Exiles of tabat, p.23
Exiles of Tabat, page 23
Did he have something intended for her fate as well, or was she just an unremarkable side note to him? People had underestimated her before. Everyone had, including Maz. And the moment she struck against him was the moment she’d start striking back at all of them.
She grimly assembled the blanket, using it to make a crude pack with everything she had. The sailors stood watching her. When she was ready, they took her along the hallway but paused to take Maz from his cell, directing him to follow Lucy’s example. So he wasn’t invisible to them right now, she supposed. She thought he would be saving his magic very carefully now, ready to spend it when it was time.
They came out of the cramped stairway into the sea air and were hit by the stench of coppery blood and spent musket powder. On the island’s beach, the sailors were dragging bodies, a dozen altogether perhaps, into a heap near what looked like a campsite, made just a little ways above the water line, near the stairway that led up into the tower.
A little sloop bobbed beside the much larger pirate vessel, its flag that of the College of Mages. Lucy heard Maz make a sound at the sight of that flag, an indrawn breath, but he did not speak, and failed to retreat into obscurity.
The sky was relentlessly blue overhead. The sun blazed, reflected off the white sand, and making the scarlet blood trails as vivid as though freshly dyed. Two sailors were going through the tents, pulling out crates and bags and dumping their contents out onto the sand in order to rummage through them.
The sailor pointed and they descended the rope ladder to the tiny dock. Jusuf was overseeing the labor. He glanced up as they approached, and indicated the piles scattered on the sand.
“You will need gear, as though you will be going camping,” he said. “There is an abundance of it there. Outfit yourself with whatever you need, but remember you will be carrying it, and some of our food as well.”
Lucy was not looking at him but at the pile of corpses. Their eyes stared back at her. They were mostly young, perhaps a few years older than she, but a handful were older. All were dressed informally, as though ready for labor. Sshe could see where they had been digging in the sand near the stairs, uncovering the eroded lines of carving there, almost indistinguishable among the worm tracks and thickly clustered barnacles.
Jusuf reached out and took her chin between thumb and forefinger, pulling her gaze back to him. “Do not look at those, little bird,” he said, far too gently for a man who had just overseen the killing of others. “Go and find what you need. Remember a waterskin.” His dark eyes were shiny with an emotion she could not read.
The captain wheeled to face the pirates. “It’s time, my squaddies. A few to stay up here, those as has difficulties with deep places. They’ll watch over things and get an equal share, same’s the rest of you. He pointed at the three. “You, Matty. And Karel and Thien. You’ll be the watch.” The two men and woman he’d indicated nodded and went below to gather their supplies.
“According to the Sorcerer, it’ll take a while for the Tower to know you,” the captain said to Lucy. “We’ll stay here tonight.”
They climbed the slippery stairs, overgrown with wet yellow weed ribbed with shadowy purple. At the entrance they paused, gazing inward. There was no interior to the Tower, just a vast upward stretch. A narrow, unrailed staircase spiraled along the inside, leading upwards. They headed into the middle, where a black pit marked where a similar staircase led down into the earth.
Lucy and Maz were dumped unceremoniously to one side like unwanted baggage while the rest went about setting up camp. A few seemed to know what they were doing, but it seemed as though for many of them, life on dry land was something unexpected and a little unnatural.
Two of the sailors built a fire of scavenged driftwood beside the pit. They set a small pot amid the flames, which boiled with merry abandon, smelling of steeping double-fin and onions.
A crew worked methodically, setting a growing series of packs beside the hole in the center. The packs were canvas, straps holding useful extras such as ropes, bandoliers of torches, and small rock picks. Under different circumstances Lucy would have admired the neat efficiency and ingenuity with which they had been put together.
Another sailor came from the ship, bringing a narrow wooden chest to the captain. Opening it, he took out silken bands, each mounted with a slippery gray soapstone disk. He passed them out to everyone except Maz and Lucy but tied one on her. Like the rest, he wore his fastened around his head, the stone disk resting flat against his forehead.
“I have been exploring and researching this Tower for over a decade,” he said. “While many chambers will not open except to the Pot King’s blood, since he was the last person to bind energies here, there are others that can be explored. Many hold sorcerous energies that play upon one’s spirit—these disks absorb the effulgences but can hold only so much. So to find these pools of invisible, noxious influences, we use captives, just as miners use canaries in mines to signal deadly gas. Should you,” he nodded towards Maz, “fall prey to the energies and seek to destroy yourself, we will know we are in the presence of such, and hurry on.”
“That is the usual sign?” Maz asked.
“A few have managed to hurl themselves into the pit that lies at the center and fall for we do not know how long.”
Lucy shivered. She could feel a cold serpent of fear coiling at her belly. She had thought things were bad enough before, but here they were getting even worse, and in a way that was clearly leading to her death. Her eyes welled with uncontrollable tears; her own body was betraying her, refusing to let her be spared the wracking of her emotions.
“There is no need to expose her to all this,” Maz said.
“Who?”
He pointed at Lucy with his chin. “I’m the Pot King’s son. She’s an innocent who got swept up in your plot unawares.”
The captain frowned, looking between them. “You’re just trying to make yourself less expendable, at her benefit.”
“Your men got confused,” Maz insisted. “They took the two of us instead of one, because our auras overlapped.”
Jusuf stared at him, then shook his head. “We’ll take both and see who falls prey to the energies first,” he said, removing Lucy’s disk. “A Sorcerer will have enough training to overcome the worst effects. But in the morning. We’ll sleep here overnight before going down at dawn, in order to use the daylight as long as we can.”
He looked around at the sailors. “Set up my tent, and another for a set of guards.” His glance fell on Lucy. “The prisoners can sleep out here as well, rather than stay on the ship. It’s not like they will be going anywhere, after all.”
Another turtle was brought and butchered on the sand, and they cut it into chunks and used the vast shell to cook the broth in, and they had biscuits made by winding strips of dough in circles on flat rocks among the ashes as they began to accumulate.
They drank watered wine, but neither of the prisoners were allowed any. Afterwards several of the pirates sang and another played a cittern, and they all sang a couple more songs and then the evening was done and everyone retired.
Lucy did not feel that she slept at all through that long night, though whenever she looked through one of the high arched windows, she could see that the stars had assumed new patterns, showing her a different slice of the glittering night sky that stretched outside.
The inside of the tower roared with the waves’ murmur, magnifying it into a steady throbbing at the back of her head. She had been given an actual bedroll this time, rather than the worn blanket she’d previously used, and by contrast it felt as luxurious as a goose down mattress underneath her, but she was too tired and tightly coiled deep inside to even think of sleeping, nor did she feel like she ever would.
She strained her ears, listening for noises from the depths of the hole. Maz was restless too. In the early hours she was roused from what she would have sworn was a wakeful state by clamor. His restless thrashings had knocked a supply pack over the side. The captain swore at him but kept his voice down.
I can’t do this anymore, Lucy thought, filled with despair at the anger in his words. I can’t get up in the morning and go down into that pit.
Tears leaked from her eyes, and a shudder passed through her as the waves cried out again.
There’s no choice, she realized. They won’t listen to my refusals. It’s not like escaping a school day by claiming stomachache.
She thought of the people she’d known and what they would have done in the face of all of this, but, in the end, they were simply too real to her for her to predict what they would do and so she retreated into Lucy Silverhands. Like Lucy, she had no choice; she simply endured and did the best she could.
There was something calming about that thought, as though resignation to her fate plucked away all its terror. The others would be with her; they would have lights. It would have been an entirely different thing if they planned on sending her down by herself, or even if they had planned to hook her and Maz together and send them both down at once.
She had wanted—well, maybe not adventure on this level, but something other than Tabat. Something that set her apart from her sisters, showed that she was better than them, no matter how much they had picked on her, how much they had acted out their hatred and blame for their mother’s death.
Which was unfair! The riot had killed her, not Lucy. At the time it had happened, she’d been at the Gladiator match with the man who had rescued her when she had been lost, Sebastiano Silvercloth. In retrospect, she realized now that she could have—and should have—asked Sebastiano to send a messenger to her home, but the truth was that such a thing had never occurred to her.
There were all these things you were supposed to know, without anyone telling you. And that was also utterly unfair.
If she were in charge of things, the world would be very different. Very different indeed. All the people that had been so unfair—her brother Eloquence, and her six sisters, and Adelina Nittlescent, who had released her from service, thinking that she had stolen from her, when she hadn’t! And Seraphina, Adelina’s secretary, who could have spoken on her behalf and hadn’t.
And Sebastiano Silvercloth, who hadn’t thought to send a messenger himself, and he was an adult and should’ve known better. All of them would’ve gotten what was coming to them. All of this city, the unfair city, full of people who didn’t care what happened to her, who stood by while she was kidnapped!
She turned over in the bedroll. There was a layer of sand over the rock, but it was hardly soft. She’d thought the flooring aboard the ship was bad enough, but this was worse, and she didn’t know how anyone was managing to sleep. She opened her eyes and gazed at the fire that crackled only a handful of feet away. Captain Jusuf was awake and sitting up beside it, talking with one of the sailors. As she watched, he leaned over to poke another log into the center of the fire’s circle, and she watched how the light played along his skin.
He was so beautiful. He was perhaps the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Her sisters would have agreed, would have run around giggling and flirting and trying to catch his attention. That was never anything that had interested Lucy. In fact it had even repelled her when sometimes visitors, like Canumbra and Legio, seemed to be looking at her that way.
Was this what being in love was? She didn’t trust the captain and she wasn’t even sure that she liked him, but she liked to look at him. Liked to listen to his voice. She didn’t know what his accent was. She had never heard anything like it before, the little sing-a-song twist he put on the ends of words. As though you were speaking songs, songs that she had never heard before.
As she thought all this, he looked up and caught her eye. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks as he smiled at her.
“Go to sleep, little bird,” he said. “Morning will come soon enough.” The sailor beside him muttered something and he cuffed the man, then spoke again to Lucy. “Go to sleep.”
And so she did.
Chapter 32
In the morning, they started down: Lucy, Maz, the captain, and five of the sailors. The ones left behind waved farewell. They had been left with supplies by the captain, including flasks of wine, “to drink health to the success of the journey,” he had said.
The party were all roped together as they proceeded down the stairway: a sailor, then Maz, another sailor, Lucy, then yet another sailor, then the captain, then two more sailors bringing up the rear. The walls were unadorned and slick with salty moisture.
The nightmarish, narrow part seemed to continue for hours but eventually they came to a place where tunnels led off in every direction, allowing them to make camp and sleep. The captain told Maz that he might explore. The boy took a torch and headed into the darkness. His pace was quick and eager, untired where the rest ached with weariness.
A rope trailed after the captain and back up towards the top. It led to a small windlass that had been set up beside the hole with sailors to watch over it.
“We may be a while down here,” he explained to Lucy. She sat a few feet away from the pit’s edge, watching the darkness while the sailors built a fire and set water boiling for tea. “And it will be easier to have them lower supplies than have someone go fetching and carrying along the staircase.”
“We might be down here for days?” Lucy asked, dismayed. The oppressive darkness dampened her spirits.
“In two more circles of the rim, we will have come as deep as I ever have. There is a closed doorway that I think will open to the Pot King’s blood. But who knows what lies beyond it, or how long it will take to wrestle the magic free?” He laughed. “Perhaps when all is said and done, we’ll come flying up out of the pit, hovering on great wings like falcons before we burst out across the Isles in glory and splendor.”
Lucy continued to watch the darkness.
“So you are not the Pot King’s son?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Just a girl,” she said.
“Ah,” he said. “Just a girl.”
The silence stretched out between them.
“Do you know why going into the earth’s heart is so perilous?” he asked.
“Why?”
“Down there, we are closer to the bones of sorcery. Emotions go awry and thoughts can damage you. So it is best to be calm down here, to avoid emotional extremes.” His voice was strained. “Satisfying lust, for one.”
“Oh,” she said. And then, “Oh!”
He stooped to whisper, “But when we are back on the surface, just a girl, we will speak of this again.” He turned and went to oversee the sailors as they prepared the meal.
I am not invisible to him, she thought. Back home she was used to her sisters drawing men’s stares, used to their gaze passing over her absently. But Jusuf Miryam’s green eyes saw her, every inch of her. She smiled to herself.
Chapter 33
An Island (Bella)
Bruna comes to us near midnight with their decision. She will take us to Margolees because they will not force us.
“But there you will find it only leads you to where we would have sent you,” she tells me. “You will regret this choice.”
Trust a Dragon? I count myself simply lucky that they have not chosen to enforce their will.
It would have been splendid to arrive via Dragon back, the sort of entrance you can make once in a lifetime. I have made many, but never one like that. It is cheering to think about all the entrances I have made, in fact, and that there will probably be some still to come.
But we do not wish to draw attention to ourselves, and so Bruna flies out in the darkest hours of the night, and puts us near the port, out of sight of it, but only a few hours’ travel east and north.
I trust the Dragon not to put us down near any late-night fishing boats, of the sort that we see as we fly over the port’s edge, little boats each holding a lantern at the top of their highest mast, little globes of light floating among the answering waves, so every light is surrounded by watery trails.
It is cold high in the air, and it would be smartest to go below deck while the Dragon is carrying our boat, but instead, we dress in several layers, Scylla and I, and Teo huddles between the two of us with a blanket I have draped around his form.
The two of us peer over the railing to see the world as few Humans are privileged to see it: the maze of lantern lanes that marks the port, and the lights of a few farms around that. Other than that, everything is in shadow and you can only tell farmland from jungle by texture in the intermittent islands. The white moon is high in the sky and its light lies on my skin like a caress, like soothing water after sunburn, like the promise of comfort to come. Its light dances on the water.
Scylla points out a thing or two, but mostly we are silent, watching the water flit by, as fast as though we were galloping full tilt, maybe faster, driven by the Dragon’s speed. It is not impatient, but it is efficient, and it has other things to do. We took on fresh water and fruit at the island, and I smoked a little of the pig meat, so we are full stomached as well, down to drinking the last bottle of wine aboard.
Soon, far too soon, the Dragon swoops, lets us down into the water as gently as she can, although we cling to the railing nonetheless for the shudder of impact, and I brace Teo against it with my leg to keep him from skidding away.
The water receives us, though not without some rocking at first, the water and the boat establishing their mutual accord. Without another word, the Dragon’s dark shadow flits away from us and rockets upward into the vast and shimmering starry sky.
Here in the Isles, those stars are like nowhere else, so close against the sky’s velvety depths, the white moon rolling in those shimmering waters as though pleasuring herself in a pool … ah, it has been far too long since I have lain in someone’s bed, that I am having lascivious thoughts about the moon!
