When his turn came, Aren stood by the trough and ate as a small handcart was filled from a chute. The fire was a comfort, and he sidled closer as he scooped gruel from his bowl with a crust of old bread. It was always cold in the mine. The dank stone leached the heat from the air and their clothes were pitifully thin. Not even the effort of mining kept them warm.
Once he’d wolfed down his meal, he held his bowl under the flow of gruel for a refill. The man at the lever didn’t even look at him. As long as you finished eating before the flow was shut off, nobody cared if you took another bowlful. It was the only perk of slop duty.
He pulled his handcart aside to make way, then ate his second helping with his wooden spoon, washing it down with water from his tin flask. He ate slowly this time, savouring every bite, letting the heat of the fire soak into his bones. The food was bland and watery, but as Cade used to say, hunger was the best spice. His stomach grumbled and ached, unaccustomed to being filled, but when he was done he felt as close to satisfied as he ever got these days.
He hung a bag of loaves off the side of the cart and trudged away. Some prisoners on slop duty would take another chunk of bread and a bowl from the tub on their way back to their detail, but Aren had never done that. There was never enough to go around anyway, so the other prisoners took a keen interest if the tub wasn’t full when it arrived. Aren told himself his sense of honour stopped him from giving in to temptation, but it was just as much his fear of retribution.
As he left the chamber, pulling the tub behind him, he passed a wooden birdcage containing a pair of grey cavepipers. Once, the sight of them had given him a thrill of dread, but now he ignored them. It was only if they started to sing that he needed to worry. Elarite seams bled an explosive oil under pressure, which was bad enough, but in concentrated quantities the oil gave off an invisible, odourless and flammable miasma called fire-fume. It gathered in pockets, trapped beneath the earth until freed by a miner’s pickaxe, when it would seep out into the tunnels until it became dense enough to ignite. The cavepipers were the only warning the miners would get. Somehow they could sense the miasma and would shriek an alarm. It gave the men some chance to escape, but not much.
Well, if disaster came, it came. Aren tried to live each day without thinking further than his bed. That was how he’d endure, until death took him, or until he and Cade were freed. It was that or give up, the way he’d seen others do. Despair gnawed a man down, first his body, then his soul, until he lost the will to live. And this was a place of despair.
But that wouldn’t be Aren’s fate. He was determined. He’d survive this day, and the next, and he’d ensure Cade did, too. There was no other option.
He made his way along badly lit routes where prisoners sat murmuring quietly or eating. He recognised some from the camp, but no one acknowledged him. No one had the energy.
The handcart was heavy and Aren had to rest on the way back, so he pulled the cart into a darkened side-corridor where no one would see it and be tempted to steal a meal. He thought he was alone until he heard a wet clicking sound and saw there were two men already here, sitting on opposite sides of the narrow tunnel. One was glaring at him with fierce eyes, mouth working restlessly as he sucked his teeth and smacked his lips. He was all skin and bone, hair in patches, features sunken. A ragweed addict.
Aren almost backed out then and there – it was best to steer clear of ragweed addicts, who could be unpredictable and violent – but something about the other man in the corridor caught his attention. He sat with his head back against the stone, eyes closed and very still. Aren stepped away from his cart and approached him cautiously, trying to make him out in the gloom.
It was nobody he recognised, but a suspicion had taken root in his mind and he had to resolve it. He reached out slowly and placed his palm against the side of the man’s face. The man’s head lolled sideways, eyes open but seeing nothing. He’d died where he sat, and recently.
Aren rested on his haunches and considered the body before him. A season ago, he’d never seen a corpse. Now the dead had lost the power to shock. They’d become part of the background of his world.
He glanced about and saw nobody except the addict, who seemed disinclined to do anything but glare. Aren shrugged at him and began to search the dead man’s pockets. After all, if he didn’t do it, somebody else would.
The sinking sun was half-hidden by the mountains as they trudged from the mine in a double line, shackles keeping their strides short, heads lowered against a bitter wind that blew flurries of icy rain down from the peaks. The summer had been punishingly hot, but the weather had turned of late, a warning of the deadly cold to come. Winter would reap them; they all knew it. The weak wouldn’t see the spring.
Aren walked alongside Cade, too weary to make conversation. Guards rode with them, herding them down the trail. They carried swords and bows, alert for anyone foolish enough to run. The pine forest to their left offered the promise of sanctuary, enough to tempt the desperate. Nobody was desperate enough today.
My father is dead because of me. The thought ambushed him. Randill’s death was a wolf in the hollows of his mind, stalking him, savaging him with grief and loss when it could. The Iron Hand would have seized the family lands by now. Randill would be remembered as a traitor, when he’d been nothing but loyal to the Empire. All because Aren had to be with Sora. All because he hadn’t listened to Harald’s warning.
He’d thought their wild love could overcome any obstacle, but reality had proved him wrong, and grief had doused his passion faster than he could have imagined. It was only a season since he’d seen her – a season of hard labour and sorrow, true, but a mere season all the same – yet her memory no longer stirred him. This wasn’t the storybook love he’d imagined, which conquered time and death and the meddling of the gods. He’d believed he would wither and die without her, when in truth he hardly thought of her at all.
It had been a dream of love, and nothing more. The stupid delusion of a callow boy. All that loss and ruin for nothing. In his darker moments, it made him want to scream.
He glanced at Cade. His friend looked worn. The flesh had fallen off him, his boyish pudge long gone. Though he’d always been the stronger of them, the work seemed to tax him harder than Aren. Each day he lost a little more energy, joked less, spoke more quietly. His suffering was as much Aren’s fault as his father’s death was. But with Cade, at least, there was some chance to atone.
‘Brother Cade,’ growled a rum-roughened voice, and Cade stumbled as he was shoved hard from behind. Aren saw fleeting anger cross his face, but when he turned, his mask was in place and he was smiling.
‘Have you been sharpening your elbows, Rapha? You near put that one through my ribs.’
Rapha gave him a tobacco-stained grin. He was a burly Carthanian pirate with a tangled black beard, his skin browned and weathered as gnarled oak. ‘Do your impression of Hassan!’ he said. ‘Show my friend here!’ The pockmarked man next to him leered encouragement.
Cade checked that no guards were nearby. Then he swept back his shoulders, firmed his chin and puffed out his chest. No longer was he a shuffling prisoner, but a figure of pompous cruelty.
‘You!’ he cried, his voice comically high as he pointed at Rapha’s friend. ‘Did you splash my cloak? Then where did this mud come from, hmm? To the dogs with you! To the dogs with everyone!’
Rapha and his friend cackled at Cade’s parody of the guard captain, and a few others nearby managed a chuckle or a grin. They all knew Hassan’s obsession with cleanliness and his fondness for feeding prisoners to the dogs. Even gallows humour was welcome here, where laughter was hard to find.
Aren didn’t join in. They liked Cade when he was funny, but Aren knew how he cried to himself in his bunk every night. He performed for them because that was his nature, but it was only an act, and it drained him sorely.
‘Now do Overseer Krent!’ urged another prisoner.
Aren turned sharply, wearing a scowl. ‘H
e’s tired,’ he snapped. ‘We’re all tired. Leave him alone.’
Rapha slapped him round the back of the head, hard. ‘No one asked you,’ he said, with enough casual menace to shut Aren up.
‘Easy there, you southern lunk!’ Cade said, his voice now genial and friendly, hands resting on an imaginary belly and a smug smile on his face. ‘No need for that! We’re not on the high seas now!’
Rapha’s friend roared with laughter as he recognised the overseer. It was loud enough to attract the attention of a nearby guard, who yelled at them in broken Ossian to be quiet. Rapha and his friend subsided, still smirking.
Cade gave Aren an angry look. Why did you get involved? Aren had meant to defend his friend, but he’d been the one who needed defending in the end, and defending Aren was what had landed Cade here in the first place. Aren wished he’d kept his silence.
The pain of Rapha’s blow quickly faded into the haze of other hurts. His feet were blistered from rubbing inside his boots. Every muscle ached from the day’s labours, and being on slop duty meant he’d got no rest. But he had a full belly, at least, and something else, too. Six fat cheroots, taken from the dead man and now stashed inside his thin, ragged coat. Aren had no idea how the prisoner had got them, but they were no use to him any more, and a lot of use to Aren. Smokes were good currency in the camp.
They followed the trail downwards, with the forest to their left and high cliffs to their right. The journey from the mine wasn’t a long one. Soon they heard the river over the blowing wind and rounded a shoulder of the mountain to see their destination ahead.
They called it a work camp, but it was a prison all the same. It stood on the north side of the river, sandwiched between the water and a sheer cliff face. A rough stockade surrounded it, a high wall of thick wooden stakes running out from the cliff, along the riverbank and back. Within, another stockade divided the camp into two sections. The smaller contained the barracks, stables, posthouse and the overseer’s mansion. The larger was for the prisoners. On the far side of a dirt yard were the longhouses where they slept, arranged in uneven rows against the curve of the stockade. There was a graveyard near the cliffs, and clustered round the south gate were the buildings where luckier prisoners worked: the cookhouse, workshop, laundry, latrines and infirmary.
On the other side of the river was the village of Suller’s Bluff, reached from the south gate by a stone bridge. It sat close against the forest, a drowsy settlement that now existed to serve the camp and accommodate the soldiers’ families. The villagers were lighting fires against the chill of the coming night; white smoke drifted from the chimneys, whipped away by the switching wind. They’d be settling down to good meals of warm bread and meat, with ale and wine to wash it down. The prisoners gazed longingly across the river, envying their food and warmth. The village was no more than a hundred paces from their prison, yet it may as well have been in another land.
The trail took them via the east gate, trudging through the guards’ section, past the mansion where the overseer entertained his guests in his dining hall. It had been built in the strict Krodan style on the spot where the mayor’s house had once stood, overlooking the river. A daily reminder to the Ossian prisoners of who held power in their land now.
Aren glowered at it as he passed, and cursed the ill luck that had him born Ossian. If he and his father had been Krodan, none of this would have happened.
A movement in one of the upper windows caught his eye. Someone was standing there in the last light of the dimming sun, looking down on the procession. With a jolt, Aren recognised that bespectacled face.
Klyssen!
Their eyes met for an instant, then the overwatchman turned away and was gone.
Klyssen, thought Aren as he huddled by the back door of the cookhouse. Was that really him?
It was raining in earnest, drumming on the roofs of the longhouses and turning the ground to mud. He was free of his shackles for the night – the guards removed them once everyone was safely in the yard – but his boots let in water through the soles and his feet were cold and soaked, which made the rubbing of his blisters worse. If only the dead man had been wearing good boots.
Hugging himself for warmth, he stared through grey, wavering curtains of rain at the fence before him. It ran around the prisoners’ compound, forming an inner ring of protection before the stockade itself. It was seven feet high, easy to climb if you had the will to do it. Few did. Between the fence and the stockade lived a pack of Krodan skulldogs, vicious killers who’d tear you limb from limb. Aren could hear one now, growling and grizzling nearby. Even if you could get past them, there was a walkway on the stockade wall patrolled by archers waiting to shoot anyone who tried to escape. Climbing that fence would be suicide. Escape was a fantasy.
His thoughts circled back to Klyssen again. That glimpse of him in the window had been so brief that he was tempted to doubt it. Maybe it had been a stranger who looked like him. After all, his presence made no sense. An overwatchman was the highest rank of inquisitor, second only to the Commander, head of all Iron Hand operations in Ossia. What would he be doing in a work camp in the mountains, thirty leagues from anywhere?
Has he brought a reprieve? The thought flashed into his mind. Had Klyssen come to right the injustice done to Aren and Cade? After all, their crimes were paltry. Neither of them belonged here with the dissidents and rebels, the thieves and murderers.
He snorted. An overwatchman riding all the way out here to pardon two insignificant Ossian boys? It was ridiculous. More likely he was here on some other business that had nothing to do with Aren. That, or he’d never been there at all. Exhaustion did strange things to the mind.
Best to focus on what was in front of him. Do what had to be done. Survive.
The cookhouse door squealed open and the cook’s assistant, Tag, popped his freckled, horsey face out. He checked the coast was clear, then passed Aren a small cloth bag.
It was suspiciously light so Aren opened it and saw three cheese rolls inside. They were mean fare, a bit of old cheddar mashed into a ball of rough bread, but under the circumstances it was a feast.
‘You said four,’ he told Tag.
‘Three was all I could get,’ said Tag, looking affronted. ‘And it’s my neck on the block here. Take it or sod off.’
Aren had the suspicion he was being cheated, but he was in no position to bargain. With a scowl, he drew out two cheroots from his inner pocket. Tag snatched them off him.
‘Pleasure doing business,’ he said and nipped back inside.
Aren stashed one of the rolls in his pocket and put the bag under his shirt. Then he scampered to the side of the cookhouse and peered round the corner. The foul weather kept most of the guards inside, but he still needed to be careful. If he was caught with contraband he’d suffer for it.
He saw nobody but other prisoners, so he crossed the road that led from the yard to the south gate and slipped away between the buildings.
He caught up with Jan as he was leaving the laundry. Jan had a lazy eye and a ready smile, and whether by luck or by craft, he’d got himself on laundry duty five days a week, cleaning clothes for the guards. He was pushing a wooden trolley full of sacks and covered with an oilcloth, the end of which he’d pulled over his head to keep dry. He stopped pushing as he saw Aren come hurrying up.
‘Got something for me?’ he asked.
Aren held out the bag. ‘Two cheese rolls, fresh as they come.’
Jan took the bag, rummaged under the oilcloth and pulled out a rolled-up pair of socks. They were made of thick wool and, as far as Aren could see, hardly worn.
‘Fresh as they come,’ Jan said with a wink.
A bell clanged somewhere in the gloom: the last bell before curfew.
‘Better get on,’ said Jan. Aren gave him a nod and they went their separate ways, Jan pushing his trolley, Aren towards the longhouses.
He felt his heart lighten a little as he hurried through the splattering rain. Fortune had smile
d on him. He might be wet and cold and tired, but he had four cheroots, a cheese roll and a pair of good socks. Days rarely came better than this, in the camp at Suller’s Bluff.
The longhouse was rank with stale sweat. The scent had seeped into the ratty blankets and permeated the thin plank walls, and no amount of airing would remove it. Prisoners shuffled between the narrow-packed bunks by the light of a single lantern, faces hollowed by shadow. Many had gone straight to sleep after returning from the mine. One man near the door had the kind of cough that wouldn’t shift, and the sound of it quietened those around him. They recognised the herald of death, and it sobered them.
Aren, sodden with rain, sidled down the aisle, past loitering prisoners who hadn’t yet gone to their bunks. He was headed for the far end where the glow of the lantern barely reached. When he got there, he found Cade already in bed, lying fully clothed on top of his blankets and staring vacantly at the underside of Aren’s bunk.
He squatted down beside him. The men nearby were asleep, sighing and snoring, so Aren said his name quietly. Cade kept staring blankly upwards until Aren shook his shoulder, and he jerked as if shocked from a daze. When he saw Aren, he looked vaguely disappointed.
‘I brought you a cheese roll,’ said Aren, ‘and some good thick socks.’ He slipped them under the corner of Cade’s pillow, making sure no one else saw. ‘Days are getting colder. You’ll need them.’
‘Thanks,’ muttered Cade, but there was no gratitude in it. It was just a word, without emotion.
The Ember Blade Page 9