Chapter 43
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
D ripping. The innocuous sound echoes in my brain before I slip back into unconsciousness.
My mouth is very dry, and I’m nauseous. I try to move, but the bindings on my wrists prevent me from lifting them higher than by my side. I’m lying down. It’s dark and I’m struggling to open my eyes. They’re gritty and sticky.
Someone comes to lift my head gently, pushing a cup to my mouth. Water. I drink greedily. The person takes away the cup before I’ve had my fill.
“Sorry, not too much, or you might hurl. Those mushrooms wreak havoc on your system for quite a while, unfortunately,” says a woman’s voice. Soft and kind.
Mushrooms. The gravy. The asshole drugged us. The first rule I teach children is to never eat anything that they don’t recognize, especially mushrooms.
Is Tovi here, too?
I try to open my eyes through the sand and molasses that must have replaced my eyeballs. My skin is crawling, like millions of tiny spiders are dancing across it. My joints ache, and I groan as I open my eyes a slit. I can see nothing but darkness.
The bed I am lying in clunks and shudders a few times before I move to sitting, the contents of my stomach sloshing around and threatening to come up. I close my eyes again, not that they had far to close. But squeezing them shut helps the intense nausea.
I concentrate on my other senses. It smells damp, and I can still hear the dripping. Hushed voices sound far away, slightly echoed. Within the dampness, there is the smell of rotten eggs and mold. My consciousness is slipping in and out again. Sometimes, I hear the flutter of wings, or is that inside my chest? Footsteps, only one set, mill about.
The next time I wake, I’m less disorientated. Opening my eyes, blinking away the stickiness, I confirm I’m back in a fucking cave. This one is cold and damp, not like the one with Arpi. Not even the thought of him manages to rouse my rage from wherever it slumbers.
I attempt to look around, but all I see is utter darkness or sloped walls. Directly to my right is a low ceiling above gently moving water. Stalactites drip periodically.
“You are awake! Hungry?” the woman from earlier asks.
I try to speak, but I can only croak. The woman comes back with a cup of water, and I finally get to see her as I take a drink. Long, wavy, dark blood-red hair in a loose ponytail to one side. Violet eyes on a pale face filled with freckles. A face full of kindness and warmth. She looks so much like Riley if his features were smaller and softened. She looks to be a similar height to Bitty, but where Bitty is straight and gangly, she’s all curves and bosomy. Amarilyss.
“Thank you,” I rasp, my throat still dry even after the drink.
“Do you think you could stomach some bread with meat paste?” her strong yet sweet voice asks. I scrunch my nose at the thought and she quickly adds, “The sooner you can keep food down, the sooner you will feel better.” So, I agree, and she feeds me.
The meat paste is disgusting . It tastes like fish, but also raw meat, and the smell is cloying in the air. I eat it all, and through sheer will alone, I keep it from violently erupting back out the way it came. Amarilyss has moved my chair around so I can see where I am. An underground river continues long into the murky blackness, made visible by the low-hanging cave walls that don’t quite reach the ground. In front of me are pockets of caves and dark passages with various flickering lanterns.
Amarilyss is chained. It’s a long chain, but still, she’s shackled to the wall with only enough length to reach each patient—prisoner—but not enough to explore. Each pocket of cave that I can see has a person or two strapped to a seat in a similar fashion to me. She flits about and tends to everyone, exercising them as far as their chains will let them, securing only some with their hands back to their seat afterward.
One Laguzborn woman is blindfolded, but everyone else seems free to look around like me. Every single one is a Patron, though I only recognize some faces from Osraed. Maniacal laughter can be heard from a cave that I cannot see.
Amarilyss is as beautiful as Tovi had described, carrying herself with confidence and determination even in this dark and desolate place. She’s as filthy as everyone else, with black bags under her eyes and greasy hair, but somehow, she radiates sunshine. Her clothes are loose, and though she’s still voluptuous, she must be losing weight. To be honest, everyone down here looks either gaunt or outright sickly.
Crying. Multiple people crying. Either softly or in heaping wails. Some people cry out for Lyss or moan the word “please.” I’ve been lying here awake and alert for a couple of hours, and Amarilyss hasn’t stopped. Benches and crates are scattered everywhere. I can see why she looks tired as she purposefully darts between them all.
My stomach rolls, and again it takes some mental bargaining for me not to vomit. My main argument is the food was horrible enough going down. It can only be worse coming back up.
Amarilyss is leaning over a bench writing notes when I call her name softly. She looks up at me, frowning, and studies me. Setting down her notes, she crosses her arms and comes forward.
“How do you know my name?” she demands softly, looking around to see who else will be able to hear our conversation.
“Aside from hearing people calling you that, Riley says hello,” I say with a struggle, devolving into a coughing fit.
“Sure, he does,” she says, rolling her eyes and turning away.
“Who has the best B&B in Nemoris?” I ask quickly before she leaves.
She freezes, body stiff. “Mama Beryl,” she whispers before whipping around, a wild look on her face. “Do not play with me. Who are you?”
“My name is Mika. I came here with Riley, Tovi, and B&B . To rescue you.” The irony of my situation makes a small laugh escape before I can swallow it.
She looks around wildly, moving swiftly to my side. “Truly?” she breathes, tears welling in her red-rimmed eyes.
I nod. “Unfortunately, me being captured wasn’t exactly part of the plan. But at least I found you.” I make an exaggerated face of triumph, mouthing “yay.”
“The king would not bring you here unless you are a Null…” she says, concerned, mild panic building in her eyes .
Of course, the Nulls. This is why I am here, and Tovi won’t be. “I am a Null. But why does he want them?”
Someone yells, and a loud crashing sound causes others to wail. Amarilyss runs off into one of the dark passages, presumably to another set of caves to deal with whatever that was.
I doze off as I wait for her to return. When next I wake, she is undoing my hand bindings, and tells me I can call her Lyss. I’m still attached to the wall in a similar fashion to her, though my chain is significantly shorter. A chair behind her holds two plates of food, neither of which looks to have the meat paste, thankfully, though it’s still a dire affair. A couple of dried berries and a hunk of smelly cheese. I eat with trepidation, unsure how my stomach will fare.
“Everyone is mostly asleep,” Lyss says between small mouthfuls.
“What is this place, and why all these Nulls?”
Lyss’ hesitation is evident. “He is experimenting on them. Successfully too. Forcing Gifts to surface.”
“With pain,” I add, remembering the drugged conversation I had with him before I was brought here.
She nods with a slight grimace.
“You’re here to heal them so they don’t die during the torture?”
“Yes, but also because the pain inflicted is messing with some of their minds. Everyone here is mentally troubled to some degree. Some more so than others. I am here to heal their minds, otherwise he could have any Gifted healer down here.”
“You said ‘successfully’, does that mean his methods have worked?” I ask with equal parts horror and fascination.
Nodding, Lyss continues. “He is trying to build an army of Gifted Patrons. But so far, the army is too damaged to be of any use. It is why most of them have to stay strapped down, instead of just chained. They are all likely too weak to do much harm anyway.”
Nausea is rising to the surface again, and not because of the food. Forcing Gifts to emerge through torture. How in the Divine is this happening? I close my eyes against the dizziness, wondering where my rage has gone.
“What Gifts have manifested?”
“Quite a few have manifested something . But most notable is Renn, an Erduborn man who can increase his muscle mass at will. Grotesquely so, he looks like a monster. It causes an insatiable hunger for him to maintain it for long periods. Then, of course, is the Laguzborn woman blindfolded just over there. She can cause explosions just by looking at something. Lenore’s the whole reason I was first brought here.”
“There was no mystery assailant. Lenore caused the explosions that hurt the doxies?”
“Yes, she caused the explosion accidentally, but none of his actual doxies were hurt. Just—” Lyss gives me a pained look, “—a few of the Nulls. He needs me to fix her so she can be stable enough to use as a weapon. It has been so many moons and barely any of them have improved. They are all so utterly traumatized, made worse by being trapped down here.”
We both shudder. I’m trying to shake off my own memories of being abused and manipulated. And here I am again. Is this all the Divine has for me in this life?
I’m not given long before King Stol wants to motivate my trapped Gift. Lyss advises me that it’s better on an empty stomach, waking me an hour or so before he’s due to arrive. I ask what he will do, but she doesn't know. It’s different every time.
“I will be here waiting for you when you return. If it gets too much, go to a happy place and I will meet you there in your mind later,” Lyss says in a fast whisper when we hear the tell-tale signs they’re coming. I don’t understand what she means. What happy place, and how would she meet me there?
Two Erduborn Patrons arrive to escort me. Unaware of what their Gifts are, I comply. The manacle is removed from around my ankle, and both Patrons wrap a firm hand around my upper arms to drag me. While they’re both older, maybe in their sixties, they’re strong.
I remain calm until they strap me to a chair.
We’re in another cave that took us a few minutes to get to, down a long passage that continued into the darkness. The room smells like blood and other bodily fluids. It’s the smell of death, and my insides turn to liquid. Something darker swirls dangerously inside of me for the first time since Pasha. I’m an empty vessel barely containing a nightmare.
But I survived Pasha. And then I killed him.
The chair I’m strapped to has my arms laid out along tall, flat armrests. Both hands face downward. There is no headrest, but if I lean my head back far enough, a small ledge will cradle it.
Across my midsection is a wide strap securing me to the chair, and my legs are strapped to flat boards. Part of me wants to fight, to try to get away. But I would put everyone else here in danger. I will not risk collateral damage.
I think of Sweet Girl. The shattered pieces of my heart splinter through my chest at the mere thought of her. I close my eyes, wanting to imagine her soft, whiskered muzzle nudging me. Seeing her prancing about, strutting in front of me, and being a general nuisance .
Here I am again. Captured by a man wanting to break me. To take something from me. To take a piece of my soul, or what’s left of it. How many times can you lose a piece of your soul before there is nothing left? Maybe you die. Maybe King Stol will be the one to finally kill the Silent Assassin, and he won’t even know it.