoed. “I cannot farseek under the ground. Maybe I was wrong about there being no one here.”
Other rebels and Misfits were coming down the ladder now, and Brydda directed some of them to go and open the front gate and others to tend to any animals needing care. I asked the dog to accompany them in case any other dogs were minded to attack.
“I have warned them,” he sent, “but I will go with the funaga.”
He trotted off amiably.
I was hesitating outside the door to the main building when Tomash and Wila joined me.
“What I don’t understand is how the priests got away without anyone noticing,” Tomash said, following me inside. “They must have gone under cover of night. Or perhaps it was all that coming and going to the ships from the cloister. Maybe there was a lot more going than coming.”
“It is so dark,” Wila said, looking back longingly at the door. “Are we looking for something?” she asked in a subdued voice.
“Prisoners,” I said. “Brydda told me there is a network of cells beneath the grounds, and if the priests are gone, I doubt they would have bothered freeing their prisoners.”
We went randomly along several halls and through a number of doors, until we came to one that was bolted from the inside.
I focused my mind and forced the lock, then pushed the heavy door inward. A foul reek rushed out, and after an initial recoil, I felt my way warily into the room.
Only it wasn’t a room. It was a stairwell. I realized we had found a way down to the cells, but it was idiotic to think of descending without light. I sent Wila and Tomash to find one, and a little time later they reappeared, both carrying candles in unadorned metal holders.
“There don’t seem to be any lanterns about,” Tomash said apologetically.
“Candles will serve,” I said.
He insisted on taking the lead, and I followed, with Wila coming along behind.
“What is that terrible smell?” she whispered, for indeed the offensive odor seemed to increase in potency as we descended. I did not dare say what I thought it was, and the fact that Tomash did not venture a guess suggested he had made the same dreadful assumption as I.
“I think this must be the bottom,” he said when the stairs ended in a low-roofed corridor running away into shadow. His voice sounded flat, as if the weight of earth above us were pressing down on his words.
“Let’s keep going,” I said.
We continued slowly along the corridor. It turned sharply, and just beyond the corner, there was a metal door, locked crudely with a beam. The door was so heavy that it took all three of us to move it, and when it opened, the smell was horrendous. Wila reeled back, retching, and I held my nose.
“Give me the light,” I said, gesturing impatiently to Tomash.
Gulping audibly, he brushed my hand aside and stepped through the door. I followed, and we both stopped at the sight of what appeared to be a room full of bodies.
“Mercy,” Tomash whispered.
Suddenly a filthy hand clawed at the light. It belonged to an emaciated man with a rash of red weeping sores over his face.
“I will tell you,” he rasped. “I will tell you everything. Don’t leave me here.”
Fighting horror, I forced myself to step forward.
“We are not priests. We have come to help you,” I said.
The man cowered back. “Please! Please,” he begged, struggling to his knees.
I took a deep breath and regretted it instantly
as the odor of the cell filled my nostrils. Forcing myself to calmness, I reached out mentally in an attempt to probe the man’s mind, but it was so shattered by his ordeal that I could find nothing to hold on to. I tried sending reassurance and compassion, but I was no empath. Finally, I simply resorted to sending images of the open sky above white-capped mountains.
To my relief, the man grew still. Then he looked up, his face twisted into a dreadful parody of a smile. “Sky.” He sighed it as a prayer.
“Come,” I said in the gentlest voice I could muster, and I held out my hand. “Let me help you to find the sky.”
The man climbed unsteadily to his feet and stared for a long time at my outstretched hand. I kept on sending images. Day skies gray with cloud, dusk skies swirling with dramatic color, skies rent with lightning. Gradually, the crazed wildness in his eyes faded into a kind of devastated hope.
“The others died, you know. They couldn’t wait.”
“I am sorry we took so long,” I whispered, fighting back tears.
The man nodded and put his hand into mine. It was so thin that it felt like I was holding a handful of dried twigs. “Come,” I said again, warning Wila and Tomash mentally not to do anything lest the man be frightened back into his witless state.
Taking the candle from Tomash as I passed, I instructed him and Wila to see if there were other cells occupied by living prisoners.
“There are,” Tomash sent in a shaken mindvoice. “I sent out a probe.”
“Then try bringing them out. I will be back with help.”
Leaving them, I led the man back to the stairs and, step by careful step, up to ground level. He flinched at the sight of the open door and the hallway beyond, and I tightened my grip on his fingers to make sure he did not pull free and hurl himself down the stairs.
“Soon you will see the sky,” I promised over and over until it became no more than a soothing chant. After what felt like an eternity, I brought him to the outer door. He shuddered violently at the sound of a dog barking, but at last he stepped through the door and looked up.
It was a brilliantly clear night. The stars were like diamonds fallen in a random spill over midnight velvet.
The man gave a long sighing gasp, and his hand twitched convulsively in mine.
“I thought I would not see the sky again,” he whispered. “I forgot how beautiful it is. I told my daughter stories of the sky, but I never got it right. We have to show her. She’s down there, too, you know. I was lying beside her, but she went to sleep.”
I swallowed hard and could find nothing to say. He showed no inclination to move, and so I stood there holding his hand and farsent to one of the other Misfits to fetch Kella. Only then did I learn that herbalists had been summoned already, for I was not the only one to discover prisoners in subterranean cells.
When I had left the man in an herbalist’s care, I returned to help Tomash and Wila search. I met them bringing out two young men who were crippled from what looked like a combination of torture and infection. I noticed that above the smell of filth and decay, there was a sweet acrid scent that reminded me of old grapes on the verge of rotting.
There were many dead in the cells, and I wondered how the priests had been able to stomach descending into their self-constructed hell and how often the bodies had been cleared out. When we came upon a number of chalky skeletons, I understood with revulsion that perhaps they had never bothered. After all, what better way to break prisoners than to put them into a cell that was serving as an open grave?
Of those we found alive, many were completely insane, or so close that there was little difference.
In one cell, we found three people alive, but barely—one of them a child whose face was so wasted she looked like a wizened little woman. I could not believe even the Herders would condemn a child to such a fate.
“Who are you?” she whispered, cowering against two women who stared at me in abject terror.
“I am a friend, and I have come to bring you out of here,” I said. The last thing these people needed was emotional hysteria, and in the face of what they had endured, I felt my tears could only be a self-indulgence.
Neither of the women moved, but the child tottered forward on spindly, black-streaked legs to look up at me. “You are so pretty,” she said, and reached out a dirty hand to touch my wrist. This reminded me so vividly of Dragon, touching my belly with her filthy hand when we first met, that I had to fight the urge to snatch the child up and run from that foul place with her.
“I am only clean. But soon you will be clean, too, and your mother …” I looked at the women.
“My mother went away with the gray men,” the girl said with owlish gravity. Her eyes had begun to water from the candlelight, dim as it was. “She didn’t come back. But these are my friends.”
“Then perhaps you can help me to bring your friends out of this terrible place into the fresh air.”
It took some persuading, but eventually I managed to get all three of them out, though they cringed at the sight of Tomash, and no amount of talking would convince the girl that he was a friend as well.
“I suppose it was men who tortured them,” the farseeker said shakily after I had taken them to the healing center that had been hastily established under the trees. Gazing up at the pinkening sky, I could scarcely believe that a whole night had all but passed.
There was a surge of flame through the trees, and I turned my head to see a shower of sparks fly up. More wood had been thrown onto the massive funeral pyre for the dead. There were far too many to consider an ordinary burial.
By the time we had cleared the buildings of the dead and wounded, it was late afternoon. Altogether, we had brought out thirty-three people alive. Two were children. Every one of them was suffering from thirst and malnutrition, and most had been tortured.
I thought it a miracle the whole place was not rife with plague and other diseases, but Wila explained that the Herders had used certain whitestick-based substances to disinfect the cells. This explained why so many of the survivors had strange, purplish burns over their bodies.
Dardelan had arranged a work crew to clean out the largest of the halls and fill it with beds. Ironically, the cloister was to become Kella’s healing center. The young rebel leader had encouraged her to arrange it as she pleased and to consider herself mistress of the herbalists he sent. Kella had accepted the responsibility of leadership with surprising ease, and although I had been concerned that the herbalists would resent her being given control, it was quickly clear that this was not so. Under Council reign, none but Herders were permitted to heal or prescribe medicines, so most herbalists had practiced in secret and in constant fear for their lives. This meant they had much in common with our Misfit existence. And seeing Kella heal, they had come to regard her with genuine admiration.
Brydda and Elii had found what they named the torture chamber. There was horror in the big man’s eyes as he told me this, and I was glad that he did not go on to describe what he had seen. Perhaps the most important discovery was a tunnel at the back of a locked cell, leading from the cloister right under the city to the seashore. Obviously, the priests had used their prisoners to construct the tunnel, and, of course, it explained the mystery of their disappearance. They would have slipped aboard Herder ships after night fell and been taken out to Herder Isle. We had no doubt now that the priests had fired the boats to prevent anyone coming after them. Indeed, Brydda was convinced that the whole elaborate banding ceremony had been no more than a cover for the mass exodus of the priests. He also suspected that it was the priests who had alerted the west coast Council to our plans.
“Why didn’t they let the Council here know, then?” I asked.
He shrugged and stood up. “Maybe it was simply a matter of timing, and they wanted all their people out before they did anything else. Or maybe they made some sort of deal with the west coast Council, which involved getting rid of their counterparts this side of the Suggredoon. I’m going to take a l
ook at the head priest’s chamber now.”
I rose, too, but he shook his head. “You’ve been up for two nights without sleep, Elspeth. You need some rest, or you’ll end up in one of Kella’s spare beds. The meeting has been postponed until tonight, and Gevan can sit in for you. You go to Bodera’s place and get some food and sleep.”
It was not until he spoke of fatigue that I realized how bone weary I really was. Horror and pity and disgust had kept me going through the long night and day, but I was at the end of my strength, and so I agreed to Brydda’s suggestions without argument.
Nevertheless, I went to see Kella first. She was in her element, moving from bed to bed, consulting herbalists and volunteer aides in her soft voice. She emanated serenity, and I wondered what I would see if I looked at her aura now. Surely in healing, she healed herself.
Seeming to feel my eyes on her, she glanced over to the door, then hurried over, looking concerned. “Are you all right, Elspeth?”
“I am, I just …” I stopped, not knowing what I had intended to say.
She nodded. “I know. I cannot believe it either. I have never seen anyone in such a wretched physical state as these prisoners, and their mental state …” She shook her head. “Some of them will never recover.” She hesitated. “But you know what I keep thinking about?”
I shook my head.
“It is terribly self-centered, but I keep remembering when they brought Domick and me and Jik to their Aborium cloister. If you had not rescued us, we would have been like these people. I was so frightened back then, but I had no … no idea what the Herders were capable of.”
Jik did, I thought bleakly. He knew, or suspected anyway. No wonder he had been so terrified.
“You should get some sleep,” Kella said gently. “Or do you want me to drain you?”
“I will let myself sleep,” I said. “I need to get away from all of this for a while. I don’t want to think anymore.”
She touched my arm. “I will give you a potion that will help you to sleep, then.” I barely registered her going away and returning to press a small leaf pouch into my fingers. “Chew it and spit it out. Don’t swallow it,” she cautioned, and gave me a push toward the door.
The Rebellion Page 77
