by Steven Novak
His wrist aching, Captain Jacques Fluuffytail realized that the massive Ochan was indeed correct in his assumption, though he hardly agreed with the manner in which it was delivered. The way the boy lit up the night; someone would undoubtedly have seen it. There was absolutely no way they could have missed it. No doubt, Ochan ships were heading toward their position at this very moment. Rubbing his wrist, he told himself that he would remind the foul-mouthed Ochan calling himself Krystoph of just who was the captain of this vessel later. Things being as they were, however, time was short and vengeance would have to wait. After retrieving his dagger from the gently swaying deck, he inserted it back into its sheath.
Turning to his still confused crew, he screamed, “Get below and repair whatever damage those damn forked tongues caused! We’re heading north, ya mangy seadogs! See to it that ya put some grease in yer gears while yer at it! I want us moving within the hour!”
Straightening the bent brim on his dusty sea-soaked hat, Jacques Fluuffytail came to the realization that this trip had suddenly gotten significantly more interesting, whether he liked it or not.
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CHAPTER 49
INCORRECT ASSUMPTIONS
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Barely conscious, his long toenails dragging across the stone, arm draped over the thickly muscled neck of Walcott, Pleebo felt nearly weightless to the Tycarian King. Remarkably skinny before being captured and tossed in Kragamel’s dungeon, the lack of sustenance during his imprisonment had left the Fillagrou citizen more malnourished than ever. The grayish white flesh covering his lanky skeleton was taut, dry and sickly looking, delicate like fine particles of dust in the breeze. Despite the fact that most of the bones in his legs were broken or severely fractured in multiple places, it was through sheer will alone that Walcott forced them to continue working. Just a little longer; they had to stay functional just a bit longer. When he and Pleebo had fully escaped from the castle of the tyrant king, then, and only then, would he allow them to bathe in the much-needed rest for which they so terribly ached. Not a moment before, and not a moment less.
The dungeon was a labyrinth of dimly lit, barely habitable tunnels extending for miles underneath the castle and its surrounding grounds. Attempting to navigate them with no prior knowledge of where he was going was proving a difficult task, to say the least. Walcott’s head was pounding, his entire body on fire. Every corridor looked the same as the last, every cell as empty, desolate and dreary as the one before. Finding it difficult to focus, he realized that he was unsure of exactly where he was. Did he go down this tunnel before? He thought maybe he had—maybe? It seemed familiar for some reason. Under his arm, pulled close to his body, Pleebo continued to drift in and out of consciousness. His long gangly body had gone entirely limp, and Walcott was finding him more and more awkward to carry. Reaching a three-way junction, the Tycarian at last came to a stop. Each tunnel was lit up for just about fifteen feet before being swallowed by darkness once again. Which way should he go? Everywhere he looked, everything felt the same. The only difference from one corridor to the next was the prisoners locked behind the bars of the cells lining the walls. Unfortunately even they were obscured by shadows. The random parts remaining exposed were lifeless, bloody, unmoving and of little help. Ochan gnats circled the bodies of the captured and beaten like vultures, surviving on microscopic pieces of their rotting flesh. Closing his eyes, Walcott lowered his head. Every part of him hurt, hurt so very bad. Simply remaining upright was proving to be among the most challenging tasks he’d undertaken in his many years. It would have been so easy to lower Pleebo to the floor, drop to his knees, lie on his back, and give in to the agony spreading like wildfire across his body. There would be no honor lost in such an act. Not a single one of his fellow Tycarians would judge him harshly if he made such a decision, not after everything he’d suffered. For a single fleeting moment, Walcott actually considered the idea. For a barely existing instant in time, it became more than a simple, passing thought. For the briefest of seconds, it had substance, and it seemed almost logical in a strange, disturbing way. In this moment, his grip on Pleebo wavered, his knees wobbling as a defeated sigh slightly part his dry, cracked lips—for a moment.
From the darkness at the end of the hallway directly in front of him came the clank of heavy steel latches being unlocked. This was followed immediately by the sound of an ages-old knob turning, along with squeaky rusted hinges desperately in need of lubrication. The corridor filled with a light so bright it forced Walcott to squint and lift his thick forearm to his face to shade his eyes. Instinctively, he pulled tighter on Pleebo while ducking the both of them behind a nearby wall and out of sight. A second later he heard voices, two of them, possibly three: Ochan voices, the guards. As the door behind the Ochans closed, the corridors were again washed in deep black shadow. Realizing he would stand no chance in a hand-to-hand skirmish, Walcott opted instead to hold his breath, make as little noise as possible, and pray they chose a corridor other than his to venture down. Six feet stomped heavily on the stone floor, growing louder as they got closer. Their thick armor clanked and ground the steel of their various bladed weapons, creating long drawn-out rattles that reverberated throughout the darkness. Under his arm, only partially conscious, Pleebo mumbled something incoherent. Immediately Walcott’s hand covered the wide mouth of his friend, muffling his faraway voice. From the blackened corridors, the sounds of walking Ochan feet stopped, the clank of metal weapons grinding to an immediate halt. Still pressing his massive flat paw over Pleebo’s mouth, Walcott closed his eyes, a sheen of sweat building on his forehead and dripping over his wide brow. Locking his jaw, he held his breath. If they had heard him, he would be forced to fight. More than likely it would prove a battle he was destined to lose. He would fight nonetheless. If he was to die on this day, it should be a death worthy of a Tycarian; it should be on his feet. This could be the only way. In the back of his mind, he cursed himself for considering giving up a moment prior. The situation he found himself faced with resulted in a brief lapse of judgment; it would not happen again.
The Tycarians deserved more from their king, and he expected more from himself.
After mumbling to each other for a moment, one of the Ochan guards laughed boisterously, his gravelly voice bouncing off the walls. Seconds later, Walcott listened intently as the group moved off in another direction until at last the sounds of their steps faded away. Quickly adjusting his grip on Pleebo, Walcott hoisted the floppy, spindly limbs of his friend into the air once more. Cautiously, he began moving toward the door the Ochans exited moments ago. Unable to see more than a few inches in front of his face, he extended his arm forward until eventually his palm came into contact with steel. Running his fingers over the metal blindly, he eventually discovered a lever and tugged downward. Pressing open the door just a crack, he peeked into a well-lit corridor on the other side. At first glance, this new area looked empty, quiet and surprisingly peaceful. Stained into the stone beneath his feet were various-colored bloods. Many creatures had been dragged through this hall kicking, screaming and begging for a mercy they likely never received. From the shadows of the dungeon behind him, Walcott again heard the distant chatter of the Ochan guards; they were moving in his direction. There was no time to waste. Again the dreary, only partially-conscious Pleebo could only mumble limply.
“Fear not my friend. Freedom is forthcoming,” Walcott whispered in response.
Ignoring the crippling pain coursing throughout his body, the massive-bodied Tycarian pressed the door open and stepped through, quickly closing it behind. Though currently empty, the corridor was enormous, extending so far in either direction that Walcott guessed it might take him twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other. A number of other corridors branched out from it at fairly regular intervals, along with fifty or so closed doors lining the walls, each of them covered in a muted, barely noticeable red paint. The air was chilly, bordering on freezing. Walcott watched as a puff of warm
steam exited his mouth with every breath. Though he had never set foot in Ocha, the Tycarian king had heard any number of stories concerning its unforgivable winters, winters that could often last the entire year. The Ochans loved the cold. No doubt this was one of the many reasons they so despised Fillagrou.
“Wha-what’s going on?” Pleebo babbled sloppily as he was drawn briefly back into consciousness, his head flopping back and forth as if his neck were without muscles.
“Quiet, my friend,” Walcott whispered shortly, dragging the woozy Pleebo away from the door to the dungeon and into the corridor. “There is much ground to cover if we’re to escape this place.” Ducking into the first hallway on the right, the pair found themselves faced with another endless corridor strikingly similar to the first. Gravity reasserting itself across his body, Pleebo’s feet slowly progressed from dragging, to stumbling, to limping and something as closely resembling the act of walking as he was likely to manage in his current state.
“I’ve got it. I can walk, it’s okay,” He added through painfully dry lips while thankfully patting his burly protector on the rear of his shell.
Walcott cautiously allowed Pleebo to slide from his grip and soon the Fillagrou was again standing upright under his own power. His legs were wobbly though, bending back inward at awkward moments and very nearly causing him to stumble forward. Through bloodshot eyes, the world around Pleebo began sharpening. What had been little more than a fuzzy abstraction moments ago now looked solid, familiar and quite terrifying. Every part of his body was sore, every muscle transformed into a bundle of nearly useless pain receptors. Reaching up, he inserted one of his fingers into his mouth. Where once there had been teeth, there were now only gums. The Ochan interrogators had taken the rest. His pale flesh was covered in disgusting lumps, welts and scars. A few of his wounds remained open, dried and caked blood sticking to the ripped flesh.
“How did you get us out?” Pleebo asked as his memories were reduced to disjointed puzzle pieces that might never again fit perfectly.
After a brief pause Walcott answered, “The chains believed they could defeat me. They were mistaken.”
Stopping for a moment, Walcott sniffed the chilly air around him, surprised to discoverer there was no discernable scent of life. What he smelled was old and dusty, as if only a few creatures had traversed the corridors in quite some time.
“What? What’s wrong?” Pleebo asked, keeping his weary eyes peeled for Ochans, despite the fact that alertness was not easily accomplished through only one fully functioning eye.
“Nothing,” Walcott whispered, “I smell nothing. It is too clean, too clean and empty.”
Lifting his head, Pleebo scanned the area around him, for the first time realizing the obvious: they hadn’t encountered a single Ochan over the course of their escape. Unsure of what this meant, he decided instead to ignore it.
“Who cares? Consider it a blessing in disguise. Keep moving.”
Walcott grumbled, coming to the decision that Pleebo was right; it was best to ignore such things for the time being. If they wished to escape, they had to continue moving forward. This was all that mattered. After making their way down two more equally empty corridors, the pair arrived at a sturdily constructed steel door at least ten inches thick and built into the end of the hall rather than on the side like all that had come before it. Unlocking the exceptionally large latch, Walcott pushed the door open slowly. Immediately a cold breeze smacked his face, freezing the sweat running down his forehead and pushing the heavy steel backward. Lowering his shoulder, both he and Pleebo shoved the full weight of their bodies against the powerful winds outside until the door at last swung open and smacked against the exterior stone with a heavy thud.
Instantly Pleebo and Walcott froze in place.
The pair now found themselves staring out across an impossibly large yard surrounded by walls so high they disappeared into the heavy gray clouds blanketing the night sky. The sand in the yard was dark brown and frozen solid, without an ounce of vegetation. Scattered about the frozen tundra were creatures of every race imaginable, each with a pickaxe or a shovel dangling between their frostbitten fingers. They looked as if they were just barely clinging to life. Covered in a layer of filth and dressed in crinkly, partially frozen rags, the creatures mindlessly broke piles of stone beneath their unprotected, frostbitten feet. Though the facial features of each were remarkably different, their expressions remained startling similar. They were the walking dead. There was no sign of life behind their eyes, no hope and no dreams. They were lost, holding onto snippets of a past they’d likely forgotten and would never find again.
“It would seem this is not Kragamel’s castle, my friend,” Walcott mumbled as the icy wind stung at the flesh of his beaten, defeated face. “This is a work camp.”
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CHAPTER 50
THE CALVARY HAS ARRIVED
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Sneaking into the Kragamel’s castle proved remarkably easy for tiny Roustaf. Locating his friends, however, was another matter entirely. Using the darkness to his advantage, the little man had zipped from one end of the castle to the other over the course of the long, cold evening. In the dungeon, he found nothing, and in the courtyard, even less. The endless rows of prisoner barracks near the rear of the fortress offered no signs of hope either. Either Pleebo and Walcott weren’t there or they were already dead. Realizing that there was a very real possibility that he’d arrived too late, that his friends were gone, Roustaf came close to breaking down. Diving headfirst into a pile of stiff half-frozen hay for cover, he buried his head in his hands, fighting back a torrent of tears. Absentmindedly, his fingers traced the contours of the stubby horns on his head. Though he’d managed to ignore it until this point, suddenly Ocha’s bitter cold seemed remarkably colder and insurmountably bitterer. From the points of the calcified bone protruding from his scalp to the tips of his frozen toes, the extreme weather had begun to have an effect on him, not only physically, but mentally. Every muscle in his body felt tired, drained and worn, as if he were twice his age and his body working at half its strength. Pulled tightly together, his wings were overly sensitive and brittle; they had been for hours. Even the briefest of touches from something as delicate as the straw surrounding him now resulted in a nearly incomprehensible amount of pain.
Wrapping his arms around his knees in an attempt to take advantage of what little body heat he had remaining, Roustaf mumbled under his breath, “You blew it, you stupid schmuck.” The thick whiskers of his mustache were frozen stiff, poking against the flesh of his forearm and adding to his overall state of discomfort. “They needed your help and you blew it.”
Berating himself in this fashion did little to improve his mood. Through slight openings in his house of straw, he watched intently as the Ochan sun began to peek just above the outer wall of the castle in the distance. So far away, the star seemed tiny in the sky, only slightly larger than the points of light surrounding it and hanging perilously onto the night beyond the heavy cloud cover. It would be daylight soon, or as close to daylight as it got in this awful dark place. Sneaking around the castle would soon become remarkably more difficult, if not impossible. If his friends were still alive, the chances of him finding, releasing and rescuing them without the aid of a shadowy night were almost nonexistent. For the time being anyway, Roustaf had come to the difficult decision that he needed to stop looking. Since the outset of the war, he’d seen so many he’d cared about die. Try as he might to hide the pain, with each and every one he lost a piece of himself, a piece he would likely never get back.
After so many years and so many pieces, it was astounding that there was anything left.
Breathing in, he sucked back the pain once more and swallowed it whole, allowing the awful disgusting feeling to sink heavily into the pit of his stomach. He needed to head back into Fillagrou, back to Tahnja and the rest of the group. Spending the day hiding out in Kragamel’s fortress would accomplish nothing. Not o
nly was freezing to death a legitimate concern, but he would likely be discovered as well. There was no other choice; he needed to leave now, before dawn. Crawling on all fours through the mound of grayish-brown hay, Roustaf used his hands to dig away an opening just large enough to scan the courtyard. In the immediate vicinity, there were only a few guards visible. In an hour’s time, this would no longer be the case. In two hours’ time, the fortress would be filled to the brim with angry, well-armed, sharp-toothed and green-skinned lizards.
The soldier nearest Roustaf checked briefly to see if any of his comrades happened to be glancing in his direction. Realizing there were no prying eyes upon him, he opened his mouth wide and yawned deeply while stretching his muscular arms. Twenty feet from the sleepy lizard man, a pair of guards exited a large doorway on the fortress wall, dragging the body of an unconscious and possibly dead prisoner across the frozen soil. Initially Roustaf didn’t recognize the creature’s species. Its pale orange-purple flesh had been so badly disfigured that it might be unrecognizable even if he did. If Pleebo was alive, he was no doubt in just as terrible a condition as that unfortunate soul. The mere suggestion sent a shiver of fear up the ridges of Roustaf’s spine. Rubbing his hands together for warmth, the tiny red man examined the movements of the guard closest to him carefully. The instant the Ochan turned his back, he would make his break for the outer fortress wall. It would be his only chance. Attempting to get some blood pumping to his sore wings, he fluttered them back and forth quickly, which in turn caused the hay above his head to scatter just a bit. He would need to get as high as he could as fast as possible, and over the wall quickly. From there, it would be a short flight to the doorway and Tahnja. What would happen after that wasn’t quite as clear. Plans would have to be made. There were difficult decisions ahead.