The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1) (18 page)

“So then we find out our caravans are getting hijacked on
their
new
routes. Vantanible changes the routes
again
, and the
same thing happens. He starts losing his shit, claiming someone in the company
is leaking the routes, or selling them to the nomads or something like that.”

Daxin gave a wry smile. “So he decided to arrest dozens of
people on account of one suspected traitor?”

“That’s not too far from the truth, actually.” Biyo scratched
his head and turned to check on the others. They were standing around or
sitting beneath what shade they could find among the dead trees, sipping water
from their skins or carrying on quiet conversations. “These dways will be ready
to head back once Schum finishes his trap.”

Daxin nodded. “So how many of the people here in Dryhollow
Split used to work for Vantanible?”

“All of us.”

“All sixty of you?”

“More than sixty. It was about sixty of us who got wind of
the arrests before they happened. There were well over a hundred, if you
include the police.”

“High Infernal.”

“Yeah. Vantanible had no trouble filling the empty jobs, I’m
sure. It would’ve been easy for him to arrest all of us and keep us locked up
until he found out who was spilling the routes.”

Daxin wetted his lips. “Do you know who it was?”

Biyo looked over at him, puzzled. “One of the people who got
arrested, I hope. Infernal forbid it’s someone here in Dryhollow Split. There’s
not a soul here who’d think twice about flaying that bastard alive.”

There was a lump in Daxin’s throat. “You should ask around,”
he said, trying to lighten the mood.

Biyo didn’t laugh. “Ask? Whoever it was—if there really was a
traitor—would have to be a dope to admit they were selling the caravan routes
to the nomads. A dope, or somebody with a death wish.”

CHAPTER 17

The Underground Sea

Each time the ship crested a wave, Lizneth’s stomach
left her. She hadn’t so much as set foot on a seagoing vessel before, and it
wasn’t long before she realized that the sea would extend her no mercy to ease
the transition. The boat’s cargo hold was even smaller than her parents’ modest
hut, and yet she found herself crowded into the cramped quarters with more than
two dozen other full-grown
ikzhehn
.

Guards took shifts on the deck above. It seemed Lizneth could
hear the crew engaging in their drunken merrymaking at all hours of the day and
night. From beyond the noise of their celebrations came a dull throbbing, more
something she could feel than anything she heard. It was soft and deep,
vibrating along the planks like the rumble of distant thunder. There were two
pitches, arriving one after the other, slow and steady. She didn’t always pay
attention to it as the hours trudged by, but it was always there.

Boards groaned as the vessel listed on the waves, complaining
of age like a gaggle of elderly dams. No matter how hard Lizneth pressed her
face into the deck or how she changed her position, there was no relief from
the queasy feeling in her gut. She was sick often, and the sack had still been
around her head the first few times. By the time she loosened the drawstrings
enough to finagle herself free of it, the fur on her face and neck was
plastered with half-dried vomit. Bile was all that came up before long, and
after that she was only retching.

Passing in and out of an uneasy sleep, she dreamed terrible
dreams. In some, she was behind the levee again, in the great trough. A horde
of slavers was chasing her, black-toothed mongrels whose mouths ran red with
blood; the mists became a yellowed cloud of choking smog that lowered around
her, blinding and suffocating her until she couldn’t see a thing and she was so
out of breath she had to stop running. Then the slavers caught up with her, and
they were fighting over whom she belonged to, each of them pulling on one of
her limbs, shouting out their own names or the gruesome names of the masters
they served.

In other dreams, she arrived home to find her family working
the mulligraw fields in chains, with Sniverlik and his Marauders at the whip.
When he saw her, Sniverlik began to set the members of her family on fire, one
by one. She woke from those dreams with her tail scalding hot and her empty
stomach twisted in knots, greeted only by the gloom of the ship’s bowels and
the pounding of that distant, thundering rhythm. The captives’ bowels
too were hard at work; the floor of the hold was slick with bilgewater and the
leavings of her fellow prisoners, both voluntary and otherwise.

Few had escaped their bonds, so there hadn’t been much
conversation in the first hours of their voyage. Whenever a guard heard voices,
he would descend into the hold and give any loud-mouths a stern shutting up
before tightening their fetters. Even without words to speak, Lizneth’s sharp
sense of smell offered her illumination aplenty. From the
haick
, she
discerned that their diets were mostly fish and refuse and leftover hydroponic
crops, like the kind grown in the nethertowns. By this she determined that her
fellow prisoners had been plucked from Bolck-Azock’s poorer classes. Metropolis
slavers didn’t need to look far to find easy prey, it seemed—especially if they
were anywhere near as foolish and naive as she had been.

There was no conception among them of how much time had
passed at sea or how many days their journey might yet take. Lizneth passed that
first indeterminate stretch of time in the irregular seesaw between miserable
consciousness and fitful sleep. The crew never fed them during this time—at
least not while she was awake, though she doubted she would’ve kept anything
down if there was food to eat. The waves felt impossibly sheer, but perhaps
that was only because she was such a stranger to life on the water.

When first they heard the sound of chains above them, it came
from the front end of the ship, at once a terrible clatter and a deep growling
over the deck, louder even than the sea’s hiss. The sound soon became an
unbearable racket in the tiny cargo hold. Lizneth couldn’t cover her ears, so
she shut her eyes and tried to think of better things. Home and family. Her
fields. The life she’d taken for granted.

Then the grated door opened, and a hulking gray-and-white
roan with half a tail and an ironwood spike for a leg hobbled down the steps
and began tossing bodies topside. The chafing noise across the deck was
deafening, and Lizneth cowered with dread as they began taking the other captives
away. She didn’t know what they were doing, or why. She didn’t think she wanted
to know, no matter how cruelly things were about to go for her.

“Next,” they would yell from the deck, after they’d cut each
captive’s ropes and shackled their wrists and ankles in irons. Lizneth was one
of the last to be removed. When she’d been lobbed through the hatch, she found
herself standing before a snaking line of bedraggled captives, bound together
by a string of heavy chain. The sea was dark around them, the air thick and
gray. Lanterns creaked in their hangers, casting their yellow beacons through
the fog.

Two diminutive agouti-furred crewmembers worked at Lizneth’s
bonds with rigging knives as she stood on the deck. It was the first time she’d
been able to get a good look at her fellow captives, and she found them as
unkempt as she would’ve imagined. Even in their disgrace, she could see
glimpses of who they’d been before: peasants, fisherfolk, carpenters, tanners,
smiths, chandlers, and farmers like her.

The two agoutis had just finished clapping her in irons when
the door to the captain’s quarters opened and Curznack emerged with his two
brood-brothers. He limped forward with a pained sneer and began to inspect the
new captives as if he owned them—which Lizneth supposed he had a right to do,
since he did. She saw his mouth twist as he moved, a subtle hint of the deep wound
beneath his tunic and overcoat.

When he reached her, he paused. She could see the edges of
the cloth bandages snug around the inside of his shoulder, a thin sliver of red
soaking through the fabric. His whiskers flexed forward and he sniffed her. His
eyes were crusted with reddish secretions. He looked her over from toe to tip
and ran a pink tongue down the back of his longteeth. That look sent a chill
through her, the kind that made the knots in her stomach pull all the tighter.
She lowered her eyes, pleading silently for him to move on.

“Keep this one off the line,” said Curznack, still staring at
her with a glazed expression. “Take her into my quarters and chain her up.”

The irons were heavy, even before Lizneth had moved; the
weight of the chains pulled the manacles against her wrists and pinched her fur
in the metal seams. The agoutis hustled her inside and fastened her to a ring
mounted on the wall, then slammed the door behind her.

The air was rife with the stink of buck, and Lizneth
recognized Curznack’s
haick
and the similar signatures of his brothers.
The cabin was meager in size, but it was more than adequate, especially
compared to Lizneth’s current environs. The room was laden with finery; all the
treasures one might expect a slaver’s life to afford. Beds were set into the
nooks along each of the three adjacent walls, soft feather mattresses dressed
in faded blue satin. There were six bunks in all, three of them made up but
unused. Parchment maps were stuffed into bins and crates in the corners;
several lay in loose rolls on the floor, trundling from one side of the cabin to
the other as the ship swayed. Windows at the back looked out over the
nothingness of the Omnekh’s dark waters; whitecaps crowned and fell away, and
the horrors of the unfamiliar tides left Lizneth with a feeling so bleak it
made her shiver. That was what awaited her, even if she chanced to find freedom
before the voyage’s end: a lonely contest, her finite endurance versus the
ceaseless waves and the inestimable depths.

One of the maps was open on the modest square table in the
middle of the room, knives staked at its corners to hold it in place. Lizneth
reached, but the closest knife was far outside her grasp. The ship lurched and
her stomach followed; she made for the floor, but the chains coursed through
the ring and grated taut before she was halfway down. Her overworked abdomen
clenched, and her tongue climbed her throat until the bitter taste of bile was
in her mouth again. She spat it away and groaned, letting the chains hold her,
leaning like an off-duty marionette.

There was another commotion outside; the sound of the chains
scrabbling along the deck grew faint, then neared the door again. Hinges
creaked, and clinking footfalls descended. The noises died after several
minutes, and she heard the cargo hatch slam shut again so hard it shook the
deck. She hadn’t noticed the thunder-like rumble missing from the air until she
felt it resume, slow and rhythmic.

It was a long time before the door opened again. When it did,
Curznack came in carrying a bowl of food and fastened the lock behind him.
Lizneth could pick out the smell of each individual morsel, but the thought of
food was both tantalizing and sickening.

“I can see you’re enjoying the voyage so far,” Curznack said,
smirking to himself. “She’s a smooth ride in calmer seas, I promise. The
Halcyon
,
we call her. A finer galley you’ll never set eyes on in these waters. You
haven’t had a chance to formally meet my brood-brothers, Azhi and Qeddiker, but
you will soon.”

“You lied to me,” Lizneth said.

Curznack smacked his tongue, his jaw working on a bite of cheese
as he crossed the room to his bunk. “I told you I was a thief and a criminal.
What you chose to believe after that is of little consequence to me.”

“You said I couldn’t go home. You said Morish would catch me
if I tried.”

“That wasn’t a lie, my dear.” Curznack was casual, smug.
“Morish would’ve taken you. Then I would’ve been out a valuable asset, wouldn’t
I? My business doesn’t get by on giving away good product to my competitors.”

The ship listed. This time, hope abandoned Lizneth, along
with her stomach. When the heaving stopped, she wiped her mouth on her arm. Her
fur was already so filthy that a little more was nothing to mind.

“You’ll keep my swabbies in their jobs yet,” Curznack said,
taking a bite of salt pork even as he stared at the puddle of black vomit.

“So all that about your younger brood-brothers then… that was
a lie?” Lizneth asked.

“No, that was the truth too. You see? I didn’t really have to
lie to you. Your fear alone was enough to make you believe what I wanted you to.
I do have two younger brood-brothers. Morish took them away and sold them as
slaves not a month past. This will be our first passage to the daylit side of
the Omnekh since then, and I hope to find them there when we arrive. If I’d
been able to question Morish, we’d have a better idea of where they might be, but
since that didn’t work out…”

“You’re still blaming me for letting Morish get away?”
Lizneth wasn’t sure why she cared enough to be insulted.

“I’m not blaming you. I don’t blame anyone but myself for
what happened back there. My brothers were too young to be off on their own,
and it’s my fault we’re all in this mess now.” Curznack took a brown glass
bottle from beneath his pillow, uncorked it, and took a long pull. He licked
his lips and swallowed, then started in on a semi-circle of hard biscuit. A fat
weevil crawled from a crevice near the bite he’d taken. He plucked the weevil
off with two clawed fingers, wrinkling his snout as he examined it up close.
After a moment, he tossed it into his mouth. He ogled her as the weevil crunched
between his teeth.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Lizneth said.

“Be happy I’m only looking.”

“I can’t believe I trusted you to keep me safe.”

“Oh, but you
are
safe. Morish will never find you,
just as I promised.”

Lizneth scritched, a shrill sound, full of loathing. “How
safe will I be when we reach the shore?”

Curznack frowned, pensive. “Well, I don’t know. That’ll be up
to your new master, I suppose.”

“
Se dyagth, krahz
,” Lizneth said, and spat.

“
Ehi fyer puq kherai
,” said Curznack, laughing. “I
find it best not to spoil my product before sale. If you’re that desperate, I
could make a request to the crew on your behalf. Several of my sailors have
mentioned that they find your
haick
… agreeable.” He waited a beat,
brandishing a satisfied smile when Lizneth sulked. “Though, I’d prefer it that
they think I’m the one who’s mounted you. I’ve learned it’s easier to exercise
my authority over them when I play to their weaknesses. Just the idea of a
fresh young doe like you is enough, oftentimes. Let them starve and they’ll
revolt, but give them a small taste, and they’ll hunger for it all the more. Once
I put the thought of breeding into their heads, they’ll get us to shore faster
than any ship this size has a right to travel.”

“Does it make you feel good to trick them like that?”

“It worked on you, didn’t it?” Curznack looked pleased with
himself. “What you desired most was safety. I positioned myself as someone who
could give it to you.”

“Yes, you’re brilliant. You took me for a fool and it turned
out you were right. Should I tell you how impressed I am?”

“You don’t have to tell me anything. I brought you in here so
I could scent you, and so I could indulge myself in a good look. Don’t worry, I’m
not going to mount you. Not today, at least. But I’m going to make it look like
I did.”

“I’d rather go downstairs and rot, if you’re finished.”

“I’m not,” Curznack said, rising from his bunk.

By the time he summoned the two agoutis to take Lizneth below
decks again, there were bruises on her snout and cheeks, and a weeping gash
above her eye.