Fire In The Blood (Shards Of A Broken Sword Book 2) (10 page)

Of one thing, Rafiq was very certain. If, as seemed increasingly possible, they
could
die in this construct, it was entirely likely that they
would
die, be the prince never so crafty. The Arphadians were far too many for the people of Hawthorne Keep, and if dragonfire had no effect on them, it was unlikely that the keep would last many more nights. He couldn’t even fly away if Akish didn’t order it, since leaving the prince there would be tantamount to causing his death, and he was Burdened not to do so.

Kako, seeing his struggles, gave a little spurt of laughter and said: “Oh, never mind! I suppose that makes it clear, after all. We should have an interesting night.”

              Night came and brought with it darkness, confusion, and a sudden change in circumstances. Rafiq woke to a sickening feeling that everything was double—or perhaps even triple—and was prevented from emptying the contents of his stomach on his bedroom floor only by the merciful return of coherence to his sight. By then that single-sight was showing him the rapid influx of spikily armed men to his bedchamber, and a shouting from Akish’s bedroom informed him that the prince had been similarly overcome. Rafiq dived for the door in an instant, narrowly avoiding two wickedly sharp knives that sliced at him in passing, and was halfway to Kako’s bedroom before it occurred to him to wonder why his Burden hadn’t forced him to go to Prince Akish’s aid instead. The thought flitted in and out again immediately, because he was then so busy fighting to get to Kako’s side that he had no room for any other thought. At the entrance of the Arphadians—for it could only be the Arphadians—she had been awake quickly enough to rapidly scale the frame of her canopied bed, from which vantage point she was at present hailing sharp, deadly spells down on the company.

Rafiq, having tried and failed to change into his dragon form, had no time to dwell upon the somewhat terrifying fact. Instead, he wrestled a knife from a bulky Arphadian who didn’t stand up well to a solid blow to the base of the skull, and furiously slashed with it, edging his way toward Kako and the bed. He had only a rudimentary idea of hand to hand fighting, however, and his wildness notwithstanding, the result was a foregone conclusion.

Rafiq was borne to the floor not two yards away from the foot of the bed, painfully beset by Arphadian boots and fists. Curling into a defensive ball with his head ringing from the kicks, he heard one of the Arphadians say: “For the last time, will you come down!”

“Oh, all right, all
right
!” Kako said disgustedly. “Look, stop kicking him! I’m coming down!”

The leading Arphadian gave Rafiq one more kick for good measure, then casually tore Kako from the curtains as she climbed down. She fell heavily, and without a sound but the crack of her head against stone as she hit the floor. Rafiq spat blood and tried to crawl toward her, but he was dragged from the room and Kako alike by one leg, jolting over the stone floor until he was in the common-room again. Akish was being shoved through the door of his own bedroom; furious, dishevelled, and disarmed.

“Change, you maggoty son of a lizard!” he howled.

“Can’t!” croaked Rafiq, aware of two missing teeth and a possibly torn tongue. “The Keep is preventing me.”

“You’re a good fighter,” said the Arphadian leader to Rafiq. “That one is, too, but he had the advantage of cold steel. I think you want to live.”

“Do you?” said Rafiq in cold rage, thinking of Kako lying senseless and perhaps dead in her bedroom.

“I do, my bucko, I do.”

Rafiq gave him a narrow look that was made all the narrower because his left eye was rapidly swelling shut. “What if I do?”

“Well now, if I was to be convinced that you’d turned—become part of the Arphadian army—I’d be inclined to save your life.”

“Convinced, how?” asked Rafiq, his thoughts flying very quickly. Was there a chance of getting Kako out of this alive?

The Arphadian grinned. “Oh, you’d have to be obedient.
Very
obedient. And you’d have to cut all ties to your past.”

“Cut ties,” said Rafiq slowly, because it sounded as though the man had used the words deliberately. The Arphadian was turning a dagger in one hand, rolling it lightly from finger to finger, and when Rafiq’s eyes rose from the dagger to his eyes, the man jerked his head in Akish’s direction.

“Kill your companions,” he said, this time plainly and clearly. “Earn our trust, and at the same time destroy any chance of being accepted by your countrymen again. Of course, it’s unlikely any of them will live through the night, but the chance, my friend, the chance!”

“You will not kill me!” shouted Akish. “I Burden you!”

Rafiq waited for the Burden to settle on him, heavy and impossible to ignore, but it never fell. He drew a slow breath, his thoughts whirring away madly, and came to the conclusion that the Keep was preventing his Thrall from being used against him. He could kill Akish here and now, without the Burden stopping him.

Kako, on the other hand, he certainly couldn’t kill.

“I won’t kill the girl,” he said. “Keep her safe and I’ll do whatever you want.”

“The girl’s dead already,” said the captain. His lips were still moving, and he might have said something like: “Just him then. Do you want to live, or not?” but Rafiq’s hearing had gone distinctly fuzzy.

The Arphadians laughed when he staggered to his feet, a scattering of half-respectful, half-derisive mirth. Rafiq’s thoughts were as fuzzy as his hearing: it seemed to him that if he had neither knife nor dragonfire to kill the man who had killed Kako, he would tear out his throat with his teeth.

He snarled and leapt for the captain, and in leaping he flew through dark and cold and the last of the Fifth Circle...

***

              Somewhere in the depths of the Fifth Circle a pair of legs protruding from one of Hawthorne Keep’s walls kicked disconsolately. Prince Akish’s legs—for they were his—seemed to have intended to follow the rest of his body through the gelatinous wall but hadn’t quite made it. The legs kicked once, twice more, while a ripple surged slowly and impressively across the reality of the wall as it became slightly less than real. One more surge, another kick, and the legs were dragged unceremoniously into the Sixth Circle.

The Fifth Circle is ended.

              Rafiq was plunged into brackish water before his stomach had time to catch up with him. It closed over his head in a rush, sparking a white hot panic that made him flail wildly with his arms and legs, clawing at insubstantial water. Then something gripped the back of his shirt and hoisted him upward, and Rafiq felt his head break the surface. He beat uselessly at the water, casting about desperately for anything solid to cling to, his eyes wide and frozen.

“Stop it, Rafiq!” hissed a voice in his ear.

Rafiq heard it as from a distance in his mad, thrashing panic. It wasn’t until something painful pierced his ear that he was shocked into the realisation that it was Kako’s voice in his ear. She wasn’t dead or injured. She wasn’t still lying in the fifth Circle with a pool of blood spreading from her cracked head. She was here with him, her arms around him from behind to keep his head above water. It was she who had dragged his head above water, she who had–

“You
bit
my
ear!
”

“Didn’t have a hand free to slap you,” panted Kako. “Anyone would think you hadn’t had to swim before.”

“Haven’t,” said Rafiq shortly, grimly concentrating on
not
windmilling madly with his arms. It didn’t feel like it, but he knew Kako was keeping him afloat with her arms around his chest and the slow, steady stroke of her legs.

“I’m going to put you over by the wall,” she said. “It’ll give you something to hold onto. Try not to kick me again, won’t you?”

“Again?”

“And if you hit me again I’ll bite your other ear.”

“I
hit
you?”

“Well, it was more of a glancing blow,” said Kako. “But it’s probably going to bruise. There you go.”

It took Rafiq several waterlogged seconds to realise that she was nudging him into a curving wall of slimy brick. He seized upon two of them that protruded sufficiently to offer grip and threw a glazed look around.

They were in a well, the opening a bright circle of light far above, and the walls curving around them in serried ranks that rose higher than Rafiq could easily follow until they met the opening. Here and there one jutted out further than its fellows, a possible but not very probable route of escape. As far down as they were, the light was green and soft, and made the water seem almost yellow.

Kako, who was still supporting him with one hand and calmly stroking through the water with the other, said: “It’s too deep to reach the bottom as well. I checked just before you fell through.”

Rafiq tried not to let the idea of bottomless depth take hold on his mind.

“What happened? Where’s Akish?”

“What do you think happened?” Kako said disgustedly. “He killed us. The Keep is trying to keep him out of the sixth Circle because technically, he hasn’t passed.”

“We’re alive,” said Rafiq, his eyes catching an eruption of bubbles against the curve of the wall across from him. He ran his tongue over his teeth and found that they were all there again.

Kako managed to shrug in a silent ripple of stagnant water. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill us. The Keep likes to make things safe– well, until the last Circle, anyway. It split us into three separate Constructs: didn’t you feel the split?”

“
That’s
what that was?”

“The split vision? Yes. The Keep copied us and put a copy into each of the Constructs to interact with the others. The prince killed Constructs of us: the same deal that was offered to you.”

Rafiq said: “You told us it was all a construct.”

“Well, it was.”

“Yes, but the only way through it was to pretend that it was real, and to act as we would have if it
was
real.”

“Are you angry because I misled you, or because you forgot it wasn’t real?”

“I’m not angry!” said Rafiq angrily. In truth, he was angry because it was hard to remember that Kako was alive, though he was speaking to her. The feelings that the fifth Circle had stirred up were still raging, high and fierce, somewhere deep inside him.

Kako said: “I see that,” and smiled at him, warm and apologetic. The warmth of it utterly did away with his anger, but left him shivering in its wake with reaction or perhaps cold. He felt stiff and wrong and somehow extinguished in the wet embrace of the well.

“There’s something over there,” he said, his attention again caught by a burst of bubbles.

“Yes, it’s probably Prince Akish drowning,” sighed Kako. “Can you hold onto the wall for a bit?”

Rafiq, who desperately wanted to say no, said: “Yes,” and Kako vanished beneath the yellow surface in a brief flurry of pink silk and bare feet. He watched the bubbling mass of air breaking the surface over by the wall with clenched teeth and the savage thought that he would much rather Akish drown alone and perhaps take with him all hope of breaking Rafiq’s indenture to the crown, than that Kako should also drown in the rescuing of him.

              She stayed beneath the water so long that the bubbles ceased to froth at the surface, and Rafiq began to think that she really had drowned. Then there was a shallow disturbance in the surface: a swirling indent that gave way to a slight bulge, and Kako slid silently into the green light once again. Close by her head bobbed another, and two limp arms floated to the surface as she towed Akish toward Rafiq. He wondered if he’d looked quite so pathetic when she did the same for him.

“Had to get his chainmail off,” she said. “Can you hold the front of his gambeson? At the waist? His legs and arms will float by themselves.”

Rafiq put out one stiff hand to grip a handful of Akish’s gambeson, feeling distinctly perilous. “Is he dead?”

“No. Well, sort of. If I can force the water from his lungs he’ll be fine.”

Forcing the water from Prince Akish’s lungs proved to be a short and violent business that almost jolted Rafiq from his handhold. Once she had the prince on his back, Kako proceeded to vigorously pump at his chest with the heel of one hand, the other supporting his shoulders. After the fourth or fifth assault Akish convulsed in the water, his chest jerking up to meet his knees, and regurgitated a disturbing amount of yellowish water.

Kako immediately rolled him to one side despite his feeble struggles, patting him encouragingly on the back, and when he stopped coughing and gasping Prince Akish seemed content to float with one hand on her shoulder. He was a swift and capable swimmer, Rafiq knew: he wondered exactly why the prince had almost drowned.

Kako, her eyes glowing with golden-brown mischief, met his eyes and said: “His legs were stuck over in the fifth Circle.”

“Curse you, wench, do you never stop talking?” rasped Prince Akish.

“
There’s
a fine thank you!” instantly said Kako. “Should I have let you drown?”

There was a brief silence before Akish said: “You were useful to me. Where is my chainmail?”

“It didn’t float.”

Rafiq saw the moment that a catastrophic idea struck the prince. There was a splashing as the prince’s fingers frantically patted down the front of his gambeson where Rafiq knew he had a secret pocket, then a swirling of water as Akish’s arms circled to keep himself afloat, relief etched clear in his face. Kako must have put back whatever it was she had stolen from him.

Implausibly oblivious, Kako said: “When you’re rested, your highness, we might as well proceed to the next Circle.”

Akish stared at her. “How? I thought only the princess and the dragon knew the way through the Circles?”

“When I was stripping you of your chainmail it slipped through my fingers and caught on something in the wall further down,” said Kako. “And out of the water, further up, right
there
– that’s a lever. I’d stake my scarf the chainmail caught on an underwater one. If you’re not going to take the Door Out–”

“I’m not!”

“–then I suggest that one of us climbs to the top lever, another swims to the lower lever, and we pull them together.”

Prince Akish thought about it for a long time, and at length voiced the same suspicion that Rafiq had been nursing.

“You’re unusually helpful, wench. Why?”

“Normally I’d try to stall you,” Kako said, shrugging a circle of ripples. “But Rafiq doesn’t like it here: so, on to the seventh Circle! It’d be much safer for you if you left now, though.”

“I have prevailed until now,” the prince said stiffly. “I shall prevail yet.”

“You know, I think you really believe that. Your certainty is actually terrifying.”

“Rafiq can dive for the underwater lever,” Akish said, even more stiffly. “You’ll climb for the one above water. I shall remain here.”

“Rafiq can’t swim.”

“I’ll climb for the top one,” Rafiq said wearily. His shivers had become full, body-wracking shudders.

“Shaking like that? I don’t think so. You’d just fall back in and I’d have to rescue you again. No, you’ll have to stay here. I’ll pull the top lever.”

“How do I know you won’t let me drown and take the Door Out?” said Akish immediately.

Rafiq grinned. He had expected nothing else.

“You don’t,” said Kako, cheerfully comfortless. “That’s the point, you see?”

Akish gave her a hard look. “I do see. Nevertheless, between what the Keep intends and what its guests do, there is a wide chasm that makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.”

“Well,” said Kako. “What about Rafiq? Do you think he’d let you drown?”

“No,” Akish said, his head jerking back in surprise. “He can’t. The Burden laid upon him forbids him bringing about, being party to, or in any way encompassing my death. Besides, his slavery is to the crown in general as much as me in particular. If I die, he remains enslaved.”

“
Well
then...” Kako said, shrugging. She was clinging close to the wall now, her sodden scarf wrapped so tightly around her neck that Rafiq was surprised she could breathe. As he watched, she made a clean, lithe lunge from the water and caught at one of the bricks higher up. For a moment she hung from her fingertips, perilously close to falling again, then another short burst of effort saw her other hand firmly in place on another brick and one foot in a hollow spot.

              When Kako reached the ledge there was a scuffle and a slight shriek from above.

Rafiq, one hand reaching for the first brick in the climb up, said: “Kako! Are you all right?”

Her voice floated back down apologetically. “Sorry! There was a rat up here.”

“You’re afraid of rats?”

“It
surprised
me!” came the indignant reply.

Akish, with no patience for Rafiq’s teasing, said: “Wench, do you have the lever?”

“Yes. How long will it take you to get to yours?”

“Give me a count of ten,” said Akish. He was peering down into the water, where Rafiq thought he could see a faint glitter of silver: Akish’s chainmail, no doubt. “It’s not so far down, but I’ll need time to position myself.”

“Will you go now?”

A splash and a ripple answered her. At Rafiq’s internal count of two, she said: “Rafiq?”

“Yes?”

“The water is going to sink. Probably quite rapidly. You’ll need to keep holding onto the wall, because the current will be quite strong, but you’ll need to keep changing your grip to follow it down.”

With a feeling of dread, Rafiq said: “Yes,” and began to feel below the water for his next hand-hold. As he did, there was the grinding of gears from above, accompanied by a shower of rust and cobwebs. A dimple appeared in the centre of the well, lazily spinning, and as lazily spread until it was a rippling coil fully to the edges of the well. Rafiq, already aware that he was sinking lower in the well and seeking another hand-hold, found that his legs were being slowly sucked away from the wall and tried to fight down his panic.

Kako’s voice said from above: “Don’t be startled, Rafiq; but it’s going to get noisy soon.”

Rafiq started to say: “Noisy?” but the word was muffled by an unearthly wail that rose in the close air of the well and tore at his eardrums. He desperately tried to cover his ears, but by then the pull of the spinning water was so strong that he needed both hands just to stay by the wall. If he had felt a sympathy approaching horror for Akish’s part in this Circle, Rafiq now felt that the prince, in having his ears clogged with water, was the fortunate one.

The wail was so painful, in fact, that when it stopped all Rafiq could think about was the blessed relief of the silence. It took the rapidly rising water and Kako’s rather impolite remarks from her perch high above him to make him realise that something must have gone wrong.

Akish burst from the water shortly after that, spitting water and coughing.

“Curse you wench, you
were
trying to drown me!”

A barely audible mutter of: “Oh, for
pity’s sake!
” floated down to them.

“Repeat yourself, wench!”

“I
said
, your highness, that the water needs
time to sink
! You’re going to be under water for quite some time– longer if you keep letting go of your lever and have to fight the current to get back to the surface!”