“Erloa.”
“It’s time for you to find freedom, Erloa,” he said with a smile. As his hands brushed over hers, he noticed that they were quite cold. “Were you once a wielder?”
She nodded slowly. “I never wielded by myself... they quenched me before I could.”
And that was why they had taken Artemi when they had. They needed her to be manageable.
Erloa scurried into the adjoining room once she had been freed, and crouched against a wall. Although she was somewhat wasted from her confinement, it was possible she had retained some of the skills she had learned during her training at Fate’s. How foolish of Gilkore to chain up perfectly good fighters.
They moved to the next room.
Another thin wielder was released, and another and another. One of them was clearly suffering from nalka, and did not look particularly well. Last of all was Laiarala. She did look different: older and made weary by her experiences.
“Where is Artemi?”
The women all looked at him blankly, except Ulena, who was too embarrassed to even glance in their direction. She hid it by standing guard at the exit.
“Have they not brought her here yet?”
“A new one?” Erloa whispered.
“Like us?”
He nodded.
“How long ago was she taken?”
“About a week.”
The women looked between one another. Blazes, what did that mean?
“They’ll be keeping her in a holding cell until she is quenched. It’s on the other side of the complex. They liked to keep us asleep through most of it. She may be drugged,” one of the women said. “Once they’ve done that, they’ll keep her underground until she’s old enough to... join us.”
“How do I get there?”
Laiarala answered, “Through the main house, or over the pit.” All of the other women shuddered or shifted slightly at the mention of it. “Light of Achellon, I never thought I’d be rescued by a Hirrahan!”
Morghiad began checking over his daggers. “You won’t. Ulena will be taking you out of here. I’ll find Artemi. What is in the pit?”
“The damned,” Laiarala whispered. Eisiels, then.
Ulena picked up a torch from the wall and lit it from one of the candles. “I’ll take them back to the road... assuming I can see it.”
“Stay hidden.”
She nodded, and the women filtered out toward the blackness.
Morghiad took up a torch for himself. He listened for a while, until he could hear that strange murmuring sound again. He now had a very good idea of what it was, and that he ought to head toward it. Artemi was on the other side of it. His Artemi.
He trotted silently through the blackness, taking care to keep his flame hidden from the windows as much as he could. The shadows seemed to creep and smother things in this building. He hated shadows!
Another pang of nalka
shuddered through his bones, almost causing him to drop his torch. As he crouched to deal with the pain, some of the darkness began to move toward him. Not now! He could do without this, this... Morghiad pointed the torch at them, and they shied away from it. The little bastards never had liked the light.
He had to keep moving. He picked up his pace this time, easing into a sprint through the hallways and narrow rooms. His feet were no longer silent, though he tried to keep the noise to a minimum. Nearly every area he passed contained a cache of barrels or
a pile of dead eisiels. The place was filled with the leftovers of the business.
Without warning, he found himself stepping back into the open air. Except, of course, that it was not the normal sort of open air. They sky was still impossibly black, and the air did not move as it should have done. The only clue to his whereabouts was the lack of any walls, and the volume of the whispers. He was close to the pit, now, very close.
“Well, well. Lord Calyrish. Have you come to check on your father’s investments?”
Morghiad spun. Burn it, he had
been careless with his light! He immediately dropped the torch to the floor and reached for his sword.
Gilkore cocked his head to one side. “Not a sensible place to put a naked flame round here. No, indeed.” Quite calmly, he pulled a fresh cigar from his top pocket and lit it with the lamp he now carried. “So, how did you find us?”
Morghiad’s sword was now withdrawn and ready for use. Fire of fires, had Gilkore always been so... solid, so tough? The whispers grew louder, but there was no sign of the edge of the pit, and none of the other
masters from Fate’s appeared to be in the vicinity.
“Silence, is it? I bet you’ll be a little more forthcoming when I mention a certain Sunidaran redhead. Pretty thing – big, pleading eyes.”
Anger roused in his muscles, struggling for some sort of escape. It begged for him to run at Gilkore and thrash and cut at the man with every ounce of strength he had available to him. That would be idiotic, he told himself. Morghiad managed to regain control of his fury, just. “I’m going to find her.”
“That is a very positive attitude,
lad. Very good, but wrong. Did you know that the stronger the wielder, the better quality the eisiel blood? No? Artemi will give us some very potent stuff over her lifetime, and I had been meaning to move into the luxury end of the poison market for a while now.” He started laughing to himself. “She’s worth a lot of money. More than the ransom on the youngest son of a nobleman! Ha! It was very good of you to tell us just how much she could wield. Very good of you.”
The anger was becoming a creature inside him; it needed an outlet, it needed to feed! “I am going to kill
you for what you’ve done.”
“I doubt that.”
The shadows were beginning to move again. His chance was now. Morghiad whipped his blade around and launched an attack. Gilkore moved as if in a dream. He left the cigar smoking in his mouth, slid his sword from the scabbard at his back and feinted left as if it required the least amount of effort in the world. Morghiad saw the move for what it was, and struck to the right. Gilkore parried it, but barely. He was not unbeatable. He was not!
A thought occurred to Morghiad
then: had he ever beaten one of the sword masters? There had been half wins and early draws with some of them, but never an outright win. Artemi, his mind whispered to itself. She depended upon him. Gilkore struck again. The force of it was explosive, sending shakes all the way along Morghiad’s arms.
The steel of their swords clashed again and again, ringing out into the nothingness, absorbed by the blackness. The whispers about them seemed to grow louder still; the eisiels could hear and feel the battle, they wanted to be a part of it. He jumped
onto one of the barrels to try to gain some higher ground, and perhaps lop his opponent’s head off, but Gilkore very nearly cut his feet out from under him. Morghiad vaulted onto the ground to avoid the strike, then rolled to one side, thrashing sideways with his sword as he did so. The blade slid into the back of Gilkore’s thigh, but he made no sound of pain at it. The captain did not even acknowledge it.
Instead, his attacks thickened and grew in ferocity. Morghiad matched them blade for blade, but he was tiring too rapidly. Something was wrong with his body; something was
weakening it, eating it away from the insides. How long before another pang came? He would not be able to defend himself when it happened.
“You fight very much like your father, Morghiad, has anyone-” Gilkore broke his sentence to meet a tricky slide-cross. “-ever told you that?”
Morghiad. He was past being riled by that now. “My father doesn’t fight.”
“Oh, not that father. The other one, the earlier one.”
Hah. If this man thought to unnerve him with implications about his mother’s infidelity, then he was not
going to succeed. His father had already explained that their distance was his mistake, and that they shared the same blood. They even looked alike!
“
He was the same. Precise. Ordered.” Gilkore slashed at Morghiad’s arm, cutting through the coat and shirt beneath it. He broke the skin, but only just. “I fought at his side.”
Morghiad ignored him, and was growing too tired to make sense of the words in any case. He felt as if he had fought a thousand battles before this. His muscles had already begun to ache with fatigue. Damn Gilkore! Burn him for his love of long battles!
“I think you know the name, somewhere in that head. Kantari. Hedinar Kantari.”
A sharp pain proliferated through Morghiad’s skull and stayed there. It was all he could do not to throw his hands up to his head. Had he been hit by someone else?
But Gilkore’s next attack caught him off balance, and Morghiad took a step back to avoid it. His foot found nothingness instead of solid ground. Before he could catch himself, he was falling backwards through the air. The
captain’s silhouette grew smaller and smaller above him, while the whispers grew into a crescendo.
When Morghiad opened his eyes, he was not entirely sure if they were open. He saw nothing. No light. No glimmers. Nothing. His head was still ringing from the impact, and one of his legs felt very broken. Blazes, Artemi! He had to get to Artemi! How long had he been unconscious? Morghiad felt about himself to check his condition. Most of his daggers appeared to still be present, and his sword was next to him. That much was good. He pulled his left knee up to
assess the damage with his hands. Something was sticking out at the shin, and he was fairly sure it was something he didn’t want to see in any sort of light.
Slowly, painfully, he reached down and pulled at his foot as if it were a boot to be removed. The bones slid over each other within his leg... nearly there... He pulled harder, but the break refused to move properly back into place. Damn it! He was crippled until he could find help, or something convenient to hook his foot into.
The ringing in his ears was beginning to subside now, and other
noises were becoming clearer. The whispers; the eisiels - he was in the pit. Morghiad froze. Could he feel anything moving beside him...? The air was definitely not still. He rose slowly, and heard a voice shouting from above, “I think you ought to see your fate, Morghiad! Consider it a gift to your honoured father!”
A burning torch descended from the blackness overhead, turning over and over itself. It came to land ten yards from Morghiad, and was rapidly obscured by the blackened shapes that crowded around it. The flame dimmed as it lay on the ground, but still shed
enough illumination to show the outlines of the eisiels. Their bodies glistened. They were wasted, dead creatures, and they were all on leashes.
He hopped carefully toward the torch, using his sword as a crutch; his left leg had proven completely useless. He knew the creatures either side of him were watching, measuring, hungry, but he tried not to look at them too closely. He did, however, glance up at the walls of the pit. They were tall, rough and bleak. Even with a good leg, he would not have been able to scale them.
As he approached the eisiels that stood around the torch, he raised his sword to strike them out of the way. But they turned slowly to face him, and none of them moved in a threatening manner. Their milky white eyes were pitiful, their teeth grotesque. Morghiad lowered his sword, and waited. Still, they did not move to attack him.
He took a deep, protracted breath and stepped sideways into the gap between the eisiels. Carefully, he eased past their slimy, black bodies, listening for changes in the whispers that passed between them. His heart was racing, thundering against the insides of his chest. All of the eisiels he
moved between had been chained or restrained in some way. With most of them, an arm or a leg had been tied to a metal ring that had been cemented into the ground; with others, it was an iron belt that cinched around their waist. They had been differentiated somehow. Perhaps some eisiels were more dangerous than others.
At last, he stepped free of the horde and took up the torch. They watched him, waiting for something, perhaps a way out. And how was he to escape this? He had no climbing hooks, no rope and no doorway out of here. A doorway... Blazes, did he still have it?
Morghiad dug around the pockets of his breeches, those of his coat and the uppers of his boots. Where was it? He rummaged inside his coat again, and this time found something that heated his fingers. It was the last piece of Artemi’s fire that he had, and it felt like Achellon in his hand. He brought the tiny Blaze bundle out to see, and that was when the screams started.
The eisiels became frenzied, reaching and thrashing for the knot of Blaze that he held. He had to move quickly to avoid their grasping claws. He clutched his hand tightly around it,
so that the glow was hidden, but it was too late. They could smell it!
One of them knocked the torch from his hand, sending it flying over their heads and onto the ground beneath the throng. The area was dimmed, and the howls descended into coarse, guttural growls. It was time to get out, to get as far as he could from here. Morghiad opened his fist to see the bundle, and was about to begin parsing the strands when one of the creatures seized it from him. “NO!” Morghiad swung his sword in anger, cleaving the thing in two. The knot of Blaze was flung to the ground at their
feet, and the oily eisiel mess began scrabbling amongst each other to reach it.
Morghiad cut left and right with his blade. He could barely see what he was striking at: limbs, bodies or heads. He could still see the Blaze bundle being kicked about in the dirt. The eisiels were attacking him now, clawing at his body, raining their punches down upon his back. How long before one of them found a dagger and thrust it into him? He roared as he cut through more of them, forging his way forward through the seething mass. Several times, he felt his sword cutting through
the metal of their bonds. Nothing like Hirrahan steel.
He threw himself to the ground and stretched his arm out, reaching for it. Just a little further. Another blow landed on his back, cracking one of his ribs. Still he stretched forward. The tips of his fingers touched the bundle; he began ripping apart the strands. They resisted him at first, but soon they parted, creating a void in the space around. Morghiad fell straight through it, and landed upon the mud floor of one of the compound’s rooms.
Ice skittered about the tiles around him upon pools of black liquid.
He was shivering from the cold, and in a great deal of pain. Artemi.
Morghiad pulled his knees up and forced himself to crawl forward. After a time, he was able to stand and hobble with his bad leg. It had already started to set incorrectly. Damn the thing! He kept going, one uneven step after the other, back toward the farm building with lights inside it. He hoped Ulena and the wielders had made it out alive.
When he arrived at building, he made no attempts to be subtle or quiet. It was too late for that. The first man he encountered was Master Rollow. He blinked, wide-eyed when he saw Morghiad, only reaching for his sword after some hesitation. Morghiad allowed the blade master to come at him with wild blows, each of which Morghiad absorbed. Pain meant nothing to him now. He was numb. When the sword master overextended himself, it was a simple task to behead him.
Morghiad stumbled onward, taking one of the lamps with him. He could hear the noises from the pit now, and they were no longer whispers. From the sound of them, they had been wound into a mad frenzy. He passed
another guard, unknown to him, whom he cut through with his sword before he had time to think.
Somewhere on the other side of the farm, a siren sounded. Had they found Ulena, or had they noticed the wielders were gone?
There was nothing he could do for them now; he could barely keep moving. The corridor came to a fork, and he chose the right-hand passage for no good reason other than preference. It was lengthy, and the ceiling bowed in above his head. When he arrived at the end of it, he found a single, wooden door. It was bolted with an iron rod
that was sturdier than the door it was meant to lock.
Morghiad opene
d it slowly, and the broadest smile he had ever possessed took control of his face. Artemi blinked at him in disbelief as he stumbled forward, fell to his knees and wrapped his arms about her. She felt fire-full and damp from the sweat of her confinement, and he savoured every sensation that he felt from her. It was not long before he was raining kisses down upon her neck and chest and lips. Had he ever kissed her breasts before? He could not recall behaving with any affection toward her body, or
she doing the same to him.
“Morghiad, this is wonderful, but I would rather not be responsible for your death, and not here.”
He stopped. He really had not wanted to stop. “I would rather die in your arms than alone.”
“You are a fool.”
“I am afraid so.” He examined the bonds that held her. Where was the blazed key? He had not seen one hanging outside, and the only guard who could have held it was some distance down the corridor. “Do you feel up to wielding?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
He reached for her fires and made a form that would cut through stronger stuff than steel. The chains fell to the ground in tiny fragments.
Artemi stood and brushed down her clothes. Although the conditions in which she had been kept did nothing to detract from her beauty, she did not smell terribly fragrant. “We’re lucky here. Some of the farm has been sectioned off from wielding anything bigger than a sneeze. I was told it’s to keep the eisiels calm, though I’m not sure if I believe it. We cannot rely on my power for a weapon.”
The Fireblade Array: 4-Book Bundle Page 178