Redden Ohmsford woke from a restless sleep and immediately wondered whether this was the day he would finally be killed. He lay on his bed of straw in his darkened cell, the stone block walls damp with moisture and the air chill and stale. There were no windows and only a single heavy door. A tiny horizontal slit cut into the door’s thick wood admitted a glimmer of light from pitch-coated torches burning in the hallway, and a hint of fresh air that wafted down into the depths into which he had been cast.
Here, any semblance of normal life had been extinguished. No sounds, no movements, no anything. Hallways like the one without, doors similar to his, and a pervasive suffocating silence that shrouded everything. He knew this much only because of what he had seen while being brought here by his jailers. How long ago had it been now? Days? Weeks? He had no way of telling. This deep underground, time stopped entirely. He ate and drank his prisoner’s meals, he slept on the straw in his squalid accommodations, he sat in the darkness and fought to keep his fears and doubts in check, and he waited for the inevitable.
At some point in time, they were going to kill him. They were going to come for him and they were going to drag him out. And no matter how hard he pleaded with them, they were going to kill him.
They would kill the Ard Rhys, as well, if they hadn’t already done so. He had no way of knowing at this point if she were alive or dead. He hadn’t seen her since they had brought the two of them to this fortress, to this massive sprawling complex of walls and towers and battlements built of black stone rimmed in iron and situated on a bluff that rose a thousand feet above the lands beneath it. Here inside the Forbidding, this keep was the home of the Straken Lord, and the seat of the supreme power that dominated this monstrous world.
The journey to reach their imprisonment had been nightmarish. They had been hauled in wagons fitted with cages. Khyber Elessedil was sprawled on the wooden floor across from him, both of them bound and gagged and chained to the bars so they could not reach each other or even speak, Pleysia’s head spiked on a pole just outside, where they could watch it bounce and sway as the wagon rolled on across miles of desolate country. Huge beasts that vaguely resembled oxen hauled the wagons, while whip-wielding drivers that looked like huge toads sat stone-still atop wooden seats, their eyes directed straight ahead. Wolves prowled the perimeter—huge shaggy beasts, eyes burning with hunger. They growled and snarled and snapped at one another and everything around them. Now and again, they lunged at the cages as if intending to tear them open and devour the prisoners inside.
And the creatures that served the Straken Lord as soldiers and handlers and minions stalked without. They were Goblins for the most part, but other things, too—things that had no recognizable names or origin or even purpose, hunching and shuffling and slogging to keep pace with the wagons.
Dust and grit clogged the air, stirred up from the dry, dead earth in which almost nothing grew. A deep haze hung over everything, mingling with grayness that never changed in this world reduced to perpetual twilight. The sky was masked by clouds that hung low against the earth from horizon to horizon; the landscape was bleak and colorless, the smell of it fetid and the taste rank and bitter.
Miles of this desolation passed, and time slowed to a crawl as Redden stared across the cage at Khyber Elessedil and she stared back at him.