The Ale Boy's Feast (20 page)

He knew that the girl was his if he desired. She’d grown up hearing the exaggerated stories of his powers and courage. She was enthralled. But the temptation was only intensifying his longing for Zhan. He smiled sadly, sitting down in the very center of the labyrinth’s path. The sun was blazing down on them in earnest now.

Try not to learn her name
, he told himself.

“I have a better idea,” he said. “You were brave to risk your life, come to the School, and spy on these despondent old fools for the resistance. But if I’ve already figured you out, so has my brother.”

She winced and withdrew her hand.

“Give up your studies here. Go back to your angry friends on the island. Tell them to stop sharpening swords for revenge. This wasteland’s not worth dying for. But New Abascar will be a paradise. And I mean to invite the Wildflower Isle colonists to join us.”

The acolyte rose and walked away, looking around, afraid.

And I’ll bring you, Zhan, if you’ll come
.

Scharr ben Fray and his brother Ryp rode north and west through the evening and a night. These were swift Jentan horses; Ryp’s was an arrogant stallion the color of coal, tattooed with runes spelling out a verse about renouncing the world, while Scharr’s dun mare was plain but impressively muscular.

Ryp led the way in smug silence, while Scharr imagined a thousand possible
purposes for this excursion. When the elder brother slowed them to a stop at a break in the earth, a steep-sided canyon on the edge of the Cent Regus wasteland, Scharr stared in disbelief. He had never imagined this.

“Behold,” Ryp tried to say, but a tooth fell out of his mouth. He climbed down from his horse to sift the sand for it.

Across the dry streambed, in the opposite cliff wall of the canyon, a line of fourteen enormous caverns echoed as the hissing wind cast debris against soot-blackened walls. Before each cavern lay massive metal bars in disarray across the ground. Whatever had been caged was gone.

“The Imityri,” he whispered. “The Seers captured the Imityri.”

Ryp, his hand covering his mouth as he tested the tooth he had inserted, said, “They trapped thirteen.” Then he gestured to a cavern that seemed unscarred, untroubled. “They needed only one more to complete their collection.”

“And then what happened?”

Ryp shrugged, scowling.

“Why? Did they mean to tame them?”

“Perhaps they merely sought to remove the creatures’ influence from the world. But as you can see, they failed.” Ryp sounded almost disappointed.

Scharr ben Fray watched him closely. “You knew this was happening.”

Ryp, avoiding his brother’s gaze, walked to the very edge of the cliff, knelt down, and pressed his hand to the stone. Stonemastery poured out from him, and the rugged cliff melted, forming a smooth incline suitable for their horses.

As they descended, the smell emanating from the empty caves spooked the animals, but they would not refuse their masters.

Scharr dismounted and walked slowly around one of the empty cells. Its walls were burnt and cracked and intricately lined as if the beast within had ceaselessly clawed at them. The cavern floors were scarred and stained. Deep gouges, bloodstains, and shreds of scaled skin littered the hard pack.

Tears stung his eyes as he lifted pieces of teeth and tusks.
If only I’d been here sooner. I would have freed them. How could anyone torment such magnificent animals? And how could Ryp let them?

When he saw his brother lift a wide curtain of castoff skin—something shed from a wing—he knew. “Seers promised to give you one. If you kept silent, they’d give you a chance to fly.”

Ryp spread the wing scrap on the ground, then folded it up in reverence. “I thought you might have set them free. I hoped you had. But I see now that you had nothing to do with it. And I do not like what that tells me.”

“I’ve never seen two Imityri in one place.” Scharr remembered glimpsing the back of a winged creature as it vanished into clouds over the Cragavar. He’d found seven-toed footprints on Deep Lake’s shores near the caves where Auralia had lived. Auralia, who said that the Keeper had sent her. “Unthinkable. How did the Seers capture thirteen, Ryp? How did they keep such a secret?”

“Beastmen guarded the Imityri while brascles circled above to watch for trespassers.”

“But someone outwitted them, Ryp. Someone set them free.” Ryp was watching him.

“It isn’t Cal-raven, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s strong but not this strong.” Scharr ben Fray kicked at one of the fallen bars. It was so heavy he could not move it.

“This ends an age of questions.” Ryp took on a lecturing tone, one Scharr had always hated. “So many have wondered if the Keeper that haunts their dreams might actually exist. But there is no such guardian—only thirteen or fourteen animals that remind them of that childish hope.”

“These skins …” Scharr ben Fray lifted a blanket of scales as long as the train of a queen’s wedding gown. “These bones they shed. It’s as if they die and rise.”

“But they’re hardly invincible.” When he turned, Ryp could not conceal his satisfaction. “You see, brother? You’ve been kindling Cal-raven’s belief in an illusion. And he has been shaped by that. A potted plant knows only the soil it’s been given. When he learns that you’ve taught him to embrace a falsehood, he’ll either succumb to fear and cling to the lie, or he’ll let it collapse and despair.”

Scharr looked up into the evening sky. He felt weary and defeated. “We see the suggestion of a shape among the stars. We give it a name, even though that shape
is only a fiction. It’s how we’ve always assembled our myths and our religions. We do this to comfort ourselves about all we do not understand. But surely this isn’t an empty pursuit. If it helps us face the day, why fight it? We all choose stories in which to root ourselves. Why not choose the story that enables us to flourish?”

“Because that is still a life built upon a lie.”

They were silent, both immovable.

When they returned to the horses, Scharr ben Fray found it difficult to leave. “What will happen to them now?”

“The Imityri? They’ll spread out again over the Expanse.” Ryp urged his horse up the crude stair, but the stallion needed no encouragement. “They’ll show mercy to those they choose, destroy those they wish. They’ll be monsters to some. To others they’ll be symbols of all we wish were true. Some will damn them. Some will strive to tame them. Some will worship them.”

Scharr ben Fray did not follow him up the path.

Ryp looked back. “Don’t you see? The world never ceases to disappoint us. Give up chasing mysteries. Come back to the Jentan Aerial where you belong.”

“Where I belong?” he barked. “I see you still embrace certain worthless illusions.”

Ryp went on, undeterred. “Ours is the only true path. Leave behind all these stories, these crutches, these blankets for frightened children. Cast off your burdensome body, your mind and its endless, meaningless excursions. Myths, maxims, proverbs, laws, principles, science … it’s all cracked and useless.” He gestured to the air about him. “Give me nothingness. So I can rest.”

Wind coiled through the empty caves, stirring up the dust as if these cells were haunted tombs.

“You’ll never solve your mysteries, Scharr. Not so long as we live in this. This world’s a whore, all soaked in perfumes, and you’re so easily seduced.” He tapped his skull. “Break the eggshell. Time to fly.”

ow I’d love a bath,” sighed Nella Bye.

“Another one?” asked Irimus Rain with a smile.

A bath was what the escapees had experienced, though not the sort they had wanted, as they fought through the polluted waterfall, raft by raft, lifting shields to deflect as much of the foul torrent as they could. Each of the eleven rafts carried seven, eight, or nine passengers, and each was propelled by two oarsmen, although they were as likely to be steering with a spear or a branch as an oar.

In spite of the fact that he looked like an owl dipped in mud, Irimus Rain was surveying the rafts as if he were once again a king’s advisor examining a royal procession. Dutifully he counted the eighty-nine passengers, and then he counted them again.

“You should be on the foremost float,” said Nella Bye, reaching to read the ale boy’s face with her hardened fingertips. “You’ve lived your whole life running through tunnels. We need your eyes and ears.”

“I’m not a leader,” he shyly replied.

Irimus laughed and knelt to take his hand. “With your ridiculous notions that we might escape, you kept us alive, boy. You held hope for us when we could hold none for ourselves.”

Nella Bye nodded. “You and the beastman drew us back from death.”

Ark-restor the baker, who had somehow remained corpulent through months
of slavery, rose suddenly from half sleep, perched himself perilously on the edge of a plank, and tried to flap wings he didn’t have.

“Some of you,” said the ale boy, “I could only bring back partly.”

Reluctant, he climbed to the first float and settled in among Bel Amicans.
I’m so weary of the underground
, he thought.
I want the forest. Deep Lake. Trees. Birds. Gatherers
.

It seemed all of them were daring to wish for things again. The Bel Amicans spoke in whispers like restless breezes, eager for food, clear water, and relief from the injuries caused by the countless days of grueling labor. Many wanted more particular cures; beastmen had made them drink Essence for strength, and Essence produced strange symptoms. Some scratched at blue patches of skin, while others sprouted hair in strange places. Some had grown distorted features, and one bled from flaring nostrils, while another bled from the gums where her teeth had grown larger. Limbs ached from unnatural growth; their skin cracked and blistered.

To distract himself from such strange company, the boy leaned over the front of the raft and lifted a white glowstone to study the tunnel walls. A wild variety of bizarre and crawling things flinched, fluttered, and scurried away from the light. He felt fitfully itchy and muffled the glowstone’s shine, turning his eyes down to the water. “At least this river’s more like soup and less like stew,” he murmured.

Maybe Auralia is painting by the lake again
, he thought.
Maybe we’ll pass right beneath her. Didn’t she say there was water somewhere in those caves?

As the rafts progressed upstream and the passengers from Bel Amica and Abascar strained to see through the fog, the ale boy leaned into memory. The thought of seeing Auralia at the end of this journey would keep his courage burning. And yet, it made him long to slip away, find his way back to the surface, and search for her.

Auralia knows me
, he thought.
No one else does. When I keep my promise and bring these people to Cal-raven, I’ll go and find her. We’ll play by the lakeside with colors and flames … if we remember how
.

Mad Batey puffed through his grey mustache. “We’re moving steadily north, I think.”

“Northeast, I’d say,” said Petch, the big-headed, sparsely bearded Bel Amican youth beside him. “But northeast to what?”

Batey flexed his jaw as he scratched another mark on his arm, a spidery map of their progress. “I don’t care, so long as we don’t see any Deathweed.”

“We may be too deep for the feelers,” said the ale boy.

“Where do you get that idea?” Petch sat so close beside Batey that he was almost sitting on him. “Where’s your evidence?”

The ale boy was already weary of this man, a fount of perpetual chatter. If anyone offered a thoughtful idea, Petch would pounce as if he felt threatened. He reluctantly answered, “Feelers push up through the ground for prey. Haven’t seen them dig down here. Not yet.”

Petch scowled. “You almost sound like you want to stay down here.”

Stunned, the ale boy groped for some idea of how he’d offended the big-headed Bel Amican. But Mad Batey pointed suddenly to the tunnel wall ahead.

Arrays of twigs and mud bloomed from pores in the wall above. “Cavebirds,” said Petch, stroking his early beard.

He thinks the gesture makes him look wise
, the boy thought.

“If cavebirds nest here,” said Batey, “then Deathweed isn’t troubling them.” He frowned at Petch. “Evidence.”

“I don’t see any birds, do you?” said Petch. “Those nests are empty.”

Batey stepped to the edge. “Worth a look. Might be eggs.”

They drew the rafts to a stop. Batey couldn’t reach the nests, so he called for Aronakt. A long-limbed Bel Amican known among slaves for his agility, Aronakt leapt across the rafts, his ragged overcoat fluttering like crow’s wings. He calmly studied the pitted wall, then applied himself to climbing. “Too late.” He dropped shards of shell back down to the water.

“Coulda been Deathweed,” Petch said softly.

“Ready the arrows we brought from the Core,” said Batey. “Anybody sights a cavebird, we’ll shoot fast.”

This tunnel is strangely familiar
. The ale boy strained to remember.
What happened after I fell?
“I think this leads to better waters,” he said.