Carry the Flame (41 page)

Meek in appearance, he walked toward the guard standing by the hole. “Sir,” he said simply, pleased the slouching men paid him barely a glance.

“What do you—”

X-ray shot him in the face before he finished, gunning down the other two guards before they straightened their rifles.

“Any more down there?” he asked the slaves who'd been hauling up dirt. One of them shook his head, the other squeezed the bucket to his bare chest.

“How many of us in the hole?” X-ray asked, snatching up the first guard's revolver.

“Five,” a man answered from below.

Keeping his guns raised, X-ray walked to the edge, the scent of cordite trailing him, ambrosial in its effect. “Okay,” he said after looking down at men covered in dirt, “grab your picks and shovels and get up here. You're going to need them.”

A tall brawny man scooped up his tools and scaled the ladder first. X-ray pointed to the dead guards by the hole. “Go grab yourself a rifle, knife, whatever you like.”

When the rest of the men followed, he told them the same thing, adding, “I've got two extra guns. One's a little short of bullets. They're in them.” He nodded at the guards. “We've all got some payback coming.”

He handed the fully loaded gun to one of the slaves who'd been on bucket duty. The man nodded his thanks, popped the cylinder and eyed it with authority.

“We're going to be slaughtered, is what we've got coming,” said a hairy-faced man who reached for the gun X-ray had fired.

“Don't you know what's going on?” X-ray asked him. He looked at the others. No one answered. “The explosions? Didn't you hear them?” He guessed not, which explained the guards' casual manner.

“We can't hear shit all the way down here,” the brawny man confirmed. His eyes never left the blond guard's body when he spoke, and he went on quickly, “I hated that bastard's guts. I wish I could've shot him.”

“I did hear something a while back,” said the hairy slave. “I just thought it was their big Fight Night party.”

“Ain't a party,” X-ray said. “At least not the one they planned. But it's a helluva chance to get even, and let me tell you something.” He pointed a gun at the dead guards. “It feels good.”

I
t seemed to take hours for Jester to climb down the ladder, wary now with every step. As he neared the bottom, a soft sighing rose from the silence that had followed his echoes. The murmur increased until he was certain he was listening to something alive, something
moving.

What the hell is it?

Jester stepped from the ladder onto smooth stone. He still couldn't see his own hand, took only a few steps before walking into a stalactite and almost swore before remembering what his last outburst had set off. He didn't know if there were any creatures down there, but guessed all kinds of animals could use echoes to find their prey.

It took him another ten minutes to make his way to the source of the gentle noise. He'd never seen a river, much less heard one in total darkness, so he learned only now that it had a whisper all its own. When he put his hands into it, he found that flowing water even had a rhythm and a pulse.

Just like blood.

A
s the four of them hurried down the tunnel, Jessie could still hear Chunga trying to smash his way past the circus wagon. Judging from the racket, the dragon worked in fits and starts. But her thoughts remained fixed on Ananda. When the bombs went off, her youngest child and the twins were near the side of the pit—along with dozens of drunken men. Then the blazing gunfire erupted, as if those fools could have shot their way out from under a collapsing roof. But Linden also had been up there, so maybe he'd had a plan. She couldn't allow herself to think otherwise.

They came upon a body. From his appearance—two eyes—he had been a guard. Jessie paused, but the Mayor stepped over it with hardly a glance. Burned Fingers grabbed the back of the prisoner's shirt, forcing him to halt.

She checked for a pulse, then rolled the body over, finding an empty holster. She stood, shrugged, and they walked on. But several steps later, after Bliss made a wide pass around the dead man, Jessie said, “Stop,” and turned back.

Burned Fingers once again had to grab the Mayor's shirt.

“This doesn't make any sense.” She glanced from the body to the tyrant. “You said this was the way out. Who comes running
into
a place with a collapsing roof?”

“My men. They are loyal to me,” the Mayor said. “But what would you know of such things?”

Burned Fingers cracked the butt of his knife against the back of the Mayor's head. The man's shoulders snapped toward his ears.

“I'll tell you what I think,” Jessie said. “That there are other ways in and out of this thing.
That's
what makes sense.”

Burned Fingers nodded, but before anyone could speak another word—in the blank stillness of unanswered questions—they heard the galloping footfalls of the giant lizard.

C
assie couldn't run another step. Her chest heaved painfully. She could barely breathe. It was like the night Sam had saved her life twice, first when she'd been ready to kill herself, and then by leading her from the gunmen. They'd run from the battle so hard that her breathlessness had forced her to stop on a dune, and Sam asked if she had asthma. It felt worse now. She was wheezing and making strange whistling sounds.

Stop it!
she silently ordered herself. But she couldn't stop because the dragon was tracking her. She heard him clearly. The beast was making loud throaty noises, but not giving up, like if he could just eat her, he might survive. With every lunge, he rattled more bones. Cracked them, too.
Baby bones.
They must be. She'd run over them herself. They broke like dry sticks.

Breathe,
she implored herself.
Breathe
. As her heart slowed, she did manage to widen her airways. The whistling stopped, but the rattle of the bones sounded closer. All the time,
closer.
Now she could smell the Komodo. Then she heard a slurping sound and a glop of saliva landed on her shirt.

Cassie charged ahead, wheezing and stumbling barefoot over bones toward what she hoped would be the safety of the main cavern. She pitched onto the narrow path, taking a scary spill that scraped her up even more. It took seconds before she understood her good fortune and dragged herself to her feet. But then she set off on the ground at a much faster pace.

By the time she felt her way past the entrance to the main cavern, her wheezing had eased. But she still sounded terrified when she called out for Miranda and Steph. They'd said they would wait for her there, but didn't respond.

“Miranda!” Cassie screamed again, now trying to find her way to the narrow bridge without falling in the water.

“Run! There's a bad man down here,” her friend shouted from far away in the darkness.

A bad man?
She'd wanted to warn
them
about the dragon, which could be coming up behind her at any moment.

Then she heard footsteps hurrying across the bridge. Not a kid's. She pleaded with all her heart for whoever it was to stop and go away, but heard what sounded like boots landing on stone.

She backed up, still frightened almost senseless that she would walk right into the dragon's mouth.

“I see you,” the man said.

How could he?

Cassie veered sharply, forgetting that the bank narrowed to nothing, and tumbled into the river.

She tried to find her footing in the water, worried that either beast or man would come in after her, then recognized she was in over her head—she'd fallen into the deep part that Miranda had warned her about. Realizing it, she panicked, almost swallowing a lungful of water.

Her arms and legs flailed as she fought ferociously to the surface, gasping for air once more.

Breathe, breathe.

Chapter Nineteen

H
undreds of pounds of maimed lizard raced through the dark tunnel, long steely claws ripping up the packed dirt. Jessie retreated two fast steps, bumping into Burned Fingers. The marauder was shoving the Mayor against a wall.

“Watch this bastard!” he shouted to Bliss, leaving the girl to rule the tyrant with a sword, as she had only minutes ago in the dragon's pen. Still, all their eyes—even the Mayor's—kept darting to the thundering darkness.

“Give me the gun,” Burned Fingers demanded.

Jessie handed it over without pause; he was the killer of long repute. “Just don't wound him again,” she warned above the din of the giant reptile's advance. Hacking off a chunk of his tongue had made the fierce creature even more dangerous. “Shoot him in the heart.”

They smelled Chunga, heard him about to burst out of the dark, but the sudden sight of the reptile's gaping, bloody mouth was still startling. The beast reared away from the torch. Dust from its abrupt stop drifted over them, along with more of the creature's vile odors.

“Mom!” Bliss groaned.

Jessie pivoted, keeping the flame pointed toward the dragon. Bliss clutched her stomach. The Mayor had kicked her and bolted when the girl glanced at the reptile's alarming arrival. He was disappearing into the darkness with surprising speed and agility for a man with his hands tied behind his back. Bliss, still gripping her gut—and slowed by her sword—set off after him.

“Get down,” Burned Fingers yelled at her.

She looked over her shoulder. He pointed angrily to the ground and she threw herself down, opening a line of fire.

Chunga bugled as Burned Fingers fired blindly into the pitch three times, shifting his aim rightward with each shot. They could not hear whether the Mayor fell during his pet's raucous attempts to attack them.

Jessie turned back to the carnivorous beast. Chunga looked even more gigantic in the tighter confines of the passage. When he extended himself on all fours, his head smacked against a roof support. She could see that the ceiling would never allow the dragon to rise high enough for a shot to his heart. The lizard, hideous, lashed the air with his mutilated, yellowy tongue, then lunged at Burned Fingers, who had looked toward the darkness for some sign of the Mayor.

”Watch out!” Jessie yelled at him, and jammed the torch against the dragon's neck, then leaped back when the Komodo tried to bite her. Burned Fingers reeled away and fired twice. Both rounds tore into the reptile's face.

No!
Sickened with dread, Jessie watched the lizard bash his jaw into a wall and gouge out a shovelful of dirt with his razory teeth—the behavior of a beast wholly deranged by pain.

She tried to fend off Chunga's fury with the torch, but he no longer found the flame as daunting.

Burned Fingers grabbed her, pulling her back so fast she tripped and fell. The beast lurched at her, and she stabbed at its face, searing a nostril. The dragon snorted loudly, flaring the torch, shooting smoke from his nose like the mythical beast of fairy tales and trilogies.

Jessie clambered to her feet. “Shoot him!” she shouted in panic.

Burned Fingers shook his head: “One shot!”

That's all?

As if reading her mind, the Komodo exhibited a bald impunity. Jessie had to hold the torch to his appalling face; stabbing the lizard with the flame didn't slow him anymore. Even using the fire directly had little effect. He simply shook, made loud guttural noises, and advanced faster, biting the walls, ground, and ceiling, biting with abandon, mindless and terrifying. His teeth found a beam and he ripped a roof support loose in a blink, spraying dust on everyone.

Burned Fingers swore. His sword no more useful than shouted threats, his gun only an instrument of incitement. Behind them, Bliss disappeared into the darkness.

Stay away,
Jessie implored her silently. Nothing could be worse than this.

But she was wrong. Her daughter was headed to a land of horror.

C
assie sank slowly in the river, gripped by agony. Her chest felt crushed. She opened her eyes, as she had when she'd swam with Miranda, hoping to find salvation in some miraculous form; but no deliverance appeared in the inky depths that her friend had warned her about.

Her feet grazed the bottom, and she tried to push off on the tips of her toes. She remembered Miranda springing out of the river to her waist. But that was in shallower water, and Miranda had jumped with her knees fully bent.

Cassie's efforts lifted her only inches. With pain now clawing her chest worse than ever, she feared she'd missed her only chance to survive. So when her toes touched the rocky bottom, she had to resist an overwhelming, but useless, urge to spring right back up. Instead, she waited . . . and waited . . . to sink deeper, knees bending with almost unbearable torpidity.

When she felt light-headed, dizzy, about to black out, unsure whether she'd waited long enough—or too long—she leaped as high as she could, moving her weakened arms and legs to try to propel herself farther.

She managed to force her mouth from the river, stealing a single breath before the water claimed her again. But she had filled up with air.

Keep doing it.
If the bridge was the deepest part, she figured the current would carry her to a shallower stretch soon.

With each jump, she forced more of her head from the water, and gained confidence. By the sixth or seventh effort, she bumped into the bank, never so happy to endure a bruise, realizing the flow had borne her to the cavern side of the river She grabbed rock and held it tightly, gulping large breaths.

But be quiet,
she cautioned herself as she feasted on air.

She tilted her head to clear her ears, and heard the man again. He was scurrying along the bank. His steps sounded only feet away, and then he shifted so close she was afraid he was reaching for her. She was about to push off, but then
he
moved, stumbling in the dark and swearing quietly to himself.

That gave her hope. He was the one making noise, threatening her, but in a low voice, like he was scared, too. Twice she heard him say, “I see you,” but he was a liar. He moved farther away each time, and she realized he'd never seen her. Who could see anything in such darkness? It kept her safe. For the first time in hours, she welcomed the night and hoped it wouldn't pass soon.

When she couldn't hear him anymore, she started to climb out, but thought better of it. Why not stay in the water? He hadn't found her when he'd been feet away. It was safe in there. She would move along the bank and get as far as she could from the dragon. The Komodo might have smelled her blood on land, but couldn't find her in the river, right?

She also hoped Miranda and Steph were okay. She felt horrible for not warning them about the Komodo, but she'd never had the chance because they were already hiding.
From him.

She listened carefully, then drifted along the bank, handhold-to-handhold. The river began to burble, as if conspiring with the night to grant her cover.

The minutes passed. Moving along became almost effortless. She flattered herself into believing she'd grown at ease in water. Perhaps she had. But as she made her way, the current accelerated deceptively, taking her firmly in its grip as it narrowed. With a start, she realized she was about to be forced underground for the long passage deep into the garden cavern. Grabbing the overlapping stone, she tried to haul herself out, but it felt like the water had endless arms to drag her down.

“Stop,” she blurted when the current swept her legs out from under her. She regretted her outburst immediately, but even her fear of the man couldn't compete with the terror of being sucked into the earth for hundreds of feet.

She held on with her armpits hooked around the stony edge. Facing upward, she stared into the blackness above—
like someone in a grave—
and clawed the smooth stone floor. She bloodied her fingers—panic much greater than pain—but inch by inch she dragged more of herself from the water.

She finally freed a leg, then rolled the rest of her body out, hyperventilating from the effort.

Cassie lay on her back, chest rising and falling to the hard pulse of her heart. It took minutes before her breath calmed so she could sit up. She looked ahead and noticed dawn seeping into the garden cavern. Then she saw him. Not well, but enough to know for the first time that he was Jester, the man who'd kneeled close to her on the desert only moments after he murdered Maul.

A
door latch snapped shut. That was all, but Bliss knew somebody had left the tunnel's darkness. Somebody like the Mayor. Furious with herself for letting the tyrant escape—furious at him for the blow to her belly—she wanted to bring him back to her mom and Burned Fingers at the point of her sword. Kill him, if she had to. But most of all she wanted to catch him before he got his hands untied.

She hurried, trailing her fingers on the dirt wall until she felt a door. Peering behind her, Bliss saw no sign of her mother's torch, not even a distant glow; but she had moved fast and the tunnel might have curved, leaving her beyond a bend. And she'd heard one of them firing the gun. No screams, no struggles, just gunshots. They should be okay. She was the one who'd screwed-up.

She left the door open so her mother would know where she'd gone. The Mayor had a two minute lead on her, but after stepping into a sepulchral, scary stillness, she gave up all thoughts of trying to reclaim the time by rushing. The faint scent of a Komodo slowed her even more, and she realized her most feral instincts had come alive. She wondered if the odor had been carried by the Mayor or by her own body. Or if the other dragon was lurking nearby, moving closer. She listened intently. An absolute silence ensued.

Bliss thrust her sword along walls, corners, and stabbed the length of a couch before concluding that she'd entered a room, and that the Mayor had fled deeper into his city. She paused, still sensing the uneasy emptiness clinging to the confines, like someone had died there. And then she realized that of course the room had witnessed death—and much worse. This was the City of Shade. Murder haunted every corridor, corner, and hideaway.

The loss of life felt so real and grisly that she feared for her sister and the other children. Her hand settled on another door. She opened it to check, setting off a loud
creak.
She flinched, knowing how exposed a single sound could leave her. In that same harrowing instant, much fouler odors assaulted her. She'd smelled them at the Army of God—burned skin, burned hair, burned clothes—and knew without question what had drawn her there: the scent of injury or death had slipped through the door and into her senses.

Covering her nose, Bliss forced herself forward.
Not Ananda, please. Not Jaya.
“Or any of them,” she mouthed wholly to herself.

Inching along, she tripped on a body, put out her arm to break her fall and pressed down on a moist torso. She jerked away, wiping her hand on her pants, then forced herself to reach out again, more carefully.

Her fingers settled on a burned shirt and chest, and with a rush of relief she knew it was a man. But not the Mayor. The body didn't have his girth, and nobody could have sustained such an attack in so little time.

She moved her hand to the face. He felt tall, thin. No one she knew came to mind. Her fingers settled on strangely rippled and torn skin, before finding cuts on a bald head. She felt like a blind woman “seeing” a person's features. Nothing but the horror was familiar.

A discernible cooling of the body had taken place. Only a degree or two, but it seemed odd that a man so burned, whose shirt had crumbled at her touch, should feel anything but fevered.

She checked for a weapon, and wasn't surprised to find the victim unarmed. Then she stepped back, knowing she would venture no farther on her own. But before she could turn toward the tunnel, torches flashed as sudden as lightning—and more blindingly after so much darkness. Men seized her arms and grabbed her sword. She was surrounded by one-eyed slaves with guns, knives, picks, and shovels. The torch flames reddened their empty sockets, while their lone eyes looked her up and down with the rapacity of pack animals.

S
am laid the satchel of guns into a shallow depression that sat below the sight line of anyone looking out from the back of the City of Shade. She brushed sand on the old leather, just enough to cover it, as she and Yurgen had planned. If she were caught or killed, they didn't want the pistols to fall into the hands of the men who claimed her.

Weak torchlight spilled past the columns supporting the edge of the roof. She saw the pale glow on packed sand as she approached the rear perimeter. The flames encouraged her. She'd worried that guards had immediately mowed down the prisoners in retribution for the attack, leaving no need for surveillance or light.

But as she slipped behind a column, more than anything she hoped the guards had left the torches burning in their haste to defend the other end of the city. Linden had said two were assigned to the smaller pit, though they were supposed to patrol the entire area, so they could be anywhere. She'd rather die than fall into their hands.

Armed with a pair of pistols and a knife, she looked left and right, her range greatly limited by the faint light. Her eyes settled back on the sand. No footprints but her own. She chided herself for leaving them.

Sam crept about twenty feet into the city, taking cover at the next column. She peered from behind the bricks, absorbing her first view of the area around the pit. She did not have an angle to see into it. A small fire burned on the left side of the opening, near a guard sleeping on his back. From where she stood, she could see only his head, long black hair fanning out on both sides. He appeared oddly pretty. Then she saw torchlight on a flask a few inches away, and adored his dereliction of duty. She just wished she had a better shot at him; his head was a miserably small target at her remove. She studied him so closely she failed to hear an advance on her right. Had the shadow of a torch not shifted, she would have been taken by surprise.