The Pleasure of Memory (73 page)

He found himself staring at the hapless Baeldon. Even as he crawled toward the corpse, he knew it was wrong, that a Baeldon would die before performing such an act of sacrilege on the remains of a comrade. Unfortunately, ethics were an indulgence he could not afford, not now. He grabbed the giant’s femur and twisted it free of the hip’s socket. He promised to repent later.

“I be coming for ye, boy,” Creenon said as the tumblers clacked free.

Luren squeezed back into the corner behind the opening door. The door sang shrilly as it slowly swelled open. The shadow of the jailer poured across the cell beyond it.

“Are ye ready to have some fun, little mouse?” The monster laughed girlishly.

The moment had come. It was time to act decisively. Luren crept slowly around the door. The monster was moving toward the opposite end of the cell where he expected Luren to be. Still laughing, the man moved as seductively as a gentleman with ungentlemanly intentions. The dreadful whip danced menacingly across the matted straw beside him, moving as if it had a will of its own.

Luren crept up behind him.

Creenon paused and then crouched down before the empty shackle. He held the torch out and swept it across the back of the cell. As he suddenly understood the situation, he flew to his feet. “Little mouse!” he shrieked as he wheeled around, “Ye’ve got—”

Luren brought the head of the femur down on the man’s forehead as viciously as he could manage. The horrid jailer collapsed back against the wall and slumped into the straw. For a moment, he just sat there looking confused and strangely surprised, the torch still held up at his side, the tentacle of the whip sprawled impotently in the straw. The man’s scarred, maligned face simmered ghostly in the torchlight as he tried to make sense of what had happened.

He swiped a hand over the blood flowing down his brow and examined his shiny palm. “Why…why’d ye go and do that, little mouse?” He looked up at Luren.

Luren rushed forward and clubbed him again with the butt of the femur. The torchlight sizzled as blood sprayed through it.

The monster cried out. He tried to climb to his feet, groping at the wall like a dead man rising from a tomb. His nose was nearly sideways and blood coursed from his nostrils and mouth.

“Why, I’ll kill ye, ye little shit,” he shrieked, “I swear to the Wyr, I’ll kill ye dead!”

All the terror and hatred Luren had cultivated since that first beating erupted to the surface. He heard himself scream as he again hammered the femur against the man’s head.

Creenon fell sidelong into the wall and slowly slumped to his knees. The whip slipped from his hand. His twisted face was a shiny mask of blood.

Luren’s rage had full rein. He would not be the victim! Not now! Not ever again!

Blood and teeth sprayed the cell wall as he pounded Creenon’s face and head, hitting him over and over. The monster collapsed into the straw and lay there on his back whimpering almost pitifully. His left eye was pulp and his ear was hanging by the skin. He tried to say something, though the message was lost in the sludge of split lips and broken teeth.

Though Luren couldn’t make out the words, he recognized the acid in the tone, and that revelation opened the dams of rage completely. He hit the monster so hard that the head of the femur snapped off and ricocheted from the wall before flipping into the shadows of the rotting bedding.

The jailer tried to stand again, but only fell back against the cell wall and slumped to his knees. The torch slipped from his hand and landed in the bedding, which erupted into flames. He shrieked horridly and kicked at the fire.

“I’ll kill ye!” he raged as he fought his way free of the fire, “I’ll kill ye, I swear I will!” The cuffs of his britches were already burning as he kicked at the rapidly growing flames.

As he watched the horror, Luren felt seized by a strange calm. His breathing slowed. His hands stopped shaking. Watching the monster’s suffering felt like a dirty pleasure. He wanted to just stand there and watch it through to the end, watch the bastard die in agony and horror. Unfortunately, his needs were too great, and his patience too feeble. Instead, he marched through the flames, marched directly up to the monster, and held his broken femur up like a sword.

The jailer held his burning hands up defensively. “Please, mouse!” he screeched, “Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt—”

The word
mouse
cut Luren’s last string of control. He drove the splintered end of the femur into the jailer’s face. He stabbed it at the man’s eyes again and again as the man tried to retreat into the wall. He beat at the monster until the smoke was too thick and the flames threatened to take him.

His rage spent, he staggered back from the murder. He dropped the bone into the smoking straw. The jailer’s hot blood covered his face and hands. The fire had consumed the back of the cell and was spreading quickly. The jailer was still rolling through the flames, shrieking wildly as the fire killed him.

Luren pulled the great cell door closed behind him and calmly locked it.

As he pulled the key from the lock, Creenon appeared in the window. He gripped the bars with his blistered hands and pressed his mutilated face tightly into the space between them. “Ye there!” he screamed, spraying blood through the bars, “Ye let me out of here!” Fire danced on his head and the rancid smoke poured past his bloody mask of a face.

Luren watched the man curiously as his screams slowly died. It was much like a scene from the books about the Wyr Realm he’d read as a youth. As he watched the man burning to death, he realized his own anger was fading away. He closed his eyes. He focused on the desperate screams. He embraced the calm they summoned in him. He felt absolutely no remorse about the murder of the jailer. In fact, he felt a little sleepy.

He backed slowly away from the door, taking care to keep his head high in hopes Creenon’s eyes were still functional enough to see his face one last time. Soon the cell window was empty, save for the oily smoke roiling between the bars. No sound came from the cell. Luren held the key chain up and jangled it before the barred window. He felt a strange kind of disappointment when the monster didn’t resurface.

Finally, he tucked the keys into his belt, and shrugged. It didn’t matter anyway. It was time to go.

He grabbed a torch from the wall and inspected his surroundings. His cell was at the end of a long, dank corridor with a low ceiling and greasy stone walls. At the far opposite end of this nightmarish hall glowed a small, squared light. It was the exit out of this terror. It must be.

He passed dozens of silent cells as he made his way toward the dungeon proper. Once there, he passed through and then pushed the cell row door shut behind him. He carefully locked it, then fell back against the door and closed his eyes. A godlike sense of peace gripped him. His mind was crisp and wonderfully clear, his thinking precise and calculated. In that moment, he knew he could do anything. In that moment, he knew nothing short of Pentyrfal could stop him.

The dungeon’s main room was enormous, easily a hundred feet wide. It was circular with spokes of cell corridors spiking off in four directions. Rotting straw and wet dirt matted the stone floor, and sinister machines of torture cluttered the room. A wide wooden beam cleaved the ceiling, and from it hung hundreds of iron tools of despair, pincers and saws, pliers and pokers. In the middle of the room, exactly between him and the door leading out of the dungeon, was a massive round table. At the edge of it sat the most wonderful image he’d ever seen: A waterskin and a cloth packet of food.

He drank his fill, but wasted little time eating. He needed to get out before more guards arrived. He packed the jailer’s lunch in his shirt and hung the waterskin around his neck. As he was about to leave, he spotted a sheath and dagger. He tucked them into his fraying rope belt.

Minutes later, he locked the dungeon behind him. The room exited to a narrow passage with wide stone stairs spiraling up and away from the iron door. He was suddenly unsure of himself. Was that the only way out? Straight up the dungeon stairs? To what did they lead? The guardhouse, perhaps?

Then he noticed the stone faces. There were two of them, each growing out of the walls outside the door, but on opposing sides of the corridor. They had the features of Parhronii men, and just below each face was a perfectly carved stone arm that extended from the wall with a torch locked in its hand. He found it strangely intriguing. As he moved in for a closer inspection, the nearest face’s eyes physically tracked his movement.

Luren fell against the door hard enough to nearly let himself back into the dungeon. He glanced up at the other face, which also had its eyes fixed on him, and he immediately understood. These weren’t statues. These were sentries, of a sort.

He moved back up to the nearest face. The stone eyes glimmered blue and the face became translucent as the eyes followed him. The energy of a Water Caeyl powered them; there could be no other possibility. He touched the creature’s cheek, which was clearly stone, though the surface was slightly pliable like hardening clay.

The face’s mouth moved slightly. Luren leaned closer. The mouth stirred again, moving stiffly as if struggling to speak. Luren put his ear up against the sentry’s mouth, all the time keeping an eye on the arm shaped sconce beside it. It was possible the sentry could be threatening, though he didn’t believe it.

He listened for a bit, and though the lips moved desperately, there was still no sound. Luren stepped back and examined the face. The eyes on the creature were intensely lifelike, though they were solidly blue when it animated. He thought back to his studies, to the stories of the early days of caeyl magic, back more than a thousand years, when caeyl energy was young and certain gifted mages could mix the energies of two differing caeyls, and then he understood.

“My gods,” he whispered, “You’re not sentries at all. You’re...you’re alive.”

The nearest face in the wall again attempted to speak. Its desperation was palpable.

“How long?” Luren whispered, “How long have you been this way?”

The dull, blue eyes drifted to the shadows at Luren’s feet, and the mouth went still.

“Forever,” Luren translated.

The eyes rolled back to Luren.

“If I get out of this castle alive, I’ll come back,” he told the face, “I’m apprenticed to the greatest mage on Calevia, and I’ll bring him here to free you. I give you my word that I will.”

The face’s eyes darted over to the arm shaped sconce growing out of the wall beside it. Luren looked up at the torch, but didn’t understand. The face repeated the gesture.

“What?” Luren asked. It was trying to tell him something. He turned and looked back at the other face. This one was making the same gesture, looking from Luren to the sconce above the first face and then back to Luren.

It was the arm holding the torch. There was something about it the sentries wanted him to examine. He jumped up and grabbed the crook of the sconce’s elbow. His feet scrambled against the stone as he climbed his way up and over the arm until he was straddling it. The torch was like the ones in Sanctuary. Baeldonian in design, it’d burn forever. He grabbed the torch and twisted it, but he couldn’t wrench it free of the hand gripping it.

He wiped his hands on his legs and seized it again. This time, he felt the arm shift ever so slightly beneath him. Then a sound like grating stone growled from the wall beneath him. He was about to slip back down to safety when the arm gave way, abruptly rotating to the side and pitching him hard to the ground.

He sat there in the dust for a minute waiting for the pain of a broken bone to announce itself. He was about to try standing when a sharp snap ripped through the corridor.

A dark line materialized in the wall above him. The crack began at the floor and slowly ripped its way up through the seams between the stones, spreading in a line around the face and back down to the earth. Seconds later, a sour groan erupted and the new door began sliding inward. A rush of dank, stale air blew in from the new space, pushing a cloud of dust out into the stairwell.

Then silence. Dust hung heavy in the hall, glowing like an eerie green fog in the torchlight. Luren moved cautiously toward the new door. There was a corridor of some sort beyond it. Mounted just inside the door on the interior wall was another Baeldonian torch. Its green flames revealed a narrow stairway descending into darkness.

“My gods,” Luren whispered, “A secret passage.”

The face gazed down at him from its perch on the receded wall, while its mouth again formed words that carried no sound.

“This is a way out, isn’t it?” Luren turned to the other face. “I won’t forget this. I’ll come back when this is done. I swear it. I’ll see you freed.”

He shouldered the waterskin and stepped into the passage. He removed the torch burning inside the door and then passed into the chamber beyond. He’d only descended a few steps when the ground shuddered beneath him. He jumped toward the sound, but it was too late. The door had already closed behind him. He watched the lines fade from the stone blocks with a sense of dread.

There was no turning back now.

XXXVIII

THE RESCUE

HOM WASN’T NEARLY FOOL ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT RESTRAINT WAS HIS STRONGER SUIT.

Not when jeopardy lurked in the shadows, and particularly not when his friends were in danger. It took all the willpower he could summon to refrain from galloping Farnot across these final few miles to the hatch. One rock, one unseen gopher hole, and it’d mean the loss of his horse, perhaps the loss of his life, and he’d be no good to Chance dead.

The message delivered by the sentry was unambiguous in its urgency. Chance wasn’t one to send so portentous a warning without right and proper cause. In fact, if anything the man was too damned forgiving of Vaemysh transgressions. He’d be far more likely to minimize the importance than exaggerate it.