22. Rushing toward freedom

The bong woke me up, and as usual, I was up and about before my consciousness returned to the waking world. I stretched, yawned, scratched myself, and finally opened my eyes wide. All my companions were waking up, and some were already moving towards the gate with varying degrees of energy… all except Dil, who was still fast asleep. I pulled him by the feet and sang to him:

“Come on, lazy demorjed prince, wake up, the bong is ringing and the bread is here!”

At last, I managed to rouse him from his lethargy, but we were the last to arrive at the gate and take the bread. As on the previous day, there was one loaf left, and the Masked One asked:

“Didn’t you find the one that was missing?”

We shook our heads, and Syrdio the Galloper said:

“If she didn’t come back, it means she’s dead. She’s not coming back. It’s not fair to make us take three more pearls.”

The masked man shrugged and replied the same as the day before:

“Bring me her body, and I’ll settle for ninety.”

Begging silently, I reached between the bars for the remaining bread. What good was it to him, anyway? He didn’t need sokwata. However, Lof ignored me, put the bread back in the bag, and repeated his refrain:

“Don’t fight and behave yourself. See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow, sir!”

Unlike usual, I said nothing and just watched the Masked One walk away. When the exit bong sounded, I took another bite of my bread and went to sit on the platform with Rogan and Dil. While the former ate with a distracted look, Little Prince chewed his bread energetically. He hadn’t liked the first day in the tunnels of light at all, and I bet he wouldn’t like this one either. Especially because today I had thought of sending him fishing for good; the day before, I had collected the three pearls for him, I had stayed in the tunnels forever because it was getting harder and harder to find pearls, and I didn’t want to do that again. I sighed. The sooner we went to get those pearls, the sooner we would be back.

“Let’s go,” I said when I had finished my bread. “I’ll teach you to fish.”

Dil followed me without protest, and we were already entering the central tunnel full of light when I heard a bong! and stopped dead.

“Sla,” I murmured, my heart beating wildly.

I turned suddenly and hurried back to the cavern of the platform. My companions had approached the gate and were scanning the tunnel, full of hope. They all knew of Slaryn’s escape. Some thought she wouldn’t return, like Syrdio, but others were more optimistic and imagined that she would return with an army of Savior Spirits. When I heard someone snort and turn to walk a few steps away, I could see the person walking down the tunnel and understood the general disappointment. It was Manras. I smiled and hurried to slip between the gwaks.

“Manras!”

“Sharpy!” he exclaimed, his voice trembling. He ran to the gate and handed me a bunch of keys. I couldn’t believe it. With trembling hands I took the bunch of keys, and the Black Cat snatched them from my hands.

“We can’t go out like this,” he explained. “Slaryn said she had a plan.”

I glared at him.

“Give me the keys!”

“No,” Yerris refused calmly.

I felt the tension rising between the gwaks.

“Then give them to me,” Syrdio intervened with an imperative hiss.

“Open the door!” Nat the Diver said.

“I want to get out!” Venoms said.

“Silence!” Yerris thundered.

Syrdio pushed him roughly against the iron bars of the gate, and the Black Cat’s eyes glittered. I got scared and yelled:

“That’s enough!”

But no one listened to me in the tumult that broke out. Syrdio punched the Black Cat in the face, leaving him dazed. He took the keys away from him, and I only managed to grab Dil so that he wouldn’t be crushed by all the gwaks who were crowding against the gate.

“Quiet!” Rogan roared.

Amazingly, the noise subsided slightly, but Syrdio continued to try the keys in the lock. He found the right one and opened the gate. But there was still the padlock. He opened it on the second attempt, and they helped him to remove the chain. When the gate opened completely, a silence of excitement and fear fell. The first to step through was Manras, in the other direction: he rushed towards Dil, grabbed his arm, and also held on to mine, and suddenly seemed much calmer. He’d just got his real family back. I smiled.

“Bless your soul, Manras,” I said, moved.

The little dark elf returned my smile, and I looked up at my fellow miners. The first gwak to get bold and decide to cross the threshold was Parysia the Venoms. She took several steps and… Syrdio held her by the arm.

“Wait a moment,” he said. “First, we have to arm ourselves. Pick up every rock you can find. Quickly.”

I obeyed him, and with Manras and Dil, I rushed along with the others to collect stones from the cave. When I had collected several, I returned to the gate. The Black Cat and Syrdio were staring at each other and grumbling. I dared not come too near, but I could hear them anyway.

“You’re going to get us killed,” Yerris growled.

“Better a handful of us die than all of us,” Syrdio replied.

The Black Cat gave him a sarcastic smile.

“We’ll all die anyway if the alchemist doesn’t give us the sokwata, isturbag.”

“Isturbag yourself, Black Cat. I may have been a fool when I stole those pearls. But now you are the fool: the gate is open. We’re free.”

“No. We’re dead,” Yerris corrected him darkly.

Syrdio ignored him, and seeing that there were already a number of us waiting by the gate, he looked at us, and his expression clouded, perhaps because he understood at that moment that we were waiting for his permission to cross the threshold.

“Give me some stones,” he demanded. We gave some to him, and after putting them in his pockets, he said firmly, “We’re all going to get out of here alive. First rule: don’t make any noise. If an Ojisary appears and gets in our way, throw stones at his head. Is that clear?” We nodded. Syrdio swallowed and said, “Well, let’s go.”

I spread my arms to hold back Manras and Dil and waited for the others to pass. Rogan stopped by the open gate, looking at us with surprise.

“Aren’t you coming, Sharpy? You like the well so much you want to stay in there?” he joked.

I rolled my eyes and turned to the Black Cat. He had not moved an inch, and his dark face did not ease my concern.

“Come on, Yerris,” I encouraged him.

The semi-gnome sighed but nodded.

“I have no choice. Let’s go.”

I gave him some stones, and we ran out to the back stairs. We passed the other gwaks, and gesturing to Manras and Dil, I explained in a whisper:

“They know the way.”

Manras had left the metal door open, and I hoped that the ruckus we had made before had not reached the ears of the Ojisaries. As soon as we passed through the door, the tunnel plunged into almost complete darkness. Only a very faint light could be seen at the bottom. After a moment’s hesitation, I decided to cast a spell of harmonic light. It didn’t matter that they knew I could use harmonics: they already knew I was a Black Dagger anyway.

The way was very easy, there was no other way possible. We went on for a while, and then my light faded, and I did not put it back on, for the light at the end of the tunnel was already sufficient for us to see. Although we were thirty gwaks, we made less noise than a spider, or so it seemed to me. I only hoped that there was no troop of Ojisaries hiding behind that door.

I raised a hand to stop them all, and, Spirits be praised, they obeyed me. I stood in front of the door, touched it, and cast a perceptive spell through the cracks, but I only succeeded in stupidly consuming my energy stem. I winced and, taking a breath, turned the handle. The door creaked as it opened. There was no one behind it.

Before I could react, Manras slipped through the opening, dragging Dil behind him, and he motioned for us to follow him. We did through an empty room with half-formed rock walls. We passed through a doorway into a corridor. And at last, after so long in an underworld, we saw the light of day. It was dim and unlit, but it was daylight. As soon as we saw it, some of us lost all caution and ran straight for the light. I followed them, fearing that at any moment the Ojisaries would cry out and draw their weapons, and my fear was well founded. As soon as we opened the door to the outer corridor I heard a roar which was half muffled by the pouring rain.

“Aleeeert!”

The first gwaks threw stones at the watchman as they ran, splashing in the mud and screaming at the top of their lungs. The Ojisary shouted, backing away:

“Sons of rats! Demons…!”

A stone hit him in the temple, and the Ojisary slumped down. We passed over him, almost flying, when another door in the corridor suddenly opened and another Ojisary appeared. They threw stones at him, and one of us, who had taken the bowl in which we put the pearls, smashed it over his head. The Ojisary collapsed. One less.

“Run! Run!” we shouted to each other.

At one point, Manras slipped in the mud, and I braked to help him up. The little dark elf’s eyes were so wide open that they seemed ready to pop out of their sockets.

“Sharpy!” he shouted.

A third Ojisary had just appeared a few feet away with a dagger in his hand. Before he fell on us, I pulled out a large stone and threw it at him, hitting him squarely on the nose and causing him to howl in pain.

“RUN!” I bellowed.

I pulled Manras by the sleeve, and we ran like two wild devils, following Dil and the others. The dead end was not very long, and as soon as we reached the alleys of the Labyrinth, we all scattered.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!” a voice shouted.

I had just entered an alleyway with Dil and Manras, and in dismay, I turned my head to see that an Ojisary was aiming at Rogan, who was running behind us. Before I had time to take in the situation, the Ojisary fired, the bolt went off with a whistling sound, and the Priest fell to the ground.

“Rooogan!” I cried. Horror almost paralyzed me, but a part of my mind told me that it was nonsense to remain paralyzed in an emergency.

I turned back, but instead of stopping where the Priest had fallen, I reached the Ojisary before he could reload his crossbow, and fired a mortic blast at him. I saw him stagger, surprised. He dropped the crossbow, but he did not lose consciousness. With a stone, I struck him with all my strength and saw him finally fall and give up pulling out his dagger.

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The rain was pouring down, and the screams, if there were any, did not reach my ears. Clumsily, I stepped back and returned to where Rogan lay. I bent down and held out a numb hand to the bolt that had been stuck in his side. I withdrew my bloody hand. The Priest was breathing rapidly.

“D-Draen?” he gasped.

“Rogan,” I whispered in a high-pitched voice. “Are you in a lot of pain? Tell me you’re not going to die, please, Priest…”

The Priest clawed at the mud with a scarred hand, and I took it from him, sobbing, as he said with effort:

“Thank you… Sharpy. I… never really had… a real friend. No one could ever stand me… as well as you do. You were my friend, weren’t you? Please tell me you were.”

His interspersed words became incomprehensible. Manras and Dil, instead of running as I had asked them to, had come closer and were now looking at the scene with distressed and bewildered expressions. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I breathed in sharply.

“I am, Rogan. I’m your friend. You’re not going to die. Please don’t die…”

I heard someone shouting something through the rain, and a few seconds later, I felt a hand on my shoulder shaking me violently. It was Yerris.

“What the hell are you still doing here?” he shouted. “Move it!”

I looked at him as if what he was saying didn’t make any sense, and I shook my head. In a neutral voice, perhaps a little shaky, I said:

“We need to get him to a doctor. Help me, Black Cat.”

The semi-gnome seemed to be about to shout at me again to move, but then he changed his mind and gave me a hand. We both took Rogan by one shoulder and dragged him down the muddy alley, down the slope. Manras and Dil led the way. From time to time, I glanced in horror at Rogan’s semi-conscious face, and as we moved forward, I tried to change his morjas to jaypu to give him more energy, but it was not easy to concentrate, and for some reason, my spells could not find their way to the bones.

We passed several silent Cats who perhaps did not even really pay attention to us. We were gwaks, after all, and many preferred to know nothing of our troubles. However, when we came out of the Labyrinth and into the Spirit Square, in the lower part of the Cats, we saw a man with a cart passing by, and I shouted to him:

“Please, sir! Please help us, he’s dying!”

The man in the cart, perhaps thinking it was some trick to rob him, did not pull the reins at once, but something he then saw through the rain, perhaps the blood on our hands and on Rogan’s shirt, convinced him that we were not pretending, and his heart must have broken, and to my great relief, he brought the cart to a halt.

“Merciful spirits!” he exclaimed. “What has happened to him?”

“A bolt, sir! An isturbagged man shot him,” I explained.

To his credit, the man in the cart did not hesitate even for a second to help us hoist Rogan into his cart, and he calmly said:

“I’ll take him to the Passion Flower Hospital.”

“Can we go with him?” Yerris asked. “Please.”

The man nodded his consent.

“Get on,” he said.

I watched Yerris out of the corner of my eye as we climbed. The further we got from the Labyrinth, the more I could feel him relax. Kneeling beside Rogan, I checked to see if his heart was still beating and whispered: “Courage, Rogan, don’t die, don’t die…” We were driving up Tarmil Avenue at a good pace when the half-gnome leaned over and murmured in my ear:

“Listen, shyur. The alchemist gave me some sokwata. I tried to save him, but… he was chained. He said that with what I took, we’ll last two moons if we only use it when we start to feel the lack of sokwata. He also said… that, at the moment, there is no cure, but he thinks he would be able to make one. I don’t know if I trust him, but… it could be true.”

Without looking at him, I heard all these words without really processing them. Rogan was dying: I couldn’t think of anything else. Yerris patted me on the shoulder.

“Try not to say too much if they ask you questions at the hospital about what happened, it runs? It wouldn’t do us any good if the flies got their noses into it and took the alchemist away from us; I doubt it, but hey… Just say that you found the Priest in that state and that you didn’t see anything more. And if you can avoid being asked questions, all the better. It runs?” he repeated.

I swallowed and nodded. Yerris hesitated and added:

“Trust the Priest. He speaks much of spirits, but he will not become one until he has wrinkles and white hair.” I felt his hand squeeze my shoulder as a gesture of consolation and farewell. “Let’s meet tomorrow at noon in the Evening Park, huh?”

I nodded again and saw him jump out of the cart and run out into the rain. Who knows where he was going.

We made the rest of the journey in complete silence. Under other circumstances, I would have been delighted to see Estergat again and to feel the wind, the warm summer rain and the open air, but at the moment, I could only stand still as a mixture of tension, oppression, and fear gripped my whole body.

At last, we passed through the garden of the Passion Flower, and as soon as the carriage stopped, our savior suggested that I should go and ask the doctors inside the hospital for help. I ran out, entered the hospital, cried out in anguish, and soon returned with two nurses carrying a stretcher. They took Rogan down, and I was about to follow with Manras and Dil, when I saw the man in the cart waving the reins, and as he drove away, I shouted in the rain:

“Thank you, sir!”

I don’t know if he heard me, but that man would go home with the blessing of a gwak. I ran off behind the nurses. We followed them through the main hall, and then they took a corridor, and a tall, chubby, light blue-skinned kadaelf in a white coat stepped in our way.

“Where do you think you are going, boys?”

“The one on the stretcher is our friend,” I explained, agitated.

The nurse pouted, looking us up and down.

“I see. I’m sorry, but you can’t come in here. This is the operations section. Follow me, please. What’s your friend’s name?”

“Rogan,” I said. And I glanced down the hall. The nurses with the stretcher had disappeared.

“Mm-mm,” the kadaelf said. He had slipped behind a small table in the main hall and was grabbing a quill and binoculars as he settled in. “Rogan what?”

I arched my eyebrows.

“Well… I don’t know, sir. But he’s badly hurt.”

“What happened?”

I sighed.

“I don’t know. We found him already wounded. A madman must have attacked him, I don’t know.”

“So his injury wasn’t an accident?”

I shook my head and, under the surprised looks of Manras and Dil, replied:

“Maybe it was an accident. I don’t know what happened, I only know that Rogan is very badly injured, and if you don’t save him, your ancestors will wring your ears off for it.”

The kadaelf looked at me through his binoculars, his pen hanging on his notebook.

“Does your friend have money to pay for the care?”

Blasthell. I hadn’t thought of that. Sajits and their omnipresent money… I grunted and said:

“I don’t know. How much is it?”

“Well… that depends on what the doctor in charge of him decides. If he has money, he will pay for the care and stay. If he doesn’t, he’ll have to work for the Hospital until he’s paid for the service he received. How old is he?”

I put on an air of ignorance and said:

“Twelve, or thirteen maybe, I don’t know.”

“Does he have any relatives I can contact?”

I bit my lip, shrugged, and lied:

“Dunno.”

“You don’t know much about him for a friend,” the kadaelf observed, “What’s your name?”

I opened my mouth, closed it again, and under his increasingly surprised gaze at my silence, I decided that I had said enough, grabbed Dil and Manras by the sleeve, and stepped back.

“Eh!” the kadaelf protested. “Where are you going?”

“Leg it, comrades,” I muttered.

I turned and ran out of there. We did not stop until we reached the Esplanade. The rain had subsided, and it was hardly raining at all. There was even a glimpse of sunshine through the clouds, and I saw a few bold people coming out into the street without umbrellas.

“Why did we run, Sharpy?” Manras asked, huffing.

I shrugged.

“Because I didn’t like that guy’s questions.”

I walked across the huge square to the Manticore Fountain and finished cleaning my hands of blood and mud. Immediately afterwards, I sat down on the stone curb and looked around. I drew in a breath, listened to the sounds of the city, the shouts of the vendors, the creaking of the horse-drawn carriage wheels, the insistent rustling of the leaves of the trees that lined the square, and a broad smile stretched my lips as I found myself free at last. However, when I thought of Rogan again, my smile faded.

“These Ojisaries will pay dearly,” I said.

Dil was throwing the stones he had in his pockets one by one, and Manras, with his elbow resting on the wall, was playing with a green leaf on the water of the fountain, pulling it by the stem. Neither of them seemed to be paying much attention to what they were doing. And of course they wouldn’t: only an hour ago, we were still in Ojisary territory, throwing stones at our exploiters.

“Sharpy,” Manras said without looking up. “Do you think your friend will make it?”

I swallowed my saliva.

“As he would say, let us pray for the spirits to heal him. And for the doctors,” I added.

Dil dropped his last stone, sat down beside me, and said:

“So we’re never going back to the Ojisaries again, are we?”

“Mmph. No, of course not,” I said. “Listen. They’ll be looking for us, that’s for sure. And I don’t think they’ll forgive us for what we did… stoning them and all. If they get their hands on us, they’ll kill us, for sure.” I saw them widen their eyes and smiled casually. “Bah, don’t be afraid, shyurs: the Ojisaries won’t catch us, because we’re gwak Cats, and gwak Cats have more than one trick up their sleeve. First and foremost important thing,” I said, standing up energetically, “a gwak Cat thinks much better on a full stomach, so… I’m gonna take advantage of the fact that I look like a dirt-poor kid in critical need, and in no time at all, I’ll be back with something to eat, how’s that?” I took off Dil’s cap with a nimble movement, and seeing that they were going to follow me, I added in an expert tone, “No way I’m going to panhandle in a group, it scares the customers. Don’t move from here.”

I wandered off alone to the stalls that surrounded the square, and making sure that there were no guards in the vicinity, I went in search of charitable people. I spotted a promising face near an apple stall and approached, holding out my cap and putting on a distressed and pleading face. But, just as I began my lament, the man went to pay for a small bag full of apples, became distracted when he heard me, dropped several coins on the floor, and swore:

“Demons.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get them for you!” I said.

I picked them up. If I had had a shirt on, I could have slipped some coin discreetly into the sleeve, but under the gaze of the apple buyer and seller, I could hardly put anything in my cap without them seeing me. After promptly retrieving them, I handed them to the man, waited for the seller to give him the bag of apples, and complained:

“Please, sir. I’m hungry. Give me something, by the Spirits of Mercy.”

The man, who had had time to feel sorry for me and see my goodwill, gave me nothing more and nothing less than one fivenail. I huffed.

“Thank you, sir! May your ancestors bless you.”

The man smiled benignly and without a word walked away with his bag of apples.

Wow, wow, I thought, incredulous. The first person I asked that day and they gave me one fivenail. Now I understood why my namesake Swift said that a career as a beggar was more profitable than as a newsboy. Smiling, I ran to buy a loaf of bread and returned to the Manticore Fountain. My friends had hardly moved, and both saw me appear with enthusiasm, so I deduced that the Ojisaries must not have given them much to eat either. I divided the bread into three pieces, gave them the two larger ones, kept the third for myself, and for the first time in a moon and a half, I ate real bread, fresh from the oven and free from strange products.

“What are we gonna do?” Manras asked, as we finished eating.

I swallowed my mouthful and replied:

“The first thing is to keep the Ojisaries from getting their hands on us. You guys, if you see any Ojisaries that you know, you tell me, okay? And we scram the hell out.”

“Even if it’s Lof?” Manras asked. “That guy’s not so bad.”

“Even if it’s Lof,” I confirmed. His question, oddly enough, consoled me a little because, for some strange reason, I had feared that one of the stoned Ojisaries might have been Lof the Masked One. It wasn’t that I rationally sympathized with him either, but… well, he’d taken care of us every day, feeding us… I didn’t want to hurt him.

At that moment, the bells of the Great Temple rang, and I counted.

“Seven o’clock,” I said. “Time to look for a good shelter. Onward, shyurs.”

They followed me, and we walked down Imperial Avenue at a good pace. After passing through an almost empty market, I cut through a deserted street, heading straight for the Estergat River. My young friends did not say a word until we crossed the Fal Bridge and entered the area of Canals and factories.

“Sharpy! Where are we going?” Manras asked then.

I replied cheerfully.

“To the birdhouse!”

I took them to the Crypt. They did not at all share my confidence in the trees of this beautiful home, and realizing it, I said to them, as we entered the forest:

“Listen, instead of streetlights, there are trunks, and instead of streets and squares, there are paths and clearings, but apart from that, it’s a bit the same, and here we won’t find any crazy sajit coming to disturb us. Besides, from there, we see the stars as well as in the valley. You’ll see it when night falls, unless the clouds don’t go away. Come on, let’s go on!” I encouraged them.

And breathing in the smell of the forest, a strange euphoria came over me, and I laughed when I saw the unconvinced faces of my friends.

“Come on, come on!”

I trotted between the trunks and bushes and heard their cries behind me.

“Sharpy, don’t let us behind!” Manras begged me.

I stopped, turned around and smiled as I saw them running in a hurry.

“Onward, comrades,” I urged them. “Come on, we’re almost there.”

“I heard… that there are monsters in this forest,” Manras said as he joined me, panting.

“Boo. Monsters are everywhere,” I assured.

At last, we came to the foot of the huge tree which had been my shelter the last time I was here, and Manras, having seen me climb nimbly, imitated me and smiled broadly as he reached my branch.

“Come on, Little Prince!” he encouraged.

“Courage and bravery!” I approved. “We’re like kings up here. Aren’t we, Manras?”

“Ragingly!” the little dark elf confirmed.

And as Dil still hesitated, resting and removing his foot on a protrusion of the trunk, I said to him:

“The wolf is coming!”

The little prince was startled, and although I do not believe that he had fallen for it, he finally decided to climb up to us. The sky was already getting darker when the three of us settled down in the heart of the tree.

“Now let’s snooze, shyurs!” I said.

I listened to their breathing and the songs of the night birds and insects. Despite the afternoon rain, our shelter was relatively dry thanks to the leaves. The disadvantage was that I could hardly see the sky because of the leaves.

“Sharpy!” Manras murmured.

I yawned and turned my head.

“What?”

“What’s that noise?”

“What noise?”

“The pwiii,” Manras explained, imitating the sound.

“Oh. That’s an owl,” I said.

“Ah,” Manras sighed. “And what is an owl?”

I smiled in the growing darkness, for Manras’ question reminded me of the ones I’d asked Yerris and Yalet the year before, except instead of asking me what a guard was, he asked me what an owl was.

“It’s a bird,” I replied.

After a silence, Manras whispered:

“Sharpy. Are you awake?”

“Hmm…”

“You think my brother’s mad at what I did?”

I opened my eyes and choked back a snort.

“Blasthell, Manras. Natural that he should be angry, and not a little. That cove is a devil.”

There was silence.

“I don’t want to see him ever again,” Manras murmured.

I smiled understandingly and reached out a hand to shake his arm.

“Then come with me, shyur. Send your brother hunt clavicles. We’re friends, right? And more than that. You’re the one who got us all out of the well with the key. We’re brothers, real brothers, the kind that protect and support each other. You, Dil, and me. Ain’t we?”

I could see his smile in the shadows, but it was Dil who answered:

“We are.”

And Manras supported him:

“Ragingly.”

The silence fell and gradually our breathing became more regular. It took me a long time to fall asleep, because to feel free again, after being locked up in a hell for so long, was an unforgettable experience. I only hoped that Rogan could remember it for a long time, too.