The young man’s question lingered in the still air of the dungeon like a memory, or the smell of blood. I wanted to shout that I was nothing like King Sondassan, that my quest was selfless and righteous and far from an old king’s desire to live forever, but I held my tongue. The less the king and his high priest knew about me, the better.
What I said was, “I would never sacrifice the lives of others. I risk only my own.”
He shook his head in helpless resignation. “We are a small kingdom, and King Sondassan doesn’t yet have a suitable heir. Without leadership, we risk conquest by any number of rival islands.” Even as he said it, I could tell that he no longer believed it.
“There will not be a Salmacha left to conquer if things continue as they are,” I insisted.
“What can I do?” he asked, a question more directed to the gods than to me. “I am tasked with feeding the prisoners and making sure the door from the palace is secured. No one will listen to me.”
I looked into his young face and saw the fear of the island—of the villagers who had fled, of the city folk who had already been bled for their king—written upon it. “Someone will,” I said, and I could almost make myself believe it. “You must try.”
As if in response, my cell shook again. A fine shower of dust rained down on my shoulders.
His brow creased into a troubled frown, but he nodded, and he turned away to the stairs. The door that I knew stood at the top was only a stone’s throw away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world, for how well I could reach it.
“What’s your name?” I called after him. If I was going to place my fate in his hands, I decided, I should at least know that.
He stopped, and let out a breath, and ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. “Ajan,” he said. “And yours?”
“Eske. Good luck, Ajan. If there are true gods here, may they watch over you.” It was a blessing that had once been given to me, at the gate of burning Phyreios, and it was all I had to give.
Ajan left, and I remained in my cell. I ate the slimy gruel and I waited. A thin beam of sunlight traced a slow path across the floor of my cell, interrupted suddenly by the passage of soldiers, running above me with booted feet. It seemed that despite the sacrifices, there were enough of them to maintain control of the dwindling population. I had seen the same in Phyreios.
I had not survived that cataclysm only for my tale to end here, I decided, and I almost believed it.
That evening, when the light had gone from my window, and the prison was dark and gray, I received another visitor. She was nearly as tall as I, dressed in a shirt of chainmail links that shimmered darkly in the light of the lamp she carried. A length of deep green silk tied up her hair and wound around her head, and another was tied around her shoulders. At her hip hung a mace with a polished wooden shaft and head of iron spikes. Her eyes were dark; her features sharp and her shoulders broad. She carried herself with dignity, her head held high, and favored me with an imperious crook of one brow.
“So,” she said, without so much as a greeting. “This is going to get worse than it already is.”
I stood up from my cold slab and put my hands against the bars. “You can’t even imagine.”
“There’s a lot I can imagine. How do I stop it?”
After a day of languishing in my cell, I found her directness refreshing. She reminded me of Aysulu, though the two women looked nothing alike. “Set me free,” I said, “and I will do whatever I can to help you. I am a warrior of no small renown.”
She gave me a flat, impassive look. Unlike Ajan, she stood close to the bars, unafraid of my reach. “Against the priests, the household guard, the city’s soldiers, and the king himself?”
“It would be better odds than leaving me here,” I argued.
I guessed she was my elder by some ten years, but the dim firelight and the careworn lines on her face aged her more. Her posture faltered.
“My name is Mara Suryan,” she said. “Since you are a stranger here, you do not know the weight of that name. For generations my family has served the daughters of the house of Salmacha, since the days of the virgin priestesses of the gods of stone and fire. I have under my command a company of twenty women, and we are charged with protecting King Sondassan’s heirs: his twin granddaughters. They are twelve years old.”
“An immortal king needs no heirs,” I said.
Mara nodded. “Once, he doted on the children, and would die before allowing even a hair on their heads to be harmed. Now?” One callused hand rubbed at her brow. “I’m not certain he could recognize them. Even if he did, what love remains in him would only make their blood more potent as a sacrifice, if Ucasta is to be believed.”
I did not know if the high priest spoke the truth. If ever the Seven Ascended had loved their people, that love had been forgotten long ago. All they had seen walking the streets of Phyreios had been means of perpetuating their power and divinity, and to that end, one citizen’s blood had been as good as another’s. At the end, they had died in hundreds and thousands, bled out in the arena or crushed as their burning homes collapsed.
“Thus far, I have kept the princesses safe from the priests,” Mara continued, “and from the designs of the nobles and the captains of the military, who sense that the death of the king must be near and wish to take the throne by means of a forced marriage. I cannot do this forever. And if what you say is true, I do not have much more time.”
“Then the king is not so hale and hearty as the high priest implied,” I said.
Mara’s eyes fell to the dusty ground at her feet. “He is not. Each sacrifice grants him another day—a week—a month. Someone like you might give him enough life to sustain himself for a season, or so Ucasta claims.”
The digging had grown louder throughout the day. My cell shook with it in tiny tremors that tickled my feet and chattered my teeth. I had thought, before Mara’s appearance, that a particularly ardent digger might break through the left-hand wall, freeing me inadvertently, but it remained as solid as ever. Deeper down, the island groaned with a voice of stone on stone.
Mara seemed forthcoming enough, so I asked: “I came here on a ship. Do you know if it got away? Is the crew safe?”
A hint of a smile cracked the stony angles of her face. “So that’s your ship lingering just out of reach,” she said. “I assume they are well, provided their stores are good. They have evaded the king’s attempts to capture them. With the villagers gone, we don’t have enough boats.”
So Hamilcar and his crew had not left me here. Relief washed over me—I was not, as I had assumed, alone—followed by a cold wave of fear. Forty more souls could mean forty more chances for King Sondassan to destroy his people.
But Hamilcar knew what he was about, and if it was his decision as captain and the will of the rest of the crew to wait for me, then I would not disagree.
“If you can find a way to contact that ship,” I said, “there are forty capable fighters upon it. Add to that all your guards, yourself, and me, and we may have a chance.”
Her face remained expressionless as she considered it, calculating our odds against a force I had not yet had the chance to see. I could not tell whether her numbers favored our side. She was a warrior, from her head to her sandaled feet, and a guardian of two young children; she would betray nothing.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said at last.
“That is all I can ask of you,” I replied.
She glanced over her shoulder, back the way she had come. Over the sound of the excavation, I could just hear footsteps coming from the top of the stairs.
“I’ve stayed here long enough already,” said Mara, “and I won’t be able to return. You will have to trust me.”
“My life is in your care,” I said, and I went back to my cold, unyielding bed, sat down, and placed my head in my hands. She said no more to me, and the departure of her light told me that she had left me alone again.
I had every faith that Mara told me the truth, and she would do everything in her power to free me and prevent the destruction that was to come, but she had the king, the high priest and any lackeys he might command, and the entire noble class and military might of Salmacha against her, though they might not have been allied with each other. There was a very good chance that I would die here, under the rock, and after years of adventuring, my story would end on a bloody altar in service to an old, sick king who clung to life even at the cost of his kingdom.
I ate what I was given, and it filled my belly even if it did not nourish me. Neither Mara nor Ajan visited my cell that night, nor anytime the day after. I feared one or both of them had been sacrificed already, and the periodic earthquakes seemed only to confirm my worries. That night, I did not sleep. The ringing of pickaxes filled my ears, and the corner of the slab beneath me bit into my back. Whenever I closed my eyes, I thought I was crushed beneath the rock, as I had been when the Ascended had called forth the great worm and their ritual chamber had collapsed on all of us.
I finally drifted off early in the morning, and I dreamt of a pool of oozing lava, ruby-red and bright as the sun. It stretched out as far as I could see beneath a dome of black rock. At the center stood a hill, and as I watched, the hill sprouted a tortoise’s head and looked at me with eyes of magma. The dome trembled, and stones rained down on the tortoise and into the pool, popping and hissing as they struck the surface.
In my hand was the harpoon I had found in the temple.
I awoke in the evening, as the sun set and the full moon that signaled my doom rose beyond the confines of my cell. The digging had stopped, and silence pressed in around me. Soon, I heard footsteps, above my head and through the tunnels behind the dungeon walls. They marched with a singular purpose toward a place in the rock somewhere to the north of me.
Ajan appeared at the stairs, accompanied by another soldier I did not recognize, who carried a torch. In Ajan’s hands were a length of chain and a pair of manacles. His companion stayed in the center of the room, while Ajan opened my door.
“Hold out your hands,” he said.
I hesitated. I considered striking him in the face and taking his weapon, and duelling the other guard before he could cry for help. My hands curled into fists.
“The pirates are here,” Ajan whispered. “And High Priest Ucasta has ordered the princesses to be sacrificed. Mara and her women will be in the ritual chamber.”
I relaxed my hands and offered them both up. He closed the manacles around them, but he did not fasten them with a lock. I held the clasps close to my body to hide them.
“Wait until we reach the chamber,” he said, and then, much louder: “This way.”
He tugged on the length of chain connecting my hands and led me out of my cell.
Back to Chapter XV: Under Salmacha
Forward to Chapter XVII: The Hollow Chamber
Big fight scene next chapter! Thanks for reading!
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