The Boys of Fire and Ash (30 page)

The water poured its way back in, and I hacked and coughed, spitting it out and screaming some more.

“Ugh, just relax, Urgle,” rasped a dry voice from somewhere to my distant right. The voice was nearly a whisper, a crackly shadow of something more familiar and clean.

I turned my head to see the owner of the voice, but still, the light from the high windows was minimal, and the figure was hard to make out in the shadows and mist and water running down my face. After a few seconds my eyes adjusted.

He was strung up in the corner about seven feet off the ground, his arms and legs spread out and bound with metal hoops attached to heavy hooks. Behind him the wall was marred by black flecks and smears, the shadows doing their best to conceal the color of his blood. His hair was wet and plastered to his face, but swollen, black bruises could still be seen on his eyes and his lips. His shirt was open and his entire body was carved up from a beating.

“Blaze?” I whispered.

He laughed maniacally, though I couldn't say what was funny given his miserable state. “They found me!”

Just like Juga said.
Because of me
.

I suppressed the bile threatening to spew out of me and tried to think of something to say. “How?” was the best I could manage.

“Ah, you know,” he said. “I couldn't outrun them forever.
In the end there were about a dozen Tunrar coming at me at once. What can you do?”

He sounded funny, as though his head wasn't quite right. I wriggled in the hoops and felt my heart rate picking up. Blaze was trapped. He was beaten. What hope did I have?

“Blaze,” I pleaded, shaking my head as though that might keep the water off me. “We have to get out of here. Krepin thinks that Cubby—”

“I know what he thinks.”

“No you don't! He—” I stopped.
He knows?
My hand tickled. The Abish girl told him. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Would you have understood me?” he snapped. “By Rawley, Urgle. You're like a newborn Sibble calf out here, blind and tripping over yourself. What would it have helped?”

I blinked tight, squeezing out some of the water that had made its way into my eyes. He was right about that. I'd been so helpless, so innocent of everything. “You should have told me,” I said quietly.

I heard him heave a heavy sigh and then he mumbled, “I should have never agreed to help you. I should have never gone to the Pit.”

“You're right,” I said, the lump in my throat ready to explode. He helped me and now here he was, the great hero, hanging on Krepin's wall. “I know who you are, Blaze.”

He said nothing.

“The Belphebans told me everything. About your wife. About your son. Norale Heights.”

He still said nothing.

“How can you just stay like that when Krepin is out there, right outside those doors!”

“Stop it!” he yelled. “Krepin's won, all right? Just stop.”

I was silent for a long time, listening to the rush of water
flowing over my ears and racking my brain to think of something to make him snap out of it, something to entice him to help me escape, but I couldn't think of anything. There was nothing I had that he wanted.

“Please don't give up,” I said with a shaky voice as the warm tears began to mix with the cool flow pouring over my head. “You got away from him before, you can do it again! We'll get Cubby and make a run for the Pit! Please!”

“There won't be any Pit.”

Everything stopped—my breath, my heart, my brain. “What do you mean…?”

Blaze began to laugh and a chill rippled up from my feet to my hair. “I only wanted to hide it for a little while. Just until I could get back to the Resistance. I couldn't let Krepin catch me with it.”

“Hide what? What are you talking about?” I said, not understanding. Then all at once I saw it, the footprint of Tanuk's baby, the blue pendant around her neck.
Keeps secret things safe
.

“The flint box,” I breathed.

Blaze let his head drop and said nothing.

“It's an Abish shroud, isn't it?”

Blaze didn't move.

“What's inside, Blaze?”

Silence.

“What's it hide!”

“Everything,” he whispered. “All of Krepin's power.”

“But…what is it?”

He stayed still for the longest time, and then, “Proof,” he said finally, from somewhere under his limp hair. “The proof of what Ardigund really did. The Secret of the Ajus.”

I swallowed hard, and Blaze went on, babbling to himself,
his voice on the edge of tears. “When my men came for me, when they let me go, I was here, right here. I thought if I could show his followers the truth…I'd been Krepin's favorite for so long, he told me exactly where he kept it. And there it was, the Secret of the Ajus, hidden in his chambers just like he said. With that one little thing…the war would have been over.”

“That's why the Tunrar chased you,” I said. “You stole it from Krepin. That's why you came to us, isn't it? To hide it from him.”

Blaze hung his head. “I never meant to tell.”

“Tell what?”

He winced and readjusted himself on the chains, his skin an angry landscape of bloody gashes and purple bruises. They'd tortured him.

“About the Pit?” I whispered.

I thought of the Brothers, playing Screamers, building fires, laughing and wrestling and feasting on Larmy. In my mind I saw him, Krepin, standing at the top of the East Wall, a swarm of Tunrar pouring down from the forest, descending on the Ikkuma Pit.

“He's coming for them.”

Blaze nodded. “He needs something more than he did when he first tried to wage war, the war I thwarted. The Tunrar found the Pit when I came to you for help. Krepin just needed someone, like me, to tell them it's exact location.”

My insides felt as if they'd withered and dried up, like everything I am, everything inside me, had been sucked out of my chest and handed over to Krepin. The Pit was ours, it was our home.
Untouched
. The Pit was everything this awful world wasn't, and it kept us safe because Belphoebe begged
it to. But could its walls protect the Brothers from a man as powerful as Aju Krepin?

“We can't let him do this,” I said. The lump in my throat felt like the size of my head.

“It's done.”

“I won't abandon Cubby!” I shouted. “I won't abandon my Brothers!”

“Just stop it, Urgle!” he snapped. “He's won, so just stop.”

The fight was out of him, all of it. He hung there like a lifeless carcass, drained completely. He had nothing left.

Getting out of here, getting to Cubby, getting to the Brothers was up to me.

Hours passed and the three of us ignored each other. Blaze didn't move the entire time. He just hung there, waiting to die. The old woman moved every so often, adjusting and shifting. She was so thin that the hoops hung loosely on her frame. If she hadn't been too weak to stand, she might have been able to escape. She didn't seem to have much of an interest in leaving. Unlike me. I'd pull and tug on my wrists, wriggling my feet and flexing my arms, grunting and stretching in an exhausting effort to escape. Nothing worked. I'd stop for a while and feel sorry for myself, feel the tickle of the cold water absorbing into my skin, chilling my blood. And then I'd think of Cubby and Lussit and the boys back home and begin my futile efforts to break the hoops all over again.

Blaze did his best not to notice, but I caught the old woman's interest every so often. She'd raise her weak head in my direction and watch me with black, disoriented eyes. Her gaze was more animal than human and I wondered if any part of the woman she had been once upon a time
might still be inside her. Had she been like Blaze? Had she refused Krepin her only son? Or had she done something else? I wondered, just how many ways could a person make an enemy out of Krepin? I stared back, searching her face for any sign of life.

She'd always break the stare with a smack of her cracked lips.

I opened my mouth and let the water from the spout quench my thirst, but the sweetness always made it hard to swallow.

The light from the windows began to fade as the sun began to set, and I prepared for a long night under the gushing water spout, when the sound of a dozen approaching feet echoed from the hallway.

It was Gorpok Juga and the guard, a group of several Tunrar stalking in front of them. Behind them were two boys about my age sporting the braid that wrapped around their necks, the mark of the Beginning etched into their foreheads, and just behind them came Aju Krepin himself.

The guard stormed up to me and turned the knob above my head, ceasing the fall of water. I shook my hair and spat, relieved for the break.

The old, emaciated woman began shrieking—panicked animal wails from a toothless, wide-open mouth.

Gorpok Juga spoke to me, but I couldn't hear her over the noise. Krepin barked a command and the boy to his left calmly approached the old woman, backhanding her across the face. She was quiet after that.

“Where is Passage Linerk?” Gorpok Juga asked.

“What?”

Aju Krepin growled at me and then looked to Gorpok Juga, who nodded and translated his words.

“Linerk! You friends was seen stealing Passage Linerk from the north tower. Where they have him?”

“Cubby?” I said, my pulse thumping in my ears and my heart swelling with relief. “Av and Fiver!” I laughed. “They got him!”

The guard slapped me across the face and the force of it made me see stars.

“Where they have him?” Gorpok Juga tried again.

For the first time in hours, Blaze's voice filled the chamber, his deep laugh echoing off the walls. “So, Krepin, Ikkuma boys got the better of you again?”

Krepin looked to Gorpok Juga, who hesitated to translate, so Blaze did it for her. He shouted at Aju Krepin in Krepin's tongue and I heard Krepin take in a sharp breath through his nose. His body remained still, facing me, but his eyes looked over at Blaze and he said one word. Whatever it was, it set the Tunrar in motion, and the many that had arrived with them slinked over to Blaze.

Blaze laughed. What was one more beating to him? He'd already given up.

The Tunrar screamed and screeched as they leaped at him, clawing at his torso, biting his limbs. He tried not to scream but they were torturing him.

“Stop it!” I shouted. “Stop hurting him!”

Krepin scratched his nose nonchalantly and turned his attention back to me. He waited there, still expecting an answer.

“I don't know,” I said. I didn't. I didn't even know how they did it, but they'd saved him. Cubby was free and Av and Fiver were all right.

Krepin murmured and Gorpok Juga translated. “And the woman? What woman was with them?”

“Woman?”

“Tall, strong. She kill four Tunrar before you friends disappear in the Baublenotts.”

Farka.

“You lead Belphebans to Krepin?” Juga shouted.

“I don't know who she is,” I lied. I was grinning defiantly, I couldn't help it. I was overjoyed. Sure, I was a prisoner of Aju Krepin, but Cubby was free and that was the only reason I came here at all.

Aju Krepin grinned right back, a sinister half smile that showed he wasn't overly bothered with one missing Passage. He spoke.

“No matter to Krepin,” translated Gorpok Juga. “Soon he will have the Abish shroud and his pick of Ikkuma boys. Krepin's armies come for them soon.”

I spat at Krepin's feet.

Without missing a beat, he slapped me in the face with his open palm and the sound echoed through the room. Stars danced in front of my eyes. My skin was so soggy that the impact split the flesh beside my eye and I could feel a warm stream of blood falling down my cheek. But even still, it had been worth it.

“The Beginning must receive our thanks,” said Gorpok Juga. “To give thanks, Krepin will give you life to the Beginning.”

I suddenly felt less bold.

Krepin grabbed my face in his hands, his expression calm and gentle, which had the unnerving appearance of caring. He spoke.

“Bet sah.”

Gorpok Juga translated: “And hers.”

Lussit.

“They're coming for her, you know? Belpheban warriors are on their way.” I didn't know that for sure, but I knew they'd be looking for Lussit. And, based on his interest in Farka, I guessed Krepin didn't want them here.

Gorpok Juga translated for him and he nodded before he spoke.

“Then they will be right on time to view her die,” said Gorpok Juga.

I struggled against the restraints, trying with everything in me to get at Krepin, to kill him before he had the chance to kill Lussit, to get to the Pit, but the gold hoops were too strong.

The guard slapped me in the face again, and I stopped squirming, biting through the pain that was throbbing in my cheek and seething.

Krepin bowed graciously to me, his face serene and calm. He called for his minions, and Gorpok Juga and the younger boys obeyed—even the Tunrar mercifully abandoned their exciting torture game to follow him out. The guard waited a moment, then reached for the knob above my head. The cold water poured over me and the guard left with the rest.

I could hear Blaze grunting and growling through the pain, his breathing labored. The old woman was whimpering, shaking her head back and forth over and over. I closed my eyes and focused on the water, letting the sound of it rushing over my ears drown out the sad noises around me. I tried not to think of Lussit, where they were keeping her, how they were treating her. I tried not to think of home, of what was about to invade the happy world of my Brothers.
Cubby is safe
, I thought. All I had to do now was save Lussit and warn the Brothers. I wouldn't let Krepin kill me first.

When night had come and darkness had swallowed the chamber, the chill from the falling water was seeping into my bones. My legs and my bottom had been sitting on the flooded floor for hours, and I could barely remember what dry hair felt like.