by Lucia Ashta
“Don’t worry. We’ll be back soon,” Dolpheus said, upbeat, as if he were enjoying the prospect of the upcoming challenge. Kai did look worried. Dolpheus’ words did nothing to change that. I could tell that Kai wanted to ask something along the lines of, and if you don’t return? But he didn’t. I had every intention of returning and knew Dolpheus and I possessed the skill to do so. If we didn’t, well, then Kai would have to figure it out on his own. I imagined that he could concoct some explanation for his brief absence and resume his role as a member of the royal guard.
Kai walked us to the tunnel’s exit, and in this case, entrance. He stood in the stream, unconcerned by the water that rushed over his boots, trying to find a way to help us. He didn’t give up, even when it became apparent that we didn’t need any assistance.
“You first? Or me?” Dolpheus asked.
“You go.” I moved right under the hole in the foundation that seemed to have been caused by dilapidation and a lack of upkeep of the thick stone blocks, instead of a purposeful opening to a covert network of tunnels. Dolpheus moved behind me. He put both hands on my shoulders and jumped. He wrapped his legs around my upper torso, pressing the cold metal of Kai’s sword into my back, his hands still firm on my shoulders. I put my hands in the air, holding my head steady to keep my balance. He scrabbled one leg atop one shoulder, straddling the hilt of the sword, and grabbed the hand right above it. He mirrored his actions on the other side. On top of my shoulders, he could reach the entrance to the tunnel with ease. He grabbed the stone edge and dragged himself inside, his boots the last to disappear into the hole that seemed too dark to contain anything within it.
Within seconds, he’d wiggled himself around, and reached both hands down to me. I could see his legs out to the side, braced against the walls of the tunnel.
I turned to offer Kai one last smile. It was a strange thing to have this young man here, a witness to the closeness and ease of friendship I shared with Dolpheus. Kai knew so little about us, yet here he was, a voluntary member of this team. I wanted to offer him more than I had, but I had nothing else to give just then. I hoped I would have more after my return. “We’ll be back soon. Then we can talk more, get to know you, talk about what may lie ahead for all of us.”
Kai nodded, suddenly shy. Grateful, I thought, to be included in contemplations of the future, like a child who wanted to be part of a band of adventurous boys but didn’t know how to go about joining it.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. Then I moved to take Dolpheus’ outstretched hands. “Thanks for letting me borrow your sword,” I called over my shoulder, even though I had taken it without asking.
“You’re welcome.” The uncertain voice trailed me into the tunnel until it was drowned out by the scuffing sound of my clothes against the rough stone floor. I rose to a crouch and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness that looked dark in the absence of the purple glow of the moon. Once they did, “Let’s move. We left the torch just up ahead. With any luck, it’s still burning. If not we’ll have to move by touch. It’s a pretty level shot, few turns.”
I saw Dolpheus nod. Then it grew darker. “It’s lighter up ahead. It must be the torch,” he said, and I agreed, following him blindly toward the light.
Seventeen
The torch still burned, which was a very lucky thing, since we had no way to relight it. We could have made it through the tunnel in the dark if we had to—there were no obstructions or major hazards, and the path was easy enough to follow—but who would want to scrabble through the pitch dark if there was another way?
“I think I’ll take this as a good omen,” Dolpheus was saying. “That everything will go smoothly for us now.”
I chuckled. “Well, there has to be a time when things start going our way. Why not now?”
“Exactly. We’ve survived our fair share of challenges—”
“—and probably a few other people’s fair shares as well.”
“Without a doubt. It’s time for us to have some good luck, and quite a lot of it would be nice for a change.” We progressed far enough that we could rise from our hands and knees to walk in a crouch. “Maybe this is the time when the tides shift for us. You escaped an execution sentence. That was some good luck,” he said, as if dodging a death sentence were a common occurrence. “You escaped all on your own, before I could even get to you. I was coming to get you though, you know that.”
I smiled at my friend’s back. “I know. I know I can count on you. You’re the only person I can count on. I’m really grateful to you, man, for being such a good friend to me.”
Dolpheus waved his free hand to the side in dismissal. “You’ve been as good a friend to me as I’ve been to you, if not better. You’ve been the only person I could count on for a long time, since my dad died.”
I had been a good friend to him. I knew that. It was one of the factors that allowed me to hope that maybe I’d been a good man at times, and that I could perhaps become a good man all the time in the future. “I knew you’d come to get me when I was in that prison. I knew you were planning something to rescue me. You’re a good guy, Olph, through and through.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far, Tan. What’s gotten into you with all this… expression? Are you all right? Did that prison shake you up? Did the guards do anything to you?” His words trailed over his shoulder in a play of shadow, light, and smoke from the burning torch.
“I’m all right. I just figured, we don’t know which moment is going to be our last, you know? There are some things better said than unsaid.”
“This isn’t going to be our last. Getting your sword back’s going to be easy. We’ve done stuff like this hundreds of times.”
Perhaps not hundreds, but I couldn’t argue with the point. We’d undertaken ventures where the odds were stacked against us many times before. And we were skilled enough to make it out of most of them without grave injury and with all of our limbs still attached in all the right places.
I let us walk in silence while I considered that Dolpheus was the only person in the entire world that I’d ever been able to trust. My mother had walked out on me. It wasn’t just my father that she left behind, she left me too, and I was only a boy at the time. My father, whomever he was, had remained but was little better. Whether my father was Brachius or Aletox, neither one had been good to me in the ways that a boy needed his father. And there had been no one else. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had died before my mother abandoned us. I hadn’t met any additional family members, didn’t know if there were any others that still lived. Dolpheus was all the family I had; we were bonded to each other by ties stronger than blood.
“I didn’t escape from the prison alone,” I said. My words broke the brooding silence to reverberate off cold stone walls.
“What?” Dolpheus stopped walking to turn to look at me. “Really?”
I nodded. He turned back and kept moving. “Who helped you?” His question was loaded with genuine curiosity. Other than Dolpheus, there was no one else who would want to rescue me from the guillotine.
“Aletox.”
“What? Ah—” He’d half turned to look at me when he banged his head on a bump that jutted from the tunnel. Even though the tunnel was now high enough to allow us to walk standing straight, its walls were hand-hewn, rougher in some areas than others, where I imagined the workers that chiseled a tunnel of this size from solid rock grew tired of the demands of their work.
“Are you okay?”
“Of course I am,” he muttered, angry. I understood. The avoidable, silly injuries were often the most frustrating; they were the senseless ones, the ones that hurt without a worthwhile cause behind them. He continued walking, his steps stormy and heavy. When the frustration subsided, and his stride was once again smooth, he asked, “What was Aletox doing rescuing you? Did Brachius send him?”
“No, Brachius didn’t send him. I don’t think that man would lift a finger to spare me from execution, even if it w
as caused by his actions.”
“Sad to say it, but I agree with you. You definitely were unlucky in the father you got. But what on O was Aletox doing saving you if Brachius didn’t send him? Aletox doesn’t do anything unless it’s what your father wants.”
“That’s what I thought. But it turns out that isn’t necessarily so.”
“Oh?”
“According to Aletox, he, and not Brachius, is my father.”
With the way Dolpheus said “What?” it was obvious he was as stunned by the news as I was. “Was he serious?”
“When have you seen Aletox joke about anything?”
“Okay, you’re right. Never. But how can it be? Why would he say something like that?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing. What I keep coming back to is that he would only say it if it were true.”
“Or if he believed it to be true.”
“Yes. The only other alternative is that my father asked him to tell me that. But then, why would he?”
“Wow,” was all Dolpheus said for a while. I followed his fast-footed form farther into the tunnel. Then, once the quiet had settled around us as densely as the darkness that the torch worked to dispel, “Do you think Aletox could really be your father?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wanted to ask you that same question.”
“He didn’t say anything else? That was it? Just, ‘I’m your father?’”
“Basically. There wasn’t time for much else. He broke the news and then transported out of there.”
“Out of the palace?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
“I know. I didn’t think it was possible either. But I watched Aletox disappear right before my eyes, so it’s possible. He told me he’d taught me to transport as a boy. Do you remember that? ‘Cause I don’t.”
“Hmmm. I don’t remember who first taught us to transport. I think I would remember if it had been him though, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what to think.”
“So what, he just showed up? How’d he get you out?”
“A guard had just come into my cell to announce that I’d been sentenced to death by guillotine at sundown. A few minutes later, the door opened, with a key, and in came Aletox. I thought I was hallucinating at first. I’d been in the process of removing my hand shackles when he came in and I was still out of it.”
“Really? Did you manage to do it?” The excitement in his voice was the same I’d heard since we first became friends, centuries ago. It was another reason we got along as well as we did. We enjoyed testing boundaries to discover new capabilities.
I grinned into the empty space in front of me before I filled it. “I did.”
“Did you tell Aletox?”
“No. I didn’t say a word about it, and I don’t think he realized that I’d been shackled.”
“Smart move. The less anyone knows about what we can do, the better.”
“Agreed. So, he appears in my cell, hurries me along, telling me that he bought off two of the guards and that we only have a few minutes. He knocked them out to protect them from suspicion, but other guards would be coming soon. I followed him down the hall, but before we reached the end of it, we could hear the voices of a couple of guards. They were about to round the corner and meet us head on when Aletox just disappeared. I followed after him and ended up in this tunnel.”
“I wonder how he knew about it.”
“I don’t know. We didn’t get around to that, not that Aletox has ever been particularly forthcoming, even with an abundance of time. But it’s clear that the guards didn’t know about the tunnels. Even when they discovered I was gone, and I could hear their voices, no one came down the tunnels. That is, until Kai did.”
“How did Kai know about them?”
“He grew up in the palace. Worked in the kitchens before becoming a guard. His mother was the Queen’s attendant, one of the ones that was killed the same night as the Queen.”
“I see. Was Aletox still with you when Kai found you?”
“No. He transported out of here and left me behind. Because I couldn’t pull it together enough to break through the block against transporting and get out of here after he broke his news to me.”
Dolpheus huffed. “Well, shit. Of course you couldn’t. If Aletox’d wanted you to transport out of the palace with him, he should’ve kept his mouth shut. Only he would deliver news like that and then expect the person not to react and continue as if nothing’d happened.”
“Because he could. He would.”
Dolpheus nodded. “He’s as cold and measured as an eel.”
“And as slippery too.”
“Aye. I wonder what he’s up to.”
It was precisely what I’d been wondering, off and on, when I allowed myself the luxury of considering the question of my paternity. “I wish I knew.”
“Having your wish magically come true might be the only way to discover what that man’s thinking.”
“Yeah. It might.” I’d never known anyone more difficult to read than Aletox. Not even Lord Brachius was as challenging to understand. Brachius might lack compassion and caring, and he might prioritize that which he perhaps shouldn’t prioritize, but at least I could puzzle out some of his motivations.
“Man,” Dolpheus said, “Can you imagine that, Tan? What if Aletox really is your father?” He whistled the unbelievability of the notion. The dark, eternal stone swallowed the sound, sharing only a whisper of it with me.
I couldn’t imagine it, not even after hours had passed since Aletox’s revelation. Still, I didn’t need to tell Dolpheus that. His questions hadn’t required answers.
When enough deliberation and time had passed that I’d grown weary of the mystery, I became anxious to move on, to leave the questions Aletox engendered far behind for a while longer. “Kai found me sitting on the floor of the tunnel. I’d been trying to transport but kept losing my focus. When I heard footsteps coming down the tunnel, I had just enough time to bring myself all the way back into body before he arrived.”
“Good thing.” Dolpheus knew better than most anybody else how dangerous it was to be interrupted in the middle of transporting. There were so few people capable of transporting anymore that we’d never actually seen evidence of splitting, but we’d heard plenty of stories. Even those that didn’t believe they could transport relayed the nightmarish tales of men and women unsuccessful in transporting, caught in different stages of the process. The results varied, but always the outcome was gruesome and tragic. Bodies that had once been complete, with their eternalities intact, were no longer whole. In most cases, the person was unable to continue leading an ordinary life; in a few, the person was no longer able to continue living.
“Kai threatened me with his sword, but it was easy enough to take it from him. I’m not sure he even tried to defend his position, even though I wasn’t armed. It took little persuasion to convince him to lead me out of the palace. I think he admires us. He knew who you were without any mention from me.”
Dolpheus chuckled. “The tales they tell about us are something else. Have you heard the one where I rip a mowab’s head off with my bare hands? That’s one of my favorites.”
“Olph,” I smiled, “you nearly did rip a mowab’s head off with your bare hands.”
“But I didn’t. That’s my point. All the stories are exaggerated.”
“Well, whichever stories Kai heard, he knew who we were. Before we even came out of the tunnel, I could tell that he wanted to be a part of our crew. And I like the guy. He seems like a good person. Like he could be someone we could trust.”
“We can trust each other.”
“Aye, we can. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to trust more than just one person?”
Dolpheus gave a noncommittal grunt.
“We can see how it goes. In the meantime, I invited him to join us.”
Another grunt that was as expressive as any long
-winded sentence.
“Do you not like him?” I asked.
“I like him just fine,” he said, trudging ahead with heavy footsteps, as if they could express his feelings better than he could. “For a young whinny.”
“He hasn’t had an easy lot in life, born into servitude. For a young whinny, I think he’s turned out pretty well.”
“And you know this from the last several hours of his acquaintance?”
“It’s just a feeling I have.”
“We’ll know soon enough whether your feelings are right,” he said, even though he knew that our instincts about people were usually right. “We’ll see whether he gave up our position when we return.”
“Yes. We’ll just have to see. And we’ll also have to see whether Lila actually comes back or not, and if she does, whether she appears with the entire Royal Guard at her back.”
“Aye,” Dolpheus said gruffly. “We’ll have to see.”
“I trust Kai, whom I barely know, more than I trust Lila.”
“Me too. And that’s why I say it’s better to trust just one person instead of trusting several. Loyalty is rare. People turn on one another all the time, and you don’t always know who’s going to do the turning.”
There wasn’t much more to say after that. We trudged ahead, deep in our thoughts, me doing my best to leave my thoughts behind with each new step, having little luck at it. I hoped Dolpheus was right about our luck finally shifting, but just as with everything else, we’d have to wait and see.
We wouldn’t have to wait long. “Tan, I think we’re getting close. I think I can hear voices up ahead.”
It seemed about right. We’d walked for quite a while, long enough to have reached the entrance to the tunnel that opened off the prisons. “Careful now, then. The entrance to the tunnel is concealed behind a tapestry. You could walk right through it if you’re not careful. The opening of the tunnel leads straight out into the juncture between two hallways, one that leads to the prisons, the other that leads away from them, the one that we’ll need to take back to the guards’ quarters.”