Hassani knelt, laughing, and swooped Avani into her arms, spinning amid the flowers. Her pale little darling pecked her cheeks with dozens of kisses. The soft hairs of the 'pillar about the girl's neck tickled Hassani. She didn't care.

Adonissian surprised them both by enveloping them in a hug. The sweet, masculine scent of the beautiful young man pushed Hassani towards delighted delirium. When Avani ran off to play amid the bright, flower-rich meadow, Hassani and Adonissian held each other first tenderly, then passionately. Collapsing to the soft, fragrant bed of the meadow, they lost hours to passion.

“I always knew this is what you did while you were gone.” Denault's voice carried no anger, merely disappointment. Hassani clutched for clothes to cover her nakedness but her fingers scrabbled on cold, bare stone. Denault loomed over her, garbed his finest robes as he stared pitilessly down at her. Blood welled through the rich cloth. His face wore a thick layers of swelling and bruise.

“I didn't. I swear Denault. He's a Phero and I-”

“Doesn't matter now.” Denault turned away, taking Avani's hand as the little girl turned and cast a doubtful look at Hassani.

Avani looked up at Denault. “Amma a bad pers'n?”

“She killed me,” Denault said, leading them towards the edge of the cliff they walked towards unseeing. “She killed your 'pillar too and she'll kill you if she finds you.”

“Denault, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to!” Hassani cried. She tried to stand, but shivers overcame her and no amount of effort could get her even to her knees. “Denault, there's a cliff there!”

“I won' let Amma kill me! I'll hide an' Amma won' ever find me.” Avani lifted her face with childish resolution and confidence.

“Hate me if you want, but don't step off the edge!” Hassani cried, her voice breaking and cracking in her thirst. “Wait. Don't!”

The cliff began to rock and tilt as she clawed her way after her family. She tried to scream as her husband and daughter walked hand-in-hand off the cliff, but it came out a bare croak.

Hassani awoke to gentle swaying. Heat radiated on her face. Hard wooden poles barely padded by a thin blanket pressed painfully against her hips and back. Groans, cries, shouts, and catcalls echoed off stone, distorted by gusting winds. Crustiness sealed her eyes and it took a moment to scrape it away before she could see.

Sheer red cliff walls striated white and pale green. A ribbon of brilliant blue sky high above spilling warm golden sunlight. A foul sewer scent wafting up on the breeze. Wooden cages dangling on ropes, most containing a slave or three. A hundred cages. A thousand. More.

“Berujat,” she croaked, relieved and despairing both. “Avani.”

Naked but for the thin blanket, she lay in a cage barely big enough for her to stretch fully across the diagonal. She'd lost weight and hard-earned muscle. Blisters spotted her sunburnt skin. Her hair hung in densely-matted tangles. A long, crusted scar ran down from her right eye and others traced her forehead, jaw, arms, and chest. Scabs and discolored spots dotted her arms and face, many of them tender. A hundred splinters. It took several minutes before she remembered where all the wounds came from.

Ziggurat. The Aze blade. Flying chunks of shattered gate, splintered weapons, bone shards from Legionnaires ripped to shreds with a single swing. She'd only used it once, but longing to use it again tugged at her. If only she had it now!

A sudden frantic search of her cage set it swaying. She clutched the bars as nausea churned her guts. Pressing her eyes closed kept her from throwing up until the feeling passed. The physical unease faded but mental disquiet swelled. She'd lost everything: Avani. Denault. Deia's gift of the Aze blade, her Inviolate vial, her 'nails, her echoseers. Clothing, dignity, freedom. Family. Duty. Everything.

Her entire world shrank to a single blanket, a cracked clay bowl swarming with flies, and the wooden bars of her cage. And a tender mass of swelling and scar tissue on her shoulder. An owner's brand, its exact shape untraceable in the puckered flesh. A sudden longing for Adonissian made her want hurl herself at the bars.

“Move more like that, been covered by that blanket too much,” a hoarse voice croaked from somewhere above her.

Shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand, she squinted up. A heavily-tanned, filthy, naked, bearded man squatted in a cage a ways off and above her. Staring at her greedily. Hand down near...

Hassani darted her eyes anywhere else, flushed, and wrapped her blanket tighter about her.

“Naw, naw, don't do that! Hey!”

Hassani turned her back to him. “You should be ashamed of yourself, watching a sick, naked woman sleep.”

“Hmph. Looked better when you got here anyway even with all the blood was all over you.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” Hassani huddled down, staring out at the horrible canyon packed with dangling human flesh for the Small Master's Market and the Shackle Pens. She'd heard of the Canyon of Cages and even walked the Market once, but never could she have imagined this.

The dangling cells ranged in size from tiny containers barely big enough to hold children to heavy constructions capable of holding an extended family. Each hung on ropes affixed to a heavy wooden beam. Each beam anchored to the cliff via a brass-hinged mechanism allowing someone to swing the arm in towards the cave mouths and stony ledges carved out of the rocky escarpment. The foul smell rose from the drizzle and patter of excrement raining down from the cages or sluicing down ravines from the city above to cake the canyon floor far below in endlessly-oozing filth that overwhelmed the shallow river below.

Offhand remarks overheard on her previous visit as to the shape of the Canyon of Cages now it made sense. One cliff face angled out such that the canyon's profile narrowed at the top rather than the bottom, the angle allowing placement of lower cages out of the direct downward path of higher. Hassani estimated that she hung two-thirds of the way up; she couldn't imagine the smell for inhabitants of the cages barely off the canyon floor.

She squinted, then recoiled in horror. A series of cages jutted from the canyon floor itself, the slow river of waste flowing through the bars. Tiny figures clung to the roof bars. Just imagining a minute in those cells made her gag. Much less hours... days. A fate worse than death in full view of ten-thousand slaves dangling above it.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

The man above her blew his nose and hollered at her. “I'm done now, no thanks to you. Hope you're more a talker than the two above me. Old woman been there longer 'an me and went blind. Other lost his tongue for somethin'. Easier work for the Feralers if they send him that route, eh? Probably won't bother since he's too old.”

Hassani didn't dignify the man with a response. She pulled her thin, grimy blanket tighter and dug deep for some nugget of hope or will or determination to see her through this.

“Avani's out there, could be in one of those cages right now,” she muttered, squinting and scanning cage after cage. Surely with Avani's unique coloration, she'd be easy to spot. As bad as Hassani's sunburns were, she couldn't imagine how Avani would be faring here. The thought broke her heart.

“Whacha lookin' for?” the man chirped. “If ya got anything snuck away up somewhere could trade it up the line see if we can't find it.”

She ignored his endless stream of questions and chatter for what felt like an hour, the man pressing on until the futility of such an effort finally became clear to him.

“Sorry iff'n my handlin' myself at yer expense rubbed wrong, no play at word intended. Not much to do 'round here might have noticed.” He stood up as much as he could and bowed his legs wide. “Fair's fair iff'n you wanna use my visage to help yerself at it.”

“You are a vile creature.”

“Hey, you're talking to me!” He turned and looked up the curled bundle of an old woman in a cage above him, the woman's long gray hair fluttering in the warm breeze. “Hey, crone! She's talking to me.”

The crone stared off into the distance with her blind eyes, mumbling to herself and clutching what looked like a ragged doll.

“What did you mean 'up the line'?”

“What I get if I tell you?'

“What do you get?” Hassani looked about her incredulously. “I have nothing. Even if I did I couldn't get it to you and even then I wouldn't.”

“I'm Johine, by the way if manners somethin' to ya,” he said, reaching his hands through the bars palms down before laughing and waving them around like a madman. “And you got two things at least, both worth somethin' here.”

“I'm not showing you my body again.”

He snorted a laugh. “Quick one, you are. Good thing you got a second thing then.”

She sighed and shifted, hunting vainly for a more comfortable position in the too-small cage.

“Do I want to know? Please don't smile like that, I can smell your teeth rotting from here even over the stink from down there.” Her emphatic downward gesture sent him into rolling paroxysms of laughter.

When he recovered, he wiped his eyes and nodded. “You sound like some one too fancy fer a cage. Maybe why you got a perch so high up here. I just got lucky.”

“My name is Hass...” she trailed off, realizing mid-word how dangerous a name could be if Rega still sought her. She doubted it, but she'd heard enough rumors of Rega's relentless, rigid attention to detail to maintain vigilance.

“Hass? Short like a Dynast, eh? Must come from pretty 'toity stock. No worries of runnin' into one of thems here so guess it's safe. Maybe you know more than most folk here then.” He stuck his head between the bars to let his beard and hair flutter in the breeze. “Calms come now and again, can hear better and pick some words outta the wind, but rest of the time it's just me, Crone, and Mutey here 'till you come along.”

“How long have you been here?” she said, shuddering at a claustrophobic feeling like the cage was shrinking. Deep breaths helped her find calm. Barely. “How do you get out?”

“I been here for more Calms than I gots fingers and toes. Three floods. And you get out when the Masters decide whether you're worth most as slavant or Feral and hopefully before you're a rotter. Get luckier, they keep you a slave. Let you haul rock, clean strider stables, or dig trenches for the Legions. Best case, you get contract with a Master needing someone just so to 'petuate their Lineage. Worst case, you ain't even worth slavanting and some gonist plucks out your freshest bits. 'till they makes up their minds, we're just a tally in their counts to be swapped about by their Skinscribes as Small Masters trade flesh for flesh. ”

“How long have I been here? You must know.” She tried to keep the desperation out of her voice as she rubbed Avani's braille on her arm.

“Two Calms. Then all fingers and this many toes worth of sleeps.”

Hassani counted his splayed toes, heart sinking. “That long?”

“Not as long as this,” he said, waggling his shriveled member in her direction.

“That would work better if I couldn't actually see it," she said, looking away to avoid doing so. "The people who put me here, did they say anything?”

He scratched vigorously between his toes, his face scrunching. “Windy that night, only caught bits. They was worried enough they stuck you right in. Mighty disappointing on my end since they didn't do their usual-"

“I don't even want to know what the 'usual' might be. Please, tell me. What were they worried about?”

"You're property now, not a person, so they'll do whatever they want with you."

"Johine, please!"

“Hear that Mutey?” Johine crowed. “She used my name now! Even said 'please'.”

Mutey cast him a dark look, then turned back to feeling the point of a long, narrow splinter he'd pried from a cage bar.

“Johine!”

“You really wanna know?” The smile on his face as he turned back to her gave her a sick feeling. "I suppose I might iff'n you..."

“I'll tell you what's going on in the Book,” she blurted, hoping to forestall whatever debauchery might drift through his mind. “I know more than you'd think.”

Disappointment and curiosity warred on his face.

“Inro's rogue Legions. The Wretch Plague. The war that's had to have started by now. Secrets of the Black Court. I'll tell you anything you want to hear.”

Wind picked up, carrying garbled snatches of words, songs, wails, sobs from up the canyon. The cage's endless pendulum sway grew noticeably larger.

“Gimme a taste if you know so much as you say,” he said finally, doubtfully.

“I left Jadeye in riots and fire, saw the Mother of Exiles from a distance.”

“Everywhere's riots and fire. If you saw the Mother, where's she at then? Everyone thought before the last flood she'd be sweepin' in with her army of Paragons and settin' us all free.”

Hassani blinked at that. “I don't know. I do know that Rega and Baka staged a coup to take control of the Legions for the Ancients before the Fraction and Isolates could do the same."

“Dynasts is Dynasts, who cares which of 'em tells the Legions which of us to kill?”

“I know that Inro's not really gone rogue, that it's all a story made to cover Rega's coup.”

Johine laughed and waved a dismissive hand at her. “Pah, ridiculous. Everyone know he's already killed every living thing in two whole verses. They say Inro's taken some ancient weapon from Sunset. He's even killing gods now.”

“Gods?”

“See, you're gettin' more from me than I'm gettin'. You don't really know-”

“I know how Deia the swordmaster killed the Paragon swordsman.”

A long pause, the wind whistling and moaning through the canyon.

“How?”

“Tell me why they were worried first.”

“Hmph, fine. But your story better be good. They were worried that Fatma was playing a dangerous game. Thought it might get them all killed or something.”

“Who is Fatma?”

Johine recoiled violently enough to set his cage swinging, cowering under his blanket at the far corner of his cage.

A woman's voice spoke coldly from behind Hassani. “I am.”