“This is bullshit.”
Chalen’s pockmarked face twisted into a nasty smile. “No, it is the consequence of your and your brother’s decisions. He chose to steal from me. You chose to intercede on his behalf. You are chafing under decisions made freely, and that is folly considering you could have stayed out of this.You opened these doors. If you do not like the rooms revealed, that is nothing I, nor any other, can help you with.”
She thought of her brother hanging like a dead body between those two guards.
“Where is my torch,” she demanded.
Chalen laughed softly. “Lo, how I wish I had met you at an earlier time in my life. You would have been a formidable lover.”
Never, she thought as a guard appeared beside her.
She accepted a flame-topped torch and stepped into the corridor.
“A word of advice,” Chalen said.
Ahmare glanced over her shoulder. “You can keep it. And go to hell.”
He flashed that broken-picket-fence smile again, and she knew she was going to see those ragged teeth in her nightmares. “My place in Dhunhd is quite well assured already, but I thank you for the kind regards. No, I would remind you that it is considered polite to return things you borrow. You must bring the weapon I lend you back to me in good working order. If you do not, you will find that we have another debt to settle.”
With that, the panel slid back into place on a resounding thunch and she was locked in.
The torch’s hiss was much louder now, and as she moved it from side to side to assess where she was, its heat warmed her face. More glistening walls. More rats on the floor—
Off in the distance, she heard falling water—like a river?
Walking forward, she was careful where she put her feet. The light from the flame did not carry far, the darkness consuming the illumination as a meal long denied. Shadows thrown from such an uneven, flickering source made it seem as though insects were crawling all over the corridor. Maybe they were.
As her neck prickled, she reached up and brushed at it. The sound of the falling water got louder, a rushing torrent.
The corner came without warning, a wall seeming to jump out at her, and she stopped short so she didn’t slam into the stone. Reorienting herself, she pivoted to the right and kept going.
The first of the iron bars came thirty feet farther on. The lengths were set into the ceiling and the floor, locked in with mortar and stone, and instinct made her stay more than an arm’s length back from them.
It was a cell. Like you would see in a zoo.
And something was in there.
Stopping, she swung the torch in a wide arc. What she wanted to see were racks of guns. Bins of bullets. Halters to strap weapons onto the body.
That was what she was looking for.
The rushing water was so loud, it drowned out—
Torches mounted on the walls exploded into flame, and she jumped with a shout. Wheeling toward the bars, she waved her own light source around, trying to see into the cell. Slivers of something shockingly white caught her eye down on the floor.
Bones. They were long bones, cleaned of meat and lying in bunches, pick-up sticks scattered after a large animal like a cow had been consumed. Or . . . perhaps it had been a guard who had gotten himself “fired.”
And they weren’t all she saw. There was a strange, shimmering optical illusion about five feet behind the bars, an iridescent . . .
It was a waterfall. A ten-or fifteen-foot-long waterfall cascaded from a thin slit that zigzagged across the ceiling. Storm runoff, she thought. That had to be the source.
“Who’s there?” she demanded.
A shape appeared on the far side of the water, looming. As her heart began to pound, her mouth went dry.
“Show yourself.” She took another step back. “I’m not afraid of you.”
When her shoulder blades banged into something cold and uneven, she realized she’d hit the opposite wall and was reminded that she was trapped in here. The good news was that there was no break that she could see in the lineup of bars, and they were so closely set, nothing big enough to chew those bones could squeeze through them.
Just keep going, she told herself as she brushed at the back of her neck again. The guns had to be farther along—
Ahmare screamed so loudly she flushed bats out of the dark corners.
4
SPRINGTIME HAD COME IN the midst of nuclear winter.
Called forth by an unexpected presence, Duran’s body breached the water that poured into his cell, parting the falling rush, disrupting the chaotic crystal flow. The summer rain was warm as it hit the top of his head and flowed down his long hair, bathing his shoulders and his torso in a respite from the cold that he knew from experience wouldn’t last long.
The chill in the dungeon was like the curse he lived under, pervasive and unrelenting, and he would not have gone near the balmy rush ordinarily. The return to the cold he lived in was harder to bear than any brief relief was worth.
It was better to remain in pain than to have to resettle into it.