The Fanged Crown: The Wilds (13 page)

“Last try!” Harp yelled. “When I go down on the ground, shoot at the same time!”

“No, Harp!” Kitto shouted.

Harp dodged as the ant lunged at him. With a burst of speed, he sprinted away from the ant to the edge of the ravine. Planting himself a few paces from the drop-off, he let the queen charge him. In the instant before she smacked into him, Harp dropped backward onto the ground, raised his sword, and plunged it into her underside just as she barreled over him.

When they saw Harp fall backward onto the ground, Kitto and Boult fired arrows that struck the ant’s back, but they bounced harmlessly off the hard shell. Instead, it

was the ant’s own momentum that propelled her to the very edge of the ravine. The creature struggled against gravity, her legs skittering for a hold on the muddy hank before she flipped over the edge, taking a smattering of loose earth, Harp’s sword, and Harp with her.

“Harp!” Kitto screamed, as Harp disappeared off the edge of the ravine.

“Hold him, Verran,” Boult shouted. Verran grabbed Kitto’s arm, but the boy jerked it away.

Kitto started down the trunk,, and Verran grabbed his elbow again. Kitto glared up at him furiously and pulled away.

“The ants will leave,” Verran assured him. “And we’ll go after the captain.”

Kitto looked doubtful, but he hesitated. Just as Verran said, the rank-and-file ants didn’t know what to do without their leader. The ants on the tree trunks dropped to the ground and milled around in confusion, eventually wandering in different directions into the underbrush. A few walked directly off the edge of the ravine and into thin air, following the path of the queen. As the horde dispersed, the crewmates scrambled down the tree trunks, but the few remaining ants didn’t seem to notice them.

Kitto ran to the edge where Harp had disappeared, dropped to his knees, and peered over the side.

“Do you see him?” Verran asked.

Boult stood at his shoulder. “It’s not a vertical drop, Kit. He could have grabbed onto something. And I can’t see his body.”

“Let’s find a way down,” Verran said. A few paces up the river, a faint path traversed the bank down to the river. Halfway down the trail they could hear Harp calling to them over the rush of the river.

“See Kitto?” Boult said. “You’re not going to get rid of him that easily.”

Kitto’s head was tipped forward, so his shaggy black hair covered his face, and he didn’t say anything until they reached the bottom of the ravine. Harp was waiting for them by the river, wincing as he rubbed his shoulder. His face was muddy, and blood from his chin had dripped onto his sweat-stained shirt.

“Are you all right?” Kitto asked.

“Hah, stupid ant,” Harp said. “Lost my sword, though.”

“Bad luck,” Boult said.

“Maybe not,” Harp said, pointing downriver. “I found something else.”

30 Ky thorn, the Year of the Ageless One

(1479 DR) Chult

Set into the face of the riverside bluff, the wooden door was half-covered in flowering vines. The edge of the river was just paces away from the door, and there were watermarks halfway up the planks as if there had been recent flooding. A narrow path, just wide enough for a single person, led from the door to the river.

“Doesn’t look much like an ancient ruin,” Boult said, looking at the sturdy metal hinges and doorframe set into the bank. Between Bootman’s attack and the ants, Chult’s surprises were nothing to underestimate. The door was one more thing. What hid behind it?

“There’s something here,” Verran called from where he’d wandered down the bank. A short slope led down to the river, and a ring of three boulders

formed a pool of calm water. Judging from the smattering of tracks along the slope, it was a popular watering hole for animals.

“I’ve never seen half these tracks before,” Verran said, kneeling down and poking at the ground with a stick. “See those hoof prints? I’d say they’re wild boar. But look, they’ve got an extra toe.”

“What do you know about wild boar?” Boult said dubiously.

Verran looked embarrassed. “My father liked to go hunting. Before he died, he used to show me things.”

Boult glared at Harp, who avoided his gaze. It would take an act of outright treachery for Harp to see that there was something suspicious about a boy who could unintentionally melt the skin off a man. Boult wasn’t fooled by Verran. He might act like he was lost and confused, but he was taller than Harp and built like a blacksmith. A youth didn’t have muscles like that unless he had done something hard to earn them.

“I can see … six different cat tracks,” Verran said excitedly. Kitto knelt down beside Verran to inspect the mud.

“I used to have a cat,” Kitto told Verran. “So did I,” Verran said. “It was a fat tabby.” “Mine was gray,” Kitto said.

Boult couldn’t believe what he was hearing. At this rate, the boys would be skipping stones and laying out a picnic. Boult looked at Harp incredulously and saw that Harp was trying hard not to smile.

“Is that what you wanted to show us, Verran?” Harp inquired gently.

“There are human footprints. There,” Verran told him.

Boult looked closer and saw a series of tracks that were unmistakably from a barefoot humanoid, and a smallish one at that.

“Another dwarf?” Harp asked. “Like the one we saw in the hollow?”

Verran shook his head and crouched down for a better look. “I don’t think so. Usually they have a lower arch and the bone below the big toe sticks out more. Look, they go back up.” Verran followed the tracks up the muddy slope in the direction of the door.

“And just what was young Master Verran doing tracking dwarves through the wilderness with his father,” Boult said in a low voice.

Kitto frowned. “Verran’s all right,” he said.

“Yeah, Boult,” Harp said. “Keep your wits about you. Maybe it was perfectly innocent.”

“Sure, they were all going to frolic together like wood nymphs,” Boult snapped.

“Can’t a man just stalk a dwarf for the joy of it?” Harp said. “Why do you have to-make it sound all nefarious?”

“Why don’t you go chew on the pointy end of your sword, Harp?” Boult growled.

“I lost my sword, remember?” Harp replied.

“Quit it,” Kitto said sternly. They trudged up the slope to where Verran was waiting.

“Well, there’s nothing to do but go inside,” Boult said after Verran pointed out how the footsteps disappeared on the dry ground in front of the door.

“Someone needs to wait out here and watch the door,” Harp said. “Any volunteers?”

“I will,” Kitto said.

“No, I will,” Verran said. “I don’t like dark, enclosed places.”

“All right,” Harp said. “Shout if you see something.”

Stepping off to one side, Harp pushed gently against the door. It wasn’t locked and swung open with a loud squeal.

“Another stellar move by Captain Harp,” Boult sneered as they stared into the gloom of the cavern. “Nothing like

rusty hinges to announce your presence.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Harp said sarcastically. “Of course, you would have thought to put a spot of lamp oil on the hinges first.”

Harp took a step forward, but Boult shook his head. “You’ve got the night vision of an old man. Let me.”

Harp put out his arm to stop Boult. “And you’re about as stealthy as a cat in heat. Let me.”

They hadn’t gone more than a few steps down the passageway when they saw an open doorway on the left side of the corridor. A long line of thick-barred, low-ceilinged cages lined one wall of the dank room. Shackles were bolted to their slick floors, and bones and hunks of fur—some of which still had rotting flesh clinging to them—littered the cramped cages. Harp’s haggard face had gone from tan to pale, and the ruddy scars crisscrossing his features stood out against his wan skin. Harp leaned one hand against the wall as if he were trying to regain his balance. Boult understood—he was having some unpleasant recollections of the Vankila Slab himself.

“I swore I’d cut out my own eyes before I’d go back to prison,” Harp said to Boult. “Particularly before I’d go back to prison with you.”

“But then you’d be stupid and ugly,” Boult replied. “And if you’ll notice what side of the bars we’re on, we’re not in prison.”

“Yet,” Harp said grimly.

ŚŠŚŚŠŚŚŠŚ

The Vankila Slab was a prison in the sky. Built by a joint effort of the Houses of Amn, it had been constructed on a barren mote, a massive slab of earth floating above Murandinn. The ogres who were charged with running the prison were given enough gold and slave labor to construct

four sky-scraping round towers connected by raised walkways. Without anything except the sky to offer perspective, the towers looked taller than they were, almost as if they might slide off the edge of the mote and go smashing into the ground hundreds of feet below without turning once. More than one prisoner held onto that fantasy—that the filthy walls of their prison tip into the airy abyss, taking their captives with them.

Originally, the Vankila Slab housed spellcasters who had defied Amn’s ban on using magic or members of well-connected families who had fallen out of favor with Amn’s ruling houses. But within ten years of building the prison, the political sensibilities in Amn shifted, and the Vankila Slab fell into the hands of a single faction that had its fingers deep in the murky politics of both Amn and Tethyr. Soon the prison became a mercenary operation that took the most dangerous criminals off the hands of the law and political prisoners off anyone who would pay.

Around that time, the wardens of the Vankila Slab discovered that the floating mote under their prison was fiHed with gemstones, and with an endless supply of free labor at their disposal they began to unearth the unexpected riches. From then on, the prisoners spent their days mining the gems with hand tools or spoons or their bloody fingernails— whatever they had on any particular day. Within a” few decades, the gems were mostly mined out, but the overseers didn’t want idle prisoners, so they kept them digging. On average, a prisoner came across a gem once a month, which earned them a hunk of meat with their gruel and little else but an early death from constant work in the scorching open ground known as the Turf.

By the time Harp left Liel and Kitto in a cove on the Moonshaes and turned himself over to the Amnian agents, the Vankila wardens were pursuing other uses for their prisoners. The faction that controlled the prison allowed

select mages access to their prisoners, but only mages who practiced a certain kind of magic that might be useful to the wardens in the future. The mages needed space to study and conduct their experiments, so the wardens constructed a fortress high above the surface of the mote using the four existing towers as a foundation. From the ground, the prisoners could see only the bottom of the fortress—a rectangle that spanned the distance between the towers and cast half the mote into darkness. The prisoners resented the loss of the sun, and soon rumors of dark rituals and sacrifices swept through the inmates, who called the soaring fortress the Sky Tomb.

It was in the Sky Tomb that an elder mage known as the Practitioner set up shop. He wasn’t always in residence at the Vankila Slab. Rather like a traveling scholar, he came and went, but his experiments were legendary. Like most of the mages, he wasn’t interested in the criminally minded, who were too hard to handle. Rather he turned his attentions to the inmates who were in prison for political reasons, almost all of whom were some race other than human.

When Harp had turned himself in to the authorities, he had known nothing about the Practitioner or the Sky Tomb, although he had heard fireside tales of a floating prison so brutal that even birds wouldn’t approach its shores. After he was taken from the Moonshae Isles in chains, Harp was put in the hold of a prison, ship, which sailed to Amn. Harp expected to face a tribunal and be given the standard punishment for mutiny—a year of hard labor. Instead, he was brought to the Vankila Slab without ever seeing a magistrate. When the hood was taken off, Harp found himself among the notorious and deranged in the very prison that had housed Amhar, Scourge of Tethyr, and Mencelas the Reaper, to name the worst of the worst.

During his first days on the Turf, Harp noticed that the guards patrolled the edges of the mote more carefully than

anywhere else. When he asked the emaciated man next to him why that was, the man startled at the sound a human voice. Pawing at the open sores on his neck, the man glanced at Harp suspiciously. His bleary gray eyes darted from side to side with seemingly involuntary jerks that made Harp wonder how the man could see anything clearly.

“Keeps us from jumping, doesn’t it?” the man whispered before returning to his digging.

During his first nights in the Vankila Slab, Harp’s mind settled on Liel in a way that was both comforting and disturbing. He couldn’t keep his mind from replaying the days he was with her and the nights he spent in her arms. Sometimes it was simply too much, like a noose that slowly tightened around his throat. He alternated between regret and anger, and the undeniable hope that she would figure out Where they had stashed him and find a way to get him out of the hellhole in the clouds.

A tenday after he arrived, the Vankila Slab still seemed like a brutal dream, and Harp kept expecting to wake up and find himself back in the sun-dappled forest on Gwynneth Isle with Liel and Kitto. He had been digging under the red sun for a couple of hours when an ogre approached him barking orders. Although he didn’t know the language, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the ogre wanted Harp to stand up and follow him. Harp happened to be working near a group of dwarves that morning, and he saw them exchange glances.

The ogre tied Harp’s hands behind his back, and all the while, the clutch of dwarves watched with great interest, surprising and unnerving Harp. One of the gaunt dwarves spoke up.

“Look for me later,” the dwarf said. “I’ll help you.”

The ogre raised his fist and cuffed the nearest face, not caring whether he was the dwarf who had spoken or not. Then they headed for the nearest tower as the ogre jerked Harp along behind him. Knowing the risk the dwarf had