by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 65
Abass rubbed his wrists as the chains fell away. His body ached at the new movement. Shifting on the dirt floor of the cell, he kept his eyes turned away from Fadhra as she knelt in the band of candlelight to free his legs.
Fadhra dropped the keys and stood. “I’m sorry, Abass, I am. You don’t understand—” She cut off. She laid one hand on his shoulder, where splinter-wounds festered. Abass flinched, in part from the pain, but more from her nearness.
He could not understand. He thought she had loved him. The words sounded pitiful even to Abass. Without a word he crawled from the cell, breathing in the fresher air of the room beyond.
It was more of a tunnel, with a low ceiling and close walls, all of the same dark, packed dirt. Two guards lay a dozen yards away, motionless in the candlelight. A small table, where the candles sat, held two plates with food still warm, to judge by the steam rising into the chill air. Thick cuts of pork and bread. The smell turned Abass’s stomach. More metal doors lined the hall on either side, all shut. Abass repressed a shiver. It reminded him of the hold. Room after room. All full of dead bodies.
He felt a bit like a corpse as he tried to regain his feet, bracing himself against the wall for support. The dew still had not returned; whatever was inhibiting it was here as well. His muscles screamed at him, and Abass let out a groan.
In a heartbeat Fadhra was there, helping him, her shoulder under his arm. He tried to push her away, but he almost fell, and Abass had to catch himself against the wall of compressed earth. Between the two of them, they managed to get Abass upright, and he leaned against the dank wall taking deep breaths. Fadhra stood next to him, still pressed against him, the heat from her body like fire that threatened to consume him. Abass remembered another night and another dark room where her touch and that heat had been a lifeline, drawing him back to hope and sanity. He closed his eyes.
As though she sensed his pain, Fadhra stepped away from him, one hand against his side as though to reassure him she was still there. A circle of heat against him. Tender. Familiar. The way one would touch a lover. Abass wanted to sob, or shout. Instead, he spoke.
“Why?” His throat was dry, and the word cracked before he could get it out. Even without looking, he could sense her nervousness; her fingers trembled against him, but she did not withdraw.
When she spoke, her voice was even. “I was dying.”
Abass opened his eyes. “What? When? What happened? One of them caught you in the Sleeping Palace. Why didn’t you say anything?”
Whatever she saw in his eyes, it made her step closer. One of her legs between his. “No,” she said. “For a long time now. The brachal.” She tapped the ring through her black shirt. “I’m not a man.”
“Thank the tair,” Abass said, leaning his head back again. The comment left his mouth before he could stop it. Abass shook his head; Scribe would have appreciated that joke, but Scribe was dead.
She squeezed his side, affectionately, and he let out a gasp. Fadhra flinched and pulled her hand away. The su-eses had not been gentle with him, adding wounds on top of what he had received in the fight itself. He did not look at her, though. The pain in his side was nothing compared to knowing she had betrayed him.
“No one caught me in the Sleeping Palace,” she said, after a long silence. “But I did speak to a Renewed there. A woman. Ayde, the other lap-esis. She knew what was happening to me. She’s a woman, she knows how the brachal affects us.”
Abass’s eyes darted to hers, against his better judgment. He recognized that pain. Shifting, he looked away as he felt his anger and pain mix with confusion.
“It kills us, slowly,” she said, as though encouraged by his glance. “We don’t have any seed to give it, no way to quicken the magic. And so it eats its way through us, piece by piece. The coughing—my lungs were rotting away inside me, eaten up by the same dew that let me live as though there were nothing wrong with me—at least, most of the time.”
“The coughing,” Abass said. He still did not look at her. He traced the outline of the door over her left shoulder instead. Reinforced metal, well-maintained, with thick bolts and a simple lock. With that lock, the door, for all its strength, would not have stopped Abass for long, even before he had the dew. From the look of it, Abass could have picked the lock with one hand behind his back. Why use that kind of lock on a cell door? The whores in Old Truth could afford better locks for their cribs.
“Yes,” Fadhra said. “The coughing. I was coming close to the end; you saw.”
Abass nodded. The door stared back at him. A ridiculous way of enclosing prisoners, especially dangerous one, like sarkomancers. It made no sense. The lock would work as well as any other, so long as the prisoner didn’t have a pick, but it would snap at the first dew-enhanced blow. Why not heavy crossbars? Chains?
The answer came quickly. Because something here canceled the dew.
“Women don’t have the seed of life,” Fadhra continued. Her voice was urgent now, frustrated. Because Abass wasn’t responding, he assumed. He did not want to pay attention, did not want to think about her, deal with her. It would have been so much easier if one of them had died; the dead did not think of pain and betrayal. When the flesh and blood left the body, the soul returned to the earth. Perhaps that, in some measure, was what Abass heard in the drumbeat, in that second heartbeat, the heartbeat of the land.
“Women don’t have the seed,” Fadhra said again, trying to control her voice. “And so there is nothing inside us to activate the brachal. Nothing except our own life, what ties our flesh and bones together. The dew heals us, keeps us strong, but every use takes a little bit more that can’t be repaired. Ayde said that the lungs are usually the first thing to go. Something to do with the way the dew works through the body.”
“And you’re not dead,” Abass said. His legs still ached, but they felt firm under him now. Better than the rest of him felt, to tell the truth. He pushed past Fadhra toward the closest cell door. Running his hands over the welded edges, along the hinges, around the frame, he felt for salt, or a salt-blade, or anything that might explain why the dew refused to uncoil. Abass worked slowly, the way he had trained himself, as though he knelt in a counting-house looking for a hidden compartment. Eyes and hands, face close enough to sense the whispers of air that might reveal a false panel.
“No, I’m not dead,” Fadhra said. She kept close to him, as though she could repair the rift between them through physical proximity. “What are you doing?”
Abass ignored her, testing the seams of the metal with his fingers, prying. The work made his broken finger throb, but it gave him something to concentrate on. It took him back to a part of his life that had ended just a few weeks before, when he had flung himself from the Sleeping Palace to save his sister. A few weeks. It seemed long years, but his hands, his body, still remembered how to search, how to find what another man would conceal. If only he could do the same for what people hid inside themselves.
“What are you looking for? We’re wasting time. We need to go, now.”
“Then go,” Abass said, pressing his ear to the door and tapping softly. It didn’t sound hollow.
“I was dying,” she screamed. “Do you understand what that means? What other choice did I have?”
His heart hammered inside him so that Abass thought he might split in half, but his hands were steady, calm as they tested the bolts holding the door together. “Qatal had a choice. He’s dead now. You’re not. You got what you wanted. Why are you still here?”
“I’m here because I love you,” Fadhra said. “Because I know what I did was wrong.”
“You don’t love me,” Abass said. His hands did shake now, and he gripped the doorframe and prayed to the tair that she would think he was still searching. Not trying to hold himself together by clutching at a door. “You can’t love me. Love isn’t selfish.” In spite of the shaking, Abass’s heart slowed. He felt calm. Clear-headed, in a way that he had not felt since before the
pits. Since before Scribe had left. “I might put the people I love in danger, I might hurt them by my own stupidity. But at least I know what love is.”
“Selfish?” Her voice was cold and soft like the soil that pressed in around them. Her eyes, when he glanced at her, were as dark as they had been when they first met in the pits. Dark and beautiful and angry. “I don’t do anything for myself. Everything I do is for my family, for the people that the tair took from me. That is love, Abass. Love is vengeance.”
With a soft shake of his head, Abass said, “Vengeance is the most selfish thing of all.”
Fadhra dropped something at his feet. Without another word, she turned and stalked down the tunnel. Abass watched her go. A few paces beyond the last cell door, she blurred and vanished. So, the dew did not extend far beyond the cell doors. Good to know.
He could not spare thought for Fadhra. Abass knew he had spoken the truth; whatever else people might say of him—whatever he might hate about himself—at least he knew what love was.
Love meant protecting other people above yourself. Love meant giving up something you wanted in order to help the people you loved. That meant looking for Isola, when Abass didn’t know if he could take another failed search. It meant trying to help her when it would take him into the tair’s sanctuary and, most likely, end in his death.
It meant, above everything else, having hope.
He returned his attention to the door and slid back the small, hidden panel he had discovered early in his search. There had been no point revealing it to Fadhra, not until he knew what she wanted. Now he knew, and she was gone.
A simple square of metal, shimmering with rainbow streaks in the candlelight, sat inside the hollow of the door. Just big enough to neutralize the dew of anyone inside the cell—and anyone who came too close to the door. Abass palmed the salt-metal and looked down at the bundle Fadhra had left.
A pouch full of translucent cubes of dew and a pair of throwing daggers. He held the daggers. Perfectly balanced. Abass shook his head and dropped them. Without realizing it, Fadhra had delivered to him his past and his future. The two things that haunted him most. Dew and throwing knives. The knives had closed a part of his life and opened another. The dew had done the same. Death had marked each transition. If the tair truly was a god-made-flesh, he would surely be laughing at Fadhra’s gift to Abass.
Love meant caring about someone else more than yourself. Abass picked up the daggers, felt their weight and balance again. He would do whatever it took to protect Isola. Even if it meant opening a part of his life that he had tried to shut forever.
He tied the pouch of dew to his belt and, legs and back still aching, staggered past the dead guards and the blood-soaked earth, past the cell door. Three paces. Ten. The dew still coiled within, unresponsive to him.
Then he remembered the salt-metal he clutched in his palm. It would keep him from using the dew so long as he carried it. But, it would also keep people from using dew too close to him. In his weakened condition, Abass was not sure it was worth it.
A thought came to him. He made his way back to the table and picked up one of the cooling cuts of pork. Using one of the dead guards’ knives, Abass cut open the pork and slid the sliver of salt-metal inside. He pressed the meat closed, held it tight with one hand, and started back down the hall.
A few paces past the last door, the dew roared to life within him, as though eager to make up for its absence. For whatever reason, the salt metal had no effect when it was hidden inside flesh. As the dew returned, pain dwindled, and Abass could feel his smaller wounds start to close and heal. His thoughts fuzzed, though, and his new-found clarity vanished. Anger and the furious energy of the dew flooded him. Strength, life, awareness all came rushing back. The darkness of the tunnel vanished.
Abass tied the piece of pork in a handkerchief and hung it at his belt, opposite the dew. The drums beat, but they were slow now, feeble in comparison to his heart. Bloodlust filled him. The High Harvest had begun in earnest. This time, he would find Isola no matter who stood in his way.