by S E Meliers
Whilst Charity was relatively discrete about his identity, even when drunk, there was a Lordliness to his carriage and accent that betrayed him as being noble born at least. He did not notice when a ‘My Lord,’ slipped into conversation with a bar maid, but Cedar did. Combined with the fact that the Prophet’s temporary hair dye had worn off, Cedar felt it was only a matter of time before someone connected the mysterious golden Lord travelling westward with the missing Lord Charity, and sooner or later, that information would be exchanged for Shoethal coin, and they would be pursued by a foe far superiorly outfitted for the journey.
They were on a perilous race west; and Charity seemed oblivious.
Even more perilous, Cedar thought grimly as he watched the Lord from across the hall, was their current company. He had not liked the small village from the moment they had come across it. It was off the road, and he had passed it by in past travels simply unaware of its presence. Charity, however, had befriended Huno, the owner of a wagon, who had more or less shared the road with them for two days, and had, in his wagon, a barrel of ale with which he made generous. Huno claimed to be a native of the village, Ample, and on his way home having successfully traded Ample’s main produce, turnips, for other, exceptionally well wrapped, wares needed by the villagers. His wagon was rank with the scent of turnips, so Cedar was inclined to believe the story initially; however Huno was also very secretive about the wares he carried back to Ample, which made Cedar speculate as to the nature of the items.
The village of Ample also had an unsettling atmosphere. At first glance, it had the appearance of most villages, little single roomed cottages set approximately in a line framing a central road, and surrounded by fertile fields, however there was a slovenliness to the cottages that spoke of a lack of caring or pride, and the few women and children he had seen passing between the houses seemed exceptionally grubby, hollow cheeked, and wary. The children were also subdued in a way that just seemed unnatural to Cedar, after travelling with the Prophet’s caravan, ripe with children, for some time. There was no playing on the street or in the yards, no sound of childhood laughter or playful shrieks.
Then there was the menfolk, who were well armed for farmers, and had a look in their eyes that Cedar had seen many times in the worst of places, in the faces of men who had committed the most heinous of crimes. Their interaction with the women and children was not pleasant, involving raised fists and bruised faces. The women seemed cowed, dispirited and hopeless, and protective of their younglings.
Cedar had concluded, as the afternoon had faded into evening, that the village had been overcome by bandits, the original menfolk killed or chased off, leaving just the women and children at the mercy of the thugs. It had happened, he decided, fairly recently, a week or maybe a little more, as the women and children were hungry-eyed, but not yet starving. That would come, he knew from experience, once the village had nothing left to plunder and the bandits moved on, if they did not kill them first.
It was a very good place to die, and a very bad place to visit.
He suspected that Charity had betrayed his noble origins yet again, and that Huno had lured him back here in order to hold him to ransom. No doubt, the thug would get the surprise of his life if he tried to ransom Charity to Amori.
Charity, so far, had shrugged off Cedar’s hints and subtle warnings, and was resistant to Cedar’s encouragement to move on. Huno was free with his ale, and a good number of men had gathered in a central village hall to drink their way through several barrels. At the moment, Charity was being treated as an honoured guest, a familiar role to the displaced Lord, but Cedar knew it was only a matter of time before that changed.
Cedar calculated the likelihood of escaping Ample without having to fight their way out, and decided that the odds were not in his favour. He reminisced on the days when he had never ventured out without a sword at his hip, when he had been in a position where it was unremarkable for him to be so armed, and surreptitiously began to assess the options of arming himself.
Just as he had decided to leave the hall on the pretence of relieving himself in the hopes he’d be followed and would be able to relieve his guard of his weapon, the door to the hall opened and a woman entered. She was not, as the other women of the village were, filthy, cringing, and half starved. This young woman wore a skirt split for riding that showed a generous portion of thigh as she strode in, knee high boots, an embroidered shirt and a corset designed to make the most of a set of rather lovely breasts. Her chestnut hair was let loose and curled with wicked abandon around her face. She had a set of mischievous brown eyes and a mouth made for kissing. She was totally unexpected; and not just to him. The bandits of Ample seemed as taken aback by her presence. ‘Catch,’ she said with an impish grin and threw something with both hands that exploded into smoke so thick that Cedar was hard pressed to see his own nose.
The hall erupted into confusion, shouting and weapon fight, partially seen through drifts of aromatic haze. Cedar managed to take out one of the bandits, who stumbled into his sight through the smoke, and seize his sword, before the room suddenly fell silent. He crouched by a table. The smoke was settling into a fine silver powder on the floor, furniture, in his hair, and skin. He tasted it, hoping to identify its origins, but it simply tasted sweet.
As the smoke settled into dust, he found he could see the room clearly again, and it was a massacre. The bandits littered the floor in a gory display of anatomy. They had not just been killed, but savagely torn apart. The young woman, bloodied to her elbows, grinned at him through a mask of blood. There was flesh, red and jellied, between her teeth. ‘Hello,’ she said, pleasantly. ‘You are Cedar? You may call me Lovel. Calico sent me.’
‘Shit,’ he said, rather eloquently he thought, considering. ‘You have… meat… between your teeth.’
‘Oh, do I?’ She sucked at her teeth with her tongue unproductively, shrugged, and poured herself a tankard of ale. She swirled some round her mouth and spat it onto a body. ‘Better?’ she bared her teeth in a mock snarl.
‘Much,’ he replied weakly, though, in truth, it was not. He remembered Charity. ‘Damn, did you kill Charity?’ he looked around for the Lord, but could not identify any of the limbs tangled over and under the furniture.
‘No,’ she reached under a table and hauled the Lord out with surprising strength. ‘Calico said not to. I knocked him out instead. He seemed to take exception to me tearing the throats out of his drinking companions and tried to tackle me. Fancy that,” she shook her head with amused exasperation of his folly. “Shall we go?’ she hauled the Lord up and over her shoulder, a very odd sight as she was not a large girl.
‘Yes, I guess so,’ Cedar followed her out the door. ‘Excuse me if it is impertinent to ask, but, you are not… our kind, are you?’ There was a covered wagon parked outside the hall with two pretty bays waiting placidly for their owner’s return. In the shadows by the hall, the bandit’s guard was a pair of booted feet – torso and head lost in the darkness. He was glad to be spared what was surely another grisly sight. She slung Charity into the back of the wagon with apparent indifference for the Lord’s wellbeing. Cedar winced, hoping the Lord had not fallen onto anything hard or sharp.
‘You are observant, are you not,’ she replied with merry sarcasm. ‘But, no, I am not even a little bit,’ she grinned, ‘of your kind. And I prefer it that way. Now, hop on board, and let us be off.’ She swung up onto the wagon seat and took up the reins. ‘This place is just a touch too oppressing for my liking,’ she added, then cheered the horses into action.
Cedar watched the little village recede. For a moment, he wondered what would become of the women and children left behind, but he shrugged. Life was littered with the carcasses of the small and helpless, and he had learnt, long ago, that one man could not save them all. Or sometimes, even one or two. ‘So, what did Calico say?’ he said as Lovel guided them back onto the main road.
‘Well,’ Lovel frowned. ‘She said that I would have to
rescue you, that it was important that Charity survived, and that I should assist you, Cedar, in anything you require of me. As usual, with Calico, it was a little vague on the important details, such as where I would find you, but thankfully, I am quite talented enough to find that out for myself. Calico provided me with what to look for: a really big dark guy travelling with a guy with sun coloured hair. Surprising how many people match that description,’ she rolled her eyes, ‘but I found you, evidently.’
‘I am very grateful,’ Cedar said honestly. ‘We were in a bind.’
She grinned, bloody face pretty despite its gore. ‘Hey, I was hungry, so you really did me a favour.’
‘Just let me know well in advance if you get hungry enough to want to nibble of Charity or myself, please,’ Cedar requested with caution. She laughed, but did not confirm. He was glad he had kept the sword he had taken from the Ample bandits, and was sure he would be sleeping light for the remainder of the journey. Just in case she got the hankering for a midnight snack. ‘How do you know Calico?’ he asked, thinking to establish her loyalty to the Prophet at least.
She frowned. ‘We have known of each other for many, many years, the Whitehair and I. Calico owe me,’ she said grimly. ‘And I intend to see that debt paid.’
Not, Cedar noted with resignation, the answer he was hoping for.
Patience
‘Ladies first,’ Gallant’s expression was mocking as her company, two guards, the Hallow, and the Priest, reached the entrance to the dungeons.
She fantasised, for a moment, about smacking that insolence from his face. But she was learning quickly to keep her true feelings hidden. ‘Thank you,’ she said politely instead, stepping past him and over the threshold. The stairs were well lit, though steep. She kept a hand on the stone wall, and could feel the stone get colder as she descended. This was her third time on this stair – once down on the day the Monads had invaded Amori, once up a day later when she had negotiated the terms of release with Gallant, and now down again. She had a fleeting moment of remembered panic, but shoved it back savagely.
The Priest’s robes whispered behind her like a bad omen; the sound almost obliterated by with the heavy tread, clank of armour, and groans of leather of the guards. The Hallow glided silently, a shadow slipping down the stairs in their wake. She wondered if the Hallow was the same one who had seen her before when she had been a prisoner here; did not know if she would be glad of her company or not.
The stairs levelled out into a hallway. There was no natural light, only the torches burning on the wall braces. The air was not, however, heavy with smoke, there being air vents cut through the exterior wall. The interior wall was lined with heavy wooden doors. Behind one of those doors she had been held prisoner; she did not know which one having been too frightened and preoccupied both in and out of it.
‘To the end of the hall, my Lady, the next set of stairs,’ Gallant instructed. ‘This floor contains the nicer cells. We are going to the less… felicitous accommodations.’ She shuddered to think of what the next level would contain if the miserable, cold, damp cell she had occupied was ‘nicer’.
The next stair was not straight down, as the first had been, but rather curved in on itself in a spiral. If they had not already descended below ground, she may have thought them in a turret. She speculated that the tight spiral was practical when one was excavating below ground – straight flights of stairs to a great depth would require more space and therefore more digging. It did however make her feel claustrophobic and very aware of the pressure of the earth against brickwork around her. She hoped the Amori ancestors had constructed the walls holding up, and back, the earth well, and focussed on not succumbing to the fear that she would be buried alive.
‘There is something unnatural to go so deep beneath the ground, do you not agree? It never quite sits right with me,’ Gallant’s voice close to her ear startled her. ‘Careful my lady,’ he held her elbow to steady her. ‘A fall down these stairs could be rather nasty.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, frostily polite, and pulled her elbow from his grasp to continue her descent. His touch made her stomach clench in revulsion.
‘Hmmm,’ she could not see his face but his tone was of a smirk, as if he sensed her distaste and it amused him. ‘Fate is capricious is it not, my Lady? A short time ago, you may have been making this journey as a prisoner and not a guest. But then, sometimes we make our own fate, do we not? And women always have something to trade. Speaking of which, you have a lovely glow to you,’ Gallant followed too closely on her heels, invading her personal space and crowding her on the narrow stair. ‘Is it possible that you are increasing already? I do not doubt the Prince is highly virile.’
She had the luxury of frowning, knowing that he could not see the expression on her face. The man delighted in being vile. ‘No, my Lord. Indeed, the opposite applies. I will be unable to attend the Prince for a few days,’ she muttered, hating the crudeness of having to report her bodily functions to a third party.
‘One could almost be suspicious that a Lady in your position would feign her inconvenience in order to avoid a duty she may find onerous,’ Gallant speculated blandly.
She found she had clenched her teeth and released the tension from her jaw with a deliberate effort. ‘Surely if I were to feign inconvenience, my Lord, I would do so before spending an evening with the Prince, rather than after having spent considerable time in the Prince’s bed. Do you wish the evidence of my inconvenience paraded daily to your office by my maids in order to verify that I speak true?’ she suggested sweetly.
‘No, my Lady, I do not require evidence of your inconvenience. I am merely disappointed that the Prince’s seed has failed to take thus far.’
‘These things take time, my Lord,’ she replied, surprised at his assumption that she would conceive so swiftly, or know it. He was not, she decided as her affront wore off and she considered his probing questions, as oblivious to the workings of such things as his conversation indicated; rather sought to provoke her by feigning ignorance. ‘There were a good six months between my first born and Charm, and years between Charm and Joy.’
‘Ah, I forget that you lost a child before your son,’ he commented. ‘An experience you and the Prince share.’
She decided not to pursue that, not sure she cared to know. ‘Yes, much to my sorrow, I lost a daughter in childbirth prior to Charm,’ she said quietly. ‘I have reached the landing.’ At least his conversation had distracted her from the great descent and the mass pushing in at her.
‘Wonderful,’ he stepped onto the landing beside her. It was a small, claustrophobic space with just enough room for four of them to stand. The Hallow lingered indolently in the stairwell. ‘Knock, knock,’ he said jovially as he lifted the knocker and rapped it smartly. ‘We are expected.’ He pulled two pomanders from his belt and offered one to her. ‘It can get rather… pungent,’ he explained.
The grill on the door opened and a face peered out at them, before closing. There was the sound of a bar being lifted and a key fitted before the door swung open inwards. A large man reeking of body odour and rotting teeth, wearing a blood smeared leather butchers apron bowed before them. ‘My Lord Priest,’ he said with a voice straight from the poorest gutters of Amori.
‘Executioner Gat, may I introduce the Lady Patience? The Lady will be taking a tour of your premises today,’ Gallant announced pleasantly. ‘My Lady,’ he gestured her inside and gestured to raise the pomander to her nose. She stepped past him without doing so, the strong scent of cloves nearly as unpleasant as that of Gat.
Beyond the doorway was a dimly lit warren. Corridors seem to meander off in all directions. Shadowy alcoves off the corridors were enclosed by metal bars, behind which pale faces and huddled bodies could be seen. The air was redolent of suffering and fear: smoke; faeces; the ammonia of aged urine; unwashed bodies; the sharp metallic tang of blood; and the heavy, meaty scent of gangrene. For a moment, she recoiled. ‘The pomander, my Lady,’ Galla
nt raised her hand holding the pungent ball to her face. She breathed in the clove scent. ‘And breathe through your mouth – it reduces the impact somewhat,’ he added.
‘By the Monad,’ she held her hand over her nose and mouth. Somewhere in the distance, someone screamed shrilly, over and over and over again. The hair on her arms and neck stood upright. Elsewhere, someone moaned, and a child cried, the soft, hopeless tears of one who had given up on receiving comfort for their woes. She felt close to tears herself.
‘Indeed,’ Gallant propelled her forward in the wake of the plodding Gat. ‘It is the Monad’s work we are about to see. Those unfortunates who cannot see that they endanger their souls by worshipping false idols, and refuse to convert to the Monad, leaving us no choice but to torture the demons from their flesh.’
She swallowed back bile. ‘Indeed,’ she repeated numbly. In the shadows of the cells, she could see small children, filthy, hollow cheeked, eyes shadowed, some with bandaged limbs, others just lying limply on the ground, doe eyes following their movements with a sort of hopeless dread that broke her heart and sickened her soul. She wondered at the parents who valued the Goddess above their children’s wellbeing… or were they right in valuing their children’s souls over their flesh? For a moment she second guessed her own choices, before shaking her head: no, there was nothing worth a child’s suffering; and no sacrifice too great to spare her children this misery. ‘But, how can a child make the right choice if their parent’s model the incorrect one?’ she asked the Priest desperate to improve their plight. ‘Surely rather than punishing the flesh of a child because of a parent’s wrong-doing, it would be better to educate the child on the ways of the Monad.’