Eona (33 page)

With a pretty smile, she took the lamp and followed him to the sturdy inner door. Yuso stepped out of their way as the warden unhooked a set of heavy keys from his belt and held them up to the light, their polished brass tops glinting in his thick fingers.

“This one will get you into the cell itself,” he said. “Maybe if you play your cards right, you can have a closer look.”

Behind him, a duller gleam of metal caught my eye: Yuso's blade sliding silently from its sheath.

“I'd like that,” Vida said. A tilt of the captain's head edged her back a step.

The warden inserted the key into the lock. “Me, too.” He gave a low laugh as the lock clicked and the door swung open. “You just give me a call and—”

With savage speed, Yuso clamped his arm around the man's chest and thrust the knife into the sacral point, low and hard. The warden arched back, the brutal flex of his throat stifling his cry. Yuso yanked out the bloodied blade, raised it again, and plunged it over the man's shoulder, hard into his chest. The only sounds were the soft thud of hilt hitting home and a tiny wet gasp. The man's weight sagged against Yuso.

I let out a long, ragged breath—I had not even realized I was holding it. Ryko had spun around to cover the entrance, knife ready. But the door did not open; neither guard had heard the muted sounds of death.

Yuso eased the warden's body to the ground and dragged it out of the inner doorway. He looked around at us, the violence still raging in his eyes.

“Get going,” he ordered.

Vida ripped the ring of keys from the lock, then forged down the shallow set of steps, lamp held up to light the way. I started to follow, but my knees buckled, the fall stopped by Dela's quick reflexes.

“I've got you,” she said. “Just lean on me.”

Together, we lurched down the steps into a stone corridor. Ahead, Vida's lamp showed a narrow downward slope and low ceiling. The stench of human pain—sweat, vomit, blood— caught in my throat, some primal part of me fighting the descent toward it.

“Holy gods, that's foul,” Ryko said behind us.

“Here! He's in here,” Vida called from the far end of the corridor, the ring of keys jangling as she fitted one into a lock.

Dela hauled me past three empty cells, the dark maws of their open doorways waiting for new flesh. The stink seemed embedded in the stone around us, our movements stirring small currents of air like fetid breath. We reached Vida as she pushed Ido's cell door open and held up the lamp.

The light found him against the back wall: naked, starved body curled side-on against the stone, his forehead pressed into the cradle of his shackled hands. The slow rise and fall of his chest rasped with effort, but he did not stir. His head had been shorn, the two sleek Dragoneye queues reduced to matted spikes. The one eye visible to us was swollen, the strong shape of cheekbone and jaw below it lost in a dark mess of blood and bruising. His nose, too, had been broken, its thin patrician length smashed and swollen. But the worst injuries were on his body: someone had taken a cane to his back and legs and the soles of his feet, and they had not stopped at shredding skin and muscle. The exposed bone and sinew across his shoulders caught the light like slivers of pearl.

“How could he survive that?” Vida whispered.

An image of the Rat Dragon—pale and agonized—leaped into my mind. Was the beast keeping him alive?

Vida pressed her hand over her nose and led us into the cell. A slops bucket, from the smell of it, sat in the far corner. In sharp contrast, an elegant table—its legs carved into four dragons—stood against the left wall. It held a porcelain bowl, the delicate gold edge encrusted with dark ooze, and a jumble of sharp metal objects that my eyes skipped across but my body registered with a shiver. A bamboo cane—half of its length stained with blood—lay on the floor beside a water bucket.

Vida put the lamp down next to Ido as Dela lowered me into a crouch beside him. I had not noted it before, but his beard was gone. Its absence, together with the close crop of his hair, made his face seem strangely young. Vida drew in a shocked breath as the concentration of lamplight showed more injuries. Both shackled feet were broken—the delicate fan of bones smashed and protruding through the skin—and a large character had been carved on his chest:
Traitor
. I leaned against the wall beside him. How could I heal such terrible damage while I was so weak?

“He's going to need some clothes,” Dela said tightly. “I'll get the warden's.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Be quick. Even Ido doesn't deserve this.”

Across the room, Ryko picked up the bowl and sniffed the contents. He thrust it away with a grimace. “Black Dragon.”

I looked up at him blankly. Vida crossed the room and sniffed the bowl, too, nodding her confirmation.

“It constricts blood,” she said. “That must be why he hasn't bled to death.”

“That's not the only thing it does.” Ryko put the bowl down on the table. “I've seen it used to heighten pain and unleash demons in the mind.” The islander had more reason than anyone to hate Ido—the Dragoneye had tortured him—but there was something akin to pity in his voice. “If they've been feeding this to him, he won't know what's real and what's not.”

I looked at Lord Ido's ruined, sweat-filmed face. If he could not distinguish between reality and nightmare, he would not be able to hold back the ten bereft dragons.

“We've got to wake him,” I said, panic rising into a surge of desperate energy. “I need him awake.”

I reached across and touched his hand. Even more chilled and clammy than my own.

“Lord Ido?”

No response. I shook his cold arm.

Not even a flicker.

“Lord Ido,” I shook him harder. “It's me, Eona.”

Nothing. He was far beyond a simple touch and call. More drastic measures were needed—more brutality. The thought of adding to such pain made me nauseous. But if he and I were to be healed, he had to be woken. Pushing past my own pity, I dug my fingers into the ridged, weeping damage across his shoulder.

His whole body flinched under my grip, his hands convulsing against the shackles. I jerked back. Surely that would wake him. But his eyes remained closed, no twitch of animation upon his drawn face.

“He's not waking,” I said.

“Try again.” Vida crossed the room.

I dug my fingers in harder. “Lord Ido!”

This time the pain flung him back against the wall, the raw contact shuddering through him. Even that did not open his eyes.

“He's deep in the shadow world. Probably a blessing,” Vida said. She held up the warden's ring of keys. “I'll undo the shackles. Maybe that will speak to his spirit.”

She fitted a slim key into the wrist irons, the heavy cuffs separating with a hollow click. Ido's hands dropped, their raw, bloodied weight slapping against his thighs. The freedom did not stir him. Vida bent and unlocked the ankle irons. “I can't pull them free.” Her voice was small. “I think they've broken his feet in them.”

Ryko squatted beside me and set the water bucket on the stones between us. He grabbed a handful of ragged hair and pulled Ido's head up. His pity, it seemed, did not translate into gentleness. “Lord Dragoneye.
Wake up.”

The harsh, slow breathing did not alter.

Ryko pushed Ido's head back against the wall, then stood and picked up the bucket. “You might want to move,” he said to me.

The water hit Ido in the face with a drenching force that caught me in its cold backsplash. I gasped, wiping the wet sting out of my eyes. It had certainly roused me from my exhaustion. I blinked and focused on Ido. The dripping water tracked through the crusted filth and blood on his face, but he was still beyond us.

I turned away as Ryko swung the bucket again. The water slapped and streamed over the Dragoneye. We all leaned forward, watching for any flicker across the closed eyes, or change in the rasping rise and fall of his chest.

“He's too far gone,” Ryko said.

“No!” Frantically I shook Ido again, the back of his head thudding against the wall. “Wake up!”

Vida pulled my hand away. “Eona, stop!”

“If he's not awake, I can't risk healing him,” I said through my teeth. “The other dragons will come, and he won't be there to stop them.”

Ryko stood. “He's not going to wake any time soon. We're going to have to carry him out.”

“It'll kill him,” Vida protested.

“Maybe, but we can't leave him here.”

The sound of running footsteps turned us toward the doorway. Dela rounded the corner, clothes piled in her arms. “Yuso is keeping watch in the front room,” she panted. “But he says hurry, we've only got a few minutes before the new guard shift.”

“We can't get Ido awake,” I said. “I can't heal him.”

She dumped the clothes on the filthy stone floor. “Let me have a look.”

Ryko made way as she leaned over and peeled back Ido's left eyelid. The pale amber iris was almost all black pupil. Then something moved across the dark dilation—a slide of silver.

Dela recoiled. “What was that?”

Hua
.

I lunged forward, lifting his eyelid again. The silver was dull and its shift across his eye slower than I had ever seen before, but it was definitely his power. “He's not in the shadow world. He's in the energy world.”

“Is that good?” Vida asked.

“It means he's probably with his dragon already.” I released his eyelid and sat back, remembering the blue dragon reaching toward me. Was it possible that Ido had taken refuge
in
his spirit beast?

“Does that mean you can heal him?” Ryko demanded.

I looked down at my bound arm. A slow throb was building through the numbness, leaching energy with every pulsing ache. I was not sure I had enough strength to get into the energy world. And even if I did, the ten bereft dragons were so
fast
. By my reckoning, I had less than a minute to find Ido and heal him before they attacked.

“I have to try,” I said. “Everyone stand back. You saw what happened last time.”

All three edged away to the other side of the cell.

Help me
, I prayed to any god who listened, and pressed my hand flat against Ido's wet chest, above the brutally carved character. His labored heartbeat thudded under my palm. A tight knot of terror clamped my breath. What if I could not do it? What if I killed us all?

I forced my way through the fear, each deep inhalation easing my chest open until I found a familiar, deepening rhythm: the pathway to the energy world. My exhaustion dragged at me, a treacherous riptide that I had to fight with every breath. Under my hand, Ido's heartbeat began to match mine, the ragged rise and fall of his chest blending into my own steady measure. The dim physical world around us twisted and bent into bright colors and streaming
Hua
.

Before me, the solid suffering of Ido's body shifted into patterns of energy. Pain slashed and spun through his meridians in sharp, jagged bursts of
Hua
. Each of his seven points of power circled slowly, the silver pathways hampered by a thick black ooze. I looked closer. The points, from red sacrum to purple crown, turned in the wrong direction. I had seen it before in Dillon.

Ido was using
Gan Hua
.

Ryko, Dela, and Vida braced themselves in the far corner,
Hua
pumping through their transparent bodies in dazzling streams of silver. They could not see the Mirror Dragon above them or sense her power, but to me her vibrant energy radiated like a small sun, searing away the shadows of the dank cell. She focused her otherworldly eyes upon me and I felt my
Hua
leap to meet her huge, shimmering presence. Her sinuous neck stretched toward me, the gold pearl under her chin alive with surging flames. Cinnamon flooded my mouth, her warm, joyous invitation bringing tears to my eyes.

But I could not accept it. Not yet.

I dragged my attention from her glowing beauty and focused on the Rat Dragon crouched in the north-northeast corner, his wedged head bowed and pale flanks heaving. The power from the beast was sour and dull, a muddy energy creating pockets of darkness within the streams of bright color that flowed from my dragon.

Lord Ido? I called silently. Are you in there?

The beast slowly lifted his head. The large eyes were not depthless, like the Mirror Dragon's. They were amber and clouded with pain.

Ido's eyes.

“By the gods, you
are
in your beast!” I said, shocked into speaking aloud. “How is that possible?”

Eona
. Ido's hoarse mind-voice was full of disbelief.
What are you doing here?

I pushed past my own astonishment and answered him mind to mind.
I'm here to heal you
.

Heal me?

Yes, but I need your help. The other dragons will come and I can't hold them back. I need you to block them like you did before. In the fisher village
.

Ido's dragon eyes met mine, their sudden human shrewdness at odds with the ferocious blue-scaled head and fanged muzzle.
Why do you take this risk? What do you want?

For all his torment, he had not lost any sharpness of mind.

I want you to train me
.

Ahh
. The big wedge head slowly cocked to one side.
And what do
I
get from this bargain?

You get your life! What more do you want?
Yet part of me admired his attempt to shift even this dire situation to his advantage.

The thin dragon tongue flicked.
I will have one other thing
.

You have no power to bargain, Lord Ido
.

You have no power without me
.

The blunt truth jerked my hand off his human chest. Across the cell, the dragon's head lowered, watching me. Ido knew he had hit home. I could call his bluff, but we were both running out of time.