Chapter 5
Eiko, You’ll Be The First To Go
Their plan sucked.
Three weeks of dried meat, bread, and water rations certainly hadn’t helped.
Teamed with the fact that they couldn’t leave their compartment unless it was to squeeze past the Oakensnare group and others who had joined the Kingsweep with the singular purpose of being accepted into the Godsguard, as they had commandeered the hallway to run training drills.
They persisted until sundown every single night—and nights were a horror all on their own.
Six bodies crammed into a train compartment, with nowhere to lie but the benches and the floor.
It had long ago become a form of torture.
Eiko and the others had decided that their best chance, upon arrival in Blackreach, the city of darkness, would be to link arms and stick together.
To move as a group and find the nearest and closest way out of the Quiet.
All they had to do was refuse Silencing no matter what was promised to them by the monsters who crept into their minds.
If they escaped Blackreach alive, without Silencing, they would be thrown into service for the crown.
A lifetime labour sentence, but it wasn’t all that bad.
At least the one lady Eiko had met who claimed to have survived Blackreach seemed to have a full enough life.
She joined the Kingsfete and travelled with it every year, telling fortunes and providing entertainment.
She wasn’t permitted to leave the Kingsfete, but she seemed happy.
Eiko had only ever heard her boast about her situation and never complain about it.
Rion had slipped back into the compartment after their stop in Suntide, having learned that those who survived would be given a choice in where they would like to serve out their sentence.
If they had special skills, their contract could be seasonally loaned out to the Kingsfete.
The Kingsfete also needed train attendants and maintenance crew.
There were a myriad of options, but after a few hours of brooding, Ky had interrupted their conversation to quietly state: “I never want to go back to Stonesigh. Not even with the Kingsfete. I never want to see that place again.”
So they all agreed to request an assignment in Goldmoor. Apparently, survivors could be divvied out to the various corps and barracks within the capital, or they could be placed on a civic duty post.
A few more days of debating, and they settled on a preference for the Kingsguard barracks.
Rion and Ky had emphatically rejected the idea of cleaning filth from the streets on civic duty, and Kira had pointed out that the Godsguard barracks would be too dangerous.
At any time, one of the Silenced could fail to hold their monster inside, and that monster could break free.
Freed from the prison of the Quiet and untethered by their human, an escaped monster was utterly dangerous in every way possible.
It was the monsters’ only way of gaining access to the world of light: to bribe a human into Silencing, and then to overpower and kill that human, freeing themselves and releasing their power into the world.
Kaito and Ren had quietly agreed that it would be prudent to stay as far from the Godsguard barracks as possible.
So that was their plan.
Stick together. Refuse Silencing. Get out as fast as possible. Request to serve their sentence at the fancy, opulent, Kingsguard barracks as pompous, buttoned-up, and delightfully rotund servants. Totally doable.
If you ignored the high possibility of dismembering, maiming, or death.
At least Eiko couldn’t be blinded twice.
“It’s filling up,” Ky whispered, his nose perpetually wedged into a gap in the door. “Everyone has weapons and armour, and they look tough and mean as fuck. I think that woman has a bigger dick than me. I think she has a bigger dick than all our dicks put together.”
“Even mine?” Eiko asked, attempting to push down her sickening nerves. They were at their final stop. Goldmoor. The glittering capital that she would never see with her own eyes, despite dreaming of it so often as a child.
Maybe it served her right. She was never happy with what she had.
They only stopped long enough to detach the rest of the train carriages and for a parade of men and women to squeeze onto the Kingsweep, determined to prove their mettle in Blackreach. To get a shot at the Godsguard.
“Especially yours,” Ky replied distractedly. “I don’t think they can fit anyone else in this carriage.” He eased the door closed with a creak and fell back to his seat beside Eiko. “Maybe we should like … stretch or something?”
Nobody moved.
“I think I’m going to vomit,” Kira whispered.
“There’s no room to vomit,” Kaito said. “Hold it.”
“You lot are insane,” Kira whispered back, so low Eiko had to strain to hear it.
To an outsider, she supposed they probably did look insane. None of them had cried since boarding the train. Only Kira. None of them had expressed a legitimate fear of the Quiet. Only Kira.
They had joked. They had complained about the stale bread.
They had joked some more. They had argued over their shitty plan, and they had spied on all the other train occupants.
They were acting like this was a mildly stressful journey, but that was just their way.
Kira, as it turned out, wasn’t stoneborn.
She was from Suntide originally but had married a Stonesigh trader when she was eighteen.
The trader had turned to mining and promptly died in an accident, leaving Kira, a few years later, with a small peach grove and a slight disdain for the hard-hearted people of the mountain.
Apparently, Suntide people were … well … sunny. And when they couldn’t be perfectly sunny, they became unbearably emotional—borderline inconsolable.
After three weeks, Eiko was itching to jump off the train just to escape that little hitch in Kira’s breath that always precluded a hesitant opening into a conversation over the likelihood of them all dying very horribly, very shortly.
The train lurched into motion again, and she found her hands quickly clasped in strong, reassuring grips. Ky and Rion. She twisted their fingers together tightly and sent a prayer to the sun that her friends and brother wouldn’t walk out of the Quiet punished, as Eiko had been all those years ago.
They travelled in silence, and Eiko only knew they were drawing close to the city of darkness when Ren broke the silence with a nervous throat clearing.
“It has to be possible, at least,” he said. “With so many people willingly boarding the train?”
None of them answered, because none of them knew. They knew hardly anything about the Quiet. About Blackreach. The hush swallowed them up, but Kaito soon broke it again.
“We need to get close to a door.” His tone was urgent and fearful. “If we get stuck on the fucking train while everyone is trying to escape, that significantly increases our time in the Quiet.”
Eiko stood without a word, and so did the others. Ky pulled open the compartment door, and they began to wedge themselves through the stifling crowd with their arms tightly linked.
At first, there were annoyed grunts and low warnings, but then the heavily muscled bodies squeezing in around them began to scoff and chuckle.
“There’s a blind girl,” one of them hollered over the tops of their heads. “Let her through, she’s keen to be the first out the door.”
They laughed and jostled her towards what she hoped was the front of the carriage—but they jostled too hard, breaking her grip on Rion and Ky.
“Wait, stop!” she called, but they were laughing too loudly, and then the train was slowing.
Eiko, Eiko, have you come to see me?
The laughter stopped.
The bodies around her tightened with tension.
The stench of fear was sudden and choking.
Eiko, Eiko, can you feel me?
Darkness had swallowed them.
Eiko, little Eiko, you’ll be the first to go.
She was pressed right up against the doors to the train, her cane still miraculously gripped to her chest, and with a horrible, sickening lurch, she realised the doors were opening.
She tried to push back against them, but the panicked pressure of a swell of desperate bodies forced her to spill forward, tripping over the steps and sprawling into the packed gravel below.
There are so many things I could give you. The voice slithered into her mind, dragging hooks along her consciousness. So many things you wish for. The possibilities are endless.
The crowd from the train began to stampede over her, her cane toppling from her hands.
A strong grip hooked beneath her arms and yanked her up to her feet, Ren’s voice low in her ear as he pressed her cane back into her reaching fingers. “We need to run.” She had never heard him sound so frightened.
But which way will you go, little Eiko?
Someone on the train began to scream.
Ren pulled her away from the entrance, but they promptly tripped over something on the ground, and this time, both of them went sprawling. She felt the unpleasant crunching of littered objects beneath her, and Ren’s sudden sound of horror had her jerking upright again.
“Bones,” he croaked. “These are bones—” He cut himself off.
Eiko waited for him to continue as she swallowed past her bile and sorted through the pile of smooth and jagged … bones … for her cane.
“Ren?” She tucked her cane under her arm and struggled to her feet, feeling for his broad shoulder. He was still kneeling on the ground.
Unmoving, unspeaking.
Screams were now echoing all around them, ghostly and amplified, like they were far away and right beside her all at once. She began to shake.
“Ren?”
The monster in his head had gained his attention.
So brave and bold. The horrible voice inside her own head was laughing at her.
“Ren, please!” She shook him.
So foolish, so silly. The silky, slippery female voice was scathing and petulant, full of confidence that she would gain access to Eiko one way or another.