84. Now River
NOW: RIVER
The rule against having any fire and the lack of fireplaces in the tower made for cold living.
It was winter, and there were no doors on the two circular entrances.
Icy winds nipped at us, and though the first level was full of people, the weather had set into our bones.
We bedded under our wagon on the cold stone of the tower floor that night, whispering about what we should do with Adelaide.
I lay there listening to Jade ask Tessa to describe how my niece had looked, and I wondered what Dermid had meant.
Fox lay next to me, looking pallid and miserable, her arms holding a sick-looking Daisy. My thoughts turned to Adelaide’s words.
The tower is like a poison. It makes anyone who lives in it mad and weak with terror. Then they become subservient.
The wagon was too ripe with the goats and chickens having shit in it for moons.
No matter how much we tried to clean it, it was impossible.
We only used it for coverage for bathing and changing clothes.
But the floor of the tower was not the earth of the long dust road.
It did not have any give to it beneath our backs. Our sleep was fitful if we had it.
Just as I was close to dozing, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see Reed looking at me through the spokes of a wagon wheel.
“I’m here to look at how we’ll get you out. Is there any exit other than the two great ones at the front?”
Peering behind him, I saw Keir and Evangeline. “I don’t know. I may have seen something, but we’ll need a torch. Dermid says to look for a cellar.”
Keir squatted next to Reed and reached out to lay the back of his hand against a slumbering Jade’s face.
“That means he’s seen an exit other than the Gates of Sound from outside.
He’s been working with Thane for days, reclaiming his wagons from the military and taking them outside the city wall.
I think Thane may not have been paid in full yet and he’s worried about losing property. ”
“Where did you see it?” Reed asked me.
“Just have her come with us, Reed,” said Evangeline.
“What are you lot talking about?” Ilsit half snored.
Lit only by the dim light let in from the front entrances, beyond which distant torches lined the street, Ilsit and I joined the three of them in a careful walk down the rows and rows of wagons and penitents, half of whom were all sitting with hanging heads, unable to sleep.
“Everyone looks drunk,” Evangeline said in my ear. “Or sick maybe.”
“I’ve other things to convey,” I replied. “Let’s get to the stables first.”
I insisted on checking on Zara again before I showed them the door with the sharp stairwell that seemed to pitch nearly straight down from the landing.
I rubbed her down while Keir collected a wall torch from outside the street and Evangeline and Reed kept watch outside her stall.
Between my and Ilsit’s petting her, she seemed more at ease by the time we left.
When Keir returned, having doused the torch to get it past the guards standing watch outside, he lit it again.
It was not one of their twisting cresset torches, the opening of which he could have closed, just a heavy wooden thing capped with a iron basin lined with oil, rope, and kindling.
We stood around him to hide any light as he struck and struck, using flint, iron, and a rag he had pulled from his shirt. It would not light.
“Hurry up,” Evangeline begged. “And don’t strike it so loud.”
As it took Keir several tries for him to light the wall torch, it took me a few tries to find the door with the flame on it.
“Makes no sense having that on a door when there is no fire allowed,” Ilsit remarked.
“Well, it’s Saint Rodwin’s crest,” I offered.
“If Dermid said to look for a cellar, he must have seen something low in the wall outside,” explained Reed. “The wall is right up against the tower. It might be used by the tower guards alone and that’s why it was locked up.”
“Lucky you found the key,” said Evangeline.
“Not lucky,” countered Keir, watching me remove the key from my apron pocket. “The guards all look unhappy. They cannot wait to leave. I doubt they worry about anything but their shifts ending and keeping the penitents in.”
That was when I realized I should, though I did not understand it, convey the theory of the tower my niece had explained to Tessa and myself. We stood in a half circle around the door, our faces lit by Keir’s small torch, looking over our shoulders for a guard.
“So, when they’re not at war, this is where their new army recruits live and train?” Keir asked. “If there is some curse of subservience, a magic worked—”
“No,” said Evangeline, speaking over him. “They’re religious lunatics. They don’t practice magic.”
“They also believe in demons who will use their skulls as soup bowls in the afterlife,” Ilsit said, crossing her arms. “Maybe they’re not wrong.”
I stared at her, aghast.
“What I mean is,” she went on, “maybe demons do exist and they are alive and in this tower, cursing the folk here.”
“How does it feel to have lived a week here?” Reed asked.
Ilsit and I exchanged a look.
“It’s awful,” she said to him. “We can’t rightly sleep. I keep thinking I need to hurl up my dinner. We haven’t had real cooked food other than jerky. And they’ve no gates to shut for those two entrances. And with no fires, we’re chilled to the damn bone.”
“There’s something afoot,” Keir said to Reed. “I don’t understand their culture or their nasty saint, but something preys on these people. Even the guards are uneasy. They don’t live here, they only work in shifts, and they’re careless—like leaving a key in a door. That’s so unusual to me.”
Reed rubbed his jaw. To me, he said, “Do you feel like you are being lulled into subservience?”
I shook my head. “No, but I am wearier each day. It’s hard to resist something when you’ve no life in you.”
“We have to get you out of here.”
“Not without my niece,” I said. “We must work that out first.”
Hearing distant footsteps, we all stilled at the same time.
“In,” ordered Keir, nodding at my hand holding the key.
“The landing is really very small,” I warned, inserting the key in the lock.
Keir went first, cursing under his breath at the steepness of the drop.
One by one, we followed, our movements hastened by fear as the sounds of guards approaching grew louder.
Evangeline shut the door behind her and we stood in a row, each balancing on a slim step with one or two hands on the wall for purchase.
“Go slow,” Reed said in a low voice.
Keir began to move, and the rest of us followed.
It took extended creeping before we reached what must have been a dungeon or cellar of the tower.
It was a large chamber that was perhaps a third of the size of the first level, making it still enormous.
It was made of that same smooth, white stone as the first level.
We could only see a vague idea of it, however, as all we had was Keir’s torch.
As our eyes adjusted, we noticed the river that bisected the chamber.
Where it ended was too far off for us to see, but it began behind us, an outlet in the wall that the steep steps were built in, allowing for the mouth of the river to come through from whatever natural spring it grew.
Though the water was bubbling, as it did in the founts that flowed around the first level, it seemed to not flow almost at all, merely a shallow, slothful surface that reminded me more of a long lake than a river.
“Would have thought that was a rushing thing,” remarked Evangeline. “What with all those damn founts.”
“I just thought the same,” I agreed.
“There,” pronounced Reed and pointed to a spot far down on the walls on our side of the underground river. “That looks like a door.”
It was. What Reed could see from where we stood had looked like a vein in the rock, but it was actually a small archway with an iron door. This too had a flame carved into it, and this too unlocked when the same key was inserted.
Behind the door—a thick, heavy, iron-and-wood slab that took both Reed and Keir pulling to open—and through a short tunnel that was about the length of two wagons, there was cool outside air.
Reed stepped through it first and, despite the time of night, he turned and said, “I can see the timber forest from here.” Then he turned again and pushed Evangeline, who stood near him, back inside with him, shutting the door behind them.
“There is a patrol outside the gates. About twenty men that I could see. The tower is just up against the wall, and they must have built this section into the tower. This will have to be timed exactly if this is the way we choose.”
“It’s the only way that I can see,” Keir said. “Thane asked if the five of you could leave, and he was told no repeatedly. Just the once to see Adelaide today. And you were likely closely watched.”
“Yesterday now,” Evangeline corrected. “It’s past the midnight hour.”
“Wait, he asked for us? He requested we get to leave the tower?”
Keir nodded. “He knows I court Jade. I told him I would prefer she and her companions have different accommodations. He readily agreed but when he asked, the army refused him. He was only able to get permission for you and Tessa to leave because his daughter refused to come inside.”
“Oh that’s perfect,” huffed Ilsit. “This is the only way out, and the girl won’t tread foot inside this place.”
Reed grimaced. “The streets outside and the entrances are flooded with guards. We’re only allowed in and out as employees of Thane’s under the guise of checking that all of his properties have been returned.”
“We’ve likely two or three days before they no longer accept that reason for us entering,” Keir added. “That’s why we have not been by. We’ve been busy working for Thane, and every time we came to the gate we were given such grief, we decided we should only try our luck a few times.”
“What is this door for?” Evangeline wondered, running her hand down the inside of it. “What’s the reason for the symbol of the flames other than their saint’s setting himself on fire?”
“An escape route should a fire break out?” suggested Keir. “Along a river would be the safest path. That’s my guess.”
“We’re missing something,” said Reed, tilting his head to see all the way around the chamber. “Why are they so concerned about a fire breaking out in a tower made of stone so old it predates written history? It’s not a barn of hay or a library. It is a confusing rule.”
“What’s more confusing,” Evangeline countered, “is why Robbie’s niece thinks people are being fed to the tower. Why is that? Why won’t the guards live here? I’ve noticed their shifts are shorter too.”
Ilsit began to fully relay to them all of the fighting we had seen, the misery amongst the penitents, the poor sleep, the cold, the moroseness.
As they peppered her with questions, I, staying inside the cast of the torch, began to wander.
As with the first level, this whole smaller chamber was made of one continuous stone.
Even the massive trough that cradled the river was made by uneven dips on each side that looked like rows of large, white boulders, though they were all connected at their base where the thick, slow waterline pooled.
I had the silly notion that they looked a bit like giant teeth.
Perhaps that thought was what caused me to kneel near the river, looking down into its sticky canal of waters that barely moved but had collections of bubbles along the surface. Strange for a rill like this, so deep in the earth, to have such slothful waters in it.
As my eyes adjusted in the dimness of the chamber and I stared aimlessly into the channel, over the lip of the uneven white boulders, I saw it. When I did, when the inkling of what I suspected took shape in my mind’s eye, my blood ran cold. I had to be seeing things.
“Reed,” I called softly.
He turned from where Keir was explaining to Ilsit and Evangeline that he thought it would take nearly a half moon to get to Eccleston, but that it was the best plan anyone had thought of yet.
The only forestation in this part of the continent, aside from countryside estates in Perpatane, were small clusters of trees along the river and timber forests owned by lumberyards.
We were near mining country, and the terrain offered little place to hide.
Thane was paying the owner of the timber forest outside the city gates to keep his wagons and horses there.
I listened to all this numbly, watching Reed cross over to me and squat next to me at the lip of the river. I was inert, paralyzed by my suspicion.
“What is it?” he asked.
My body heaved, and I had to pitch forward on all fours, hands grasping at the white boulders sitting in the floor. I swallowed the bile in me rising up my throat, needing to come out.
“Are you ill?”
“I—I need you to look down into the water and tell me what you see. With your air sight, you can better see. Please tell me I am mistaken.”
I sat back on my heels, mouth covered with my hands, trembling.
Reed peered past the white boulders, and as I was on his right side I saw the white of his eye flash, saw him jerk backwards and stumble to his feet. He reached down and pulled me up roughly by my wrist, hurting my arm and shoulder. “Get the hell away from it,” he hissed.
When we had stepped backwards enough for him to deem me safe, our retreat causing Keir to fall silent, Reed removed himself from our grouping, doubled over, and vomited onto floor.
The nausea that had overwhelmed me was so powerful it was crippling. I could not repeat his actions, paralyzed by my disgust, though I sorely wanted to unburden myself of the poison I had drunk, bathed in, washed my hair with.
“What’s going on?” Evangeline inquired, drawing near to Reed and putting a hand on his back. “Are you sick?”
“It’s a tongue,” he rasped out. “It’s a fucking tongue.”