by Mok, DK
Seris looked steadily at Albaran, incidentally thinking that when he got back home, it might not hurt to exercise more and possibly grow a few inches taller.
“For the empire,” said Seris. “I’m sure you know what’s at stake.”
Albaran’s expression didn’t change.
“I’m afraid I’m a little out of the loop here in Tigrath,” he said dryly.
Seris hesitated, glancing at the other soldiers in the room. After a languid pause, Albaran nodded disinterestedly towards the door, and the room quickly cleared.
“I’m sure you’ve sensed the rising dissent, even here,” said Seris. “Separatists conspire in every city, and Penwyvern Manor itself was recently attacked, in the heart of Horizon’s Gate. The prince’s disappearance is somehow connected.”
“Rather alarmist words. There will always be fools and malcontents with idealised notions of self-rule. They forget the petty wars and corrupt, feudal warlords. The banditry, the starvation, and the endless border skirmishes. The reality is, the Talgaran Empire has put food on the table and given us the longest period of peacetime in centuries. Most people realise this and fear a return to the dark days of scanning the horizons for invasion, scratching in the dirt for food that isn’t there.”
“If you really believed that, I doubt your prison would be so full, Captain Albaran.”
Albaran studied him for a moment, and Seris couldn’t help feeling that perhaps he was being measured up for his very own set of chains. Albaran walked casually to the doorway.
“Four mercenaries, was it?” said Albaran.
Tigrath prison had been built with a certain mathematical tidiness. Cells were neatly arranged in geometric rows, and section blocks were sorted according to offence and length of sentence. As Seris followed Albaran through the sandstone corridors, he glanced furtively at the passing cells, hoping for a glimpse of badly hacked hair or a menacing smile. Although there were plenty of both, none belonged to the particular person he was looking for.
Albaran glided to a stop at a shallow cell holding four unkempt men, their clothing rumpled where armour had recently been unstrapped.
“These are the mercenaries?” Seris stepped towards the bars.
As he moved past Albaran, his heart suddenly caught in his throat. The captain’s clothes smelled of Elhan—the scent of zebra finches and old hessian. Seris glanced at Albaran’s inscrutable expression.
“Something wrong?” said Albaran.
Seris forced his gaze back to the prisoners, with their weathered skin and bloodshot eyes. One thing at a time.
“You’re Sulim’s mercenaries?” said Seris.
The men exchanged quick glances.
“Yeah,” said the sandy-haired one. “We’re the ones.”
Seris looked over the men carefully. They tried to look nonchalant, but their eyes darted nervously between him and Albaran.
“Which one of you works with Sulim the most?” said Seris.
The men glanced at one another.
“Him—”
“Me—”
“Yeah, I meant him—”
Seris addressed the one with a distinctive facial scar.
“What’s your position?”
“Um…sitting?” said the scarred man uncertainly.
“When Sulim sends you on assignment, what’s your post?”
The scarred man threw a nervous glance towards Albaran.
“Um, I have a bit of concussion,” said the scarred man, looking uneasy.
Seris let the silence turn thick and awkward. He turned slowly to Albaran.
“Are you sure these are the mercenaries you arrested last week?”
“I run a very organised prison.” Albaran returned Seris’s gaze. Go on, it said, I can do this all day.
Seris pressed his lips into a line, resisting the urge to kick Albaran in the shins. He was starting to recognise the limitations of negotiation and was seriously considering the benefits of Elhan’s rather more incendiary approach to problem-solving.
“Captain, I do believe you didn’t ans—”
A thundering crack boomed through the complex, and the ground bucked beneath their feet. Seris crashed into the bars and rebounded onto the floor, while Albaran crouched quickly, fingertips balanced against the shaking ground. A rumble bellowed from far beneath the earth, and Seris had the feeling that Elhan had tired of waiting for him.
Elhan had been in oubliettes before, but this was probably the largest. They’d shuffled her down stairwell after stairwell, passing through underground levels rough-cut from the desert limestone. The cells lining the walls were little more than caves gouged from the rock, tightly barred across the front. And most of them were full.
Elhan was taken to the lowest level, barely illuminated by a handful of sputtering torches. Dank pools covered the floor, and the only noises were slowly dripping water and muffled groans. The guards shoved her into a dim, crowded cell, and dozens of jaundiced eyes blinked at her from the shadows.
“Hello,” said Elhan. “Would you be the political prisoners?”
“Tell her nothing,” hissed a voice from a corner.
“I take that as a ‘yes’,” said Elhan.
“Death to Delmar’s dogs!” muttered another voice near the back.
“An emphatic ‘yes’,” said Elhan.
A young man with curly brown hair raced to the bars, calling out to the departing guards.
“Look, we’re really not involved! Talk to Sulim! She’ll tell you!”
Elhan smiled. There were days the curse just made life so much easier.
“You’d be one of Sulim’s mercenaries?”
The young man turned to Elhan, despair in his eyes. This quickly turned to horror as he took in the figure before him, and he staggered back. Elhan sighed.
“Hello. I’m Elhan del Gavir.”
An audible intake of breath swept through the cell.
“You’re a sympathiser?” said the young man, curiosity plucking at the sleeve of fearful horror.
“Actually, I’m probably here to rescue you,” said Elhan. “Depending on who you are.”
“I’m Parry.”
There was a nervous silence.
“Parry del Alis,” he said softly. He added more urgently, “But I’m really not one of them. I mean, I sympathise, but I’m not a sympathiser. But they’re just rounding everybody up.”
“Albaran’s guys?” said Elhan.
“It’s not just in Tigrath. I’m a scout for Sulim, and it’s the same everywhere. Anyone who’s seen as vaguely seditious gets taken away.”
“Are your buddies here, too?”
“They split us up. I think Ola and Rai are on this level, but I’m not sure about Tefen.”
“Well, I guess we’d better get this gaol break started, then.”
Elhan grabbed hold of two cell bars, each one as thick as a forearm, and started to rock back and forth. It would take too long to bend the iron, but limestone she could handle. After a few minutes, Parry joined Elhan, steadily pushing and pulling at the iron bars as limestone dust sifted down.
Elhan supposed it would’ve been too convenient for all of the mercenaries to be together, and then for Seris to show up in time for their escape. Seris had probably been kicked out, if he’d gotten in at all, since he obviously wasn’t mounting any kind of dramatic rescue. Then again, he wasn’t the heroic type—righteous was different from heroic. Heroic was saving people. Righteous was dying messily while trying to save people.
Elhan found herself musing that Seris would probably die a messy death preceded by a long speech or a very disappointed look. She couldn’t stand that kind of naïveté. Seris had lived a sheltered life inside a bubble of ignorance—he’d never even seen cookie lizards before. He didn’t know what people were capable of, what people really wanted. He thought you could be good to people and they would just be good back to you. He didn’t know what it was like—
There was a sharp crack, and Elhan saw a dark, ja
gged line spreading across the ceiling. She grinned and yanked again, watching as the crack raced across the top of the cell. She wrapped both hands around one of the pitted iron bars, and Parry did the same. They both heaved again, and a rumble shook through the walls as fragments of stone began to fall from the setting. With a crack and a groan, the top of the bar pulled free, and a weak cheer rose from the prisoners.
When the rumbling through the walls didn’t stop and instead grew in intensity, the cheer turned into panicked yells. Cracks spread across the walls and ceiling, and chunks of stone plunked into the pooled water. The torches fluttered madly and the trembling ground started to heave like a ship on the high seas.
“Earthquake!”
The cry spread quickly from cell to cell, and prisoners began to scream for the guards.
“All right.” Elhan tossed aside a loose bar from the crumbling cell. “Time to get out of here.”
Seris flailed to keep his balance as the ground shuddered.
“Evacuate!” yelled Albaran to the guards. “Immediate withdrawal! No recovery! All squads to regroup at Tigrath!”
Soldiers began to stream towards the exit.
“What about the prisoners?” said Seris.
“We’ll retrieve what’s left afterwards,” said Albaran.
Frightened shouts began to fill the corridors, and Seris watched the fleeing soldiers with desperate frustration. Feeling vaguely like a suicidal bee in a collapsing hive, he tried to run against the tide. A viselike grip closed on his arm, and Seris turned to see Albaran looking at him with cool hostility.
“Going somewhere?”
Seris tried to jerk his arm away and was slightly embarrassed to discover that this had absolutely no visible effect.
“What are you really doing here?” said Albaran.
“Prison collapsing,” said Seris. “Really not a good time to chat—”
“Oh, we’ll definitely have a long chat later.” Albaran dragged Seris after him towards the exit.
“Hey!” Seris struggled against Albaran’s grip, vowing that he would definitely exercise more when he got home. Assuming he ever got home.
One of the advantages of a sensibly planned prison was the ease of evacuation, and Albaran had little trouble navigating his way through the rubble, even with a struggling cleric in tow.
Albaran had never been a fan of labyrinthine complexes—certainly they were impressive, but you often ended up with entire hidden communities living in the nooks and crannies, and fire drills were an absolute nightmare.
Suddenly, he felt the cleric’s feeble resistance stop, and Seris lunged towards him, reaching for the sword at his belt. Just as Albaran was about to knock the cleric unconscious, a hot flash of light burst across his vision, and a brilliant heat scorched his hand. Staggering backwards, Albaran heard footsteps pattering away erratically, heading back into the complex. As his eyes recovered, he glanced down at his sword, and saw the half-melted end of his keychain swinging from his belt.
The complex roared with shattering stone and rending iron as Seris pounded through the corridors, the hefty ring of keys clanking in his hand. How Albaran managed to stride around with them on his belt without his trousers coming down, Seris would never know.
The cauterisation flare was one of the few offensive spells Seris could cast, but if there was anyone he didn’t mind wholeheartedly offending, it was Albaran.
Many of the sandstone cells had already cracked open, releasing their prisoners like spores. But some were still intact, the inmates screaming for someone, anyone, to help them. Seris staggered from cell to cell, fumbling through the keys and opening every door he could find.
Soon, he’d cleared the main level, but Seris could still hear a chorus of cries echoing faintly down the passageways. Eventually, he discovered a hidden stairwell behind a partially fallen door, spiralling down into a whole other complex.
Cell after cell, level after level, descending into the earth—rattle, turn, tug, next. He could see unmoving limbs protruding from beneath slabs of rock, broken bodies littering the floor, but he couldn’t do anything for them now. Keep the living alive—you couldn’t bring back the dead.
Yet another level cleared, and Seris raced down the empty corridors, leaping over piles of rubble. The only sound now was the thundering of the earth, and he tried not to think about all those stairs he’d have to climb to get back out. However, as he neared the end of the passageway, he saw another stairwell winding downwards, and his heart sank. He had a brief vision of the prison stretching down like an infinite stone layer cake, full of endlessly screaming people. He froze as movement stirred in the stairwell. A figure rose from the shadows, skulking like a creature emerging from its lair.
“Hey! Seris!” called Elhan. “What are you still doing here?”
She leapt up the last few stairs and jogged towards him, followed by a young man with curly brown hair, two rugged women, and a man who looked vaguely like a pirate. Elhan paused beside Seris, waving the mercenaries onwards.
“How many more levels are there?” cried Seris over the rumbling.
“Just one.” Elhan moved towards the far stairs. “What does it matter? We’ve got the mercenaries!”
Elhan sprinted towards the exit, like a phantom retreating into the shuddering darkness. Seris felt oddly calm, and the noises around him became a muffled throbbing in his head. He wasn’t particularly aware of making a decision, or of there being a decision at all, as he turned towards the final stairwell.
“Seris!” yelled Elhan, seeing Seris headed in the wrong direction. “The exit’s this way!”
Seris paused in the alcove of the stairwell, fragments of stone caught in his hair like sedimentary snow.
“I have to make sure there’s no one left.”
“There isn’t time!”
“Then go,” said Seris, and vanished down the stairwell.
The prison had been sturdily constructed, but it wasn’t designed to withstand an earthquake of this magnitude. The corridors heaved and contracted, as though the building itself were undergoing some kind of quickening.
The cells on the final level were deserted, and Seris noticed that some of the bars had been wrenched from the walls, as though by some superhuman feat of strength. Slabs of rock crashed around him, spraying rocky shrapnel through the air. The torches had almost all been extinguished, and as Seris staggered in the near-darkness, he imagined he could hear the cries of the dead rising to welcome him.
However, as he splashed through deepening pools of water, he realised the faint cries were actually coming from a man-sized crevice in the wall. At first, he’d assumed it was a fissure from the quake, but as he neared, he could see a faint light on the other side. Slamming from one wall to the other, Seris finally reached the gap and squeezed through.
It was a rough cul-de-sac of six small cells, filled with frantic, emaciated figures, their arms waving through the bars like the fronds of a sea anemone.
“I told you we’d be rescued!” cried a gaunt old man.
“Fifteen years too late,” said a skeletal, hazel-eyed man. “She wasn’t going to wait for me, you know.”
“Forget about the girl,” snapped a wispy-haired woman. “I had a kingdom waiting for me!”
Seris flipped urgently through the keys as more and more of the ceiling ended up on the floor.
“Give me that!” The hazel-eyed man grabbed the keys. “It’s this one.”
Seris grasped the rusted iron key and quickly unlocked the doors. Thin figures rushed out like a wave of stick insects, and Seris shooed them towards the stairs. Upwards he raced, following the sound of their surprisingly nimble steps. The fact that atrophied prisoners were fitter than he was probably should have worried Seris. His muscles burned with exhaustion, and his throat choked on clouds of dust. As the last stairwell jolted into view, a crack boomed from above. He dove forward as a chunk of falling ceiling slammed into his shoulder, knocking him to the ground.
Breathle
ss and disoriented, he crawled out from the rubble. The pain in his shoulder was agonising, but there was no time to check the wound. He rose unsteadily and continued running, leaping onto the stairs just as the corridor collapsed behind him.
By the time Seris reached the ground floor, almost the entire ceiling was gone, which should have been a good thing, except the floor was headed the same way. He sprinted through the deserted prison, the walls caving in around him. Seris caught sight of a figure rushing down a side passage, and he skidded to a stop. The figure stared back at him through the haze of dust.
“What are you still doing here?” yelled Elhan.
“Getting out of here!”
“About time!” Elhan raced towards the exit.
Seris scrambled after her, the floor bouncing hard under his feet. At last, he saw the looming iron door, thrown open at the end of the corridor. He pounded towards it, trying desperately to ignore the strange splintering noise chasing his heels.
Don’t turn around, thought Seris.
The complex was collapsing in on itself. Level smashed through level, the centre of each floor crumbling outwards like a devastating ripple. Elhan burst through the front door ahead of him, and the air groaned with the noise of the earth being sundered.
Seris felt the ground giving way beneath him, and he saw Elhan spin around, framed in the doorway against the blinding desert sun.
“Run!” yelled Elhan.
“I am!” Seris snapped.
The ground suddenly dissolved into falling rubble, and Seris glimpsed the yawning chasm below as he lunged desperately towards the door. He mustered all his strength, all his prayers, all his will to live into a single burst of strength, and hoped it would be enough.
As it turned out, it wasn’t.
Seris leapt towards the light and felt the emptiness beneath his feet, his fingers closing on sand. The moment seemed to last far longer than it should, stretching out into a rather compressed internal monologue about the benefits of staying at home with your potatoes.
Yet in this fragile moment, this thinnest of life’s cross sections, Seris knew he would have changed nothing, aside from possibly the bit about dying. He’d taken an oath, he’d made a choice, to lead a certain kind of life. One of his earliest memories was knowing that one day he would be that man, kneeling in the gutters of blood, his hands taking away the pain. He would be the one towering against the sun, taking in the broken children and repairing them as best he could. He would be the one turning the key as the earth swallowed the sky, releasing those who thought they’d been long forgotten. Even if it meant that all he had, when his moment came, was a fistful of tumbling sand.