He lay back and pulled himself through the opening along the ice. Cold stung his back through his sodden shirt, but the fresh air was a welcome reprieve. He kept his legs spread wide to form a sturdy base on the ice, then leaped up and grabbed a loose stone on the canal wall. A drain pipe leaked icicles, and jutted out. From there, he was able to grab onto the lip of the canal and slowly pull himself up to peer over the edge.
He was at the opposite side of the square where he’d faced execution.
He stole a glance toward the coast. Even on the small portion of the wharf visible from so far, there were dozens of rowboats bearing the tan and black standard of the Shesaitju army. Hundreds of gray men lined up, marching down the streets, fauchards and spears erect. Dead and dying Winde Port citizens and soldiers were scattered throughout the plaza. The battle for Winde Port was already finished, and the Black Sands were in complete control.
A loud thwack drew his attention to a barbed arrow still trembling in a wooden docking post to his right. His eyes went wide as he spotted a cluster of Shesaitju warriors on their own, bearing down on him. Probably performing clean up duty while they secured their new city.
Whitney ducked just before another arrow zipped overhead. He leaped along the wall to another pole, then looked down. A fall from up so high might send him plunging through the ice to a watery doom. And if it didn’t, he’d been leading the blood-thirsty soldiers right into the sewers after him. So, he did the unexpected, didn’t overthink it because a second guess about rolling up into the open and he wouldn’t have done it. An arrow slashed through his sleeve, drawing a thin line of red once he was up. He sprinted straight at the soldiers who emerged from the nearest alley.
A spear whipped over his head as he slid.
Just like running from angry Yarrington guards, he told himself. Only these ones had the intent to kill.
He planted his foot against the wall and shoved off. A scimitar clanged right behind him. Reaching the wall opposite he did the same, and again, back and forth until he’d scaled up to the tile roof.
The warriors chattered in Saitjuese, several pointing upward.
“Sorry to disappoint,” Whitney shouted, “but I’ve a meeting to attend. Good luck with the whole invasion thing!”
As he cleared the lip of the rooftop, a spear careened through the air right in front of his nose. He rolled onto the flat of his back, taking a moment to catch his breath and keep his heart from bursting. Then, he peered off to his right and realized his mistake. Beyond the square, the army amassed, and it would only be seconds before he was spotted by one of the thousands. Or even worse… Kazimir. In all the insanity, he‘d forgotten about the wretch hunting him.
He stood, backed up enough to gather some speed and then leaped across the chasm to the adjacent rooftop. Below, he heard armor clattering. He peered back over the ledge. The Shesaitju group had done precisely as expected, rounding the corner of the building Whitney had climbed to wait for him on the other side. He quickly slid down a balcony, dropped to the plaza, and darted back for the canal behind their backs.
He slid down the first docking pole he saw, earning a couple of splinters on the way. His feet tapped lightly against the ice. Enough to cause some shallow cracks. Whitney didn’t bother to be careful the rest of the way. He clambered through the porthole back into the sewers, his feet digging out chunks of ice in his wake.
Darkness returned, and the awful smell returned with force. “Better than being skewered by Black Sands arrows,” he panted, sitting in the stale water and happy to be there. Now that he knew how thoroughly Winde Port had been conquered, he knew there was no more surfacing to figure out where he was.
He’d have to endure the warren of tunnels and troughs crisscrossing beneath the city. He’d figure out landmarks—a misplaced stone here, a chunk of moss there, and rely on looking straight up through grates to find his bearings. His foray into the plaza had him all spun around, so he decided he’d head for the Darkings' mansion first. It was closer than the Ghetto, straight to the north, somewhere where it looked down upon the wharf with the rest of the city’s high nobility.
Whitney set off. The deeper he delved, the colder it got. The ends of his sleeves were literally starting to freeze. He had to hold his hands tight against his chest to keep from shivering.
The smell grew worse too, like death and decay now. The corpses dotting the surface surely didn’t help, nor the blood tricking through grates here and there. His eyes were fully adjusted now, able to distinguish between grime and blood. His sense of hearing was heightened as well as he listened for which direction the wind was coming from, which direction the bay was.
He’d always prided himself on his senses and their ability to get him out of a jam. When he was just a boy, he and his family had traveled to Yarrington to witness the Dawning at Yarrington Cathedral with a view of the sun over Mount Lister. It was one of the few times they’d left Troborough. At the turning of every new year, Pantego’s two moons drifted side by side in front of the sun, blotting out its light like two eyelid’s closing over the world.
His father made them get there early to attend the ceremony led by Wren the Holy himself. At the end, the High Priest made them focus their senses inward. That was what the Dawning was all about, a test at each passing year when, for a short while, Iam’s light was blocked, and humanity was left to look inward to find it.
With their eyesight all but stolen from them, Whitney found he could hear snails inching along the wet ground, or the grass grow. Wren explained it all with his mumbo jumbo about faith, but to Whitney, it always felt like a magical power.
Then, he met real mystics and blood mages and realized it was nothing like magic.
The thought of Sora picked up his pace. He ignored the swishing of human excrement beneath his boots and tickling the hem of his pants. He’d been walking for what could have been minutes or hours.
As he shivered, he caught himself daydreaming of a warm bed and a blazing hearth. Without even being aware of it, he’d been imagining the Twilight Manor, the tavern and inn located in the middle of Troborough. Or at least, it had been there before the gods-damned Shesaitju came in and razed it to the ground.
Whitney’s desire to drive a dagger into the skull of every gray-skinned bastard in Winde Port and avenge Sora grew. Torsten would be proud. “For Iam!” he would yell before hefting his absurdly large claymore high above his equally oversized head.
Something weird was happening, something Whitney wasn’t used to. He found himself caring about people in a way he never had. Sora was a given—they’d grown up together. But with the occupation of the city above, he couldn’t help wonder if the Wearer of White would arrive in time to save the day.
He laughed and shrugged the thought away.
Then, a sound not unlike an earthquake rumbled through the sewer and focused his wandering mind. Several screams replaced it when it stopped. Against his better judgment, Whitney bolted in the direction from which it had issued.
You’re not a hero, you fool! Stop acting like one.
“I helped kill a goddess,” Whitney said to no one but himself, then ran faster.
The amber light flickered up ahead, reminding Whitney of Sora’s fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw the back of a Panpingese woman with long black hair, with the exact same stature as Sora. His eyes bulged until she turned around. He couldn’t deny his disappointment. She was a bit older than Sora, and the man beside her was older still.
“Please,” she begged. “Help my son. Help us!”
She shifted her weight, and the movement revealed a little boy, barely ten years old. He looked strangely familiar, but he could have been any number of beggar children Whitney had seen since entering the city.
The man Whitney presumed was the father was working hard to extract the boy from a large pile of crumbled stone. Whitney glanced up. The source of the noise was revealed in the gaping hole in the ceiling and the mound of stones beneath.
�
�What happened?” Whitney asked as he rushed to the man’s side and began removing large hunks of rock.
“Cave-in,” he said. “Must have been the catapults. By Iam, I hoped I’d never see another war.”
“Then you don’t know much about kings and queens.”
Whitney kneeled before the mound of debris to better appraise the situation. “We’re going to get you out of there, kid.”
By the looks of the situation, he couldn’t help feeling like he was lying.
The boy moaned—deep and agonizing.
“What are you doing down here?” Whitney asked his parents.
“Those tunnels lead out of the city,” the woman said, pointing toward a crude opening in some loosely stacked stones. Beyond it, was a tunnel that no longer looked to be a part of the circular sewer-ways, but instead, rough and carved through rock.
“Our master is a cruel man. We thought we could escape,” the woman continued. She bent over to do as much as she could to help remove the stones, but they were too heavy.
“You’re slaves?”
She shook her head. “No slaves this far in the heartland, but we may as well be the way he pays us. That very passage was created to smuggle our peoples in and out of Winde Port after the Third War of Glass.”
Whitney recalled that was how the Panping people referred to the Panping Wars. It made sense. In their eyes, Liam and the Glass were just foreign invaders come to take yet another land that didn’t belong to them. They’d always made the excuse they were fulfilling the will of Iam—free them from their unholy mystic rulers—hog shog.
How many lives across Pantego had been taken in the name of some unseen god or goddess? Whitney had almost been one of them, fighting to find some cursed doll for a mad prince. Well, this wasn’t going to be just another casualty added to a long list.
“You’re coming out of there,” Whitney said, even though he knew he should’ve just tucked tailed and run. “You hear?”
Whitney fought every ounce of his survival instincts, bent his knees, and grabbed a particularly large boulder. As he pulled, more dirt settled and the pile shifted, threatening to come down on all of them.
“Fate is determined to kill you, Whitney Fierstown,” said a pitchy voice from behind him. “And you? My best servants. So sad it had to come to this… your boy always was my favorite. Never spilled a drop of brandy.”
Whitney glanced over his shoulder to see Bartholomew Darkings, then back at the boy.
That’s how I know him! He’d brought them wine after Whitney was forcefully escorted to the mansion somewhere above them.
“It’s not the time for this,” Whitney growled, continuing working to help free the boy. During his quick glance, he’d seen Bartholomew’s one-eyed lackey. Whitney huffed a curse but didn’t let it stop him.
“Fenton,” Darkings addressed his man. “Mr. Fierstown needs to finally learn his place.”
“Fenton?” Whitney laughed. “How proper. I think I’ll stick with One-Eye.”
Whitney heard shuffling behind him and fully expected to feel the clammy hands of One-Eyed-Fenton on him at any moment, but it never came. Instead, he heard a scream as the guard seized hold of the boy’s mother and dragged her toward Bartholomew. He removed a hunting knife from his boot and held it to her throat.
“Turn to face me, or we make this father and son watch as Fenton does to her what he likely already does to her every night,” Bartholomew said, eliciting a chuckle from Fenton.
Whitney didn’t know if he’d ever hated anyone more than he did Bartholomew Darkings. The woman’s husband wiped tears from his eyes and spun on Darkings.
“Don’t worry about me!” the mother cried. “Save Ton’kai!”
Her husband didn’t listen. He stomped toward Bartholomew, but before he’d come within a meter of them, Fenton’s fist hit his stomach with such force he crumpled to the ground like his legs had disappeared.
“That’s enough Barty!” Whitney shouted. “This kid is going to die if we don’t get him out of there.”
Bartholomew stuck a fat finger out toward Whitney. “I own that boy! If I want him to die, that is my choice.”
The boy’s mother was sobbing now and the boy, Ton’kai, had stopped making noise altogether. His pale Panpingese skin was even paler, and Whitney feared they’d already lost him until he saw a finger twitch.
“Fenton,” Bartholomew said, “bring the thief to me. He’ll die in these tunnels like so many of his whore-girl’s ancestors.”
Whitney clenched his teeth as he hauled off a couple more rocks, finally seeing the boy’s legs, crushed and bloody. He bided his time, waiting until the perfect moment. Listening to Fenton’s footsteps, he counted under his breath…
Three…
Two…
One…
He spun around, gripping a heavy stone with both hands. It connected with the side of Fenton’s face with a bone-crunching crash. His knife flew from his hands, and Whitney snagged it out of the air as Fenton hit the stone floor. He wasn’t dead, but he was definitely no longer an immediate threat. Bartholomew stood staring, incredulous.
“Whitney,” he stammered. “Just calm down. We can work this out. Let’s help the boy out, together.”
“Lord Blisslayer, to you,” he said, pointing the knife his way. “You’re lucky I don’t carve up your pudgy little face.” He looked to the boy and then to his blubbering parents. “But we need all the hands we can get.”
“You can’t expect me to—”
“Help him!” Whitney brought the knife toward Darkings' face, stopping only inches away.
The worthless wretch looked like he’d pissed himself.
“I won’t ask again,” Whitney said, seething. He grabbed him by the collar with the other hand and shoved him toward the pile.
All four went to work. There were a couple of close calls, clouds of dust spilling down from the loose ceiling, but they managed to avoid catastrophe. When the final hindrance was removed, Whitney pulled Ton’kai out. His father grabbed him immediately and cradled him tightly. His mother sobbed louder when she saw the state of his legs. One was crushed and bruised. The other was bent backward at the knee, clinging on by a thread of skin with a bone sticking out.
Whitney turned his head to hide his retching. Out of the corner of his eyes, he noticed Bartholomew doing the same. The big tough man who treats his servants like proper slaves didn’t even have the stomach to watch them suffer.
Whitney shoved him. “Lead the way,” he demanded.
Bartholomew glanced at him, then at the suffering family. His lips curled into a wicked grin. “Your heart is going to get you killed.”
A small stone whacked Whitney in the side of the head before he could react. It wasn’t enough to knock him out—not with Bartholomew’s flabby arms—but it sent him sprawling as the former constable took off into the smuggling tunnels.
“You said that about my tongue,” Whitney groaned, rubbing his head. “Follow him!” he called to the family. “Save the kid.”
The father passed Whitney, chasing Bartholomew, Ton’kai draped across his arms. His mother tried to keep up but fell behind, losing so much of her strength to tears. Whitney gathered his wits and gave chase, knife in hand.
Bartholomew maintained a healthy lead. Whitney was amazed that the man could keep up the pace for so long with all his excessive weight. He seemed as determined as any to escape the city before the Shesaitju killed them all.
After a multitude of turns, they followed him around a corner, the amber light of Celeste reflecting off the river outside. Bartholomew was the first one through but stopped the moment he emerged. Whitney soon found out why. Before him, stood a host of King’s Shieldsmen. At their helm was one familiar face Whitney wasn’t sure he wanted to see. Torsten Unger, the Wearer of White.
The first thing Whitney thought to do was grab Bartholomew and raised the knife to his throat. “Of all the smuggling tunnels in all the world,” he said. “Here you are.”
XXI
THE KNIGHT
“Get them to the camp and wrap his wound!” Torsten picked out two Glass soldiers escorting his company of King’s Shieldsmen. They got to quick work, grabbing the injured Panpingese boy who’d emerged from the tunnels and rushing him up the hill. His parents followed close, faces streaked with tears.
“Now, Whitney, drop the dagger,” Torsten demanded. Of everyone he’d have been glad to see emerge from their secret path into Winde Port, there wasn’t anyone lower on the list. The thief held a dagger to the throat of a middle-aged man. He looked familiar to Torsten, but he couldn’t place him. He wore the clothing of a noble… had the gut for it, too.
Whitney’s eyes darted nervously at all of the armed King’s Shieldsmen surrounding them.
“I don’t think so,” Whitney said, sliding the blade closer along his captive’s throat. It was so quiet Torsten could hear the metal scraping across the man’s stubble. “By the way, it’s nice to see you, too.”
“Bartholomew Shelley Darkings, what have you gotten yourself into?” Yuri asked before Torsten could respond.
Both Torsten and Whitney snapped toward him. Whitney stifled a laugh. Torsten’s head cocked, his mind racing over how strange a reunion this was. Almost as if there were another, greater hand at play.
“You’ve been in the capital too long, Father,” Bartholomew said. “This is the filth infesting our city now.”
“So, this is your big, famous Pa?” Whitney said. “Kind sir, I mean this with all due respect, but where in Iam’s name did you go wrong raising him?”
“How dare you speak to him like—”
“Quiet boy!” Yuri bristled. “You were supposed to meet us here to let us know whether or not the tunnels are clear. Why am I not surprised you somehow managed to find trouble doing even that?”
The Redstar Rising Trilogy: (Buried Goddess Saga Box Set 1: Books 1-3) Page 58