by C. K. Rieke
“You fools. You really thought you could escape? The king has decreed that you both are to die, and we do not fail our king. Right, boys?” The others huffed loud grunts. The knight gave a smug look at Zaan. “But . . . he did not mention . . . how you are to die,” he said. “One of you is going back to the castle, but which one?”
Zaan noticed that there were many torches all around him. At least a dozen. He looked back at Gogenanth, who looked back at Zaan, his eyes bulging as he suffocated. “Please, let him go. We haven’t done anything,” Zaan said.
“That’s not what I heard. What do you think, boys? What are we going to do with them?” the silver knight asked of the others. He pulled tighter on the whip, raising Gogenanth inches higher from the ground.
Not one responded.
“No one has any ideas? Well, I have one. A profitable one at that,” the silver knight exclaimed, looking at Zaan. He then nodded his head.
Zaan heard a dull thud, felt a sharp pain to the right side of his head, and fell to the leaves, losing consciousness.
Part III
The Rescuers
CHAPTER TWENTY
ZAAN awoke, but it was difficult to open his eyes. They were heavy, and his nostrils burned. A dark blur slowly shifted to recognizable shapes. The first image he awoke to was a faded rock ceiling.
He sat up and looked around, trying to gather his bearings. He was in a cave of sorts, with a barred iron door. The door was locked, and he was trapped inside. He shook the door, which was sturdy.
“Hello, anyone, hello,” he called out.
No one came. He could not tell what time of day it was, as there was not sunlight. He was hungry. Reaching down to his neckline, he felt for where his father’s compass usually lay, but it was gone, taken from him. For hours he lay in a bed, covered in blood and sweat, thinking of what had happened during the previous days. He was scared and worried about where he was, and who had the key to the door.
He heard footsteps, and a woman came to the gate. Zaan sat at the edge of the bed. She reached under the door and laid a bowl of rotten bread and a cup of murky water on the floor.
“Hey, where am I?” Zaan asked the woman.
She looked at him. Her skin was pitch black and her hair was short and greasy. Her eyes were pale green. She did not respond. She put her head down and started walking away.
“Hey! Where am I? What’s going on? Talk to me!” Zaan yelled as the footsteps disappeared. “Somebody talk to me!” he yelled in the dark.
Hours passed. Zaan took turns lying on the uncomfortable bed and pacing back in forth. His head still hurt, and it carried a large lump now. He went through fits of anger and rage, pulling at the door and trying to break it. What will I do if the door breaks, though? Where will I go? He didn’t even know where he was. He also went into a state of great fear. He cried in the corner of the room. The thoughts of his family in Fur-lol or Gar in Auracity made him immensely sad. He grew tired of crying and finally was able to fall asleep.
Footsteps sounded again—this time two sets. A stocky bald man slipped a key in the lock and opened the door. He pulled out a short sword and pointed it at Zaan. Another man stood behind the bald man, seemingly uninterested.
“Down,” the bald man said.
Zaan slowly knelt. “Where am I? Can I talk to someone?”
The bald man put the sword to his side, walked toward Zaan, and kicked him in the face. Zaan fell to his back. His nose bled and he screamed in pain. The bald man kicked him repeatedly in his sides and back. Zaan screamed for help, but no one came. The pain was excruciating, and he was terrified and helpless. The blows intensified as they hit the same areas over and over, for what felt like an eternity.
The man stopped when he must have gotten tired. Tears and blood ran down Zaan’s face. He was curled into a ball in the corner of his prison cell, trying to catch his breath.
“Get up. Or do you want more?” the man said.
Zaan mustered all of his strength and made it to his feet. He was at the brink of consciousness and terrified of being hit anymore. The bald man held his sword toward him while the other tied Zaan’s hands in front. He pulled at Zaan’s restraints and led him out of the cell. Zaan could hardly see—his eyes were cloudy with tears and stung from sweat. It was hard to breathe; the air was thick and heavy.
The men led Zaan out of the cell, and they walked through what seemed to be a maze of caverns. Torches hung on the walls about every three yards. Walking was difficult, because the rocky floor was uneven and hard to see. The men pulled at Zaan when he fell behind their pace. The cavern twisted and turned. He heard a slight clicking sound ahead of them—metal hitting rock. It got louder as they approached.
Clack clack, clack clack. The sound was getting louder and harder. It finally came to Zaan where he was. They turned a corner to a large opening with dozens of people, all of them covered in soot, with pickaxes, hitting the walls of the cavern. He was in a mine. He was in the one place the traveler on the road had told him not to go.
The bald man untied Zaan’s hands, bent down, picked up a pickax, and handed it to Zaan.
“You run, we catch you. You steal, you lose your hands,” the bald man said, inches from Zaan’s face. The man’s breath was like a stagnant sewer.
Sharp splinters covered the pickax’s handle, but he held it firmly, his first instinct to put it in the bald man’s head. Rationality and fear gripped him, though: Even if he did get a swing at the bald man, the other was there right beside him, and both were armed with real weapons made for killing, not a rusty pickax that made Zaan’s hands bleed just by touching it.
The bald man pushed him toward the other workers with his foot.
Zaan took the pickax up over his head and hit the rock wall. He didn’t even know what he was looking for, but he mustered as much strength as he could and kept hitting it. His sides and head burned from the beating earlier. He looked around, and not one person looked at him in return. No one spoke; they only hit the walls with their own pickaxes.
The air in the chamber was thick with black dust, and it burned Zaan’s nose and eyes. He took his shirt up to cover his mouth and nose and hit the wall, over and over. His hands bled, and he had no idea how long it would go on. Surely they would get a break soon. Surely they would be given water. His thirst was unbearable, yet he was too afraid to ask anything of the monstrous men who watched the entrance. They laughed and told pointless stories to each other. Every now and then, they would whip in someone’s direction if they thought they weren’t working hard enough. They even whipped one woman along the arm once. She cried out in pain, but then started hitting the wall twice as fast.
Exhaustion and thirst weighed heavily on him. He could barely lift the pickax up over his head when a third man entered the cavern, said something to one of the guards, and left.
The bald man exclaimed, “Okay, maggots.”
All of the clacking ended suddenly. Zaan was relieved. He thought he was about to pass out at any moment, and he was seeing double. The people being forced to mine placed their pickaxes on the walls by the entrance and walked in single file, following one of the guards. Zaan stumbled behind.
They turned corners, and every now and then a torch would appear to light another tunnel. They did not need to walk far until they approached a black gate. The guard in front shook some keys and opened the door. The miners entered into the cell, Zaan last in line and last to be ushered into the room before the door closed behind him and was locked. The guards lit one torch on the side of the room and left. Most of the prisoners sat at the walls of the cell and hung their heads. There were slight whimpers and sobs from them.
The room they were in smelled of urine and feces. Zaan himself squatted in the corner and relieved himself. Not one person spoke. Zaan approached the oldest man in the group.
“Hey, do you know where we are?” Zaan asked.
The man did not answer, and it didn’t seem that he would
if further pressed.
Zaan went up to the woman hit with the whip earlier.
“Can you talk?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she replied, turning her head away from him.
“Hey, look at me, please,” Zaan asked her. She slowly looked toward him and into his eyes. He looked back into hers.
It was the same woman with the pale green eyes that had laid the bread and water out for him before. He now noticed that her skin was not black, but covered in soot.
“Does anyone know where we are?” he asked her.
“Hell. If there is a hell, this is it,” she responded. Her dry lips smacked together as she said this.
“How long have you been here?” Zaan asked.
“Forever, it feels. Maybe around a year, or two?” Her eyes welled up as she looked up at the ceiling. “Listen, the sooner you realize this, the better off it will be for you: We are going to die here.” She gave a deep sigh. “I used to dream of someone coming to save me, or of escaping.” She looked at the locked gate. “If you scream and holler, you get beat bad.”
Zaan looked blankly at her. He didn’t want to believe that. He wanted to believe that someone would be there to rescue him, and quickly.
“One of us goes every couple of weeks. They take you away and dump your body, or we slowly die down here. Be careful of the red-haired guard; he’s the worst,” she said, and turned away again. She scooted her back up against the back wall of the cell and let her greasy hair fall in front of her face.
The light of a torch came creeping around the corner. A man carried a bucket of water in one arm and another bucket of something else in the other. The bald guard followed him.
They opened the gate, walked into the middle of the room, and laid down the bucket of water and the other bucket. They turned and locked the gate, a red braid fell between the shoulder blades of the guard who’d carried the buckets. He must be the bad one.
Once the guards disappeared around the corner and the light was gone, everyone rushed to the bucket of water and drank with their hands. As Zaan watched them literally crawling over each other, they looked like animals. He tried to squeeze in between the others to get at the bucket, but by the time he made it he got only two handfuls of dirty water.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, staring at the bottom of the empty water bucket in disbelief. “They’re going to bring more, right?” He looked around and received no response. He then realized the truth; no more was coming. “How can they expect us to work like that and not give us fucking water!”
His blood boiled, and he went over to the gate. He was about to shake it and scream and tear it off the hinges when a gentle, callused hand touched his arm.
“Don’t,” she whispered to him.
He realized then that he would probably be beaten again if he reacted like this. He tried to calm his breathing and went to the other bucket. It was half-filled with food barely fit for swine. People took turns picking through the half-rotten vegetables and grains. It was hard to see in the torchlight what they were eating, and it might be better not to know. Tears welled up in Zaan’s eyes.
He didn’t sleep well that night. He was thoroughly exhausted and in need of sleep, but every time someone urinated in the corner of the room, or he caught himself shivering, he would wake back up. He was frightened and alone. If he hadn’t gotten caught, Gogenanth and he would be in the mountains by a warm fire, probably eating warm meat.
“I don’t want to die here,” he whispered to himself. “Not like this. Not like this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“WE’VE got to rescue him!” Gar said, “We’ve got to go after him.”
“Gar, we don’t know where he is, and I’m sorry to say this, but he’s probably gone,” Gildur replied.
Gar started to cry. “No! He’s not dead! They wouldn’t!” Gar’s fists were clenched, and his face turned bright red.
Tilda put her hand on Gar’s back. “I’m sorry, Gar. I truly am. I know that he was your friend, but we must focus on the matter at hand. Gogenanth is to be executed at noon tomorrow. We have to save him, but we need help.” Her face was illuminated in the blue torchlight.
“We must free him from his cell. A midnight jailbreak is more feasible than a daylight rescue,” a woman said in the soft blue lights. Her eyes glowed the color of the clear afternoon sky. She was lean and had excellent posture and long wrinkles along her face.
“Yes, Elindrill, you are right, but Gildur is too known and Gar is too new to assist in the break,” Tilda said. “I’ll get him, but I’ll need help. Elindrill, can you call for help from one of your kin?”
“I want to help. I can help,” Gar said.
“Yes, you could, lad, but you’re not trained. You’d be more burdensome than helpful,” Gildur responded.
“I’ll call for help from my kin. One will come; I’m sure of it,” Elindrill said.
“We’ll free Gogenanth tonight. Then we’ll focus on Zaan,” Tilda said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
TILDA suited up for the jailbreak, dressed in dark leather leggings and a light breastplate under a black leather jacket. She wiped black ash on her face and hands. She carried a hardened steel short sword and a thin, sharp dagger.
Accompanying her would be Astor Delasius, who had arrived in Auracity one hour prior. He had come at the beckoning of Elindrill, his aunt. Astor was less than six feet, was thirty-two years of age, and had slicked-back blond hair, a lengthy goatee, and a lean face. His skin was the color of mahogany, like Elindrill’s, and he had ivory earrings in both ears. Tonight he wore all black and had two heavy short swords. He covered his face in a dark, canvas mask.
“Ready?” Tilda asked.
“Ready,” Astor responded confidently.
They left the security of the blue flame circle and went off in the direction of Fordenreign Castle. They hid in the cover of the alleyways, where they had the advantage of darkness. Heavy clouds hung low and hid the light of the moon. Tilda was at the lead, Astor at the rear, as he did not know Auracity as she did. Stealth was key to the rescue of Gogenanth.
They did not know exactly where he was held in the prison. However, they did know that all prisoners sentenced to death were held in a certain cell block in the east corner of the dungeon building. This was done intentionally so they could see the gallows from their windows. All of these cells had windows.
They crept in and out of the alleys, dodging the streetlights and patrolling soldiers. It began to rain, and then they heard the crack of thunder. As they approached the walls to the dungeon building, the ash began to run from Tilda’s face. The rain came down on them as they attached the spikes to their boots. Thunder crashed loudly as lightning lit up the sky.
“This storm may be good for us this night,” he said.
“Yeah, as long as it stays like this and doesn’t get much worse.”
“What now?” Astor asked.
“We’ll go from north to south along the wall.”
They stuck the spikes into the stone along the wall, climbing upward slowly and checking their footing before advancing. They stopped as, below them, two guards ran by and went into the door leading into the building. They continued climbing. The windows they were heading for were on the third floor. They reached them, and Tilda slowly peered over the first window on the north side of the east wall, seeing the cell door was open and a guard sat at the entrance facing the hallway.
She took her head down quickly and shook it sideways to Astor. Then she climbed to the left and peered into the second window. A man lay in bed, but he was not nearly the size of Gogenanth. She drew her head back and checked the next window to find another empty room; she was beginning to worry that Gogenanth was held elsewhere. She checked the following window, and it was empty as well. There were only two windows remaining. She shimmied over to the next window, high above the ground.
She looked into the cell and saw a man sit
ting on the bunk on the side wall of the room. He was looking out of the window at the rain, and his eyes met hers as soon as she peeked up over the stone. Gogenanth’s smile was impossible to hide, but he knew better than to overreact. He slowly stood, stretched his large arms up into the air, then held out two fingers on one hand for her to see, indicating to Tilda that there were two guards at the entrance of his cell. She nodded to Gogenanth, then looked down to Astor and held up two fingers.
She took a piece of copper colored metal out of a pouch and held it against the top of one of the bars in the window. She whispered a chant, and it began to glow dull blue, then bright white. The bar slowly melted away until it was nothing more than a thick pool of cold steel. She did this to the remaining two bars. Stealthily as a cat, she entered the room, squeezing through the window. Neither Gogenanth nor Astor would fit through the window, so this would not be the escape route. Astor put one of his two swords through the window, and Tilda handed it to Gogenanth.
She whispered into his ear, “We’ll have to deal with the guards. Do you know the way out?” He shook his head no.
“Well, we’ll have to improvise.” She went to the bar-less windowsill and whispered to Astor, “We’re going to head toward the east door.” He nodded back to her. The rain came down in hard droplets on his head.
Tilda crept along the floor and placed a small piece of the copper metal into the backside of the lock on the door. She didn’t make a sound and was not noticed by the guards, one of whom was even asleep, she noticed. She crept back and uttered the same chant as before, and the metal glowed again.
The color attracted the attention of the guard to the left. “Hey! What the . . . ?” he said.
Tilda pulled the door open quickly, and Gogenanth rushed out. Before the guard could react, Gogenanth put a strong fist into his stomach. It knocked the guard down to the ground in agony. The guard who was sleeping awoke, raised his sword, and was met with Tilda’s knee in his groin. A solid thump with the hilt of her sword had him asleep again. She kicked the man Gogenanth had hit in the face, and he slept as well.