The Outworlder (18 page)

“You do not ask the questions,
outworlder.”

The rebuke from the figure in black fell on
her with such fury that she involuntarily stepped back. Something
had happened. The high emotion disturbed the figure’s veil of
concealment, and for an instant she glimpsed—or thought she
glimpsed—what hid within the dark cowl. Like two wisps of smoke,
one after the other, Sahara saw appear first the emaciated, almost
skeletal face of a man and then the fierce blood-red eyes of a
dragon. She blinked, and the moment was past.

“Why do you care about Silesia?” the grey
figure resumed the interrogation. “Why do you not return to your
homeworld?”

“They think I’m dead.” She swallowed the rest
of her answer.
They wouldn’t want me. Not after….

“Your friends on Silesia think you dead also.
Not many who come to K’ilenfir ever return.”

The grey figure sat silent, watching her.
Sahara took a breath.

“There is someone else here from Silesia,”
she said, wondering why she was asking the question even as the
words spilled out of her mouth. “What will happen to him?”

“The
poeilil
,” the black figure said.
“He is already on his way back to Silesia.”

Sahara caught her breath as sorrow,
loneliness, relief, hope, and confusion tumbled together inside
her. She relaxed her hands.

“That makes you happy, does it, outworlder?”
the grey figure asked, but there was no gentleness or concern in
his voice.

“For him, yes.”

“You will not be so fortunate,” the other
assured her. “We have seen you before, and for this same reason.
The Council will decide your fate, and you will remain in your cell
until it has.”

The two figures stood and, as if on cue, the
door swung open. They left the room and vanished up the hallway
that curved away into the darkness of the fortress. The guard
returned and clipped a metal chain onto the collar Sahara wore
around her neck.

“Time to go,” he snarled.

Before he could pull her out the door, she
had the chain wrapped around his throat. In another moment, he lay
strangled to death at her feet.

Sahara drew a shaking breath. She unclasped
the chain from her own neck and then pulled the guard into a corner
of the cell where he would not be visible from the hallway.
Searching his body quickly, Sahara found a jagged knife and a ring
of keys. She took both, and then hesitated over the small sack
dangling at his waist. It contained a few gold coins and three
semi-precious stones.

Bribery and bartering aren’t conducted
with imaginary coin
, she thought, and unhooked the purse.
And he won’t need these, not where he’s gone.

A thick gloom hung over the hallway as she
crept out of the cell, pulling the heavy door almost closed behind
her. Silently, she crossed to the opposite wall and paused to
consider her route.

If she followed the hallway down, it would
take her back to the prison. Since Jared had already been released,
she had no reason to go back there. She turned and surveyed the
other direction, following the curved slope of the passage as far
as her eyes could make it out in the darkness. It led, she knew,
toward the Council Hall and the tower. It also led to freedom. With
a final glance back toward the prisons, she started up the gentle
slope.

The wall on her left hand curved around, and
the hallway hugged it for some distance. Sahara encountered no one
and nothing but blank stone walls. She paused every hundred feet or
so to listen, but there was nothing to hear. She tried not to think
about where she was headed and what she might find. It was enough,
for now, that she was free.

Suddenly, without warning, the wall on her
left dropped away into nothingness.

Sahara crouched down, her palms pressed
against the smooth flags of the floor. Several hundred feet below
her lay the Council Hall, illuminated by three huge torches, one at
each corner of the room. Not six feet in front of her stood a heavy
door. Glancing to her right, she saw that the hallway turned
sharply and continued on into darkness. Sahara hesitated, weighing
her options, trying to remember the layout of the place.

The door in front of her began to open, and
she heard voices approaching from the passage beyond it.

There was no time to run down the hall to her
right, and if she got caught she would be executed on the spot.

She crawled as quickly as she could to her
left, to the edge of what had been the hallway. She discovered that
she was on a ledge, almost like a balcony, overhanging the Council
Hall. Long twisted beams of stone and metal arched from the walls
to the center of the great hall, forming a support system for a
giant dais suspended by chains from the beams. One of the braces
was just within Sahara’s reach, and she quickly lowered herself
onto it.

The voices were growing louder, and she could
now hear footsteps too.

She shimmied down the beam into the darkness
below the ledge and huddled against the wall. Barely breathing, she
waited until the footsteps paced slowly past her position and
receded down the hall in the direction of the prison.

When all was utterly still once again, she
maneuvered herself so that she could straddle the brace, its
firmness supporting her stomach and chest and making a suitably
comfortable seat. She was now facing into the center of the hall,
and she wondered how long she would have to wait before the Council
convened to decide her fate.

I hope it’s before they discover the dead
guard and the fact that I’m not back in my cell.

Even as she finished the thought, the door
below her opened, and the Council members filed slowly into the
hall. They were all hooded and cloaked like the figures who had
questioned her, their features completely concealed.

At first, they all seemed identical, but as
the roll was called and each figure spoke, the colors of their
cowls changed subtly to match the tone of their voices. Soon the
hall was filled not with black figures, but with figures of every
shade of grey. On the dais below her sat a figure all in white and
the figure in black who had come to her cell.

The black figure spoke first. “This Council
is called to order.”

All the figures sat down simultaneously with
a whispering of robes on stone benches. They waited.

The white figure spoke then. “You have been
summoned here to decide the fate of the outworlder, who led the
rebellion against the Dragon-Lords of Silesia two weeks ago.”

Two weeks!
She was stunned. Had it
been two weeks?

“What need have you of the Council’s
decision, my lords?” a delegate in a silver robe asked, lifting his
voice to address the dais. “Can this not be resolved in the
customary way?”

The customary way. Like last time. A sentence
to life in the labor camp of some barren planet. In spite of
herself, her mouth twisted into a grin. It hadn’t worked out so
well for them last time.

“This outworlder has been here before,”
answered the figure in black. “She has caused trouble of this kind
before. She is dangerous to the order established by the
Council.”

A murmur of agreement swirled through the
hall.

The white-robed figure continued, “She was
here five years ago, accused of plotting rebellion on her
homeworld. But she escaped, curse her and all those who aided her!
Then, a year ago, she herself assassinated our minister and High
Dragon-Lord Zhezhna-ban. But the price for her victory was her own
capture. She was brought here and sentenced to the labor camps of
Silesia.” He paused, and Sahara realized that they must not know
how she had escaped. “Two weeks ago, she led an assault on the
fortress of the Dragon-Lords on Silesia. But she found their
defenses to be much more effective than they were on her own
homeworld.”

Sahara bowed her head. That much was true.
She had banked too much on her earlier success, not considering
that her enemy might have made some adjustments in their security
measures. And then, Arnauld had not been patient. It wasn’t
supposed to have been that way.

“Speak, then, my lords,” a Council member in
charcoal robes said. “What choices lie before us?”

The white-robed figure held up a scroll
etched with a red script. “We have two choices for the Council to
consider. First, we have received this message from Silesia. The
Dragon-Lords have laid claim to her.”

Sahara felt a queer cold knot tightening in
the pit of her stomach, and she clutched the stone brace.
Why do
they want me? Why?
She was relieved when one of the council
asked that very question, for she desperately wanted an answer.

“She is to be a blood-offering.”

A murmur shivered through the hall. Although
she could not discern individual voices, she instinctively sensed
the pleasure this caused.

“A blood-offering!” Sahara breathed in the
barest whisper.

“And our other choice, my lords?” one of the
council asked.

“Your other choice is to send her to the
prison world of Al’alsunne. None sent there ever escape, and none
are ever released alive.”

There was a long silence.

Sahara didn’t want to be sentenced to
Al’alsunne, but the reason that sprang into her mind was
idiotic.

I’ll never see Jared again.

Then she laughed at herself.
You fool, and
you’ll never see him again if you’re given to the Dragon-Lords as a
blood-offering either!

Still the silence dragged on below her.
Sahara wondered what they were doing. Would there be no debate? No
statements of the pros and cons of each choice? Apparently not.

At least Jared got out
, she thought.
I wonder how he managed that?
Then she remembered that he
had charmed the guards with his minstrelsy.
They called him
the
poeilil
,
she remembered. It must be
on account of his songs that they let him go free.

Or perhaps they had underestimated him. It
was easy to do. He was unassuming, hiding his true self under many
guises. But whatever the reason, he was free.

For a split second, she wished she’d tried
the charm route instead of strangling a man to death. Now she truly
was in a bad position. If they discovered she had murdered a guard,
their justice would be terrible and swift. And although she might
be free of her prison cell, she couldn’t get off the moon without a
ship. And even if by some miracle she got hold of a ship, she
didn’t know how to fly.

Stupid, stupid!
she thought.
I
couldn’t possibly be more stupid!

All the failures of the past two weeks—of the
past five years—swelled within her like the rising of sand before a
strong wind, and she found it suddenly hard to swallow. She had
never learned patience, in spite of everything that had happened to
her, in spite of all the times she had failed.

She bent her head to the cool stone of the
beam. Until this moment, she had never grasped that some chasms are
best crossed by careful planning and slow descent rather than
risking everything on a single leap.

But hadn’t Jared always told her that?

“Cities are not built in a week,” he used to
tell her. “Stone by stone, Sahara. Stone by stone.”

Stone by stone.

And that was why she hadn’t found the trap
door leading out of the holding room. In her confidence that she
remembered where the switch was and in her haste, she had skipped
every other stone.

God!
she thought.
What a miserable
fool.

And now here she was, dangling in the shadows
hundreds of feet above the heads of those who would decide her
fate. It might not be too late for her, if she could just manage to
stop hindering herself.

“We have decided,” rang out all the voices of
the Council in unison. It was a strangely harmonious sound, and
Sahara felt the beam under her vibrate in consonance.

“And what have you decided?” the white-robed
and black-robed figures asked together.

“Let her be given to the Dragon-Lords. Her
offense is against them—let them exact the penalty that will
satisfy them. We do not want trouble with them. It would endanger
the peace.”

“So be it.”

The Council members rose and all filed out of
the room, as silently as they had entered. As the heavy metal doors
clanged shut behind them, Sahara breathed a deep sigh. For some
reason she felt relieved, and she did not allow her mind to frame
the reason into a name. But it was there anyway.

She waited for a few minutes to make sure no
one was walking in the hall above her, and then she shimmied back
up the beam and clambered onto the ledge. As soon as her feet
touched the cold stone, she was up and running without a sound back
down the hallway toward the prison.

When Jared staggered into the council hall, a
wall of surprised and stunned faces greeted him. Arnauld rose
slowly from his seat, the color seeping out of his face.

“Jared!”

Jared managed a smile and a choking sort of
laugh. “I’m not a ghost, Arnauld.”

Chair legs scraped on the stone floor as
everyone stood, watching the two men in breathless silence.

“My God, Jared,” Arnauld said at last, “you
look like hell!”

Jared rubbed a hand across his shaggy black
beard and his smile widened. “It’s good to see you too,” he
said.

“A goblet of hot spiced wine for Jared!”
Arnauld called to a steward. As the man bowed and disappeared down
a hallway, Arnauld gestured Jared to a seat at the table. “Sit and
tell us your tale! We never thought we’d see you again when you
didn’t come back after the battle.”

Jared dropped gratefully into a chair and
stretched out his legs. “My thanks, my lord,” he said. “Those
miserable wretches dropped me in the foothills and I had to hike
all the way back.”