The Fanged Crown Read online

  “Why don’t you go chew on the pointy end of your sword, Harp?” Boult growled.

  “I lost my sword, remember?” Harp replied.

  “Quit it,” Kitto said sternly. They trudged up the slope to where Verran was waiting.

  “Well, there’s nothing to do but go inside,” Boult said after Verran pointed out how the footsteps disappeared on the dry ground in front of the door.

  “Someone needs to wait out here and watch the door,” Harp said. “Any volunteers?”

  “I will,” Kitto said.

  “No, I will,” Verran said. “I don’t like dark, enclosed places.”

  “All right,” Harp said. “Shout if you see something.”

  Stepping off to one side, Harp pushed gently against the door. It wasn’t locked and swung open with a loud squeal.

  “Another stellar move by Captain Harp,” Boult sneered as they stared into the gloom of the cavern. “Nothing like rusty hinges to announce your presence.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Harp said sarcastically. “Of course, you would have thought to put a spot of lamp oil on the hinges first.”

  Harp took a step forward, but Boult shook his head. “You’ve got the night vision of an old man. Let me.”

  Harp put out his arm to stop Boult. “And you’re about as stealthy as a cat in heat. Let me.”

  They hadn’t gone more than a few steps down the passageway when they saw an open doorway on the left side of the corridor. A long line of thick-barred, low-ceilinged cages lined one wall of the dank room. Shackles were bolted to their slick floors, and bones and hunks of fur—some of which still had rotting flesh clinging to them—littered the cramped cages. Harp’s haggard face had gone from tan to pale, and the ruddy scars crisscrossing his features stood out against his wan skin. Harp leaned one hand against the wall as if he were trying to regain his balance. Boult understood—he was having some unpleasant recollections of the Vankila Slab himself.

  “I swore I’d cut out my own eyes before I’d go back to prison,” Harp said to Boult. “Particularly before I’d go back to prison with you.”

  “But then you’d be stupid and ugly,” Boult replied. “And if you’ll notice what side of the bars we’re on, we’re not in prison.”

  “Yet,” Harp said grimly.

  The Vankila Slab was a prison in the sky. Built by a joint effort of the Houses of Amn, it had been constructed on a barren mote, a massive slab of earth floating above Murandinn. The ogres who were charged with running the prison were given enough gold and slave labor to construct four sky-scraping round towers connected by raised walkways. Without anything except the sky to offer perspective, the towers looked taller than they were, almost as if they might slide off the edge of the mote and go smashing into the ground hundreds of feet below without turning once. More than one prisoner held onto that fantasy—that the filthy walls of their prison tip into the airy abyss, taking their captives with them.

  Originally, the Vankila Slab housed spellcasters who had defied Amn’s ban on using magic or members of well-connected families who had fallen out of favor with Amn’s ruling houses. But within ten years of building the prison, the political sensibilities in Amn shifted, and the Vankila Slab fell into the hands of a single faction that had its fingers deep in the murky politics of both Amn and Tethyr. Soon the prison became a mercenary operation that took the most dangerous criminals off the hands of the law and political prisoners off anyone who would pay.

  Around that time, the wardens of the Vankila Slab discovered that the floating mote under their prison was filled with gemstones, and with an endless supply of free labor at their disposal they began to unearth the unexpected riches. From then on, the prisoners spent their days mining the gems with hand tools or spoons or their bloody fingernails— whatever they had on any particular day. Within a few decades, the gems were mostly mined out, but the overseers didn’t want idle prisoners, so they kept them digging. On average, a prisoner came across a gem once a month, which earned them a hunk of meat with their gruel and little else but an early death from constant work in the scorching open ground known as the Turf.

  By the time Harp left Liel and Kitto in a cove on the Moonshaes and turned himself over to the Amnian agents, the Vankila wardens were pursuing other uses for their prisoners. The faction that controlled the prison allowed select mages access to their prisoners, but only mages who practiced a certain kind of magic that might be useful to the wardens in the future. The mages needed space to study and conduct their experiments, so the wardens constructed a fortress high above the surface of the mote using the four existing towers as a foundation. From the ground, the prisoners could see only the bottom of the fortress—a rectangle that spanned the distance between the towers and cast half the mote into darkness. The prisoners resented the loss of the sun, and soon rumors of dark rituals and sacrifices swept through the inmates, who called the soaring fortress the Sky Tomb.

  It was in the Sky Tomb that an elder mage known as the Practitioner set up shop. He wasn’t always in residence at the Vankila Slab. Rather like a traveling scholar, he came and went, but his experiments were legendary. Like most of the mages, he wasn’t interested in the criminally minded, who were too hard to handle. Rather he turned his attentions to the inmates who were in prison for political reasons, almost all of whom were some race other than human.

  When Harp had turned himself in to the authorities, he had known nothing about the Practitioner or the Sky Tomb, although he had heard fireside tales of a floating prison so brutal that even birds wouldn’t approach its shores. After he was taken from the Moonshae Isles in chains, Harp was put in the hold of a prison ship, which sailed to Amn. Harp expected to face a tribunal and be given the standard punishment for mutiny—a year of hard labor. Instead, he was brought to the Vankila Slab without ever seeing a magistrate. When the hood was taken off, Harp found himself among the notorious and deranged in the very prison that had housed Amhar, Scourge of Tethyr, and Mencelas the Reaper, to name the worst of the worst.

  During his first days on the Turf, Harp noticed that the guards patrolled the edges of the mote more carefully than anywhere else. When he asked the emaciated man next to him why that was, the man startled at the sound a human voice. Pawing at the open sores on his neck, the man glanced at Harp suspiciously. His bleary gray eyes darted from side to side with seemingly involuntary jerks that made Harp wonder how the man could see anything clearly.

  “Keeps us from jumping, doesn’t it?” the man whispered before returning to his digging.

  During his first nights in the Vankila Slab, Harp’s mind settled on Liel in a way that was both comforting and disturbing. He couldn’t keep his mind from replaying the days he was with her and the nights he spent in her arms. Sometimes it was simply too much, like a noose that slowly tightened around his throat. He alternated between regret and anger, and the undeniable hope that she would figure out where they had stashed him and find a way to get him out of the hellhole in the clouds.

  A tenday after he arrived, the Vankila Slab still seemed like a brutal dream, and Harp kept expecting to wake up and find himself back in the sun-dappled forest on Gwynneth Isle with Liel and Kitto. He had been digging under the red sun for a couple of hours when an ogre approached him barking orders. Although he didn’t know the language, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the ogre wanted Harp to stand up and follow him. Harp happened to be working near a group of dwarves that morning, and he saw them exchange glances.

  The ogre tied Harp’s hands behind his back, and all the while, the clutch of dwarves watched with great interest, surprising and unnerving Harp. One of the gaunt dwarves spoke up.

  “Look for me later,” the dwarf said. “I’ll help you.”

  The ogre raised his fist and cuffed the nearest face, not caring whether he was the dwarf who had spoken or not. Then they headed for the nearest tower as the ogre jerked Harp along behind him. Knowing the risk the dwarf had taken in speaking up, Harp felt a chill despite the he
at of the day. The ogre walked Harp off the Turf and into the darkness of the gated yard below the Sky Tomb. As he had done many times before, Harp tipped his head back to look at up the fortress and wondered what went on so high above the ground. He was about to find out. After climbing the long staircase to the Sky Tomb, the ogre led Harp into a spacious, attractive anteroom—the exact opposite of the conditions on the Turf. With golden struts framing walls of rose-colored glass, the anteroom looked more like a sanctuary than a tomb. The morning light filtered through the glass ceiling and cast the air in a soothing red glow. It would have been beautiful if there hadn’t been such a sinister feel to the silence.

  The ogre took him through a door, up a flight of stairs, and into a circular room covered by a rose-colored dome. Judging from the unspoiled view of the landscape and the heavens, it was the highest point in all of the Vankila Slab. An older, gray-haired man sat at a large wooden desk with his head bent over a parchment, the curled ends of which were held flat with blue crystals. He wore a black skullcap and wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. When they entered the room, he peered at them momentarily over his spectacles, but he returned to his reading as if he had little interest in his visitors.

  Except for the glass walls, the room reminded Harp of a study at an academy of arcane teaching. There were bookshelves set into trenches along the floor and ladders to get down to them. A long table laden with pots filled with yellow and red flowers ran the length of the eastern window. In the center of the room was a simple wooden chair.

  The ogre shoved him into the chair and tied one hand and his feet to the rungs of the chair, which was bolted to the floor. The ogre clamped a leather cuff lined with matted fur around Harp’s other wrist. The cuff was attached to a long chain that was also bolted to the floor. The chain allowed Harp some movement of his arm, but not enough to strike out. As the ogre checked the knots on the ropes, Harp noticed a strange scent like a mixture of burning hair and honey. After the ogre left, the older man continued to sit at his desk, sipping tea and reading until Harp got tired of waiting for something to happen.

  “You got problems with birds hitting the glass?” he finally asked.

  At the sound of Harp’s voice, the man closed his book and gave him an amused smile.

  “So, Master Harp. You made some people very angry.”

  “Apparently.”

  The man picked up a ceramic bowl from the table and carried it over to Harp. Inside, a white cloth floated in soapy water.

  “Please wash your face and hand,” the man said, still looking vaguely amused.

  At first, Harp thought about refusing, but decided against it. It was just water after all.

  “Are you my judge or my executioner?” Harp asked, tossing the grubby cloth back into the bowl. The man set the bowl next to the flowers and turned back to Harp.

  “Maybe a little of both,” the man said, sounding appreciative at Harp’s question.

  “Since when are mutineers put in Vankila? It’s overkill, don’t you think?”

  The man tipped his head and peered down at his prisoner. “Are you guilty?”

  “Of mutiny?” Harp asked.

  “Of anything.”

  “Are we having a philosophical conversation? Because I’ve got to warn you, I’ve never had much use for books,” Harp said. He had a feeling the conversation wasn’t a discussion on the nature of a guilty soul.

  “A pity. Books offer so much. There are some who find enough joy in learning to last an entire lifetime. It’s such a pure way to spend one’s time. Don’t you think?”

  Harp said nothing. The man walked over to his desk, rolled up the parchment that he had been reading, and tucked it inside a drawer.

  “I expected to devote my life to study, but instead I became distracted by other pursuits. But you haven’t answered my question. Are you guilty?”

  “Is my confession necessary for whatever is about to happen?”

  “No, I just find it interesting how people handle pain.”

  So there was going to be pain. Harp wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.

  “Life is pain,” the man told him with the same amused expression on his aged face. “Have you learned that yet?”

  Harp took a deep breath. He’d seen Predeau torture enough people to have an idea of what was coming. Oddly, it was the serene surroundings that unnerved him the most. He wondered if the ogre was coming back and if he was bringing tools.

  “If someone else is the cause of your pain, you feel as though you are a martyr. But if you have caused your misery through your own actions, then you are complicit in the agony. The men who are murderers, well, they know they deserve it. But the men who are here for their beliefs are different. The pain builds a self-righteous fire in them—at least at first.”

  “I don’t deserve to be tortured for my crime.”

  “And which crime is that?”

  “Mutiny.”

  “Ah. And what about the crime of adultery?”

  “I didn’t …” Harp stopped short when he realized the man was talking about Liel. It made him ill to think that the man would know that Liel even existed. And worse, that he would know about her and Harp. Liel was something precious, and their relationship was something that should have remained secret and safe. Only Harp and Liel knew what they had been to each other. So if the man knew, then Liel must have broken the secret.

  “Master Cardew would say differently,” the man said gravely. “In my opinion, a betrothed woman is the same as a married woman.”

  “Not everyone would agree with your opinion.”

  “Then they are mistaken. There is a natural order to the world, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Men should rule the world. Women and the lesser races must submit. There is no other way.”

  “I’d say there is. But considering our situation, I’m not in a position to argue with you,” Harp said numbly.

  “Indeed.” The man stood up and crossed over to Harp. “Please give me your arm your arm, and turn your palm up.” Harp complied. “Master Cardew said you should have kept your hands to yourself.”

  At first, it felt like a warm stone had been placed between his fingers. Mild at first, the sensation was concentrated in the palm of his hand. There was an unpleasant tingle at the top of his wrist, and then a burst of angry red lines shot across his skin, branching slowly across his palm and creeping up toward his fingernails. It took him only an instant to fathom the pain—it was like his skin was splitting from the inside, cut to shreds by invisible, white-hot needles. He’d never known pain like that. He’d never imagined it could exist. Then he couldn’t understand why it didn’t kill him.

  “I’m fascinated with how things are put together,” the man said thoughtfully. He pulled his hand back, and Harp slumped over in the chair gasping for air. “And how the right spell can reveal the structures of life itself.”

  Liel had done that, Harp thought as the room spun around him. Liel had told Cardew about her relationship with Harp. His whole body ringing with pain, Harp willingly gave in to the blackness that closed around the edges of his vision. But as Harp’s eyes drifted shut, the man brushed Harp’s forehead with his fingers, and Harp jerked back into consciousness. Liel knew exactly where he was and what was happening to him, he thought. Her betrayal was absolute.

  The skin on his hand began to disintegrate into a mass of tiny cuts, each deeper than the last, until the end of his arm looked like a bloody stump, nothing like a hand at all. Harp heard himself sobbing for the man to stop, to cut off his hand, to cut off his head, anything to make it stop.

  “You see, I think there are building blocks that make up every living thing,” the man continued. “The miniscule bits are smaller than you could ever imagine, but they are the fabric of everything. It may not give you comfort, Master Harp, but my work is for a purpose greater than yourself.”

  Harp had no memory after that, but when he awoke in his cell, the gaunt dwar
f was sitting in his cell with him holding a flask of water to his lips. Harp was surprised to see that his hand was still attached to his arm. The cuts were closed. Flaming red scars showed where the chunks had been ripped apart and put back together.

  Harp and his friends left the room with the low-ceilinged cages and headed down the main passage. As the tunnel sloped deeper into the cavern, pale yellow bricks had been used to shore up the walls. Holes in the wall where bricks had crumbled to the floor revealed dirt instead of rock. One wall bulged dramatically as if the soil were trying to force its way into the tunnel. The passage ended at a wooden door, which was open slightly with only darkness beyond.

  “If there’s anyone in there, they would have seen the light from our torches,” Boult said as they hesitated outside the door.

  Harp pushed the door wide open, and they entered a dark, cold room. Judging from the echo of their footfalls, it was a large room with a high ceiling. Kitto lit the torches on either side of the door, illuminating rows of cages lining the north and south walls. They were larger cells than the ones they’d seen near the entrance of the cavern, and there were no bones or carrion littering the cobblestone floors. A wide ceramic trough ran along the front of the bars.

  “I don’t think there’s any place I’d rather be less than here,” Harp said under his breath.

  “And what do you suppose that charming substance is?” Boult asked, looking down at the dark, sticky stains that coated the bottom of the trough.

  “Sweet molasses?” Harp suggested. “Bottled sunshine? Goodness and love made into a tasty draught?”

  “I was going to say chopped-up bits of local wildlife, but that’s just me,” Boult replied.

  Holding his torch low to the ground, Kitto followed the trough to the mossy stones of the far wall where it disappeared through a pipe.

  “There’s a door,” Kitto said. The light from his torch barely lit the dark corner that was obscured by the line of cages. Harp and Boult moved to join Kitto when a grating whine blasted their ears and made them freeze in surprise. Kitto grabbed his sensitive ears and darted away from the wall. As the sound faded, there was a moment of silence, and then a hum and clank of gears reached their ears.