“Same on the next barge?” Kip asked.
“Yes. There’s—there were two hundred thirty of us.”
“You fucking traitors!” Kip exclaimed. He paused for only one moment more. He couldn’t tarry here; his friends might be dying outside at the other barge even now. He said, “Meet me at Fechín Island if you want to find your honor again. Otherwise, fuck off and at least don’t fight for him.” He slammed the key against the man’s chest. “Scuttle the barge when you leave.”
No wonder the Blood Robes had set charges. A resource like two hundred thirty neutral warrior-drafters wasn’t to be scoffed at—and it certainly wasn’t something you wanted to fall into the hands of your enemies.
Kip ran onto the deck in time to see the other barge list to one side, great gaping holes in the hull from the charges. Ferkudi and Big Leo were on the shore, bloodied. Kip couldn’t tell how badly they were injured. But there were no slaves with them. That barge was going down with more than a hundred semi-innocent men chained belowdecks.
Cruxer was shouting at Kip, telling him that the bridges connecting shore and ship were about to collapse—that it was too dangerous, too late. He was right. Those men were going to die because of their own choices. Their own cowardice had led them to their chains. It made no sense for Kip to risk himself and everything he could accomplish to try a hopeless rescue. A man who can’t swim shouldn’t attempt to save the drowning.
But Kip surged forward anyway and ran for the widening gap between the sinking barge and the sloping planks.
Ah fuck me, he thought as the gap yawned wide. Why do I have to be so dumb?
And then he leapt.
Chapter 33
The seal sat in his reflection at the height of his forehead. Before he got too exhausted to be amused, it amused him to be scratching out the dead man’s third eye, or his own.
It took two sweaty desperate days of cramping hands and blood to hit the seal.
He barely felt the nub when he finally reached it; his dogtooth skipped across the uneven knot of luxin like a stone across water for only a few strokes, and before he could stop, the seal broke suddenly.
A section of the prison wall as wide as his own spread arms simply disintegrated into chalky blue dust.
Freedom whispered then, but she said, ‘I’m too far away. You’ll never see me.’
“It’s impossible,” the dead man said. “You built these prisons too well. You’ll never get out.”
The sand was draining through the glass now that Gavin had broken the cell. If he’d been more aware of the seal, he would have slept, waited, gathered his strength before he broke through. As it was, there was no time. A small alarum was rigged to ring in the chambers above if the cell’s seal broke.
Gavin hadn’t remade the alarum for this cell since his brother escaped, but he couldn’t be sure that Andross hadn’t found it, hadn’t repaired it, hadn’t heard it. There was no way to tell what time of day it was, so there was no way to guess when he could trigger the alarm without Andross’s being in his room to hear it. If a slave heard it while Andross was out, she likely wouldn’t know what it was. Gavin couldn’t imagine his father’s trusting anyone as much as he had trusted Marissia. Maybe his father trusted Grinwoody that much.
No. Not even him.
But it didn’t matter. Gavin was committed.
The cell filled the entire space Gavin had carved out of the Chromeria’s rocky heart here. He had burnt through lux torch after lux torch for the light necessary. Here there was only a small area to stand in, and then a single tunnel so low it was necessary to crawl through. A fortune’s worth of hellstone was mortared into the floor and the walls.
His father, of course, had simply been able to take the vertical shaft down to the blue cell. Unfortunately, the cell itself lifted into a new place, and the only way to trigger the controls to lift it was from above. There was no way for Gavin to reach the ceiling of his blue cell—much less break through it—to try to escape that way.
He had to go through his own tunnels and cells.
It seemed Andross hadn’t altered the tunnel from Gavin’s original design. It curved one way into darkness, and then would swoop back so that no blue light could leak through. If Gavin could still draft, the hellstone would have been a huge problem: it would drain any blue luxin from him before he got to the next cell.
A moot point now, but the razor-sharp hellstone would still shred skin and bone if he fell against it.
But he remembered the path: crawl like a bear here on hands and feet, rest a knee here, hand there, crawl again over to here. A singular way that had to be recalled from memory once he made it past the first bend and he was fully in darkness. He rested on a knee after the second bend and reached up. It took him several minutes to find the depression overhead, and there, recessed, was another piece of hellstone, loose in its mortar’s grip. Gavin pulled it free and tucked it in his mouth. It was no larger than a dogtooth, small enough to be missed. Small enough to be swallowed if necessary, and maybe still not kill him coming out the other side. Gavin continued on.
The trapdoor was still where he remembered it.
His heart sank. Apparently Andross had found this tunnel, because the trapdoor had been repaired. The latch was designed to break under the pressure of a person’s weight. He’d wanted to be sure that his brother fell in, instead of triggering it and staying in the tunnel—which was a dead end anyway. But since the real Gavin fell in, it had been reset.
Gavin felt nauseated. He’d expected it, of course. His father wasn’t stupid, and he would have searched thoroughly, but Gavin had hoped against reason that his father wouldn’t find the other cells. If Andross had found the other cells, then he’d found his eldest son’s rotting body.
Dear Orholam, forgive me.
Gavin put his full weight on the trapdoor and tumbled down into the green cell.
He stood to find that it, too, had been repaired. His brother had blown a hole in one wall, but there was no sign of that now, just perfect, slightly undulating, woody green luxin. Gray to Gavin’s eye.
He stood, slightly wobbly despite that he’d expected the fall. He was not well.
“Long time no see, Guile,” the dead man said. He looked somehow different in the green wall. A worse reflection, of course, but some trick of Gavin’s memory made even his voice different, as if, in a green wall, the dead man must have green characteristics. His voice husky, something wild in his leer.