Straken (16 page)

She pushed herself off the floor and limped over to the cell door. Her mouth was dry and her head was pounding. Her vision was blurred from too many days of no food and water and no real sleep. She was still impacted by her ordeal with the Furies, her impulses still governed by her need to be one with them, to mewl and spit and snarl. She fought those impulses, but the effort was debilitating.

“Open the door, Weka Dart!” she snapped at him. “Let me out! Hurry!”

She did not mean her words to sound so urgent, did not intend to appear so desperate. But her needs overpowered her intentions, and the truth escaped before she could contain it. She would do anything to escape. She would give anything to distance herself from the horror she had endured as the Straken Lord’s prisoner.

But instead of opening the door, Weka Dart glanced sharply at her, an uncertain look in his yellow eyes.

“What are you waiting for?” she snapped. “Do you have a way to
free me or not? Is our bargain still good? Will you honor it as you have said you would?”

“Our bargain is not complete,” he growled. He reached into his pocket and produced an iron key, holding it up for her to see. “My end of the bargain is here—the key to your cell door. I can take off the conjure collar, as well. But what of your end of the bargain? What of the service I require of you?”

“Forgiveness? You already have that. I have told you that by telling me the truth, you have gained that forgiveness. I don’t want revenge on you. I won’t harm you when I’m free. You have my word!”

His strange, wizened face scrunched down farther on itself and the yellow eyes glittered. “Your forgiveness was the price for my truth. That bargain is made and done. This bargain is new, Grianne of the Straken Lord’s jails. If I give you your freedom—from this cell and from the collar—you must give me what I need in turn.”

She stared at him, realizing suddenly that he had failed to reveal as yet his reasons for coming back. Coming to her aid was not something the little Ulk Bog would do out of the kindness of his heart. He had abandoned her, cast her off as useless to him when she had refused to allow him to lead her where he wanted—which was right where she had ended up anyway. But he had lost his chance at reinstatement as Catcher with Tael Riverine, a loss that left him homeless and shunned. He had come back because he expected her to do something about it.

“I can’t give you anything,” she told him. “It isn’t within my power to give you anything.”

“Ah, Straken, you underestimate yourself. You are exactly the one who can help me, and it is for that reason that I will help you. A favor for a favor. I don’t want much. I don’t want anything more than what you want for yourself. Freedom. From these prisons and from this world. I want you to take me with you.”

Take me with you
. She stared at him. Take him out of the Forbidding, he meant. Take him back with her into her own world. Voluntarily release a creature that had been locked away by the Faerie world since before the dawn of Mankind.

“You want to come with me?” she asked him, still not certain she was hearing him right. “You want to leave the Forbidding and come back with me into my world?”

He licked his lips and nodded eagerly. “When you find a way to
get free, you must free me, as well. I know that you were brought here against your wishes. I know that you are trapped. But I have seen what you can do. I think that you know a way back—or if you do not, that you will find one. I have seen how resourceful you are, much more so than any other Straken I have ever encountered. You may be a match for Tael Riverine himself!”

“I am a match for no one,” she countered. “I don’t know if I can help you. I don’t know if I should.”

He bristled at her words, stepping back from the cell door and hissing at her like a snake. “Then I don’t know why I’m wasting my time! I don’t know why I bothered coming here at all! You would rather stay in this cell than escape back into your own world? You would rather die here? Better that than help someone like me? Is that what you are saying? That I am not worthy of your efforts, that I don’t deserve your help?”

He spit at her. “Free yourself, then!”

He wheeled and started to walk away. It took everything she had to refrain from calling out to him, from begging him to come back to her. But if he thought she needed him more than he needed her, she would be in his power, and that was a price she could not afford to pay.

He was halfway down the hall when he wheeled about, his face contorting in fury. “I came back for you!” he screamed so loudly that she jumped in spite of herself. “I risked everything to come back for you! I came to save you, and now you won’t help me? One little thing I ask of you, Straken! One tiny, little thing!”

He came rushing back down the hall, sobbing uncontrollably, his shoulders shaking. “Nothing, for someone with your power! Nothing! Why won’t you do it?”

She took a deep breath. “I can’t be sure of my power here. I can’t be sure of what it will do. What if taking you out of the Forbidding is more than I can manage?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, as if her words made no sense. “Don’t you understand, Grianne of the cat sounds? I was driven from my tribe for eating my children! They will never take me back! No Ulk Bog door will ever be open to me again! Losing the protection of Tael Riverine closed every other door, as well. Now all creatures are my enemies. I am shunned by everything that breathes.
I have nowhere to go and no one who will take me in. Better I was dead than to try to live like this!”

“But why bother with me, Weka Dart?” she pressed. “If you just wait, won’t this demon that Tael Riverine has dispatched to my world break down the Forbidding and free you anyway?”

“Free me from what?” he screamed at her. “Free me from one prison so that I can go into another? Free me from one world in which I am outcast so that I can be outcast in another? I don’t want the Straken Lord to succeed! I don’t want the Forbidding destroyed! If your world becomes like the world of the Jarka Ruus, what difference will it make whether I escape into it or not!”

He pushed his face up against the bars. “You can help me, Straken. If I can help you, surely you can help me! How hard can it be for someone like you to give me what I want?”

In truth, she didn’t know. What would it take to escape the Forbidding? Was the boy foreseen by the shade of the Warlock Lord real? Was he coming to set her free, or was the prophecy a cruel trick? She couldn’t be certain, but it was the only hope she had. The shade of Brona had not lied about the truth behind the reason she had been sent into the world of the Jarka Ruus—Weka Dart had confirmed that. She was here so that a demon could be free, a demon that would destroy the wall of the Forbidding. If Brona’s shade had told the truth about that, then it might well have been telling the truth about the mysterious boy.

So she must gamble on the words of a monster. She must accept the possibility that her only chance for escape was through the coming of a boy she didn’t know. It didn’t seem to her that Weka Dart’s hopes for escape were any less realistic than her own. While she did not relish setting the Ulk Bog free in her world, it would be infinitely worse to refuse his bargain if it meant that she must stay imprisoned, as well.

“If you release me,” she said, “I will try to find a way out of the world of the Jarka Ruus and back to my own world. If it is within my power to do so, I will take you with me. I can promise you nothing more.”

“I have your word?”

“You do.” She held up one cautionary finger. “But remember, I don’t know yet that I can find a way back for either of us. I don’t
know that I can save us, even if you set me free. I don’t know that I can find a way to stop the Moric from destroying the Forbidding. I don’t know that.”

He was already working the key to her cell into the lock. “You will find a way. I know you will.”

H
e released her from the cell, then used a second, smaller key to unlatch the conjure collar. Stepping back, he handed her the collar, his wizened face bright with pleasure.

“I kept my keys to the cells and the collars from my days as Catcher,” he said to her. “Tael Riverine never suspected I would dare to do such a thing.”

“He has misjudged us both,” she said. She cast the collar aside. She would never wear such a thing again or ever again be anyone’s slave. “How do we get past all the guards and their demonwolves?” she asked as they stood facing each other in the empty hall.

He grinned, all his teeth showing. “We won’t go that way. That way is death. We will go another way, a way I know that few others do. It is how I got into Kraal Reach to find you in the first place. I know secrets, little Straken. I know many secrets.”

She didn’t doubt him. But she refrained from saying anything, gesturing for him to lead the way. She was weak from her imprisonment and lack of nourishment, and she was already wondering how far she could go before her strength failed completely. She had no idea how long she had lain semicomatose in her delusional state in that cell, but it had to have been days. During that time, she had not eaten or drunk anything that she could remember. She had barely slept, suspended between sleeping and waking, beset by dreams and dark imaginings, still caught up in the subterfuge she had used to survive her ordeal in the arena of the Furies.

Some part of her was still there, she knew, amid the cat-things, unable to quite let go of the identity of the creature she had pretended so hard to be. Her magic was a powerful thing, and when it was employed as she had employed it in the arena, she could do or be anything. But the aftereffects were equally powerful and tended to cling to her psyche like the damp leavings of a sweat brought on by nightmares. She was Grianne Ohmsford again. She was Ard Rhys of the Third Druid Order once more. But she was also the Ilse Witch
and the things the Ilse Witch could become. She had opened a door she had kept carefully closed for more than twenty years, and she was not sure what it would take to close it again.

They went down a corridor lined with doors that opened into cells like her own, some of them empty, some of them become containers for piles of bones and small lumps at which she chose not to look too closely. The corridor was silent and musty and empty of life. She heard Weka Dart’s breathing and the scrape of his boots, but her own passage was soundless, a wraith’s passage through darkest night.

The corridor ended at a set of narrow steps leading up, but Weka Dart took her into the shadows behind the stairs, where a rusted iron door was seated in the stone. He worked its ancient latch back and forth, a slow creaking in the deep silence, and at last the door opened into a wall of blackness.

“Very dark down here,” the Ulk Bog announced solemnly.

He reached into the blackness to produce a torch, stuck its pitch-coated tip into the flames of one already lit in the corridor behind them, and caught it aflame. He gave the fire a moment to spread, then grinned at her once more and led the way forward.

She followed him down into the earth, down stairs eroded by centuries of footsteps and moisture, into depths so frigid that the cold cut right to the bone. The tunnels they traversed smelled of old damp and raw metal, and at times she saw what looked like frost on the rock but was, in fact, patches of lichen that glowed with a strange, bright radiance. Weka Dart’s torch burned with smoky insistence, clogging the air with its distinctive smell, causing her to cough and finally forcing her to breathe through the sleeve of her tunic. There was no ventilation in the tunnels, and the smell of burning pitch trailed after them like a marker. If anyone thought to look for them down there, they would not have a hard time tracking them, she thought.

Weka Dart pressed on as if pursuit were not a concern, glancing back at her now and then to be certain she was keeping up, as if fearful he might lose her in the dark. Indeed, it wasn’t an altogether unrealistic concern. She was already having trouble keeping up with him, even absent his tendency to roam as he had earlier in their travels. Her head ached from the cold and smoke, and her body was fatigued and shaky. She wished she had looked for something to eat or
drink, but she had not even thought of that, so anxious had she been to get clear of the cells. In truth, she had not eaten or drunk in any reasonable way since she had come into the Forbidding, and the gradual erosion of her energy was finally making itself felt.

Time passed, more than she could keep track of, and the trek through the tunnels beneath Kraal Reach wore on. Clearly determined to take them through as swiftly as possible, Weka Dart did not stop or even slow. From time to time, he retrieved a fresh torch from a crevice she would have passed by without even seeing, lighting it from the old one so that they could continue. Their passage wound down crude steps cut into the stone, along narrow, twisting corridors in which they were forced to stoop, and through caves thick with stalactites dripping with mineral-rich water. After a time, the air warmed a bit, and Grianne stopped shivering. The floor of the tunnels began to rise; they were moving back toward the surface.

But still their journey continued with no end in sight.

Finally, as they were passing through yet another cavern, she stumbled and fell. She lay where she had fallen, her vision blurred and her muscles aching, too tired to rise.

“Are you hurt, Straken?” Weka Dart asked, trying in vain to pull her back to her feet.

“I am exhausted,” she told him. “I have to rest.”

He shook his head. “It is not safe here.”

“I don’t care. I have to rest.”

She crawled along the floor of the cavern to an open space where she could stretch out. She was breathing so hard that the wheeze filled the silence of the cavern, frightening her with its intensity. Her head was spinning, and she felt as if all the strength had left her body.

“Do you have anything to eat?”

He produced a tuber of some sort, which she ate without questioning its strange taste, then accepted the water he produced from a gourd tucked in his clothing. She was beyond caring about the source of the offerings, beyond caring about anything but taking nourishment and going to sleep.