Stonewiser (22 page)

Hope. Sariah grabbed the deck and ran in the dead water, pulling upstream, parallel to the rot flow. Her lungs ached with the effort. She was intent on the palisade on the other side of the flow. There had been a torch atop the place. Meliahs, please let her find the torch.

A trace of the torch's smoke was all that remained, but it was all she needed. She pulled the deck further up-flow and estimated the distance. Thirty spans maybe? The width of a healthy river. She ran into the deck shelter. Rope. A decent deck had to have good long rope. She found two, and knotted them together, before stringing an end to one of Kael's arrows. Archery was not her strength, but she figured she had a very large target on the palisade. Once the arrow was embedded in the wood, she would use the rope to pull herself across. Not ideal, but it would have to do.

Next, she stripped the deck from its shelter, untying ropes, dismantling the two sections that made the thatched roof and folding the walls. A bit of thatch got caught on her bracelet. Ironically, she plucked it out of Shrewdness's link, the one engraved with the knotted rope. Domainers were indeed clever, crafty, diligent and practical. She had learned much from them during her year at Ars. Now it was her turn to be shrewd. She worked fast, mindful of the time, talking to an absent Kael.

“If you mind your arse, you better dillydally, you stubborn ox,” she rambled like a crazy woman. “I'm working as fast as I can.”

She undid the twine holding the deck's logs together, split the deck in two, and then reknotted the ropes. She had to replace some of the burnt twine and reallocate the intact ones. When she was done, she had two decks, one much narrower than the other, but both still stable enough to float. She piled the makings of the shelter on the bigger deck, along with the supplies Orgos had provided, and dropped the claws to anchor it safely away from the rot flow. Then she turned her attention to the other deck.

The width of five logs comprised the smaller platform she had created. It was longer than she needed, and a bit unwieldy, but she had neither the time nor the tools to shorten it.

“Here's to nothing.” She lifted a frog to the sky in solitary toast.

She wiped the deck with the frog as if it were a sponge and she was a new Guild pledge assigned to mopping the floors. With small, circular movements, she smeared the logs with frog slime. Even though the frogs seemed to produce the slime on demand, she took turns using different animals. She didn't want to hurt the helpful critters. She worked diligently until the entire surface was covered with the pungent secretions. She turned the deck over and did the same with the scorched underside, smearing the frog slime over her weave and on the ropes as well.

“Sorry, mate.” Sariah caught another frog. “I hate to do this to you, but the ride is free if you want to go back in there.”

The frog belched irately.

“I know,” Sariah said. “I feel the same way.”

Sariah hooked her leg over the railing and willed her lungs to accept the air she was desperately sucking in. She dangled from the balcony of Orgos's quarters like a tangled bat. Her arms and legs quivered with the strain. She heaved herself up painfully, coming nose to nose with a loaded frog. The animal hopped clear to the next level.

“Showoff,” Sariah muttered.

She flung herself over the railing and landed against the sliding door. The frogs had provided her with many advantages this night, including keeping Alabara's residents indoors. But as she pressed her ear to the wood, their infernal croaks smothered the sounds inside Orgos's quarters. Sariah inserted her fingers along the window's clever frame, palpating blindly until she found the wheels which moved the panel out of the way. They were locked in place. With a bit of prodding, she pushed the pin sideways and opened the window just enough to slide inside.

Fine wax candles imbued the room with a pleasant scent that tricked the nose into normalcy. The candles’ golden gleam numbed the eye to the crass and the vulgar. The mellow glow softened everything in the room—Orgos's trinkets, his coarse furnishings, the shock of Kael's nude body sprawled on the bed, the brutality of the chains that bound him by his wrists and ankles to the massive bed's spiraling posts.

She took quick stock of his condition. His face was pale, maybe a bit pasty. His eyes were closed. His mouth struck her as unnaturally red. His limbs were tense from the reflexive fight against the bonds and his white-knuckled fingers gripped the chains as if in just retribution. She knew he was alive and awake because his breathing was fast and shallow. Was Orgos hurting him? She loaded her sling and aimed, cursing the tremors shaking her hands.

The muted sound he made delayed her shot. More than a moan, it was a muffled grunt she recognized. For a moment, she stopped looking at him in order to take in the totality of the situation. It was only an instant or two, a stumble in the disciplined progression of time, but it played in her mind excruciatingly slowly, as if time had taken a break to show her the moment in vivid detail.

She saw Orgos for the first time. She had known he was there all along, a large menacing shadow looming over Kael, sitting next to him on the bed, weighing down the mattress with his bulk. In the candlelight, Orgos's nakedness was suffused by a red nimbus of coarse hair that outlined his body. His belly's bulge was trapped between heavy pectorals and sprawling thighs. He leaned over to kiss Kael, not harshly, as Sariah expected, but rather gently, taking his time, savoring the inert lips, prying, probing, plunging, until his tongue had excavated the well of Kael's reluctant mouth and settled there to drink from his throat.

But it wasn't Orgos's kiss arching Kael's body and convulsing his limbs. It was the firm grasp Orgos had on Kael's erection, a harrowing clutch the marcher was mirroring on his own sex, a rhythmic, relentless stroking up and down both larded shafts. Kael's sex was engorged to imposing proportions. His cheek pressed hard against the pillow. He was biting down on the pillowcase, grinding on the fabric with the force of his clench. It was Orgos who roared first. His body shuddered. Bursts of clotted semen rained over Kael's taut belly in a sudden irrigation of his groin.

“My boy,” Orgos rasped. “My beautiful boy.”

He reached out to tousle Kael's hair. He thumbed the cusp of Kael's eyebrow where the scar broke it in two and then slid his fingers over the raised outline of his well-defined mouth. There was something intrinsically intimate about the gesture, something that sparked Sariah's proprietary outrage and left her struggling to suppress the growl gathering in her throat.

“You promised you wouldn't fight me. Remember?” Orgos rubbed his face against Kael's groin, like a big red tomcat, marking its territory. “Come, my boy. Your turn. I want to see you do this just for me.”

Sweat streamed down Kael's face and pooled above his lips. His body was slick with perspiration, stretched to extreme tautness, a fitting continuation of his erection. His skin was a geography of prickling goose bumps. His blood rushed in a maddening race to fill every vein to bulge. Betrayal loomed in every part of his body.

“No?” Orgos's smile was a grimace of pure lust. “Then I have something special planned for you. Not even you can stand this.”

Unexpectedly, Orgos dumped a beaker of thick oil over Kael's groin and rubbed it in. Then, in one great gulp, Orgos took Kael's sex in his mouth and swallowed it to the balls.

Kael roared.

Without further hesitation, Sariah took aim and shot.

Seventeen

 

S
HE MUST HAVE
made a small noise, a squeak, a rustle, or perhaps the growl she had been repressing simply escaped her senses’ guard, because Orgos lifted his head at the last moment, mouth drooling with tinted saliva, eyes wide with surprise. Sariah had known she had only one chance. The stone hit him in the center of the forehead, sinking into the bone with a satisfying crunch. The man toppled backwards and crashed on the floor. He lay there, obscene and inert, like the waterlogged wreck of a massive sweptoff timber.

Sariah rushed to Kael's side. “Where is the key?”

Kael's eyes were dull and unfocused, red-rimmed and unclear, squinting to see through a haze that wasn't there.

“Are you all right?” She took his face in her hands. “Are you hurt?”

“Who?”

“It's me, Sariah. Kael, what has he done to you?”

She looked him over quickly. He was slippery with a combination of sweat, fragrant oils, and Orgos's emissions, but she couldn't find any major wounds on him. She tried to unravel the chains from the bedposts, but it was useless. If she was going to get him out, she needed to find the key to the manacles. It was a small key, she could tell by the lock, slim and blunt at the ends.

“Kael, make an effort. Tell me. Where is the key? The key for the irons.”

His brows knotted in concentration. “The key?”

What was wrong with him? Sariah examined his face again, the rolling eyes, the ashen pallor, the mouth, bright red. “Rotting pits. Did he give you something? What did he give you? Kael, listen to me. I need to know what he gave you.”

His words slurred, but he gestured to one side with his head, indicating some level of comprehension. Sariah looked at the table beside the bed, and gasped, horrified.

Hepa. She recognized the nuts littering the table, shaped like her fist, hard like a rock, deeply grooved and coated with coarse curly fibers. There was a jug of strongly brewed canundro on the table as well, and a cup reeking with the scent of the hepa's treacherous milk. The canundro had turned red, the same deep color staining Kael's lips. There were several cracked shells on the table and floor, far too many. The bastard had fed Kael hepa.

Sariah fought the panic overtaking her. Delusions, disorientation, confusion, weakness, extreme sensitivity, these were the side effects of ingesting hepa. How was she going to get a hepa-stricken Kael out of Alabara?

One problem at a time. The chains. She had to get him free and off the bed. She searched around the room, on the pegs by the door, in trunks and drawers, and through Orgos's discarded clothing. Nothing.

“Kael, I understand Orgos fed you hepa.” Sariah pressed a cup of water to his lips. “I need you to listen to me. I know it's a great effort right now, but I need your help to get us out of here. Where's the key?”

He couldn't keep his quivering pupils steady on her, but his brows were knotted again and his mouth was trying to speak. “Ate… it.”

“He ate the key?”

What kind of vile beast swallowed the key to his prisoner's manacles? The kind that intended to consume his prey alive and on site. The type that began by destroying hope from the start. The kind that indulged his horrid fantasies from beginning to end.

“Meliahs curse you, Orgos, you miserable dung of a polecat.”

No key. The realization hit Sariah like an icy gust. She had a vision of herself kneeling by Orgos's gutted carcass, arms dripping to her elbows with gore and blood as she rummaged through the mangled mess of his entrails looking for the key. What were the chances such a search would yield it?

Wait. She could pick the locks. She had done it at the keep many times. She could do it again. With what? She looked around the room. A stylus? Too thick. A needle? Too weak. A tooth from Orgos's ivory comb? Long, slick, sturdy. It might work. She broke the tooth from the comb, climbed on the bed and tackled the left hand manacle.

“Let go.” She tried to peel Kael's four-fingered clutch from the chain, but he wasn't budging. She worked around it. The lock was shallow but sturdy, a little slippery inside. Or was that her hand, shaking? There, she found the bolt. A twist, a jiggle, a push at the right time.
Click
.

The hand was free, bruised but intact. She didn't think that Kael could completely understand what was happening, but he brought the hand to his chest and flexed his fingers, staring at them groggily as if they were separate from his body and unexpected. Sariah fed him more water. She thought he looked a bit more alert.

Next. Left foot. Same procedure. Hurry. She dared a quick look at the door. It was barred from the inside and safe for the moment. For how long? Damn this iron, it had decided to be difficult.