“Easy,” said Nissa from above. “Easy, Havert. Ease up.”
Sal glowered at Havert, then turned around again to face the wall.
It had to be tough, having nowhere to go and get away from each other, thought Scorio, finally allowing himself to topple over and curl up on the ledge.
“Don’t vomit all over the cave,” said Sal testily. “You’ll waste the cure if you do.”
“Deep breaths.” Hestia sounded strangely hollow. “You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
Havert’s voice seemed to come from a world away. “Enjoy the fever dreams. I sometimes take a pinch of the stuff just to make the week go by faster.”
Scorio faced the wall. His insides were burning. It felt like the antidote was scouring away everything but his ribs.
“Hestia,” he heard Nissa say. “Get him a wet cloth. He’s going to be burning up soon. And with what Prax did to him, he’ll have no defenses.”
He closed his eyes, tucked his hands under his chin, and drew up his knees as his body began to shake.
Scorio thought dimly of Leonis and Lianshi. Of that vast basilica, the Archspire, and the promise of power and freedom.
It all seemed a lifetime ago.
A hand rested gently on his shoulder. “It’s all right. You’ll get through this. You’re going to be fine.”
1
When Scorio finally awoke, it felt as if two weeks had passed. An age spent floundering in fever dreams that he mercifully couldn’t recall. There’d been a sense of someone talking to him as he’d tossed about upon the ledge and pressing a cool, wet cloth to his brow. The luminous scrawling upon the cavern walls had taken on a nightmarish urgency, pulsing as if they were veins carrying riotous colors across the inside of the cavern’s body.
Scorio sat up. The fever had broken. His wrist was no longer inflamed, the puncture wounds had scabbed over, and he was able to clench his hand into a fist without much pain.
“You’ll be thirsty,” said Nissa, walking over with a stone cup.
“That I am, thank you.” Scorio took the cup and drained it dry. Before he could ask for another, Nissa smiled wryly and gave him the one she’d been holding in her other hand.
“Thanks,” he managed when he finally came up for air, his stomach pleasantly filled with the cool, mineral-tasting water. “How long was I out?”
“Time’s hard to reckon down here,” she said, bringing over a large bowl of some lumpen, milky-looking gruel. She handed it to him and sat at the end of the ledge. She was lean, raw-boned, face pale to the point of unnatural pallor. It made her stark blue eyes all the more striking. “We generally adopt the same sleeping shift and use that as a measure of time. Whether it’s day or night upstairs we’ve no idea.”
“I see,” he said, shoveling the gruel into his mouth. His tongue was still scalded by the antidote, which he supposed was a blessing. “You’ve been here three years?”
“Yes.” There was an immensity of loss and resignation in that word, as if she’d exhausted a well of rage years ago. “Feels much longer though.”
“I bet. But it looks like we might be getting out?”
“If we can open the Brass Door.” She paused and studied her hands, lips pursed, then sighed. “If so, we’ll leave the warren behind. But the odds of actually reaching the surface? Not so great. And then I catch myself thinking, how large is Bastion? A thousand souls? Ten thousand? Fifty? We’ve no idea. How hard will it be to hide out there? What kind of life are we going to live? Will we be fugitives forever, or might we be able to start an actual life without being caught and thrown back in here?”
“I don’t know,” said Scorio at last. Her gaze was striking, mesmerizing in its intensity. “But anything’s better than being down here, right?”
She stood up. “You’re right about that. Come on. If you’re up to it, I’m to take you to the Brass Door. Sal’s already setting up.”
Scorio stretched, then climbed off the ledge and stood. He felt stiff and ravenous but otherwise fine. “Setting up?”
“His contraption. He can’t leave it out or the fiends’d destroy it.” She moved to where a heavy pack was set against the wall. “If everything’s in place, we might make a go of it tonight. If we leave it any later, there’d probably be too many fiends waiting on the other side.”
“Because they’re drawn here? By the lure Havert spoke of?”
She lifted the pack with wiry strength and slipped it over one shoulder. “It’s a theory. For all we know, the cave beyond the door fills with fiends the moment the door closes. But Sal thinks it slowly accumulates monsters, which means tonight’s our best bet. The last wave’s threats have died off, but there’s still a couple of weeks till the door opens again. Happy balance between safety and the numbers waiting for us outside.”
Scorio moved over to a second pack that had been set aside for him. “And if we run into trouble?”
“We’ve got these.” She moved to a rack set by the entrance. “Nothing very durable or effective, but they’re better than using our nails and teeth.”
Scorio hauled the pack on, then stepped over to examine the motley collection of weapons. There was no denying how primitive they were. Bone daggers and clubs made out of large rocks lashed to femurs, mostly, with a few curved spears that would never fly true.
He hefted a club. The grip was made of interwoven plant fibers, the bone larger than any man’s, and the stone at the top heavily ridged and the size of his fist. He gave it a few experimental swings, and found it top-heavy; it whipped around easily but was hard to control.
“All set?” Nissa asked.
“Let’s do it.”
She led the way through the narrow exit chute and out into the tunnel. There they spent a moment strapping on their packs, and with weapons in hand, they headed out.
For a while they walked in silence, Nissa taking the turns without hesitation, but then she glanced back at him, her face illuminated a radiant blue by her moss-lantern. “What were you accused of? By the Archspire?”
“Accused of? You mean my previous self?” For a moment Scorio felt reluctant to answer, but he couldn’t think of a reason not to. Whomever that person had been, it wasn’t the man he was today. “I was called The Scourer. Lord of… Nagaman? Nagaran? The Quencher of Hope, Unmaker of Joy… it went on for a bit. Bringer of Ash and Darkness. That kind of thing.”
“Impressive.” She looked ahead once more. “I was merely the Flayer of Men.”
“Nissa the Flayer of Men?”
“Yeah.” She raised her lantern, illuminating a narrow side tunnel, and stepped into it. “I’ve thought about it a lot, over the years. Why did I flay men? How many must I have flayed to become known for it? Who gave me that name? Did I choose it, or was it thrust upon me by my enemies?”
“The chancellor said there were histories. That some of us have kept journals over the years. Maybe the answer’s out there.”
“Maybe. Don’t think the academy will give me access to their records, though.”
Their footsteps echoed about them, and then she sighed and lowered her lantern so that it hung down by her knee. “It was just me and Sal for two years at first. He wasn’t quite so… himself, yet, at that point. But by the time Hestia and Havert showed up, I was about ready to find my own corner of the warren. They helped a lot, but there’s only so much folks with no past can talk about before running out of conversation.”
She slowed, came to a stop, staring down at the ground. “Only so much speculating about the same things you can do before you begin to hate the sound of your voice. But even death’s no escape, knowing that we’ll simply be reborn within a year or two and thrown back down here.” She turned to stare at him sidelong. “You know what’s the worst thing I found down here?”
“What?”
“A name. Carved in rock. Below a hundred others. All of them… my own. The oldest one is barely legible.” She stared morosely at the ground. “I kept debating whether to add my name again to the bottom.”