She Who Has No Name (The Legacy Trilogy) (55 page)

Eventually, they came to a length of rough-hewn passage that had four iron doors along one side.  One of the escorts rushed ahead and, throwing his lantern aside, drew three great sets of locks open on one door and laboured to
pull
it open.  They pulled Samuel towards the gaping doorway and he only had a moment to see that there was pitch
black awaiting inside, before they pushed him in and through, slamming the door shut behind him.  Three rattling clanks sounded as they bolted the door behind him.  They left him in complete darkness, chattering awhile amongst themselves, before he heard them sidle back away along the passageway from whence they had come.

Samuel stood perfectly still for the first few moments, controlling his breath and scouring the darkness with his magician’s senses.  Anyone else would have been completely blind, but as his
sight
sprung into clarity, he could make out the faint energy that seeped from the very stone.  It took some time to make out his surroundings
and
found that he was in a small and empty cell that had been hacked from the bare stone without precision, leaving the sides rough and uneven.  The ceiling was a cluster of smooth stalactites that hung to various lengths.  Slowly, as he focussed his senses around the cell part by part, he gained a greater idea of the walls surrounding him.  There were some torn rags strewn on the floor and so Samuel collected these together then sat himself upon them, opposite the door
,
to wait.

He had no idea how much time had passed before the door opened again, except that he had waited many hours, then slept, and then waited again.  And he had repeated that cycle at least twenty times without interruption.  In that time, he had eaten nothing and had drunk only the drops that formed on the tips of the stalactites above him.  He could only reach two of the spikes flat-footed, and one more by standing on his tiptoes and reaching up as far as he could with his tongue.  In this way, he had persisted.  Without such sustenance, he had no idea how he was supposed to have survived.

He had sensed figures come creeping down the corridor at times, stopping outside his door in complete silence before padding away hurriedly.  He had sat still and ignored them all.  He supposed it must have perplexed them that he made no sound, but not enough to have them open his door to see what had become of him.

When the door did open, it was with a bright and blinding light.  He stood and shielded his eyes but
,
as something came bounding in upon him, howling and snarling, he leapt aside, almost cracking his skull against the wall.  The door shut again, leaving him once more in darkness, but with something angry and growling sharing the cell with him.  He could not tell immediately what it was, but its life shone brightly in the cavern against the dull stones.  As he made out its shape from the pattern around it, he realised it was a dog of some kind, and it stood in the dark, growling savagely.  It could smell him and probably hear him, despite how hard he tried to stand perfectly still.  With a snarl
,
it leapt and Samuel stepped aside, grabbing it around the neck with one deft movement.  He was weakened from lack of food, but it was not a large animal and he dropped his weight upon it and drove the beast into the ground.  With a yelp, it was dead.  He felt little remorse, for he had been allowed
no
choice but to defend himself. 

Moving his hands over its body, he found it to be
,
indeed
,
some manner of muscled and ferocious dog, but it had been wounded and tortured only recently to make it all the more savage.  Looking closer, he sensed it to be full of slow-acting poisons.  Curious, he thought, for the poison had not had time to affect the animal.  Then perhaps it was a test for him: starve him, test him, give him meat—and if he ate it
,
he would perish in turn.  It seemed his captors were playing games with him and he started to wonder if the Desert Queen even knew he was here.

Time crawled by and Samuel began to wonder if he should take action to free himself.  Balten had told him to have patience, but how
long
w
ould he need to wait?  Then again, without his ring he had no idea how he could possibly do anything at all.  Instead, he practised all his old lessons from his days in the School of Magic
:
the mantras and words of power, the stances of summoning and expending power (as much as the space would allow) and the complex hand matrices—all designed to align him as closely as possible with the weaves and flows of the infinite pattern of existence. 

Still, that felt hollow and so he turned his time towards other pursuits.  He practised squeezing his fists at the end of his stances, transforming the movements of summoning and casting into strikes and evasions, just as he imagined Horse doing them.  With each repetition, he felt satisfaction
,
for he could feel his blows developing—
becoming
tighter, faster, more efficient.  He could hear his sleeves rippling and whipping in the darkness as he locked his attacks into place and
,
as the noise became sharper and more violent, he knew he was improving.

He experimented with kicking, based on what he had seen the Koian do, but these felt somehow awkward and he was not sure if they would be effective at all.  Still, he had little else to
occupy
his time and he continued practising whatever he could, moving around his tiny chamber in the blackness until he knew its every inch by heart.

When the physical practice exhausted him, he would sit and focus his mind.  He sent his senses deep into the stone and found only more stone all around.  Looking further, he detected some narrow passages far away and other living things—perhaps other captives—deep within the rock.  Occasionally, his visitors would come and check on him, and occasionally, spells would be sent to search for him—powerful spells originating from far outside the mountain—but little else happened in his timeless world of dark and quiet.

Footsteps pounding along the passageway alerted Samuel long before they arrived, and Samuel had time to stand and ready himself when the guards next opened his door.  They held torches and called to him
,
gestur
ing
for him to come out
,
and he did so warily, eyeing their daggers with concern, ready to leap aside if required. 

Once again, the men bound his wrists and dragged him through an unending
labyrinth
of passageways and tunnels.  Quite suddenly, he found himself in sunlit halls, passing women and servants, all of whom seemed revolted by him and did their best to keep their distance.  He was not at all surprised and guessed that he must have looked and smelled quite terrible after his stint in captivity.  The rotting dog carcass beside him had not helped, as all he could do at the time was wrap it in the rags that had been his bed and stuff it in the corner.

His escort led him down a short flight of stairs and the
n
opened a large set of double doors.  They cut his ropes and pushed him through and it was there that Samuel found himself
inside
a great arena, with perhaps tens of thousands gathered in the seats around him.  The sand was stained with several patches of dark blood and so Samuel trod slowly to the centre of the area, still wincing at the brightness of the sun and looking at the crowd all around him
in
confusion.  The wait seemed painfully long, but it was obvious what would happen next.  Surely enough, another door opened and out came trotting six masked and armed desert-men, each bearing a different form of weapon.

He was without his power, and suffering from lack of decent food and sleep, but he hoped he would be able to manage these men with his physical skills alone.  The isolation of his cell seemed to have protected him from the thought of having no magic, but now, out in the open and requiring spells, he began to panic.  He patted his pockets desperately, hoping for his ring to reappear, but it was a vain hope.

He just had time to thank the fact that he had been practising his attacks in his cell, when another door burst open and a huge lizard came bounding in.  It was the same kind of creature that had attacked them outside of Rampeny, but he could see this one clearly and it was enormous.  It locked its eyes upon him and came scampering toward him at full speed. 

He flexed and tested his muscles and
mentally prepared himself
as the thing bore down on him—he had no idea if he was capable of defending himself at all.  It hissed, flapping its blue tongue, and snapped at him.  Samuel moved aside, surprising himself at how much distance he covered in one spry step, but the thing continued after him like fluid lightning.  He leapt high—higher than he intended—but the lizard was also agile and arched its head up, snapping after him.  He cleared its mouth by inches and scampered down its scaly back and behind it. 

The armed men were waiting and he dashed amongst them, hoping to confuse the great lizard.  It had already turned and was after him in a frenzy, and the men fled from its path.  Samuel ran at them, for they seemed equally disturbed by the presence of such a monstrosity.  They scrambled to be away, but he slid into the
shin of the
closest man and kicked up into the front of his knee.  The man cried out as his leg bent backwards and Samuel leapt over him, crushing his throat as he passed. 

The ease of doing so was a surprise to him, for in his mind he had superimposed the movements of Horse upon himself, and he seemed to be able to match them almost perfectly.  He had the man’s spear in his hand and threw it at the furthest fighter, where it buried itself deep into his chest.  The desert-man only gasped and fell to his knees, propped up by the shaft of the weapon with his lifeblood gushing out onto the sand.  The heavy hammer in his hand dropped to the sand beside him.

The lizard was again upon him and the other four men had scuttled out of its way, so Samuel
found himself
back-stepping to be away from it.  He danced behind the speared man and the lizard trampled over the corpse to
gat at him
.  He ran for the wall and the thing followed, hissing closely behind with rancid breath.  He r
eached
the wall and took two steps up it, vaulting back as the lizard crashed into the stone below him, cracking the great stones.  Again, he raced down its back and was away while the thing writhed in pain. 

The fighters had spread out and Samuel raced past the pulverised and speared body, scooping up the heavy hammer as he passed.  The nearest fighter had a spiked shield and net and he threw the latter at Samuel as he approached, hoping to ensnare him.  Samuel
now
threw his hammer with his full force, swinging it by the end of the handle for momentum; it carried the net back with it, crashing into the man’s shield and toppling him backwards.  Samuel stepped on the shield and kicked the man in the teeth as hard as he could.  Three desert fighters remained. 

Samuel was off again, pulling the shield with him, feeling his heart now thudding wildly in his chest and labouring for breath, but he could not stop until they were all dead, or it would be his end.  The lizard had recovered and was again galloping for him, so Samuel bolted towards the next warrior and manoeuvred behind the man.  It took a moment for the desert-man to realise what was happening, but too late for
,
as he watched Samuel scoot past him, it was already too late for him to run from the thundering lizard’s path.  He disappeared beneath it and Samuel was off again, towards the next fighter.

This man held two swords and he stood carefully, keeping Samuel between himself and the creature.  Samuel raised his shield and
sprang
upon the man.  One sword bit into the shield and the other swept at Samuel’s legs, but Samuel was airborne and fell upon the warrior with his full weight, spearing him to the ground with the sharpened tips of the shield. 

One fighter remained and Samuel picked up both swords from the
man
he had just defeated.  This
last fighter
was wielding a heavy axe and Samuel knew he would have no trouble dispatching the man, so he returned his attention to the lizard.