My fists clenched in anger and I fought to keep control. “Let her go. She won’t do it. Just let her go.”
“Oh, Quetzalli.”
A flick of the wrist landed me back on the floor, and I was dragged by my kicking feet towards the corridor and back to my stone restraints. The Shaker boy was already waiting to lock my wrists and didn’t seem to mind my screaming complaints at the guards. It was over in a flash and I was back to the stone cuffs locked to the wall.
“Lark, what happened?” Micha asked first. I had no idea of even where to begin or what to tell them. I let it sink in for a moment and started telling the story.
“Khea’s alive. They think she’ll be the mother of the future Nakben tribes.”
“What?! She’s alive? Why can’t you reach her?” I hadn’t even considered before then that she was alive despite my attempts to reach her. What had they done to her?
“I don’t know. I only saw her for a second.” In that second she had still been devastatingly stunning despite the circumstances. I desperately hoped it wouldn’t be the last I ever saw of her.
The weight of all my pain at losing her lifted immediately only to be replaced by the crushing fear that it would happen again. I was well on the verge of never seeing her again and getting myself sacrificed, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. The anger at the unfairness and the craziness and the helplessness began to surge up and boil over, but I was still locked in my stone embrace.
“What are they going to do with her?” The image of her with another man put my anger on edge, much less the thought of a man taking her without her consent. If I ever managed to get out of there, I would kill every one of them.
“I don’t know. They wanted me to convince her to go through with it.”
“What? That’s sick.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Why doesn’t she just get out?” Micha asked.
Of course he had thought of it first.
“I don’t know. They must have done something to her. She just had ropes around her wrists. It’s like she won’t use her Spark. Or maybe she can’t?”
“They can do that?”
“She said they had been breeding people to be able to block Readers. Maybe they figured out a way to go the other way, block people from using their Sparks.” I was more thinking aloud than tapping into any sort of knowledge, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.
“What are they going to do with us now?” Khasla asked after a few minutes of silence.
“I don’t know. Kill us, I imagine.” It seemed like it had always been the plan. We were only being spared for the time being to try to get me to convince Khea. Since that was never going to happen, it was probably just the end for us.
That night, in the dim light of the evening torch, the weight of all the day’s events began to sink in. Khea was alive, but somehow unable to use her Spark. Xiuhpilli wanted to breed her with ‘the tiger’, whoever that was, to make a new queen. And I was locked in an underground cell with nothing to do to change any of it.
I slipped the ring off my finger so I could reach a thread out to Avis, hoping to show him what I’d learned about Lheda and warn him. When I found him, he was riding Pearl hard and thinking he would ride clean through the night to get away from Myxini. I showed him the only image I had of Khea, nearly falling to the ground but alive nonetheless. He, too, was beyond relieved to know she had been alive all this time, but terrified of what her fate would be.
Will you come help us?
I asked him silently.
There’s nothing I can do.
I knew it would take him weeks, even with the best of luck, to reach the far north of the islands. He would get here well over a month after this was all over. But it wasn’t for a lack of concern. He seemed sick with sadness that the Nakbens were getting ready to attack Takla Maya and put Lheda into power again, that Khea would be tormented with her role in Nakben’s future, and that I would be killed. It was the culmination of everything he had worked to prevent, and it came at great personal cost. He loved me, just as he loved Khea, like his sister he had helped to raise, and he was about to lose us both.
With my wrists feeling much better since the bath, I pulled and tugged again, hoping the Shaker boy had done a poorer job the second time around. It seemed like they might be slipping out a bit, but without the light I couldn’t see.
A few minutes later, my eyes must have adjusted to the dim flame, for surely it hadn’t gotten any brighter, and I could see my wrists were, in fact, beginning to pull from stone. Rejuvenated by what little progress I had made, I began to pull in earnest.
“What are you doing?” Micha asked after the sounds of my exertion.
“I think I might be able to get out.”
“How? What are you doing?”
“Just pulling my hands out.” I sensed Micha thought I was started to lose it. We’d each tried to slip our hands through the stone restraints a few hundred times.
If only I’d thought of that
, came spilling down his thread.
Sure enough, my right hand was unleashed from the restraint after a lot of pulling and a serious amount of pain. My hands could’ve both been broken for all I cared, as long as I was free of the stone and able to get out to help Khea.
A minute later, my left wrist came out as well, and I moved both in small circles to stretch and marvel at my accomplishment and my freedom.
“Holy shit, you’re really out!” Jhoma all but yelled, prompting a series of ‘shushes’ and ‘shut the hell ups’ from the others.
“Come get us out. Lark! Get us out!” I desperately wanted to help them, but I couldn’t think of a way. I didn’t have any tools, and I certainly wasn’t a Shaker like Khea. I could only hope they would be locked there for a while longer until I could sort out a way to get them out.
“I’ll come back as soon as I can. I promise,” I said quickly before running into the corridor. I could hear their protests and shouts behind me, but I didn’t want to be around to answer for it. For all I knew, I had just abandoned my friends in hopes of saving a girl I had been with for a few short weeks, and I might very well never see any of them again. If I didn’t cut and make a run for it, I would never get to it. The decision was costly, but it was the only one my aching heart could make.
I had learned the way to the queen’s room from the afternoon visit there, but that wasn’t where I wanted to go. In fact, that was precisely the place I wanted to avoid, just in case there were permanent guards stationed there. I followed the path through the twisted corridors until I was close the white stone room with the jade bench, but this time I turned off to the left. Khea had been taken into a space on the opposite side of the room from where I entered earlier that day, and I hoped to pick up the corridor on the other side without actually going into the room.
My steps slowed as a pair of Nakben guards crossed the corridor. Hoping they hadn’t heard me, I crouched down and hid against the wall; fortunately, they moved past without so much as a glance. I waited a few moments longer before continuing down the corridor.
I found the hallway I thought was the one Khea was probably taken through and followed it until it came to an intersection. There were three guards to the right, each with fairly impressive tattoo sleeves. Despite my attempt to rush back behind the wall, one saw me and signaled the others. They carried the spears that seemed to be standard equipment for the queen’s guards and ran fast enough to cover the few dozen feet that separated us fairly quickly.
Standing in the space where the two narrow corridors crossed, I waited for them to approach. At just the last second, I darted back behind the corner and waited for them to make the awkward turn with their spears extended. The shafts were too long to make the turn in that position, so each had to lift the spear head almost to the ceiling and it was just enough of an opening to make a move.
I reached up and grabbed hold of one spear shaft as it was raised over my head, pulling my legs up and throwing them into the chest of the guard to my right. He dropped the shaft as he fell, and I swung it around to catch the middle guard on the back of his head. The third guard didn’t stand a chance when the spear head caught him in the torso and passed through to the other side, making him sink to the floor rather calmly as the life drained from his eyes.
Before moving on, I broke the shaft of one of the spears down to a length of about two feet, just long enough to be easily handled in the narrow halls. Deciding that way was as good as any, I turned in the direction the three guards had come from.
If there were guards down there, then there must be something worth guarding.
I hoped it was Khea and continued moving, grasping the shortened spear shaft.
The corridor ended against a wall, splitting into a corridor to the right and left. Again there were guards on my left only a few steps away, though only a pair this time. One was quite large compared to the other, but the smaller one had more tattoos, easily identifying who I should concentrate on first. The larger guard saw me just as my spear stuck into the smaller guard’s back, but I quickly pulled it out and blocked the larger guard’s spear with my stunted spear shaft. He made a series of slices in the air in front of me, but one he made too large and ended with his spear head down by his knees. It was the opportunity to get my spear into his throat and slam him onto his back on the floor behind him.
I had navigated through the passages fairly quickly and put down any resistance faster than I would have thought.
Could I even be that good?
I wondered just how hard Avis had been pushing me all those years. My luck didn’t last much longer though; I continued down the corridor and found myself in a room with more than a dozen guards.
It took only a moment for those who had spears resting against the wall to collect them and aim them in my general direction. Two flew through the air and I easily dodged, as if the wind pushed them away from me. The first wave of guards charged at me on foot; it took some quick maneuvering, but I managed to move past them. The following wave had four guards, but I just wasn’t fast enough to block all their shots. A spear plunged into the meat of my calf and I let out a scream of pain. Distracted by the hit, I barely saw the flat of the spear head as it whirled towards me– then it all went black.
Not again.
The Majestic
The smell of the salt and the light sound of the churning sea brought me back. I was tied to the railing on the deck of a ship, sitting in the hot sun of late afternoon and looking down into the deep purple of the Northos. A squinted look up showed the blue sails of the royal transport ship.
“So you’re not going to miss it after all,” Jhoma despaired somewhere behind me, though I couldn’t turn enough to see him. My hands were tied to the railing tight with rope.
Rope?
“Where’s Khasla?”
“Here, but no help to you if that’s what you’re after.”
“Why not? What did they do?”
“A copper band around my wrist. It prevents me from using my Spark.” I looked down around my own wrists and found nothing there.
“You don’t have one. You’re not a
threat
.” Khasla felt an interesting mix of pride and torment at being the only member of our group with the copper band.
“Can’t even escape,” Jhoma mumbled loudly, clearly still sore about me leaving them behind. I guess I couldn’t blame him, but it wasn’t like there had been an alternative.
“Micha?”
“Here.” His voice sounded farther away than the others, but at least he was still with us.
“Tototl alive.” He sounded afraid and reserved, like a man who knew his fate would come soon.
“What am I going to miss?”
“Nothing now that you’re awake. We’re almost there,” Khasla continued. Since no one seemed keen on offering up any information, I drew a thread to Khasla and got nothing. Apparently his copper bracelet blocked me as well. I sent a thread to Micha instead and found him similarly tied to the rail at the very front of the ship, watching as the docks of Chimalma came into view.
“Why are we going back there?” I asked without thinking.
“To be killed.
Obviously
,” said Jhoma.
I scanned Micha’s thoughts and was surprised to see he had watched Khea get boarded onto the same ship. She was there, on that very ship, no more than fifty feet away from me. I couldn’t get a read from her thread, but it was comforting to know she was so close. Then again, maybe I didn’t want her to be anywhere near me if I was about to be sacrificed.
I twisted and pulled at my wrists to see if I could somehow get loose like I had before, but the ropes were tight enough to be one the verge of cutting off the blood supply rather than offer some chance of getting out. I remembered my last escape attempt and it’s decidedly-poor outcome, but I only found dried blood stuck to my leg. There was no sign of the injury from the spear.
Less than an hour later, the wind pushed us right up to the docks. Khea was carefully unloaded first, pulled up from the lower deck by the guard with a scar and giving me a sorrowful glance over her shoulder. Her devastating beauty mixed with the anguish of her features hit me like a punch to the gut. The soldier quickly escorted her along the streets to somewhere beyond my sightline; my position toward the rear of the ship only let me watch her for a few hundred feet before she disappeared behind the buildings.
The queen was escorted off the ship next, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when she swung her legs over a sand colored horse that could only be Jasper. Someone had gone through a lot of trouble to rescue her from the Turtle. I began to wonder if Obsidian was alive somewhere as well, but seeing as how I would be dead soon, it didn’t seem to matter.
Guards came for us next, severing the ropes that held us to the railing and walking us in the direction Khea and the queen had gone. I attempted to ask the guard where he was taking us, though I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer.
As the sun began to set behind the structures of the city, we arrived at our final destination. The center of the city held at least ten thousand chanting, excited people surrounding an ancient, stone tower that stretched high into the sky. It was a building with a design similar to the queen’s palace: stairs surrounded each side from the bottom to the very top. A look at the top revealed a small platform where something was sure to happen soon.