Redoubt: Book Four of the Collegium Chronicles (A Valdemar Novel)

by Mercedes Lackey

  Now it was heat, and silence, and darkness.

  And he was lying on his side.

  How could he be lying on his side?

  The surface underneath him was wood, and moving, vibrating, and swaying from side to side. There was cloth over him. He was sweating buckets now, his clothing was soaked through and—

  Clothing?

  He was wearing real clothes, just as the Pieters boys did, not rags. He could feel them on his skin, even if he couldn’t move his arms or legs or open his eyes.

  Where had he gotten clothing?

  He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t.

  His thoughts seemed to be struggling through thick mud. It was so hard to put them together.

  This couldn’t be the mine. And it felt too real to be some sort of fever dream. Or if it was a fever-dream, it was so impossible that he must be dying of it.

  But what if it wasn’t a fever dream? What if this was real, and it was the mine that was the dream?

  He was in clothing, soaked in sweat. He was terrified. His head hurt. He was lying on his side. He couldn’t open his eyes, or move anything.

  Think!

  It was hot, stifling hot.

  He wasn’t hungry . . .

  That realization lanced through him like being struck by lightning. I’m not hungry. At the mine, the only time you weren’t hungry was when you’d had some lucky accident. Maybe you somehow found a patch of cattails or cress or poke or goose grass no one else had gotten to, and you gobbled it all up there on the spot. Maybe the cooks had had an accident with the ovens and a lot of bread was burned and intended for the pigs, but you got to it first. And you remembered those times, because they shined out in your mind. But he didn’t remember a windfall like that recent enough to make him full now, and of all of the parts of him that hurt, his stomach wasn’t one of them. His stomach was entirely happy.

  That only made him more frightened. If he wasn’t at the mine, where was he? Why was he here—and where was here anyway? The surface he was on was moving, shaking a little—

  He strained his ears, and he could hear the sounds of wheels, and hooves. Was he in a wagon or a cart?

  But why?

  He tried to remember . . . but the only thing he could think of was . . . a roof. Or, rather, a rooftop.

  That only frightened him more. He shouldn’t be able to remember a rooftop. Why would he have been on a rooftop? Particularly a rooftop like the one in his mind, surrounded by more of the same, under a cloudy night sky.

  And his head felt so . . . wrong.

  Why? Why did it feel as if there was part of him, inside his head, that was either missing or, like his uncooperative limbs, not working?

  And why couldn’t he move?

  That rooftop—had he fallen from it? Was he now lying in a state of paralysis, being taken somewhere? Had he broken his neck? But if he had, why wasn’t he dead? If he had, why could he feel his arms and legs, but not move them?

  What had he been doing up there in the first place?

  The surface he was lying on gave a great jolt, confirming that it was a wagon. But he didn’t roll, or otherwise move. He was wedged in this position, on his side, curled like a child. He could feel it, even if he couldn’t move.

  And it was so hot . . .

  His stomach might be happy, but his throat was parched, dry, his tongue felt swollen. His mouth and throat felt on fire with the need for a drink. Without even thinking about it, he managed a moan.

  The wagon or cart he was in stopped moving. He heard someone dropping to the ground, then footsteps. The cart tilted a little.

  There was a sound of cloth being whipped away, and a brief breath of cooler air. He fought to open his eyes and succeeded, only to find himself in the dark.

  A hand groped over his face and buried itself in his hair.

  He was hauled up by the hair. There was someone there, who ruthlessly jammed a thumb and forefinger into the hinges of his jaw to force his mouth open. The wooden spout of a waterskin was shoved in between his teeth, and bittersweet water trickled over his tongue.

  He drank, because the burning of his mouth and throat would not allow anything else. He drank, because some instinct told him that if he didn’t, it would be forced down his throat in some very unpleasant manner.

  But he didn’t drink fast. He didn’t gulp at the water, the way he vaguely recalled doing earlier. He drank sparingly, only as much as would ease the burning thirst, and the person feeding him didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t sucking the water down as fast as he could.

  Maybe because it was dark. Or maybe the person was so impatient, in so much of a hurry to get this over with, that he wasn’t paying attention.

  There was a drug in the water, he was certain of it. Water shouldn’t taste like that.

  Was he sick? Was that why he was being drugged?

  But sick or injured, none of this made any sense. Cole Pieters would never have wasted real clothing on a mine-slavey, much less sent one away to be treated for injury or illness. What had happened to him? Who had him, and where were they taking him, and why?

  He wasn’t dropped down, he was lowered back, even if it was by the hair, and curled back up in that fetal coil. He felt boxes and bags all around him, arranged into that shape to hold him there.

  This time the person didn’t cover him up again. He felt the cart shift with the other person’s weight, then heard him drop down to the ground, go around to the front of the cart again, and heard him climb back up.

  “Gabble gabble?”

  “Gabble.” A snort. “Gabble gabble gabble.”

  “Gabble.”

  The cart began to move again.

  Mags felt his head reeling. Had he lost all ability to understand speech? There was not a single word there that he recognized!

  But then, it didn’t matter, as he found himself back in the mine, crouched in the mineshaft, hands wrapped numbly around his tools and waiting for the devil to come for him.

  8

  The devil had found him. The horrible thing was coming for him, the devil that Cole Pieters had sworn was his due. It had just popped up, in the middle of the yard, just as they were all heading out of the mine.

  Mags hid, hid in the place he knew the best.

  The mine.

  They were all terrified, even the Pieterses, so it looked as though claiming he was a saint for taking in all the mine kiddies wasn’t doing any good. The devil had already torn one boy apart, mistaking him for Mags, so maybe the thing wasn’t real good at figuring out who his victim actually was supposed to be. But then again, the other boy had been right next to Mags, so maybe the devil had just missed him and gotten Davven by accident.

  Or maybe the devil was here for a lot of them and would get around to him, sooner or later. A devil probably wouldn’t care if he got a few extra on his way to the one he wanted. Maybe the devil was just here to kill everyone. Depending on why it was here—if one of the crazy cripples had gone to hell and sent it back, well everyone was going to be dead. Even if they liked the mine-kiddies, the crazies all figured they were better off dead than here, and they said so, often.

  Mags didn’t know and didn’t particularly care. He ran, and so did everyone else who saw the thing, which must have confused the devil even further about which of them to chase. After all, all the mine-kiddies pretty much looked alike, matted mops of dirty no-color hair on top of stick-thin, sexless bodies in rags. Once they began to run, it would be even harder to tell them apart.

  You couldn’t really make out what it was. It was sort of a smoke-shape, and sort of a shimmer in the air, and sort of a black thing like a kind of burned-up skeleton in the middle of all that. It kind of changed within the smoke, first one thing and then another, and only bits of it visible at any one time. But you could sure make out what it was doing. Mags had seen it shred that boy it had pounced on, just tear off arms and legs and—well at that point, he’d been too busy running to look back.

  Mags
left it chasing after two of the Pieters boys, hoping it would catch them and be sated. Or at least catch them and give them what they had coming. But he was pretty sure it had marked him as a target; he could feel it, and he ran for the mine. His first thought was to hide in a place where the devil would be at a disadvantage and he would not. By the time he got past the mine head, he had a plan—not much of one, but at least it was some kind of a plan.

  His arms and legs were aching, his back was aching, and his side was aching when he finished working his way through the labyrinth of shafts to the latrine tunnel. He ducked inside and kept running, keeping to the edge of the shaft. Most people didn’t bother going all the way to the end to relieve themselves, so it stank hardly at all by the time he got to the back of it where the seam of sparklies had died out in tough granite. He had to crouch after a while, as the shaft narrowed and started to peter out. Then he went to his hands and knees.

  By that point the tunnel was only high enough to crawl along, which was what he was counting on. There was a lot of fallen rock here, and that made it painful to crawl, but it would be a lot more painful to get caught by the devil.

  If the devil hunted by smell, the latrine-stink might confuse it. If the devil hunted by sight, well, he had an answer for that too.

  He stopped where he had a timber shoring up the roof, but a good amount of rock that had either been shoveled in or fallen down all around him. Carefully, moving more quietly than a mouse, he built up a wall between him and the rest of the tunnel. He could hear lots of screaming off in the distance; as long as he heard that, he had time to build his wall. Maybe in the dark it would look to the devil like the back of the shaft. Placing the rocks stone by stone, he had wedged the final one in when he heard someone come screaming down into the mine. Then he blew out his head lantern and waited, trying not to breathe.

  Wait, where did the lantern come from?

  He brushed the irrelevant thought away. There were much more important things to think about now, like living. There were lots of screams in the mine now, echoing through the tunnels. He couldn’t tell if it was more than one person, but he thought it might be. And he thought he could hear the devil now, too, making a kind of growling deep in its throat and muttering to itself. “Gabble gabble,” it said, then answered itself in a second voice. “Gabble gabble.”

  He ached all over, ached not just with the aches of working all day and the aches of running for his life, but with cold. Where before he’d been hot, now he was cold, cold enough to shiver. He clenched his teeth to keep the devil from hearing them chattering with cold.

  Shivering, terrified, he huddled in on himself, arms wrapped around his legs, eyes clenched tightly closed, and listened to the devil mutter to itself. It sounded like it was having an entire conversation right outside the latrine tunnel.

  And his head felt so wrong, as if someone had stuffed it with rags. Or cut pieces out of the inside of it. What was the matter with his head? Why did it feel so wrong, as if something was missing?

  He was shivering so hard now that he couldn’t sit, he had to lie down, which wasn’t going to help at all because the rock would be so cold. . . .

  But the rock wasn’t cold, or at least, it wasn’t any colder than the air was . . .

  . . . because it wasn’t rock.

  It was wood.

  And it was moving.

  It wasn’t a devil that was muttering somewhere beyond his head. It was two men, having a conversation, and he couldn’t understand a single word.

  He was lying on his side in a curl, shivering with cold. His head ached so badly, but now, for the first time, when he tried to move his arms and legs, he could, just a little. That was when his mind cleared a little, and he realized that his last clear memory was of being on that rooftop.

  A rooftop in a city.

  Haven. The city was called Haven.

  He remembered being up there, looking around himself. He was about to go . . . somewhere. Somewhere important. And then, once he got to the important place, he would go home, only “home” wasn’t the mine, and he didn’t belong to Cole Pieters anymore.

  Something up there was watching him in the memory, and he was studiously ignoring whatever it was, because it had been watching him for a long time now, and nothing had come of it. Everyone said that eventually it would go away, that it wasn’t dangerous, and nothing was going to happen. Except this time, something did.

  Whatever it was that was up there in the darkness, whatever it was that had only been watching him until that moment, had . . . done something. Something unexpected, catching him completely by surprise. And then there was blackness, and he found himself back in the mine.

  How had he gotten to a city from the mine in the first place? And where was this place that he knew was home, even though he couldn’t even remember what it was?

  Little by little, fragments of memories came back. He clung to them fiercely.

  That bittersweet taste in the soup and the water . . . that had to be a drug. And the smoke—that must have been how they’d gotten the drug into him the first time, after they hit him in the head. He was pretty sure he’d been hit in the head; it felt as if someone had nearly cracked his skull open. He’d been burning hot for what seemed like forever but had probably only been days, but now he was cold. What did that mean? Had he been dreaming himself in the mine for weeks? Was it winter now? Or had he been burning with fever, and now the fever had broken?

  Maybe all it meant was that the weather had changed . . . the weather had been due to change to colder. Everyone in Haven had been complaining that it hadn’t. He remembered that, too, even though he couldn’t remember who the everyone was.

  He couldn’t understand a word the two men were saying, and that sent him into a panic. Had he lost his ability to understand speech?

  Had he had that same thought before?

  Was he going insane?

  He huddled in on himself more, and despite his effort to keep quiet, his teeth started to chatter.

  The wagon stopped.

  Oh, no . . .

  Of all things, he wanted to hang onto this clarity. He didn’t want them to drug him again! He squeezed his eyes shut, held as still as he could, breathing evenly as if he were still unconscious, but allowed his teeth to chatter.

  This time he heard two sets of footsteps coming around to the back of the wagon, two men grunted as they pulled themselves up into the rear, and the wagon moved under their weight.

  And that was when he suddenly realized, with a touch of hysteria, that he desperately needed to urinate.

  He felt boxes and bales being moved around him, and kept still and limp. But he was not expecting it when he felt rough hands hauling him upright.

  The men gabbled at each other in a grumbling sort of way as he debated—should he stay limp? Or should he act like . . . like a sleepwalker?

  He had about a fifty percent chance of guessing wrong; he guessed, and acted like a sleepwalker . . . half-cooperating as they manhandled him down out of the wagon. He almost wept when he realized this was what they were expecting.

  He cracked his eyelids slightly. Sleepwalkers sometimes opened their eyes, so he didn’t think it would matter, and it would keep him from hurting himself if he could see where he was going.

  Wherever he was, it looked nothing like the land around the mine. It did look like early fall. He could smell the leaves turning, and they were going colors, here and there. The trees were more sparse than they were around the mine, the ground seemed harder, barer. It was definitely hillier. He thought it was very early morning, the sunlight had that thin quality to it.

  The men walked him over to a clump of bushes and . . .

  It took all of his control to keep from reacting as one of them, with a grunt of disgust, pulled his trews down and took out his . . .

  But the desperate need took over, and he let loose, even though it was someone else doing the directing and all. His knees nearly gave with relief when the man pulle
d his trews back up, roughly, making it crystal clear that he would rather have been doing anything else.

  That’s why they’re feeding me soup. So they don’t have to worry about getting me to squat.

  He let them half carry him back to the wagon, arrange him in a curl, but this time on his other side. His teeth were still chattering; the men didn’t seem cold, but his clothing wasn’t very heavy, and it was clammy and damp with sweat. Their clothing was a lot heavier than his, and it looked a little odd to him, something like a padded leather jacket over baggy trews wrapped at the ankles with thin strips of more leather.

  They hauled him up, dropped him into what was evidently “his” spot, and curled him on his side. He was almost grateful when one of them tossed a heavy blanket that smelled of horse over him before they piled the bales and boxes around him and tossed a canvas over the top of it all.

  Now he opened his eyes completely. He still couldn’t move, much, so he concentrated on trying to remember, instead.

  My name is Mags. That was easy, he already knew that.

  The last thing I remember is being ambushed on a rooftop, in a city called Haven.

  Why was he on the rooftop in the first place?

  There was a man . . . Nikolas. He could see Nikolas in his head—nondescript, unmemorable, and yet somehow he knew that this “Nikolas” was a very important man. He was doing work for Nikolas. Work that . . . was also important.

  He got another flash of memory, of a shop of some sort. A shop that sold. . . .

  No, a shop that mostly bought.

  Pawnshop.

  His mind supplied the name.

  All right, he was there at that shop, in Haven . . . why? Doing work, but—what kind? And the clothing he was wearing now . . . it was all wrong. It felt wrong. He only wore this to do that work for Nikolas. It wasn’t his usual clothing.

  All right then, what was his usual clothing? He tried to picture it, imagined himself getting dressed in the dark, and when he came out into the light he would be wearing—