“Rathe!” Thushar bellowed from the doorway, followed by Osaant’s outraged squawk.
Rathe tore the sword free and thrust Girod away. The man tumbled to the floor, not yet dead. Lisana slumped to one side and went still. The fury left Rathe as quickly as it had come. Confusion and uncertainty, emotions from which he had never suffered, crashed over him. The sword fell from his limp fingers, and he crumpled to his knees at Lisana’s side.
There came a scuffling behind him, but he did not turn, even when Thushar’s strong arms wrapped protectively around him. The Prythian warned Osaant’s gathering guards to stay back, but to Rathe his voice came from far away.
“Do not make my troubles your own,” he murmured, sinking into a dreamscape of bemusing hues as the drugged wine fully addled his wits. “Let them have me, brother.”
Unheeding, Thushar threw Rathe off the far side of the bed and jumped down next to him. “Take up your sword!” the Prythian bellowed.
Rathe sat sprawl-legged, limbs numb, head reeling. Everything was distant-Girod’s death, Lisana’s blood covering his hands and arms, the clash of steel not a pace distant. Some part of him wanted to fight, but the world around him became a muddled nightmare.
Thushar, a snarling wolf defending his leader, wielded his sword and many of Osaant’s men fell. Those who survived dragged themselves clear of the carnage missing limbs, gashed to the bone, or eviscerated. A true Ghost of Ahnok, Thushar fought longer than any man should have been able to, but in the end, Osaant’s guards were too many. More swooped into the chambers and battered Thushar and Rathe into submission.
Osaant ordered, “Keep them alive!” Quivering with fury, he spared a single glance for Girod, whose eyes had been dulled by death. “By all the gods, I will see that you both suffer before you die.”
Chapter 7
Lost in the murk, Rathe shifted on the damp dirt floor of the cell, making his chains rattle. He had been imprisoned long enough to grow accustomed to the reek of spilled chamber pots, moldy straw, and unwashed prisoners, but the clinking of his own chains still chilled his blood. He tried to judge the passage of days, but could not. Twilight was eternal in the deep cells, where only a single oil lamp, somewhere outside his barred cell, kept absolute darkness at bay. He slept and woke, tried to ignore the rumble of hunger in his belly, contemplated the palpable weight of misery upon his heart and soul, then slept again. He knew for certain he had slept a dozen times since Thushar had lost his life for the crime of protecting his commander.
Shifting into a slightly more comfortable position, Rathe watched through the rusted bars of his cell as his companions slunk along the corridor, nosing through moldering straw, hunting for any morsel. Three-leg, a great black rat, slid between the bars of another cell across the way, making straight for a bare foot covered in running sores. Nose outstretched, it sniffed cautiously at the waiting toes. The prisoner, a man Rathe had never fully seen, did not stir. Taking that as an invitation, Three-leg took a tentative nibble. The foot thrashed weakly and drew back, a moan came from the darkness. Three-leg moved on, hunting a more submissive meal.
Nub, a small gregarious rodent bereft of a tail, scurried quickly from cell to cell, as if knowing exactly what it was looking for and how to find it. Nub veered toward Rathe’s quarters, halted just out of reach and sat up, beady eyes giving him a curious once over.
“Nothing for you this day, friend,” Rathe croaked. “Of course, you know that, don’t you?”
Nub’s whiskers twitched, its head bobbed as if in answer.
“Like as not, I will be dead soon,” Rathe continued. “Then, little one, you can have all the meat you want. How would that be?”
Nub bobbed its head again, front paws held before its chest like a pleading supplicant.
“Off with you,” Rathe said. “I am not dead yet.”
Perhaps it was encroaching madness, perhaps imagination, but Rathe felt sure that Nub considered his words and, finding such an arrangement acceptable, it dropped to all fours and continued its rounds.
In watching Nub’s progression, Rathe spied Patches. The two regarded each other. A one-eyed rat dotted with snowy spots, Patches did not move around much, as though trying to blend in with the shadows and crumbling brick walls. When it deigned to explore, it did so with heightened caution.
“You have had a rough go of it, haven’t you?” Rathe said. Until coming awake the first day in the deep cells, he had never reflected on the conduct of vermin. He had discovered they had a hierarchy, and it seemed poor blemished Patches was at the bottom of its pack.
“You will have to find your stones, if you ever want to make something of yourself,” Rathe advised with a wry chuckle.
In answer, Patches lowered its head and slowly backed into the darkness of another cell.
Rathe sighed and leaned his head back against the rough brick wall. Other vermin squeaked and hunted in the gloom, pausing occasionally to nibble a toe or finger on the chance that the owner of that appendage had died in the night. If the prisoner yelped or groaned, the rats scurried on. If not, they feasted until one of the gaolers collected the corpses.
None of that bothered Rathe anymore. He supposed hunger made him lethargic, or maybe the lingering effects of whatever potion Girod had put into his wine. Or, perhaps I no longer care about anything?
With that thought came a jumble of visions and sensations from that night: wine and celebration, surrounded by highborn with no greater cares than who to bed; Lisana’s seductive smile and the blue of her eyes; after, the scarlet flood pouring from the gruesome tear across her throat, those beautiful eyes glazing in death; Girod sword in hand, readying to strike her again. Rathe’s fist clenched tightly, as if around a hilt. In his mind, he skewered Girod’s bowels anew, pinning the brute to the headboard. The longer he let the ghastly images cavort inside his skull, the more tangled they became, losing all connection to reality. Maybe I am losing my mind? Given that he counted vermin as companions, even named and spoke to them, he guessed that made sense.
Around him his fellow prisoners wept, moaned, or held silent vigil. Rathe closed his eyes which, improbable as it was, snuffed out the visions of his downfall. As he dozed, he saw Thushar’s severed head bouncing out of the stone basin in the executioner’s yard, the stump of the big Prythian’s neck spurting blood. He dared not allow himself any measure of self-pity, not with Thushar’s death cavorting his mind. Even as the executioner’s axe had fallen, with a smug Osaant and a chained Rathe looking on, Thushar had never lost his defiance or pride. Such a man as that did not deserve me for a friend.
The hardest thing for Rathe was that Thushar had not condemned him for falling so easily into the trap laid by Girod and Osaant, nor had he regretted guarding a stuporous Rathe until the end. His last words, spoken in the dark of their shared cell, had been confident, even joyful. “The wine of the gods is surely better than the goat piss we have shared so often. I will wait for you at Ahnok’s feet, brother, with a plump wench on my knee, and a drunken smile on my lips.”
I will remember you, brother, until we meet again, Rathe thought. That day could not be far off. Falling into a troubled slumber, Rathe could only hope to meet death with the same dignity….
A kick to the ribs jarred him awake, but the blinding glare of a torch closed his eyes again.
“It’s time,” a voice said with sinister jubilance.
Blinking, Rathe saw that Cartach had come for him-the worst of the gaolers. He struggled to get up, but found he was too weak-food was not wasted on the condemned, much to the disappointment of his vermin friends. When he fell back, Cartach stabbed the torch against his belly. The pain was immediate, as was the sizzling stench of charring flesh.