‘Keep track of him. If he’s as good as Edvalt, I would like him to make weapons for us rather than our neighbours. Besides, you’re likely not the only one who will notice the family resemblance.’
Balven said nothing as they mounted the steps into the keep.
• CHAPTER TEN •
In the Crimson Depths
Hatu awoke suddenly, in pain and darkness. It took him a few moments to organize his thoughts enough to remember that he had been on a boat with Donte before he was pulled under the sea by monstrous sea creatures. The abrasions on his body smarted from being exposed to salt water, and several deep bruises throbbed. He blinked and saw dark shapes moving in the gloom.
He shook his head as he realised that he was bound by his wrists, shackled to chains hanging from the ceiling; his shoulders ached and felt as if they might be separating. Hatu looked up, barely able to see the upper limit of the dark, wet cave. He saw a glow coming from the pools of water scattered around the large cave, and from pockets in the walls, and recognised it as some kind of phosphorescent algae. It gave off just enough light to cast shadows and faint patches of illumination. He looked up again and, as his eyes adjusted, began to make out further details: the chains were threaded through a heavy iron ring attached to the ceiling by a massive bolt.
To his left, an unconscious figure dangled limply from another pair of shackles. Hatu got his feet under him and discovered he could move but barely a couple of inches once he stood upright. A shorter man would have been literally hanging from the chains. He ignored the chill in his legs from the ankle-deep water and stood as tall as he was able, moving his arms a little. It eased the deep pain in his shoulders slightly and he moved them gently; as circulation returned they throbbed, but he could tell nothing was dislocated or seriously injured.
A deep moan echoed from some distance away, and he could hear the sound of lapping water. Hatu looked to his right and saw another chain hanging empty, and possibly a fourth beyond it, but he couldn’t be certain.
He stood on tiptoes, which eased his shoulder joints further. When the pain faded, he gripped the chains with his hands and pulled slightly, causing a popping sound in both shoulders, loud in his ears against the relative quiet of the cave. He felt instant relief and moved as best he could under the circumstances.
Then the calm was sundered by a cry from within the deep gloom: a weak wail of pure pain and terror. Hatu had heard many men scream since his boyhood, so he understood the differences. He’d heard men shout out in pain as their wounds were treated, or some bellow their outrage, or give savage voice to battle lust, but this cry was …
The sound ended in a gasping echo, like a man sucking in his last breath, followed by a loud anguished sigh trailing off into silence. For the first time in his life Hatu was visited by a fear that settled into his bones, one that turned him colder than any wet cave ever could. He gritted his teeth so they wouldn’t chatter, his mind racing like an animal seeking escape. For a long time, no coherent thought was possible.
Hatu let his feet go limp; the painful jolt he felt as he once again hung from the ceiling was enough to banish his mindless terror and gave him space to replace it with more useful outrage. Another crucial lesson taught by every master and teacher from his earliest memory was that you were never without hope until your very last breath. He tugged against his chains a few more times and judged that trying to force them was totally futile, so instead he turned his mind to his surroundings and to those who had captured him.
He could see no one else besides Donte’s still figure on his left, though at least half of the cavern was hidden from his view by deep shadows or utter darkness. Hatu turned to look at his friend and whispered, ‘Donte?’
Donte hung motionless, not stirring. Hatu could just make out a wound on his friend’s head: a scalp cut that had bled freely and bathed one side of his face, neck, and shoulder. He knew from their training that scalp wounds often looked worse than they were, but also worried that Donte’s limp form suggested the cut may have come from a hard strike. A blow that had caused him to be unconscious for this long might be killing him silently. His education had included tending the wounded, and head wounds were often the most difficult to understand and treat; a man might take a blow to the head and seem to be on his way to recovery, only to then die suddenly. Master Bodai had watched healers cut into the heads of dead men to learn about the causes of such things, only to come away as baffled as before. He had surmised that the damage was probably obscured by the inspection, the evidence destroyed as the healer cracked open the skull.
Hatu spoke Donte’s name again, but his friend remained silent. He could see Donte’s chest moving slightly, so at least he knew he was breathing.
Hatu forced his mind from mindless terror as he tried to make sense of their surroundings and look for an escape. He had little concept of where they were, but before he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by other problems, his first task was to free himself of these shackles. He’d heard of sicari who’d been trained to dislocate their thumbs and slip their hands through such bindings. He moved his fingers and thumbs around, realising he had no idea how to go about such a feat. He tugged and pulled, but whatever the trick, he knew it was beyond him.
Hatu gave a single tug on the chains, knowing it was just a vain attempt at discovering a last-second escape, as distant voices broke the silence. He decided to feign unconsciousness, and perhaps learn something.
The voices resolved into soft-spoken female tones, speaking a language unfamiliar to Hatu. As they neared, he could feel their presence even with his head down and eyes closed.
‘This one pretends.’ The woman spoke in the trade language of the isles. ‘Isn’t that so, boy?’
Hatu saw no benefit in prolonging the pretence and risking the consequences, and so opened his eyes, standing as best he could.
The two women were dressed in similar red robes with their hoods tossed back. The twinkling light of the phosphorescent pools made discerning details difficult at first. The play of shadows across their faces disguised them until Hatu’s eyes adjusted to the play of the light.
One of the women was perhaps older than Hatu by only a few years. The other was of such an age that she could have been her mother, or maybe an older sister, but there was no resemblance between them. The younger woman had plain, angular features that Hatu imagined might turn beautiful as her temperament added patina and tone. She looked at her companion, then back at him suddenly, and Hatu saw only madness in her widening eyes.
The older woman possessed surprisingly normal features and a pleasant smile, though, given his current situation and how the ship had been attacked, Hatu assumed her geniality to be a mask. The two women had obviously played some role in the onslaught, and it involved magic of the darkest sort. The creatures that had attacked the ship were not from a drunken seaman’s tale to get others to buy drinks. Those man-shaped things were surely the product of something powerful and evil.
‘Ah,’ said the older woman. ‘The last two from that accursed ship. What to do?’ Looking at her companion, she asked, ‘Meat, mate, or swimmer?’
The younger woman regarded Hatu and said, ‘He is not pretty enough. Meat.’ She then approached Donte and said, ‘This one is pretty.’ She examined his head wound and said, ‘Mate, if he recovers.’ With a petulant tone she added, ‘I have not had my fun in a long time, Madda. I haven’t made a daughter!’
The one she called Madda said, ‘You’re young, Sabina. You want your fun all the time and neglect your duties; all you think of is mating and daughters.’ She cast a disapproving look at the younger woman. ‘There was a day, before my youth, when girls like you were also meat. There were more of us then, and we ruled this ocean.’ Her voice fell off as she finished, ‘Be thankful times changed.’
The younger woman’s rapacious expression twisted into one of anger and resentment as the reprimand struck her like a physical blow. She scowled, and Hatu decided there was nothing attr
active about her sharp features. The woman called Madda would have to be cautious of this one.
The first woman ran her hands down Donte’s chest and fondled his groin. ‘He’s big,’ she said, smiling with an evil gleam in her eyes.
‘If he regains his wits, you can mate, then meat.’
‘Mate,’ the one named Sabina whispered. ‘No meat; it’s too pretty.’
Madda began to say something and then stopped. She leaned close to Hatu, close enough for him to get a good look at her face, and he realised that whatever opinions he had formed were now secondary to something he had never felt before: a strong, overwhelming aura. He was seized by a nearly mindless desire to get as far from the woman as he could, and found himself pulling back on the chains that suspended him, hard enough to fully extend his arms and brush his back against the wall behind him. Fear, followed closely by rising anger, overtook him.
An animal whimper escaped Hatu and he turned his face as she reached up to touch his cheek. He clenched his eyes tightly, then his eyes snapped open, locking his gaze to her. As she was about to touch his face, she yanked her hand away, hissing as if in pain. Then he heard her say, ‘Go, bring Hadona here.’
‘What—’ the younger woman started to complain.
‘Bring Hadona here!’ shouted the older woman, and the tone and volume of her voice made it clear there would be no more argument.
The young woman hurried off and Madda whispered, ‘Who are you, youngling?’
Hatu said nothing, his mind now consumed with a fear that had reduced him to a quivering animal. His one desire was to be anywhere else but in this cave with this woman. Anger rose with that fear, just a moment behind it.
‘Fear drives the beast,’ muttered Madda. Hatu felt her grab his chin and yank his head around, so that his nose almost touched hers.
He mustered every iota of discipline he could find and kept silent, determined not to let his fear give this woman any more advantage than she already possessed.
Suddenly, a rush of energy coursed through him, and he relaxed. He stared into her eyes and was rewarded as she pulled away slightly, released his chin, and stepped away. ‘You are more than you seem,’ she whispered.
Hatu thought he detected a note of fear in her words but said nothing. His lessons had taught him that his best chance for survival was to keep calm and never stop looking for a way out. One master had even gone so far as to tell him, ‘If you fall from a cliff towards rocks below, screaming mindlessly means certain death. If, in those last few seconds, you turn your mind to finding a way out, you’ll likely still die, but you give yourself a chance to survive.’ It had been said in semi-jest, but there was a kernel of truth in that admonition.
The woman was reacting strongly to him, as if she could almost feel the rising anger within him, directed at her like a weapon, and perhaps that played to his advantage.
As she withdrew another half step, Hatu stole a glimpse at his friend still hanging limply from his chains. At least Donte was spared this terror, he thought. His continued lack of movement led Hatu to the conclusion that he’d never recover from the blow to his head. Anger drove out the remaining fear and Hatu considered that should he somehow survive this captivity, he dreaded telling Master Kugal that his grandson was dead. The nearly comic probability of that outcome almost tipped Hatu into a sense of giddiness that he recognised as being a short step away from hysteria. From fear or rage, mindless hysteria was no choice at all, so he used every trick learned since boyhood to force himself into as calm a state as possible.
Over Madda’s shoulder, Hatu saw a group of women emerge slowly out of the gloom; they surrounded an old, bent woman but kept a respectful distance from her. The young woman Sabina preceded the elder.
Hatu blinked to focus until the woman blocking most of his view stepped aside and bowed. ‘Hadona,’ she said in greeting. ‘It’s this one.’ She indicated Hatu.
If the other women repelled Hatu, Hadona totally repulsed him. She was not only ugly and wizened, her shoulders rounded by the weight of her years and her face little more than parchment stretched over bone, but evil flowed from her like a palpable miasma, a cloud that surrounded her and grew stronger as she neared.
She stepped before Hatu and muttered, ‘What is this?’
‘He is why I asked for you,’ answered Madda. ‘I sense—’
‘Fire,’ interrupted the old woman as she moved closer to Hatu. He could see every detail of her face; she was ancient, but the light in her eyes seemed timeless, and she wore the expression of a cunning feral cat calculating how best to snag its prey. Hadona reached out, but her fingertips only hovered over Hatu’s chest.
‘Who are you?’ she whispered, and put her hand over Hatu’s eyes.
He fell into a dark place where shadows moved against darker shadows, and images rose out of them, but of a sort he had never seen before, like the impressions left when he closed his eyes against a sudden brightness. The streaks of colour resolved into fluid shapes: faces from his past rose and fell away, shifting into other images, constantly morphing and turning.
As if in a waking dream, he remembered.
THE FIGHT HAD ERUPTED OVER some imagined slight, two boys trading barbed comments for no reason other than boredom. Hatu didn’t even know what the first remark had been, or who had made it. The confrontation had caught his attention only after it had escalated to insults and pushes.
He and Donte stood among the onlookers who had gathered in the otherwise empty warehouse. It was a hot day, the takings had been lower than the masters expected, and every street thief, gang basher, pickpocket, and lookout was on edge. It didn’t matter what the reasons were; people were always punished by the leaders for a low take.
There were two types of street gangs operating throughout the nations of South Tembria, in the hundreds of ports scattered among the two thousand or so islands to the east of the continent. A few of the key ones were controlled completely by the Quelli Nascosti of Coaltachin; others, like this one, were infiltrated by members of the The Hidden.
Hatu glanced at Donte, who, with a tiny shake of his head, indicated they should both stay out of this fight. Their current gang called themselves the Black Spiders, and they would otherwise have been beneath notice, save that recently they had been aggressively expanding their activities, and that had come to the notice of the Council in Coaltachin. Hatu and Donte had been placed there to discover the identity of the Black Widow, their leader. Local gangs were allowed to operate as long as they didn’t get too ambitious. Whoever this Black Widow was, she had intruded upon operations controlled by Coaltachin.
It was Hatu and Donte’s first mission together – smaller boys were less likely to be suspect – and the crew boss who oversaw them was blocks away, so it was critical they make no error that would jeopardise their safety. It had taken them a few weeks to insinuate themselves into this crew and get a sense of the Spiders’ overall organization. Donte had a lead, and if it panned out, they’d have the Widow’s identity and could send a message home: the trigger that would likely result in the Black Widow’s eventual elimination, and her gang’s being scattered or absorbed. This fight might be just the opportunity to—
‘No,’ a voice came into Hatu’s mind. ‘Further back. You’re more than a mere street thug.’
A flash of light, a sliver of darkness, and he was back on his home island again. Heat bathed the students as they struggled to master the task before them. The art of being silent was being driven home by this morning’s practice – the lesson Hatu hated the most. He did not mind standing on one leg – he was strong and had good balance – nor remaining silent, but he found it nearly impossible to empty his mind, whatever that was supposed to mean.
He was almost eleven years old and his mind raced even then. He wanted to know things, understand how they worked or why they were … how they were. There were so many unanswered questions in his mind, but to speak to a trainer without first being spoken to was forbidden. Any infra
ction brought forth the switch or a leather strap. So, he kept silent and remained frustrated, and the years of silent obedience masked low burning anger, always there deeply hidden.
‘No,’ came the voice of Hadona, ‘further.’
Another lightning flash, more darkness, and Hatu was in the village below the school. Part of his mind knew it wasn’t real, and for a brief moment he fought against the compulsion to obey the reality offered to him, but he didn’t really understand how to resist it, and so was swept back even further.
Hatu saw the dog and without knowing why, he felt afraid. He wanted to cry out and run away, but even by five years old, he had been trained not to cry or voice any distress. A tiny whimper was all he let escape.
He had been playing with some coloured stones that one of the matrons had given to him while she hung the washing out to dry. Other children played nearby, occupied with various things to keep them out of trouble, but he was the closest to the road.
Hatu stood and hurried to where the matron pegged clothing to a line and tugged on her skirt. Looking down, she raised one eyebrow in question and he pointed towards the dog.
She instantly dropped the washing and scooped Hatu up into her arms. Looking around, she saw a pair of farmworkers walking down the road from the tableland and shouted to them, ‘Mad dog!’ Then she carried Hatu towards the other children.
Over the matron’s shoulder, Hatu watched as the men, who carried a rake and a pitchfork, saw the dog behaving strangely and hurried to put it down.
‘No … something else.’
There were no words this time. His vision was jumbled, and random memories came in and out of focus. Light and shadows dominated his thought, and Hatu found himself fighting to give words to concepts. He was tiny.
His existence knew touch, smell, lights, and shadows, warmth or the absence of it, hunger or suckling contentment. And yet, there was more, too; for in the brief moments between nursing and sleeping he felt other things course through his mind, things he did not yet understand, even though he felt certain the understanding would eventually come. They were energies that felt apart from the world of sensation and perception that he was growing into, and he welcomed the attachment to what he would later come to think of as ‘the other’.
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