CHAPTER 44

The braziers are burning low, only black coals now. The cold sand in the middle ring chills me but propels me forward as I rush and trip over myself in my haste. After the cautious way we advanced when we were afraid of being ambushed, this seems positively idiotic. But what is there to be cautious about now?

Hidden things, I think as I realize that in my reverie I’d walked too far.

I turn back and this time shine the torch close to the wall at knee level until I find it: the passage Hilde pointed out, the one she and Rev used to get down from the second level. I go in feet first, sliding down a little mound of sand before landing on rough brick. I’m grateful for the solid ground. After all this time, my boots feel like they’re carrying their own weight in sand. I find a stairwell here, narrow and twisty, with small steps that I take two and three at a time. My body doesn’t protest too hard.

Before rushing out of the arena, I only stopped to pocket the dice, grab the mousy kid’s jacket, pick up the shortbow and a few arrows from the archer kid’s remains, and retrieve the magic rope from around the drake’s neck. As an afterthought, and answering to an inner need I don’t hope to comprehend, I took a single gold coin from the drake’s hoard. So Rev can have a memento from her dragon-slaying days, I tell myself. Everything else, I leave behind. If I’m right, this is all I’ll need to reach the exit. If I’m wrong, there is no amount of weapons or gold that can get me out of here.

Rue has been buzzing in a strange new way since I dashed out of the arena. The music is frantic, with highs and lows and a rigid rhythm. Even with my Gift, it takes me a little to understand the emotion it conveys. It’s happiness. Not the mere satisfaction of circumventing a trap to get at the prize it protects, but joyous, bursting pride that his little gift of dice managed to get me moving again. I can feel the delight wafting off of him as I make the last turn, huff and puff up the last flight of stairs, and pass through a crack in a wall to emerge, panting, on the second level.

I recognize this place as the spot I left Hilde to go and try to nab the bottle of glue and stop to get a lungful of air. A wave of nausea swirls inside me and sends me tumbling against a wall. I breathe in, out, push it down. When it passes, I’m left light-headed in its wake, propping myself up against the wall and blinking back the stars that pop up in my vision.

Godsdamnit, I think. Not now. Not now.

I raise my injured hand up to the light, and discover it a blue and black mass, swollen beyond belief, almost unrecognizable as flesh. When I attempt to move the fingers, to squeeze them together into a ball, I can’t even get halfway before the pain grows too much to bear.

Shivers course through my body, making my teeth chatter. With a grunt, I step into the corridor dragging my feet, forcing each in front of the other. The dungeon looms around me like a cocoon. Trapped rooms on both sides of me, dust filtering down from above and settling on my throat and eyes, racking coughs shaking me to my core, the echoes mixing with Rue’s worried buzz. Only on in three torches is still lit. The one in my hand flickers, throwing more shadows than light, threatening to go out with each step.

The infection has spawned beasts of its own, has become the monster prowling the dungeon. I see it in every corner, waiting, biding its time and showing teeth.

You’re hallucinating. Keep walking.

I know it isn’t there, yet I can see it, describe it even. Its one eye follows me from the depths of every open room, its scaly snout hisses tempting words, suggesting I to lay down and sleep, to cease this inglorious stumbling. Reva is dead, it says. Wouldn’t it be better to join her and wait for Katha? She’ll be dead too, don’t I know, before any time at all has passed. If she isn’t dead now, it adds, this time from another mouth in its green, slimy chest.

I ignore it. Ignore the hissing, the scales, the eye, the sound of wings on dust, and move from door to gloomy door, searching for the one that matters, the Sapphire-bathed Ebony Door.

Rue’s buzzing filters into my ears, but my brain is unequal to deciphering his words. I take a bad turn, slam against a wall and fall down in a heap. The buzzing intensifies, but I wave at Rue, ask him to be quiet. It’s too much right now, too much. I need to rest to regain my strength, I decide. It’s not a bad thing, to rest, it doesn’t mean I’m giving up. I’m being sensible, I decide: rest now, find the Door later.

Mercifully, the buzzing subsides. I think I feel Rue slither away in the darkness. I settle further into my pain, my sickness, my nausea, feeling sorry for poor Rue and his unlucky choice of companion.

“Leave,” I mutter. “It’s best if you leave, it’s for the best. So long, Rue!”

I sound insane. Don’t I sound insane? I ask my fever and it hisses calm words in reply. It’s not sneering any more, not mocking. It’s being very gentle and careful, very soothing, its sibylline words like soft caresses. Poor Rue. Poor Rev. Poor Katha. Poor me.

Balled up in a heap, dreaming, mumbling, feeling sorry for myself, I drift off without noticing and stand at the edge of the real, staring into the dreamy depths of sleep, when I think I feel rough hands grab and pull me down. Thankful, I let myself fall.

*

“Have you ever thought of leaving?” Katha asks.

We’re on one of the paths that leads from the hills down to Reach. My body still smarts from going toe to toe with Bago, and it would smart a lot more if Katha hadn’t intervened. I remember this place and this time. The dream doesn’t fool me like in other times. I don’t surrender to the memories.

I stop on the path and look Katha in the eye. She seems thoughtful, her eyes lost in the distance, observing the expanse of our valley but seeing another place instead. I’m surprised at the deep sadness I feel. It’s not just the simple pain of longing for someone gone; it’s something else deeper and attached to this memory. Some test I failed, a detail I missed.

“Take me with you,” I say.

I don’t know why I say it. Katha didn’t leave, she was taken.

She turns to me a little further along the path and lets her eyes linger like she’s taking in the scene: me and the hills behind. Her hands are crossed behind her back and her naked feet trace patterns in the dust. The sun flickers.

“Please wake up, Malco,” she says softly.

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And then she walks on, disappearing in the bend, vanishing from sight.

*

“Please,” says a voice.

My throat feels rough and pained, my tongue sand-dry with dust and grime. The floor under my face is cool, and just as I groan awake a sharp smell assaults my nose.

“Oh, thank the gods!”

Someone stands in front of me, their face hovering over mine in worry, framed by the blue light of a swirling portal.

“Hilde?” I ask the figure.

“Gods, Malco, I thought you were dead. You were burning up. How do you feel?”

Dimly, I recognize the room behind her as the place I started my time in the dungeon. The air is mostly free from dust, though cracks in the walls suggest the room also suffered with the collapse of the upper levels.

“Better now.” I wipe the sweat from my face with my good hand and sit up against a wall. I feel weak and overwarm, but there’s no light-headedness. After paying closer attention to the puddle in front of me I realize why. “I vomited?”

“You did. I tried to give you water, but you wouldn’t swallow it. Here.” She hands me a bulging waterskin that I eagerly accept. The water washes down the dirt clogging my throat and mouth. I drink so much that some of it spills out and I only force myself to stop when I realize this is Hilde’s water I’m drinking.

“I’m sorry,” I say with some shame. “There isn’t much left.”

She waves my worries away with her hand.

“I’ve had my fill. Drink up.”

Gratefully, I take another gulp and wipe my mouth on my sleeve. The water does me good. It’s a while before my mind turns again to the situation at hand.

“You were supposed to have left,” I say. “Got the portal open and everything.”

“You can be happy I didn’t! When Rue showed up here shaking like mad, I feared the worst.”

“Where…?”

A buzz interrupts me with a few discordant notes. It comes from a small opening in a wall, the stones around it painted in the likeness of an eye.

“He was at your side for a while and then wandered in there. I peeked. There’s nothing but a skeleton.”

“It’s where I found him. He was locked in there a while. A very good while, from what I gathered.

“Ah.”

And over there is where I killed the cyclops, I think.

In a little bit. I rest my eyes. There’s something pulling at my attention, something that seems very close and very far at the same time. I dream I was having, something about Katha…

“I took as good care of your hand as I knew how,” Hilde says in a low, hesitant voice that pulls me away from the remaining threads of that particular memory. “I cleaned the wound and the bandages.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Is it as bad as it looks?”

I nod and keep my hand resting on the floor beside me, not wanting to look and be confronted with the awfulness of it again. Anything to keep that out of my mind. And in fact, there’s just the thing.

Hilde doesn’t hide her alarm at seeing me stand on wobbly legs that I quickly bully into sullen obedience. I ignore her, and instead grab a torch and walk over to the half-destroyed door just to the left of the blue portal.

The pit is just as dark as when I left it, the spikes jutting out just as sharp and menacing.

The drake didn’t turn to smoke, I think.

I didn’t notice that until now: almost as soon as the cyclops fell in the pit, it turned to smoke.

I didn’t even think much of it at the time. I just thought it was Godtouched magic.

And it was Godtouched magic. I just didn’t realize the significance of it at the time.

I lay on my stomach and thrust the torch into the hole. Hilde stands in the doorway watching me, tapping her foot to the rhythm of her preoccupation. Is she thinking that I’ve gone mad, wandering blindly through the halls, investigating holes in the ground? I wave the torch between the spikes. The floor of the pit is dirt and bare rock with a thousand small shadows that all seem like what I’m looking for and yet prove to be nothing but ghosts.

“Malco…” Hilde begins.

“Shh…” I answer. “Let me focus.”

Something is shining in the hole. Something leaning against the base of a stake, looking like any other stone yet glimmering like a dark puddle.

The entrance to Rue’s old prison shows nothing but darkness.

“Rue?”

“Hello, Malco,” he says, echoing slightly. “I might have saved your life, you know?”

“More than once. I need your help, Rue. Could you come out?”

“Of course.”

He emerges from the cell as a darker spot of shadow and climbs onto my sleeve, hanging on with thin tendrils. I return to find Hilde peering down the edge of the pit, confused and dejected. She says nothing, merely watching while I transfer Rue to the tip of the magic rope and lower him down among the spikes.

“Do you see it? It should be leaning against a stake.”

Rocks clack down below as Rue sifts through them. The rope tugs this way and that. Dimly, it reminds me of fishing in one of the Steel’s many pools. Only there’s no sun, very little laughter, and the way my bait keeps buzzing is more likely to scare fish than lure them.

We wait in silence, me and Hilde, as the clacking goes on. To her credit, the dwarf doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t interrupt us while Rue, down in the darkness, sounds like he’s having a fun time at the beach overturning rocks. I must look exhausted and insane, and I can feel the barrage of questions, the demands building up behind Hilde’s silence. But she holds, shifting from foot to foot, and waits.

“I found it!” Rue buzzes loudly.

“Sure?” I ask. Steady. Steady.

After an affirmative hum I begin to reel in the rope, which in the meantime has grown considerably from its resting length. The added weight at its end makes it swing in larger, slower arcs, but when Rue emerges from the shadows, he comes alone. It takes me an instant to realize that he and the stone are nearly the same shiny, oily hue. When I extend my hand so Rue can climb on, he dutifully releases his charge.

“The Jet Key,” I say to Hilde.

In size and cut it’s very similar to the other stones. It’s the color that makes it stand out. While the other keys took in light and shot it back broken into many colorful streams, this one guards it jealously.

I look at Hilde with a little smile, happy for her patience and pleased that I have something to reward it with. I’m surprised to find relief in her face.

“Once again you save me,” she says. “I thought I was going to die in this hole.”

I nearly ask what she means. Her way out of here is at this very moment swirling in place, giving everything a faint blue coating. But then I realize it. Why she’s so nervous and so patient and why she waited behind.

She confirms my suspicions when she extends her hand.

“Hilde…”

“You’re not going to argue your way out of this, Malco,” she says. “Please. You’re weak, feverish, and you have one working hand. How are you going to climb to the White Door?”

“I have a plan.”

“You always have a plan, ancestors damn you!”

Her sudden gravely shout echoes in the small room, shocking us both. Hilde raises her hands in peace. In an instant, her fury is replaced by the quiet and meek resistance I’ve come to know.

“Sorry, that came out wrong. I mean, you’re in no state to face flying serpents, slimes, and gods know what else. Give me the Key. Take the portal.” Hilde extends her hand.

She’s right, of course. Facing her figure framed by the blue light streaming out of the Ebony Door, hand outstretched, I feel myself unequal to answer her. Of the two of us, she’s the stronger and least battered. Even if I refuse, Hilde could just pull me bodily to the portal and toss me in after taking the stone. Her manner is patient, but her eyes glint with the resolve of saving my life, by force if necessary. And the truth is, I want her to. Whatever force that’s kept me upright and walking all this time is nearly gone.

“All right, Hilde, yes,” I say finally, my voice sounding tired and broken even to me.

I hold out my hand and she reaches for it with surprise and relief. I see Hilde’s mouth beginning to form words of gratitude and then she sees I’ve presented not my good hand, but the ravaged, broken one. In that moment of surprise, I catch her out of balance and rush forward. Her attempt to protect me once again, to not slap away my sorry mess for a hand, leaves her no option but to take the brunt of my weight and be pushed back, shout, and fall.

We pass through the portal, Hilde in front, but I’m the only one to reach the floor on the other side. Pain burns in my arm like hot iron. I look back in time to see the portal’s parting light before it consumes itself, swirling into nothing. Hilde’s expression, the betrayal in her face as she fell, remains with me.

I pick up Rue and the rest of my things. With the Jet Key safe in my pocket and a piece of cloth fastened around my mouth and nose, I walk out into the corridor and towards the White Door.