Auralia's Colors

by Jeffrey Overstreet

  He chose a long and soiled woodscloak and shook it free of dust. When he did, a shadow slumped to the floor. Radegan jumped back with a shout.

  The shape beat leathery wings against the floor. Then from beneath that spiny span, legs, one after the other, emerged—jointed and striped. Clusters of oily eyes emerged and stared at him over fangs that seemed carved from obsidian.

  A spiderbat.

  Radegan pulled the cloak around himself and shuddered. He had never seen the famous menace of the Underkeep, the plague loosed by the opening of the abyss.

  Abascar’s miners had broken through, once upon a time, to a chasm that seemed to stretch on forever. Some of the diggers had fallen through, swallowed by an ancient silence. A slightly more fortunate few managed to catch a hold on the chasm walls and remain there screaming until rescuers could pull them back up. They spent the rest of their lives locked in rooms wrestling with a powerful madness. Even those who merely guarded the abyss were seized by weeks of excruciating dizziness. Eventually the king commanded that no one, not even patrolmen, could go near the abyss. Gates were installed. The king ordered the soldiers to secrecy.

  But nothing could silence the rumors, and soon there were many and varied stories about what lurked behind those gates, what wafted through the tunnels with sickening groans. Some spoke of an invisible terror, a cruel wind with a will of its own that sent its prey into panic and confusion. Another menace was easier to prove—a storm of eight-legged bats had reportedly emerged, flapping and crawling about in the recesses of the Underkeep. One prick from their venomous fangs, and a victim would swell like bread in an oven; a few days later the poison would lay siege to the mind and memory.

  And here was that terrible proof, clutching at the floor like a massive, hairy hand. The bloodthirsty abomination flexed its legs as if preparing for a leap, raising and stretching its fanlike wings.

  Radegan stepped back into the corridor and closed the curtain. In that instant, he felt the weight of the creature as it struck at the curtain. Its claws scratched and slid down the cloth.

  He stepped aside and waited, gasping. He saw the legs protrude from beneath the dark veil. One moment more, and its head was through. Radegan brought down his heavy boot and smashed it against the floor. Bruised, spluttering foam, the spiderbat thrashed, pounding against the dirt, clinging to the curtain and pulling itself around onto its back. Radegan struck again, the heel of his boot snapping its neck and crushing its bristly black head like an egg. The wings flapped in spasms, the legs clutched at his ankles and pricked at his shins. And then it went still.

  He heard a hiss behind him and turned to find the cavecat standing, back arched and fangs bared.

  “It’s dead,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Radegan broke into a run down the corridor. He had made too much noise and would need more than a woodscloak to avoid drawing attention.

  A commotion echoed ahead of him. He stepped sideways into a small cell-like room.

  They were unfriendly voices, one unmistakably the complaint of an inebriated man in great distress.

  Radegan’s eyes adjusted in the dim light to another kind of horror. Shackles were fixed to the wall where a man could be chained at the wrists, arms stretched. Stains lined with hair smeared the floor. A bench ran along the opposite wall for whoever would decide the prisoner’s fate. And in the far corner was an empty wooden crate.

  When the guards and their prisoner entered, Radegan was curled in the box below the reeking, heavy woodscloak, holding his breath, listening intently for a clue he could work to his advantage.

  The drunken prisoner must have been a guard or a soldier himself. He cursed like one as he was shackled to the wall. That would explain the clang of a helmet hitting the floor, the clatter of armor cast aside.

  “Kar-balter ker Keven-lor, you are stripped of your title as an officer of House Abascar. Your medals are retracted. And you are sentenced to five years among the Gatherers for stealing ales from the king’s distilleries. In addition, you are accused of recklessly endangering those who dwell and work in the distilleries by entering their storehouses in a state of unruly drunkenness with a forbidden and unshielded torch.” The officer clucked his tongue and muttered, “What are you, some kind of goatbrain? That’s like throwing a match into a tank of lamp oil. For this, an additional year is added to your sentence.”

  Shackles were fastened with forceful clacks. Kar-balter’s weeping increased Radegan’s anxiety—plainly, the reprimand would entail more than the reading of the captive’s misdeeds.

  The initial physical punishment did not last long. After suffering several dull blows, Kar-balter’s protests ceased. Guards and others talked in a hush. One, Em-emyt, was praised for cleverness in setting the trap for Kar-balter’s theft. And then heavy boots clumped across the cell to the door.

  Radegan smiled, pulled back the woodscloak…and was struck in the head by the prisoner’s armor, which the last of the departing soldiers had tossed into the box.

  He lay there, holding his breath, his skull ringing like a bell, blood spilling into his eyes. “Fantastic,” he almost said aloud. “Another scar.”

  When the throbbing of his bruised forehead subsided, Radegan looked at the helmet, armor, and boots. And he laughed.

  As he pulled on the soldier’s boots, he stopped to salute Kar-balter, who hung by his wrists, naked, blood splattered, and drooling. “What a tired old lesson you are,” Radegan whispered, finding the boots a bit large. “Like a moth to a lantern, eh, Kar-balter? It’s a miserable life, serving King Cal-marcus. Could drive a man to drink.”

  Putting on the armored breastplate, he smiled at the prisoner’s attempts to reach the floor with his feet. “You should never drink before stealing. It clouds your judgment.” He strapped a curtain of chain mail around his waist. “My father was a drunkard. Taught me a great deal about how not to live my life.”

  He slapped the senseless convict’s face and then pulled the helmet onto his own head. “This is just too easy. Now I’m off to take a thing or two that never belonged to the king. Thank you for the armor and weapons. They’ll come in handy.”

  Leaning close, he added, “Here’s a tip. Don’t develop desires you can’t control. That’s what makes men slaves. I may have been cast out. But today they’re going to learn what a man can do when he’s sharp, quick, and free.”

  All that Kar-balter could manage was a moan.

  A few moments later Radegan was running swiftly down the hall, noisily—Kar-balter’s armor was a loose fit. He paused to remind himself of the turns he had made. If he could not find his way back to the right lift, he would have no sure way out.

  He was straightening his weapons belt, guessing at the passages that would take him to the storerooms, when a company of soldiers surged toward him. He thought of retreating, but that would look most suspicious of all. He stopped, pulled the visor of the helmet down over his eyes, and decided to stand his ground.

  No one seemed surprised to see a soldier alone in the corridor. He turned and stood flat against the wall, allowing them to pass. That’s when he noticed these officers were clustered around none other than King Cal-marcus ker Har-baron himself.

  “My lord, how shall I explain this to the people?” It was Irimus Rain who leaned against the king. “The riot is still fresh in their minds. When they hear you have sentenced Auralia to the Hole, it will spark another uprising.”

  The king stopped, just three strides past Radegan, his robes billowing dramatically about him as he rose to his full height and stared at his sniveling advisor. “I went to the dungeons to pardon her, Irimus. I went to fulfill Cal-raven’s wish. I would have sent her far from Abascar. But you saw what she had done.”

  “I did, yes.”

  “She’s a witch, I tell you. Did you see that corridor? The stones in the wall…stones don’t shine. And the prisoners, they were claiming she had come to save House Abascar. As if we needed saving. Powers like those will make her dangerous
anywhere we take her.”

  “Yes, my lord, but…”

  “How can I proceed with Cal-raven’s wedding when rumors are already spreading that a treasonous Gatherer is wearing his Ring of Trust?”

  The Hole. Radegan felt a pang of panic. Auralia was to be left in the hands of the jailer, the abomination of the Underkeep. She was being sentenced to a fate far worse than he would ever have guessed. The Gatherers would be ruined. Nella Bye would walk, weeping, into the forest and go missing for days. Krawg was already at death’s door, and this would break him.

  It was easier to consider how others would respond than it was to imagine what Auralia would face.

  Perhaps he could rescue her.

  He remained still, at attention, every bit the dutiful soldier as the crowd waited for the king’s temper to cool.

  He glanced back down the corridor. If they had just come from the dungeon, then he could find it. He could pose as a jail guard, come to escort Auralia to the Hole, and then spirit her away. In her gratitude, she might even learn to think of him differently. Perhaps he could take Auralia away with him and leave Merya to deal with her husband.

  And then Radegan had another surprise.

  What he had assumed to be the glow of torches carried by the king’s guards was in fact something glimmering in the king’s own hands.

  “She refuses to destroy this abomination,” the king roared, shaking Auralia’s cape in his advisor’s face, “this open mockery of my Proclamation. I will have it plunged into a dye that will obliterate her work, then throw it back to her before she chokes on the jailer’s tools!” Face red as a beet, the king looked ready to collapse in the corridor.

  And then, as quickly as Cal-marcus had stopped, he started forward again like a charging vawn, the guards scrambling to keep up.

  Radegan stepped away from the wall as the last man passed, his gaze following the king’s crown in the dim torchlight.

  He would take those colors. He would snatch them from the dye vats. It would be risky, but there was nothing more beautiful in all the world.

  To steal the very thing the king had outlawed and to be rewarded for bestowing it upon Bel Amica…That would make Cal-marcus the greatest fool of the Expanse. This was better than staging Auralia’s rescue. This would be his parting insult to House Abascar.

  As the king and his company passed the room where Kar-balter hung bleeding, and then moved beyond the cloak closet, the last man in the procession slowed to a standstill, staring down at the sticky mass of smashed spiderbat.

  Radegan laughed in spite of his peril, for he knew now what he would do. He had no choice.

  The last man in the entourage was Captain Ark-robin himself.

  Obeying his hatred, Radegan placed his hand on the hilt of the dagger he had taken from the captive officer. He advanced, just a few steps behind the soldiers, ready should the moment present itself to strike down his enemy, seize Abascar’s prize, and leave this blasted house behind.

  22

  THE JAILER

  M augam was bald, and so broad and flat was his skullcap that sweat pooled there and became stagnant. With such vigor did he apply himself to his vocation that he did not bother to swipe the grime away when it finally spilled into his eyes nor as it continued falling like tears to soak his baggy trousers.

  He was focused, committed to his responsibility—he considered it an art—and accustomed to the solitude of his macabre workshop. What did his unsightly mass or his reputation matter? The dungeon was a small corner of House Abascar, but it belonged to him.

  Abascar’s kings—Maugam had served three of them—detested him in every way. But they had each been forced to admit the benefit of keeping him close at hand as a silent threat to Abascar’s criminal sort.

  How Maugam stayed alive through the years, no one understood. Some said he was dead inside and moved only by the will of the darkness his deeds attracted. Others whispered of the shapeless menace that drove Underkeep miners mad, saying the jailer had embraced it.

  Some proposed another possibility. Cursed with a repulsive appearance, Maugam found joy in spoiling those more beautiful than himself.

  Maugam loved scars, if he could love anything at all. He was meticulous about inflicting them. Some people sculpted stone or clay. Maugam’s medium was flesh. When Abascar deemed a criminal too loathsome for the Gatherers, the magistrates sent him to the dungeons, either to rot in Maugam’s deliberate neglect or suffer as objects of his cruel arts.

  He mastered his prisoners. He measured their respect for him in the silence that met his approach. He forged and mapped many and varied paths to confession, to supplication, to surrender. Some paths were efficient. But others were more interesting.

  It was true that young Maugam, a sickly child, had been fond of verse before his training busied him with other skills. He had written volumes praising his young sister, whose beauty he worshiped. Here he would sometimes practice his talents on the guilty until they offered praise in the form of pleasing verse.

  Few found enough wits under Maugam’s punishments to compose any verse.

  Maugam’s scarmaking required a wide array of tools, one of which he held lightly in his hand, a good solid whip. Once in a while, when a prisoner survived with impressive scars, Maugam would loose him among the Gatherers to spread the testimony of his persuasive methods.

  Razor stones were tied to each strand of the whip, and as it swished along the floor of slate tiles like a restless snake, they rattled and scraped. A white coal sizzled and hissed in the corner lantern.

  “Maugam, be a good child and thank the prisoner,” the jailer sighed. He was no longer able to acknowledge that this pulpy, ghost-fleshed creature was, in fact, himself. Thus he addressed himself with scorn, as if he were someone else. “You enjoyed this, Maugam. The prisoner cooperated so willingly, you had the chance to carve something that pleased you. The grudgers you carved yesterday, they were not so willing. Ah, well, you know you are not finished. It is time to take this good subject to the Hole.”

  He got quiet as he thought about that. He got this quiet at other times too. Like when he gazed admiringly at pieces of freshly carved roast streamertail or after setting a ripe pear on a board and slicing it into thin, sweet, precise wedges.

  Blood dripped from the dangling prisoner’s toes and into the pit over which he was strung.

  “King Cal-marcus is sending someone special down to you, Maugam,” the jailer said to himself. “Someone who must be taught a lesson. Treason, they say. Inciting riots among those same grudgers that you carved yesterday. You hope she’s like a beastman, don’t you, Maugam? Something unnatural. Those half animals, they bring out the worst in you. And they make such exquisite noise.” The jailer yawned wistfully. “Save some strength, child. Prince Cal-raven is on the hunt. He will bring you beastmen soon.”

  He rubbed his forehead. Even when he was busy elsewhere, pacing the corridors, that vacuous black Hole gave him a headache. He rolled his head back and popped his vertebrae like a string of firecrackers.

  The chains suspending the prisoner squeaked like dissonant fiddles.

  The jailer sighed. “No cell time for this one, Maugam. Doesn’t learn his lesson, the good captain said. Came back from outside the walls for revenge. Such audacity. Ark-robin’s dogs, they helped, they did. They sniffed out the Underkeep station where someone had let him in. And they found the summoner, didn’t they, Maugam? You wonder what the thief had promised her. You wonder, don’t you?”

  A faint sob escaped the prisoner.

  “You’re laughing, Maugam,” the jailer said, scolding himself. “You’re laughing at the prisoner’s pain. Is it really so amusing that this disobedient fool drew a dagger to strike Captain Ark-robin and—so unlikely, yet it’s true—the dagger had only half a blade?”

  That inspired a rattle in the shackles, a surge in the prisoner’s spirit.

  “Ah, but this unruly burglar was wearing Kar-balter’s armor. Yes. You’ve heard about Kar-balt
er, Maugam. It’s a simple rule: examine your blade before you attack. And that’s why a man is hanging here, getting stuck. Stuck with those dreadful, sharpened things. Stuck.” Maugam liked that word. He said it again as he picked up an old spear, rusty from its years lying in the underground mud. “Stuck.”

  He gave the spear one more thrust into the back of the prisoner’s knee, and the body seemed to come alive, a puppet flailing on strings. Maugam dropped the spear and walked to the wheel from which chains ran up to a ceiling pulley and down to the prisoner’s wrists.

  “Was that really necessary, Maugam?” he asked himself. “Now he may not survive the Hole.”

  He kicked the lever on the crankwheel, which spun and unwound a long clattering stream of chains, plunging the prisoner into the Hole. When the chains reached the end of their slack, the dungeons rang with an echoing bang.

  The jailer withdrew a pear he had stuffed in his pocket for just such a moment and took a deep bite. As he held the juicy orb in one hand, he worked the crankwheel, muscles flexing.

  The prisoner reappeared, a clutch of shredded rags. Maugam slid a large net across the top of the Hole and kicked the wheel’s lever again, dropping the body into the net. Then he dragged it back to the floor. He knelt down and unlocked the shackles. Then he towed the prisoner by hand and hair to a corner for the guards to clean up like trash.

  But the guards who arrived were not interested in what was left of Radegan.

  There were two, and Maugam could see immediately they were new to this task. They eagerly tossed their burden into the cave and drew back, waiting to make sure he acknowledged their delivery.

  She was a small and shuddering girl.

  Maugam heard that officers had locked up a rebellious woman who had provoked the grudgers. But he had been too busy to visit her himself.

  Never in all his days as jailer had he seen a prisoner so young, so vulnerable.

  He quickly put down the whip and blinked mole eyes at the flinching guards. “No one with any sense would bring…that…to Maugam. No one.”