by Ted Dekker
She pulled behind a large nanka tree thirty yards from the library’s front door, where two guards slouched against the wall. Strange how she felt no anger toward them since her drowning. She couldn’t say she felt any compassion for them, as some did, but she regarded her lack of fury mercy enough. The fact that she’d been complicit in condemning Justin only made her anger toward the deception that blinded them more acute.
She had not been surprised to realize that her anger was directed at the disease, not the Horde. She had no compassion for the disease. The difference between her and some of the others—William, for example—was that when she saw two diseased guards, she saw mostly the disease; William would have seen only the guards.
Mikil blinked away her thoughts. It was time for her to practice a little deception of her own. She had to assume that Johan and Jamous were in place.
She lowered her head and walked directly toward the wide path that led to the library. Twenty-five yards. Gravel materialized under her feet—surely they’d seen her by now. She took a deep breath, stood as tall as she gracefully could, lifted her chin as a princess might, and strode directly for the two guards.
The guard on the left suddenly stood and coughed. The other heard him, saw Mikil, and quickly straightened. They were speechless. Not too many visitors this time of night, is that it, you sacks of scales?
She stopped near the bottom of the steps. “Open the door,” she commanded quietly.
“Who are you?” the one on the right asked.
“Don’t be a fool. You can’t recognize Qurong’s daughter at night?”
He hesitated and glanced at his comrade. “Why are you wearing—”
“Come here!” Mikil jabbed her finger at the ground. “Get down here, both of you! How dare you question my choice of clothing? I want you to see my face up close so that you never again question who it is that commands you! Move!”
She wasn’t sure she sounded like a princess, but the guards descended the stairs cautiously.
“I intend to let this indiscretion go, but if you move like mud, I may change my mind.”
They hurried forward.
Two shadows flew from each corner of the building, and Mikil raised her voice to cover any sound they might make.
“Now the fact of the matter is that I’m not Qurong’s daughter, but know that I’m here on her behalf. She’s told me where to find the albino so that I can rescue him. She’s in love with our dear Thomas, you see.”
The guards stopped on the bottom step just as Johan and Jamous sailed onto the steps behind and clubbed them each at the base of their necks. They grunted and fell in tandem.
They dragged the guards from the stairs and lay them in the grass. “Any damage?” Mikil asked.
“They’ll survive.”
Thomas would object, but he would eventually see reason. And though these two might jeopardize the rescue, they would live anyway. That was a kind of nonviolence in itself. The bit about the princess’s love for Thomas was absurd—something to give them a laugh later. If Mikil was lucky, it might even land the dear princess in a spot of trouble.
“Let’s go.”
Johan and Jamous entered the library quietly with Mikil right behind. The door to the stairwell was precisely where Thomas had told her it would be.
“This one. I’ll call them up.” She waited for Jamous and Johan to stand in the shadows on either side of the door, then cracked it open. Torchlight glowed from below.
She nodded at Jamous, threw the door open, and took a step down. “Who’s awake down here? I need the help of two guards immediately!”
Her voice echoed back at her. There might have been a sound, but she wasn’t sure.
“Are you asleep? I don’t have all night! The Books have been found, and Woref demands your assistance immediately!”
Now the sound of clad feet slapped the flat stones below. She spun around just as two guards came into view, both wielding torches.
“Hurry, hurry!” She walked into the foyer as their boots clumped up the steps.
These two were taken by Jamous and Johan with even less incident than the ones outside. It had been too easy. Then again, the right intelligence was often the key to victory in any battle.
Mikil fumbled at one guard’s belt for keys, found them, snatched a torch from Jamous, and descended the stairs as quickly as her long robe would allow. A corridor carved from stone led to a door on the left.
“Thomas?”
“Here! Mikil? The door, quickly!”
She inserted the key and unlocked the door. It swung in and her torch illuminated Thomas, standing in a long black robe nearly identical to hers. He saw her face and froze. She had expected him to bound past her and take immediate charge. Instead he seemed oddly stunned by her.
“Relax. Contrary to my ghostly appearance, I’m not an apparition.”
“Mikil?”
“This isn’t what you expected? Don’t tell me, my beauty stuns you?” She smiled.
He seemed to shake himself free. He ran to her and grasped her arms. “Thank Elyon. The others?”
“I have Jamous and Johan. We haven’t gone for the others yet.”
Thomas sprang for the stairs. “Then we have to hurry!”
She had to warn him. “We had to use a little force, Thomas.”
He barged into the foyer and pulled up. Two bodies lay in a heap. He looked from them to Johan, then to Mikil who stepped around him.
“Just a bump, Thomas. If you want, we could feed them some fruit,” Mikil said.
Thomas ran to the door and glanced up at the sky. A faint glow was teasing the eastern horizon.
“No time.”
22
Thomas ran behind them with the dread knowledge that they would be too late. There was no way four albinos could go unnoticed once the city began to wake.
“Speed, not stealth,” he said, passing Mikil. “We don’t have time to slip in. We ride hard and we snatch them fast.”
“And let them hang eight instead of four today?” Johan said. “We have to think this through.”
“I’ve done nothing but think it through,” Thomas said. “There’s no other way in the time we have.”
“And you intend to do this without force?”
“We’ll do what we have to.”
They catapulted themselves over the fence and mounted the horses. Thomas rode in tandem with Johan, but they would need five more mounts if they hoped to outrun the Horde.
Thomas led them to the stables, where they collected the horses.
“Saddles?” Mikil whispered.
“Bridles only. We can ride bareback.”
It had taken them fifteen minutes, and the sky was gray. They were too late! Riding farther into the city now would be suicide.
And leaving was as good as condemning the others to death.
Thomas swung onto one of the horses and grunted with frustration. So close. The palace rose to their left. Chelise slept there. Something about this escape felt more like an execution to him. Nothing seemed right. They would either be caught and executed as Johan suggested, or they would escape only to meet another terrible fate.
“What is it?” Johan demanded.
“Nothing.”
“This isn’t ‘nothing’ on your face! What do you know that we don’t?”
“Nothing! I know that you might be right about being caught. I only need one with me. Mikil and Jamous, meet us at the waterfalls in thirty minutes.”
“I didn’t come to run,” Mikil said. “And I have the disguise.”
“You’re married.” He kicked his horse.
“The waterfalls,” Johan said. “Hurry.”
“Then take this. I don’t need it.”
Mikil stripped off the robe and tossed it to Johan.
Thomas and Johan rode with two extra horses each, a fast trot, directly for the lake now just half a mile ahead of them. Johan pulled the robe on as he rode.
“She’s right about one thin
g,” Johan said. “Anyone who sees our faces will know we are albinos.”
“Then our only hope is to hit them before they have a chance to think any albinos would be mad enough to crash through their city. Do you have a knife?”
“You’re planning on using it?”
Was he? “Planning, no. I have no plan.”
“That’s unlike you.”
They rode on, straight toward the dungeons now. Their horses’ hooves were muted by the soft, muddy earth. Wood smoke drifted through the morning air from a fire in one of the huts to their left. A rooster crowed. The castle still stood in silence, now behind them.
“Mikil tells me that you need me to dream with you,” Johan said quietly. “Something about a Carlos.”
He’d nearly forgotten.
“Is that a reason to live?”
“Maybe.”
Of course it was. But he didn’t have the patience to think through this dreaming at the moment. Here, surrounded by the Horde city, something was gnawing at his mind, making him uneasy, and he couldn’t understand what it was.
You don’t want to be freed, Thomas.
No, that wasn’t it. He would do anything in his power to be freed from these animals. Even if it meant hurting a few of them.
A surge of hatred swept through him, and he shivered. What kind of beast would threaten to kill what Elyon had died to save?
Where is your love for them, Thomas?
“I can’t pretend to know what’s happened to you, Thomas, but you’re not the same man I last saw.”
“No? Perhaps living here among your old friends has made me mad.”
Johan wouldn’t dignify his cut.
“Forgive me,” Thomas said. “I love you like a brother.”
“I may use my weapon?” Johan asked.
“Use your conscience.”
Johan nodded at a group of warriors stretching by what looked like a barracks directly ahead. “I doubt my conscience will help against them.”
Thomas hadn’t seen them. Several watched them curiously. Even with hoods pulled low, the Scabs would know the truth soon enough. Their faces, their eyes, their scent. They were albino, and there was no way to hide it.
“You have the fruit?”
“Two pieces.”
“When I go, ride hard.”
“That’s your plan?”
“That’s my plan.” One of the Scabs was suddenly walking toward the road as if to cut them off. “Ride, brother. Ride.”
He kicked his horse hard. “Hiyaa!”
The steed bolted. Both horses in tow snorted at the sudden yank on their bits. They galloped straight toward the startled Scab, who scurried out of the way.
Thomas and Johan were past the barracks and at full speed before the first voice cried out. “Thieves! Horse thieves!”
Better than albinos. Thomas forced his horse off the street onto the lakeshore and pointed it straight for the dungeons.
There were two guards on duty at the entrance. By their expressions Thomas guessed that neither had ever defended the establishment against a prison break. The guard on the left had his sword only halfway out of its scabbard when Thomas dropped from his horse and shoved it back in.
He swung his elbow into the man’s temple with enough force to drop him where he stood.
The second guard had time to withdraw his sword and draw it back before Thomas could take him out with a swift boot heel to his chin. Like old times, quick and brutal.
He snatched the keys from the first guard’s belt. “I need thirty seconds!”
“I’m not sure we have thirty seconds,” Johan said.
A group of unmounted warriors were lumbering up the path. They’d been caught on foot, but they realized now that stealing horses wasn’t the intent of the two riders who’d blown past them.
“Do what you have to,” Thomas said. Then he plunged down the steps, three at a time. There was still something wrong gnawing at his gut, but he felt new clarity. They should take a torch to the whole city.
He sprinted down the narrow corridor. “William!” He’d forgotten to grab one of the torches from the wall, and now he was paying for his haste. There were rumors that some of the Horde still kept some of their earliest prisoners alive somewhere in this dungeon, but Thomas wouldn’t have the time to look for them.
He called into the dark. “William! Which one?”
“Thomas?”
Farther down. He ran past a row of cells and slammed into the bars of the sixth one. William and Suzan stood, dazed. Cain and Stephen were pushing themselves up on either side.
“We have two dozen Scabs closing in,” he panted. He shoved the key into the lock and turned hard. The latch released with a loud clank.
“Are there others?”
“Probably.”
“Run! Horses are waiting.”
Thomas ran without a backward glance. They would help each other. He felt a surprising compulsion to engage the Scabs who bore down on Johan. A year ago, two of them could have taken on two dozen and at least held them at bay. He could taste the longing to tear into them like copper on his tongue. Blood lust.
Thomas took the stairs in long strides, lungs burning from his burst of activity. The voices of yelling Scabs reached him when he was only half-way up.
“Hold them!”
A voice cried out in pain. Johan?
Thomas tore from the dungeon into the light and slid to a stop.
The sight stalled his heart. Twenty sword-wielding Scabs had formed a semicircle around the entrance. Johan stood with his hood pulled back, bleeding badly from a deep wound on his right arm. The Horde was momentarily stunned by the sight of their old general, Martyn, staring them down.
The scene brought back images of a day thirteen months earlier. They had been gathered around Justin then, but in Thomas’s eyes this scene was hardly different. They had killing in mind.
Something snapped on his horizon. Red. He scooped up the fallen sword from the second guard he’d knocked out earlier and swung it in a circle over his head. “Back!” He threw back his hood. “You don’t recognize Thomas of Hunter? Back!”
The ferocity in his voice unnerved even him. He clung to the grip with trembling hands, desperate to tear into the Scabs. Johan was staring at him. The Horde was staring at him. He had a familiar power at hand, and he suddenly knew that he would use it.
Here and now, he would swing a blade in anger for the first time in thirteen months. What did it matter? They were all dead anyway.
The Scabs held their swords out cautiously. But they didn’t back up as he’d ordered.
William and the others spilled from the dungeon behind him.
“Are you deaf?” Thomas cried. “Take up the other sword, Johan.”
Johan didn’t move. “Thomas—”
“Pick up the sword!”
You’ve lost yourself, Thomas.
He rushed the Scabs, screaming. His blade flashed. Struck flesh. Sliced.
Then it was free and he was leaning into his second swing. The sword cut cleanly through one of their arms. Blood flooded the warrior’s sleeve.
The attack had been so quick, so forceful, that none of the rest had time to react. They were guards, not warriors. They knew Thomas only by the countless stories of his incalculable strength and bravery.
Thomas stood panting, sword ready to take off the first head that flinched. These animals who wallowed in their sickness deserved nothing less than death. These disease-ridden Shataiki had refused the love of Justin.
They were to blame for Chelise’s deception.
Thomas felt his chest tighten with a terrible anguish. He clenched his eyes and screamed, full-throated, at the sky. A wail joined him—the second man he’d cut was on his knees clutching his arm.
Thomas spun to Johan. “The fruit.”
Johan reached into his pocket and pulled out a fruit that resembled a peach. “Use this,” he said to the Scab, tossing the fruit.
Immediately the
Scabs stepped back in fear, leaving the wounded man with the fruit by his right knee.
Thomas dropped his sword and lunched forward. “For Elyon’s sake, it’s not sorcery, man!” He grabbed up the fruit and squeezed it so the juice ran between his fingers. “It’s his gift!”
He grabbed the man’s sleeve and yanked hard. The seam ripped at the shoulder and the long sleeve tore free, baring a scaly arm, severed below the elbow. The bone and the muscle were cut.
The Scab began to whimper in fear.
Thomas reached for the arm, but the man slapped him away.
His earlier rage welled up again. He slapped the man on the cheek. “Don’t be a fool!” He knew that he was doing this all wrong, that everything about this escape had gone very wrong. But he was committed now.
Thomas gripped the man’s arm with one hand and squeezed the fruit over his wound. Juice splashed into the cut.
Sizzled.
A thin tendril of smoke rose from the parted flesh. The healing was working.
Thomas stood and tossed the fruit at the first man he’d cut. “Use it!”
He turned his back on the Horde. The others were staring at him with something like shock or wonder; he wasn’t sure which. He marched to his horse and swung up. “Ride.”
He was sure the Horde would rush them, but they didn’t. They were staring in horror at the man he’d given the fruit to. His arm was now half healed and hissing still. William broke toward a horse. Suzan, Cain, and Stephen rolled onto three others.
“If you think Qurong’s power is something to fear or love, then remember what you’ve seen here today,” Thomas said. “This time I give you fruit to heal your wounds. If you pursue us, you may not be so fortunate.”
With that he whirled his horse around and galloped toward the forest, stunned, confused, sickened.
What had he done?
23
Nothing,” Qurong demanded.