Chapter 8 #3
The mortals inside scrambled to move, whispering and bumping into each other in the dark. Kai went to the next cage. Those inside seemed weaker, and as he was draining the wooden joins, he asked, “Have you had any food or water?”
“Only what we brought with us,” a voice rasped.
With bitter amusement, someone added, “We rationed it, but we weren’t expecting to be gone this long.”
“You just have to get outside,” Kai told them. He pulled the pack Ramad had given him off his shoulder and passed it through the bars. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Who are you?” the first one asked.
“I was sent here by the Light of the Hundred Coronels and Chancellor Domtellan,” he repeated. He got the section of bars off. For all their questions, they didn’t hesitate; the first prisoner climbed out and reached back to help the next.
“But what’s your name?” someone persisted.
“Call me Kai.” He stepped away to look for Highsun. The next cage was further down the curve of the wall, the light from a fire pot falling on a slumped figure inside.
Then the sound of footsteps—slow, deliberate—came from around the curve of the Well’s platform.
Kai flung himself to the floor and started sketching out the fire design in the grime and dust. It was a trickier version of the one that had set the weed mat in the flooded Summer Halls alight, but it would need less pain to power it.
As he fed stored pain into it, the lines took on the faintly luminescent, floating quality only an expositor could see.
He didn’t like to think about how many lives he could have saved during the war if he had had the skill to make something like this back then.
From behind him, Kaeter’s voice whispered, “What are you doing?”
“Setting a fire.” Kai finished the design and pushed to his feet.
The steps were closer. The slower mortals, more weakened by deprivation, were out of the cage and moving or being helped toward the archway.
Kai would put the lives of fourteen mortals above one Immortal Blessed who he had never met, but they seemed attached to Highsun and he didn’t think he could keep their cooperation if he told them to leave without him.
The confusion and darkness were keeping the scholars under control for now but it was a tenuous situation.
When they heard the approaching footsteps, they might panic.
“Lead the others down the corridor, I’ll catch up. ”
Giving Kaeter a job did the trick and they darted back to get the others moving. Kai ran to Highsun’s cage and started to drain the joins between the bars. He kept his gaze on the bowl light further down the wall, and saw the instant a large figure stepped into that flicker of firelight.
Kai had known there must be expositors’ constructs here, but he had never seen one so big or so old.
At least three people had gone into its making, as well as something with moldy rank brown fur.
Its patchwork skin was a gnarled gray, and it had three legs, five arms, and its eyes were in its chest where the breastbone should be.
Its uneven gate accelerated as it spotted Kai and the empty cages.
Kai ripped the weakened bars out and reached for the slumped figure.
He touched the limp body’s head and felt the life still there.
He grabbed the shoulders of Highsun’s coat and hauled him out of the cage.
Highsun was almost as tall as Tahren but wider.
If Kai had to carry someone out of here, he would rather it be anyone other than an Immortal Blessed, but there was no help for it.
Cursing, Kai heaved the heavy body up, ducked down, and let it fall over his shoulder.
Straightening up was awkward and running was worse, but he had to get out of the chamber before the construct reached the spot where the design was drawn into the floor.
Near the archway, he stumbled on a rough paving stone and almost fell.
The grubby crowd of mortals gathered under the bad light of a fire pot niche, their clothes torn and dirty, some streaked with dried blood.
All stared doubtfully at Kai. Tael said, “Here, help him!” and two grabbed for Highsun, taking his weight as Kai dumped him unceremoniously.
Kai’s back protested with a sharp spike of pain and he braced himself on the wall, keeping his chin down so the shadow would hide his eyes.
Despite the urge to feed the pain into the incipient intention, he gritted his teeth and tucked it away.
He was sure to need it on the way out. Unfortunately, storing it or fueling an intention with it didn’t mean you stopped feeling it.
“Run, now,” Kai told them, remembering at the last instant to speak Belithan.
He was certain most would understand Old Imperial, but Belithan would be more reassuring.
“I’ll catch up and show you the way.” He pushed off the wall and moved to the side of the arch, leaning on the carved stone.
The construct picked up speed, barreling this way.
Another came into view behind it, smaller but no less hideous. Shadows moved in the dark behind them.
Kaetar called softly, “Come on!” The two carrying Highsun moved, the others following, helping each other.
Tael, who was a tall woman, the fire light catching her harsh features and the marks of her tattoos, stepped up beside Kai. She said, “There’s ten of those creatures, at least.”
“The fire will slow them down,” Kai assured her, watching the construct get closer and closer.
It had to get near the intention, so the design would know what to attach itself to.
Otherwise all the mortals would be dead, Kai would lose his body, and someone else, as Ramad had said, would be making the decisions.
“You can’t—” Tael sounded more honestly puzzled than argumentative. After being stuck in the dark for days, menaced by constructs, with little food or water, she might not believe this escape was actually happening. “You can’t set a stone structure like this on fire?”
“It’s not the stone I’m going to burn,” Kai said. Not long now.
The construct’s foot landed barely a pace away from the design, and Kai released the intention.
There was that moment of pent energy, like the heartbeat between a too-close lightning strike and the crack of thunder.
Then a terrible red wave of flame shot up the construct’s legs, flowed over its gray skin.
It staggered sideways, all its arms waving.
“Oh, you’re a Witch,” Tael said blankly.
Past the first, another figure burst into flame with a whoosh, like a pile of the driest rushes catching light.
Then further back another, and another. Kai counted six whooshes by the sound and burst of light; some of the constructs were still on the far side of the Well’s platform.
There was no screaming. Expositors never gave their creations mouths.
Probably afraid of what they might say, Kai thought.
He took Tael’s arm and pulled her away from the door. “You said there were ten?”
She followed him, looking back toward the archway. “I counted ten, I think.”
She didn’t sound certain at all. Kai knew that being terrorized and held captive didn’t do much for anyone’s memory or accurate grasp of events.
There could be anywhere from none to twenty constructs still lurking somewhere.
“The others will burn too, but it’ll take a while for the fire to find them.
” It would spread through the corridors, searching for creatures like the first one it had touched.
As long as Highsun and the mortals were not secretly expositors’ constructs, it would ignore them.
Towing Tael behind him, Kai caught up to the others in the first court. He let her go and hurried to the front of the group, hoping no one would look too hard at his face. Then he made the mistake of glancing back to make sure Tael was keeping up.
Someone gasped and stopped abruptly, another bumped into them. Kaeter looked at Kai and drew back hastily. “You’re a demon!”
Kai set his jaw and said, “I’m a demon sent by the Tescai-lin. If you want to get out of here, keep moving.” He turned and kept walking.
He didn’t make the mistake of looking back again but he could hear that they were following, though some needed to be urged along by others. Tael was telling them that they were mistaken, Kai was a Witch.
“He has the hollow eyes!” someone objected.
“There are no demons anymore, not since the war.”
Sounding uncertain, Kaeter said, “He said he was here with someone from the Rising World council—”
The rasping voice from the second cage said, “He said his name was Kai.”
“Kaiisteron?” someone else said tentatively.
Kai stopped and turned to face them. He knew Belith remembered him as the implacable creature who had led the Witches across the straits, the battering ram for the Rising World forces to drive the Hierarchs out of their cities, leaving ruin in their wake.
Just because the Belithan leaders had agreed to it didn’t mean they had understood what it would look like afterward.
He said, “Yes. If it distresses you, you can stay here, and I’ll send a mortal vanguarder in after you.
” Ramad would do it, too, and probably die with the rest of them.
But Kai had no intention of leaving them behind.
He wasn’t going to walk out there empty-handed in front of Arnsterath and look like a fool.
He would get them out of here if he had to frighten them half to death to do it.
Kaeter hesitated, clearly torn. Someone said, “If Ilhanrun was awake—”
“No, no,” Tael said from the middle of the group, decisive and certain. She took hold of the two younger scholars on either side of her and pulled them forward, plowing through the others. “We’re going, no one is staying. Go, go all of you, now.”