“Go to the compound and the barracks,” I say to Beswe. “Take everyone, every rock, and kill them while they’re down.”
I climb down the rope safety ladder. The platform has crashed all the way down the shaft. The guard I pushed lies sprawled amid the debris, and two slaves have been crushed beneath the heavy baskets. Children cower as slaves and criminals struggle with the guards. The only reason the guards don’t slaughter the laborers is that they are heaving and vomiting even as they fight for their lives. A group of men led by Menesis come running out of the darkness and lay into the guards with the mallets and chisels with which they work the rock.
I can barely hold myself up by clinging to the rope ladder as the last guard is slaughtered with a chisel in the eye. A haze darkens my vision, and I don’t know if it is the sight of blood and violence, or my still-inflamed eye, that makes me woozy and disoriented.
Silence spills out from the miners until all I hear is their ragged breathing and the hiss of a burning lamp. There is something grotesque about the way the dead lie there with no spark. Where does a spark go when it departs the flesh, when there is no net to catch it?
Suddenly in my spinning memory I’m sealed in the oracle’s tomb with my family, clutching a stillborn infant in my arms. I remember how the coffin jolted sideways, how the corpse of Lord Ottonor rolled out toward me, how his cold fingers touched my ankle. How in a panic I dropped the baby’s tiny body onto that of the dead lord. Yet there was still a spark alive in the lord, a life stolen from an innocent girl to help him walk to his own tomb.…
“What do we do now, Spider?” Menesis asks.
I have to focus or we won’t succeed.
“Sweep the mine. Look for stragglers, for guards in hiding. Leave no one behind. We’ll strip the compound of supplies and set out at once. Most important of all, don’t anyone drink or touch the soup.”
“Whoever goes up that ladder first is going to get a sword in his face,” says one of the convicts.
“I’ll go up first.” I start but I’m trembling too hard and have to come back down.
The pulley has broken. Men set to work fixing it as Menesis moves up the ladder with a guard’s whip and a sword slung over his back.
A voice shouts down the shaft. It’s Djesa.
“Efea will rise! Can you hear me?”
“Yes! Yes!” my compatriots shout.
“It’s safe. They’re all dead!”
I shout, “Get wagons, supplies, everything! We have to go right away.”
As the others clamber up, I sit in a daze, almost confounded that it worked. And yet we’re not safe yet. We still have so far to go, a searing journey across the unforgiving Stone Desert knowing that pursuit will be on our heels all too soon.
The shadows of the dead men flicker at the edges of the lamplight. What if their shadows swim over the ground and crawl into my body? Will I be strong enough to resist? I want to move away from all this death but I’m so tired. I didn’t feel the pain in my wrist when I climbed down but it throbs so badly now that it takes all my energy just to breathe. My eye hurts every time I blink.
“Spider?” Selukon looms out of the darkness, carrying the last lit lamp.
How long have I been sitting here?
He goes on. “The mine is cleared. All the tools and weapons have been taken up.”
A creak causes us both to startle, but it’s Menesis, descending on the repaired pulley.
“Spider! It’s time to go. Are you all right?”
“Yes.” One word is all I have breath for.
We are the last ones out, leaving the bodies behind.
The women have done their work. Wagons are hitched, supplies loaded, the weakest clinging to tailgates or crammed together on the front benches beside the drivers. There’s only one road out of the ravine, one path to freedom. For some reason they are waiting for me to take the lead, so even though I’m so exhausted I want only to lie down and sleep, I trudge forward.
Behind me, the wagons roll. We are on our way.
The sun is merciless, and I’m grateful when Djesa runs up and dumps an entire bucket of precious water over my head. The people around me laugh, the sound rising into the air as joy and strength. Some begin singing a song I’ve never heard before; its eerie melody winds a prayerful cadence around my bones.
You are the breath that sparks life in us, the earth that fashions us, the sun whose rays illuminate us, the water that nourishes us. You are the heart.
Hope burns so hard my five souls swell and strengthen. Even in our ragtag ranks we can survive the Stone Desert. We can. We will.
Then I hear a faint rumbling sound. At first I think I’m hallucinating. The sky is cloudless, as always, so it can’t be thunder. It rolls on and on. Vibrations tremble through the soles of my feet.
I hold up a hand to halt the line, then walk forward past a sentinel tower, where a guard sprawls dead in the open door, an overturned soup bowl at his side. As I come around a bend in the gully I see a horrible sight ahead of me. So stunning. So unfair after everything we risked and achieved.
Wagons fly the Inkos temple banner. In long lines chained between them stride new prisoners for the mines, mostly Efeans but with a few Saroese and foreign people scattered among them. The Saroese guardsmen haven’t spotted me yet. They’re not expecting to meet armed and desperate people. If we rush them, take them unawares, free the captives who are with them to fight beside us… and yet that’s what’s odd. The prisoners don’t walk like beaten, cowed people. They walk like proud soldiers.
That’s when I see Ro-emnu.
He’s seated beside the driver of the first wagon. He’s wearing no vest, leaving his torso bare in the manner of Commoners and slaves, but he looks sturdy and well fed, glossy with health and strength. He scans the hills with a piercing gaze, as if he’s already composing a poem about this sun-blasted day. At first I can’t believe it’s him. Surely I am dreaming. My lips form his name but I don’t have enough breath to speak. Footsteps hurry up from behind as Menesis, Selukon, and Djesa join me.
“A curse on fortune,” says Selukon with a cynical laugh.
“We fight,” says Djesa.
“What do you say, Spider?” asks Menesis.
“Wait,” I say.
Ro’s gaze skims over us. He doesn’t recognize me. He must think we’re random workers wandering the road.
I take a step forward and with a last burst of strength open my arms wide in Spider’s gesture of triumph, throwing her webs to the wind.
His eyes widen. He grabs a whip off the seat next to him, leaps from the moving wagon, and runs to me.
“Jessamy!”
“Who are you?” Menesis steps in front of me, brandishing a sword he’s taken from a dead guard.
Ro slashes the whip through the air for emphasis. “This is the Lion Guard of the Efean army, come to liberate this mine.”
“Too late, Honored Poet.” I can’t help but sound cocky even though I’m beyond exhausted and barely able to keep to my feet. “We liberated ourselves.”