Beneath the Keep

by Erika Johansen

  Every inch of the room seemed bathed in light. Fire was everywhere, torches and candles and chandeliers suspended from the ceiling. But Carroll barely marked them; he was too busy scanning the enormous crowd of backs. There were at least two hundred people here, mostly men, and Brenna had disappeared neatly into the throng.

  Feeling more than ever that he had made a mistake, Carroll nevertheless pushed his way into the crowd. It was easier than he had expected; the smells of whiskey and ale permeated the place, and most of the men he shoved past barely had their own balance. In a short time, Carroll had made his way near the front. Some sort of fight was going on; Carroll could just glimpse the flickering, heaving outlines of two figures. Boxing, most likely; Dyer and Fell liked to gamble on their off days, and Carroll had heard them talk about the boxing in the Gut. Though they were both younger than Carroll, neither Dyer nor Fell had grown up in the Keep, and he liked to hear them talk about the wider world.

  I should have listened better. I should have asked some questions.

  Now Carroll heard a sound he recognized: the snap of a breaking bone. It echoed even over the din of the crowd, and the man behind Carroll roared his approval.

  “Bring all the ringers you want from the country, Miller! He’ll crush them all!”

  “Put him away!”

  A bone broken, Carroll thought. The round should stop now.

  But it didn’t. It kept going, and a few seconds later there was another high snap, followed by a scream. Dread fell over Carroll, seeming to squeeze his heart. What sort of fight was this?

  You don’t want to know. Walk away.

  But he could not. He needed to see. As though someone else guided his steps, he ducked and angled through the crowd. Carroll was agile, and his slim build allowed him to quickly push his way through to the front.

  What he saw would be with him until the end of his days.

  The ring was not large, only some twenty feet square. The floor was stained with blood, some of it fresh. On one side lay a man, his arm twisted at a grotesque angle, shrieking. His left leg had nearly been severed; it hung by only a few strips of sinew, and blood jetted from the ravaged flesh. While Carroll watched, the injured man collapsed into unconsciousness, and only then did Carroll turn to look at his opponent: a young man, even younger than Carroll perhaps, his eyes deep and dark, trained on his fallen antagonist in the manner of a hunting dog. The boy was tall, much taller than Carroll, and his arms and hands were covered with their own myriad of wounds. But these wounds were well scarred, and a distant part of Carroll’s mind noted that many of them were shiny and stretched, as childhood wounds when the limbs grew and lengthened.

  “Finish him, boy! Don’t toy with him!”

  It was the same man who had spoken before, his voice hoarse with drink, and suddenly they were all shouting, demanding finality, demanding death. Gradually all of the voices merged and blended into a single chant, and this, too, Carroll would never forget: the sound of the mob, unsatisfied and hungry.

  “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  What more do they want? Carroll wondered wildly. That poor bastard will bleed to death inside of a minute. What more must he do?

  But the boy seemed to know, for as Carroll watched, he lunged forward and kicked the bleeding, unconscious man in the face, knocking him backward. In a series of movements almost too fast for even Carroll’s quick eyes to follow, the boy had straddled the man, grabbed his neck, and twisted it in a single expert movement. The corpse collapsed to the ground. The crowd howled its approval, and Carroll, who had seen wounded men before—even a dead man once, when a drunken Keep servant had stumbled and fallen to his death off the parapet—felt his gorge rise. He had had nightmares about the Keep servant’s dead body, his arms and legs lying bonelessly in a pool of blood on the drawbridge. But the violence of that death was eclipsed by what he saw here. The crowd parted, and Carroll suddenly glimpsed the albino, across the fighting ring, near the back of the crowd: just a flash of white grin beneath the hood. Then she was gone, darting into the black tunnel at the far end of the room.

  Carroll pushed past several men, who shoved him backward, cursing blearily. Spit landed on his face. He kept going until he found himself in the tunnel the witch had taken, his running footfalls echoing around him. He passed by a long wall that had been painted with Blue Horizon graffiti—THE BETTER WORLD, the letters blared, some five feet high, and Carroll thought wildly that the rebels, well-meaning though they were, were wasting their time down here—but then the light disappeared and so did the letters, fading into darkness behind him. He thought he might be gaining on the seer, but after rounding several turns, Carroll was forced to dive against the wall, crouching on all fours, and let it all come up: eggs and toast, the breakfast he had eaten this morning, bathed in the warm, safe light of the Keep.

  I will tell the Queen, he thought wildly as his guts heaved. I will tell her, and she will make it stop.

  But here again he found himself uncertain. Queen Arla had plenty of courage, yes. She frightened Carroll, and she frightened others too; he saw it when petitioners came to court. She was a tough woman, not shy of the fight. But would she ever come down here and fight for these people? For the child pickpocket in the alley? For the man in the ring? Carroll didn’t think so. Only Elyssa would do that. Only Elyssa had moral courage.

  Finally, after a span of time that seemed endless, the agonized clenching of his guts eased, and he was able to totter a few feet farther down the tunnel, away from his own sickness, and collapse against the wall, breathing deeply. Acid welled in his throat; Carroll cleared it and spat, and only then did he realize where he was: alone in the dark.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, he was forced to admit that he was lost. He had thought it would be a simple matter to backtrack to the well-lit room—though that was no reprisal he was looking forward to, for certain—but he had clearly run farther down the tunnel than he thought. There were several splits, and he must have chosen wrong. Every staircase he encountered went down. Even this tunnel led steadily downward, and once Carroll realized how lost he truly was, he halted and stood panting in the dark.

  Every Queen’s Guard, from the Captain down to Kibb, carried a simple kit of survival gear, compact enough to tuck inside a belt. Carroll opened his and found the flint and a small vial of oil, carefully wrapped in a piece of cloth. The cloth would be enough to light a torch, but it wouldn’t burn for long, and after a moment’s thought Carroll pulled off his shirt. The floor was littered with something he took for sticks; only when he had grabbed one, wrapped it with cloth, and lit it did Carroll realize that he was holding a long, splintered human bone. After a brief shiver, he did not examine his makeshift torch again.

  These tunnels were not the clean affair he had first encountered at the bottom of the staircase. The walls dripped endlessly, their stones stained nearly black with centuries of mold. There were no torches in holders; indeed, there were no holders at all. Someone clearly used this tunnel regularly, for boot prints tracked through the muck, but whoever they were, they must bring their own light. Beyond the small circle of illumination provided by his torch, Carroll sensed limitless miles of tunneled darkness, the vast bulk of the earth weighing down on his shoulders. Claustrophobia wrapped him like a moist blanket.

  Don’t panic, he told himself. You’re a Queen’s Guard of the Tearling.

  But these words carried little weight. Carroll had not proven himself, like Mhurn or Coryn, Almont farm boys who had come from nothing and won their places on brains and swordcraft. Carroll had never drawn his sword outside the practice floor, had never even been in a fistfight. Yes, he was a Queen’s Guard, but in this moment, he felt that he would have traded his grey cloak in an instant, no bargaining, in return for a staircase that led straight up to daylight. Even the steady drip of water, a sound that Carroll enjoyed on rainy nights in his room, now began to seem op
pressive, as though it were the voice of the darkness speaking steadily in his ear.

  He began walking upward again—if for no other reason than that up was surely better than down—moving as quietly as he could, trying not to think of the seer or of the fight he had seen. Getting out of here, that was the problem at hand, and Carroll hurried faster up the tunnel, keeping an eye on his torch, which was beginning to burn out. Well, if need be, he could light his trousers as well.

  But there was no need. He had backtracked perhaps half a mile when he heard men’s voices, the scuffling of footsteps ahead of him.

  “Hello?” Carroll called.

  The footsteps stopped, and so did the voices. Now Carroll could see several pricks of torchlight in the distance. He hurried forward, continuing to cry out joyfully, but when he was perhaps fifty meters away, something made him stop.

  There were four of them, he could see now, though they were only dim shadows in cloaks and hoods. Two were tall, two short, and each held a torch. But they did not come forward, and they said nothing. Carroll had the impression that they were studying him.

  “Hello?” he asked again, hesitant now. Belatedly, perhaps, he had remembered where he was, what he had seen of this place. Carroll had always believed, deeply and fundamentally, that the world was full of men of goodwill. He believed it still. But he did not think he would find many of them down here.

  The shortest of the men suddenly began to howl with laughter, nearly doubling over. His hood fell back, and Carroll saw that he was a round, ruddy man, with several days’ worth of stubble on his jaw.

  “Ask and you shall receive, Ellens!” he guffawed. The slur of consonants told Carroll that the man was very drunk. “Not even your birthday!”

  “Great God, you’re right!” the tall man on the left—Ellens, presumably—boomed back. He too was drunk, though not quite so sloppy as his friend. “A good night at the tables, and then God sends me a pigeon as well!”

  Pigeon. Carroll took an involuntary step backward. He had never heard that word applied to anything but birds, but there was no mistaking the threat in the men’s tones. Pigeons were for plucking. They would rob him, perhaps take his sword.

  “I am a Queen’s Guard of the Tearling,” Carroll announced clearly. “Let me pass.”

  All four of them collapsed in laughter, holding each other’s shoulders for balance. Four drunks at the end of a long night were no danger to anyone . . . but Carroll’s nerve endings said differently. There was an undercurrent here that he did not understand, and he felt anew his own lack of preparedness for this mission, how little he knew of this world. Realizing that he was half naked, dressed only in trousers, Carroll drew the sword from the scabbard at his back.

  “Stand by and let me pass.”

  Three of them continued to chortle, but the tallest, who had not spoken yet, straightened up, staring at the sword.

  “Where did a little cagey bird like you get a piece like that?”

  Carroll hesitated. He had heard the man’s voice before, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember where. At court? It seemed unlikely. He knew all of the Queen’s courtiers, even their voices.

  “I am a Queen’s Guard of the Tearling,” Carroll repeated steadily, holding the sword in front of him as though it were a cross. “Let me pass, or the wrath of the Guard will find you.”

  The tall figure drew his hood down over his brow, and Carroll, who had been a perceptive boy all his life, suddenly understood that here was a highborn, a man with something to lose. Oh, Carroll knew that nobles went down into the Creche, just as he knew that they abused their tenants and withheld food from the starving. But knowledge was easier to ignore in the Keep.

  “You take this seriously, lad?” Ellens demanded. But he was not speaking to Carroll.

  “Not sure,” replied the hooded man. “But that’s good steel the boy is carrying. Where would a pigeon get such a thing?”

  “Stop calling me that!” Carroll snapped, hating how childish his own voice sounded.

  “Fuck it,” one of the short men said. “Let’s just rush him. He’s too small to use that sword.”

  But the hooded man grabbed two of them as they started forward. “I can’t afford to be identified.”

  “By who?” the shortest demanded. “Your wife?”

  The hooded man ignored him. “What’s your name, boy?”

  Carroll hesitated, but there seemed no value in concealment. Perhaps the man would know him, know that he was telling the truth.

  “I’m Carroll, of Princess Elyssa’s Guard.”

  The hooded noble sat back on his heels, nodding, but the mutinous muttering from the other three had intensified, and Carroll understood that if the hooded man was the leader, it was a nominal business only. Rogue dogs sometimes formed packs, but that didn’t stop them from eating each other when the time came. The gruesome quality of this image, the way it had come so naturally to his mind, said more than anything to Carroll about what this place had already done to him. A burning drop of sweat trickled into his left eye.

  I must get out of here.

  Abruptly Ellens shoved the hooded man out of the way, and the three of them came for him, flinging away their torches. Carroll swung his sword, and the short man in front crumpled, shrieking, a high, womanish sound. But this tunnel was too close; at the end of its swing, the tip of the sword buried in the porous stone of the wall and lodged there. The hilt was jerked from Carroll’s hands as the other two hit him and took him down to the floor. His head rapped hard against the flagstones, and his vision went as dark as the night sky, full of bright, eye-bursting constellations. He struggled, kicking and scratching, trying to remember what old Vincent had taught him . . . but most of Vincent’s lessons had dealt with swordcraft, not close combat.

  “Christ, help us hold him, Latimer!” Ellens shouted. “Boy’s like a damned fish!”

  “My name, you fucking piker. You used my name.”

  Ellens offered no apology. And now Carroll knew where he had heard that voice before: Lord Latimer, who had once been Prince Thomas’s guardian. He had fallen from favor several years before, though no one would tell Carroll why . . . but he thought he knew now. Latimer had moved into the fray, his hood thrown back now to reveal the narrow face that Carroll remembered seeing around the throne from time to time, and Carroll found his own legs suddenly and securely pinned. After that it was an easy matter to pin his arms. They might be drunk, these three, but they were strong.

  And still Carroll did not understand, not until he felt a hand yank down his trousers and touch his privates. He screamed, fighting harder, but the hand pinning his legs held him fast, the breathing above him roughened.

  This place, Carroll thought, despairing, not even knowing what place he meant—the tunnels? the Gut? the Tear?—and shut his eyes as a second hand slid between his legs. This place breeds monsters. I am going to die down here, and worse, and no one will hear, no one will ever know—

  Torchlight flared above his head.

  Carroll looked up, but tears were swimming in his eyes and he couldn’t focus. The figure above them was no more than a dark blur.

  “What goes on here?”

  The brief flare of hope that had been born with the light died in Carroll’s mind. The voice belonged to a young man, and there was only one. Another “pigeon,” probably, and Carroll’s sense of fair play, which had been with him since his earliest memory, suddenly came to the fore.

  “Run!” he screamed at the vague blur in front of him. “Run for your life!”

  But the silhouette did not move. And now a miracle happened: the hands holding Carroll’s arms and legs were suddenly gone. He could move again, and he rolled over in a quick convulsive movement, yanking up his trousers, weeping. Above his own harsh sobs, he heard Lord Latimer speaking quickly.

  “We want no quarrel with you, Lazarus. I
f you want the pigeon, take him with our apologies.”

  Carroll wiped his eyes. In torchlight, it took him a moment to recognize the figure before him: the surviving fighter from the ring, not a warrior now but only a young man, with wild hair and a deep black bruise on his cheekbone.

  “I don’t know this boy from Adam,” Lazarus replied, and that dead gaze swept all of them, Carroll included, before focusing on Lord Latimer. “But I do remember you, my friend.”

  Latimer turned pale. “I have never met you.”

  “That’s true. We have not been formally introduced, and it was years ago. But from what I see here, you have not changed a bit. The Prince’s handler, is it not?”

  “Yes, I am,” replied Latimer, drawing himself up.

  “No, he’s not!” Carroll cried, not sure why except that he did not like lies, and certainly would not support them from this piece of human sickness. “He’s fallen from favor, banned from court!”

  “That so?” The fighter’s dead eyes seemed to come to life, glowing from within, like twin sparks in a slowly kindling fire. It was not a good sight; Carroll felt as though some beast had woken before him, not sleepy but maddened, already hungry for the kill.

  “Fallen from favor, have we?” Lazarus repeated. “Lost our cozy royal post?”

  One of the men—Ellens, it was—grabbed the sword stuck in the wall and began to yank on it with all his might. He managed to pull it free, but his hands shook so badly that the sword clattered to the ground.

  “We want no quarrel with you, no quarrel at all!” another of them babbled. “Take Latimer, the boy if you like, but let us go free!”

  Moving casually—but oh, what a deceptive casualness that was; even Carroll could see that it hid a wealth of purpose—Lazarus set his torch on the ground, where it continued to burn lopsidedly, illuminating the short man whom Carroll had gutted. The crimson sparkle of innards made him feel sick . . . but not regretful.