The netherling appeared from the gloom, long face staring between the bars with either incomprehension or anger; it was hard to tell with them.
“Listen, heathen, we need help,” Asper said, gesturing wildly to Nai. “She’s about to die. I need water, cloth. . something.” The female stared back blankly. Asper snarled, pounding a fist against the bars. “You filthy purple stool-sucker, listen to me.”
The netherling’s milk white eyes drifted to Nai. “Sheraptus?” she asked.
“Hurt.”
“Yes, yes,” Asper said, nodding vigorously. “Sheraptus! You know what-”
“Lucky,” the netherling said, turning to leave.
“What? No, wait! Get something! HEY!”
The netherling wasn’t listening. She simply turned around, pausing momentarily to regard the creature that had suddenly appeared before her. Tall, lanky, and possessed of a broad smile, he gently laid a gloved hand upon her shoulder.
“Hey,” he said, just a breath before a loud clicking sound.
By the time she had grabbed the hilt of her blade, blood was already weeping from her neck in great gouts. She didn’t make a move as he jerked his hand away, the metal spike protruding from his wrist glistening with her blood. She stared, speechless from shock. Also the hole in her throat.
And then she fell.
“Huh,” Denaos noted as the netherling’s blood pooled beneath her corpse. “That actually worked.” He pulled the blade’s hidden latch, drawing it back into his glove. “Should have said something more impressive.”
“Denaos!” Asper cried from behind the bars.
“Hello to you, too,” he replied, walking over. “Hey, if I had said ‘you’re working too hard,’ would that-”
“Open the door! Hurry!”
“Well, fine,” Denaos replied with a growl, kneeling over the netherling’s corpse. “If you’re in such a damn hurry. Just let me find the keys.”
“No time! Just pick the locks!”
The rogue looked up at her with a resentful glare. “Why would you assume I can pick locks?”
“I just thought. . well. . you’re a-”
“A man who is not a locksmith,” Denaos said, rifling through the netherling’s belt. “What’s the big hurry, anyway?”
“It’s-”
She suddenly realized that Nai hadn’t said anything for some time. She turned and saw a pair of glassy eyes staring up at her above blackened lips that no longer drew breath. She looked from Nai’s body to “her” lying nearby and saw the other prisoner also gone, as though she had simply been waiting for someone to leave with her.
Asper swallowed something foul.
“Nothing.”
The lock on her door clicked, the bars creaked as it slid open. Denaos stood in it, smiling broadly as he twirled a crude iron key around his finger.
“Granted, it would have been a lot more impressive if I had picked the locks,” he said, “but then again it would have also been more impressive if I had come riding on the back of a steed that travels by shooting fire out its. .”
His voice drifted as he saw her, died completely when he met her eyes. She was quiet, still, barely breathing. And he saw the tremble, something held within her that seemed like it might burst if she did anything more than breathe.
So he held out his hand. She took it, stepped closer to him.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“I know,” she whispered back.
“We can’t stay.”
“I know.”
He looked over her, to the two unmoving shapes in the shadows of the cell. “But if you want to. .”
She squeezed his hand before stepping past him. “I don’t.”
Denaos nodded. “Then we need to be careful. There weren’t a lot of netherlings out when we snuck in here, but there’s a guard force left behind.”
“They’ve left, then,” Asper muttered.
“To Jaga.”
“To Lenk and the others, assuming they made it.”
“Right,” Denaos said, nodding. “It’s a big fleet, though, and Hongwe has a small, fast boat. We can still make it before they do.” He pointed down a corridor. “Now, just head that way, Dread should be standing-”
“Where? Here?”
“No, back at the. .”
He didn’t even bother once he saw the wizard come walking up the corridor. No urgency was in his step, no breathlessness, nothing to indicate anything was the matter with anything but him. Dreadaeleon’s brows were knitted, his face set in a frown as he walked up to the cell.
“What is it?” Denaos hissed, reaching for a knife. “Are they coming?”
Dreadaeleon did not reply. He briefly pushed between them, peering into the cell. Without so much as a blink for the two bodies inside, he turned and walked back to the center of the room.
“Dread?” Asper asked, reaching out for him. “Are you. .”
He warded her off, holding up a single finger for silence. Pursing his lips in thought, he cocked an ear up. In a few moments, a scream echoed out of the darkness. The boy smiled.
“Ah, there we are,” he said.
And, with a rather morbid spring in his step, he took off exactly the opposite way from the exit, disappearing into the darkness. Asper looked expectantly to Denaos. The rogue looked offended.
“Well, how am I supposed to know?”
With little choice but to indulge this particular madness, they followed, finding him walking resolutely into the chamber ahead. Asper kept her eyes on him, trying hard not to look at the blackened wall of the chamber with a woman-shaped outline.
“Dread,” she urged quietly, “we should go. I mean really go. You don’t know what’s down here.”
“That’s why I am down here,” the boy replied, looking around as if searching for something in the round chamber. “It’s not so much calling to me as just sort of sending out a thousand messages to anyone who will listen. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it. Though I guess it would be difficult, what with-”
Another scream, this one frightfully close, echoed through the darkness.
“Yes, with that. Anyway, I have to find out. You understand.”
He didn’t wait for a confirmation before he took off running down the corridor, deeper into the darkness. Asper looked helplessly to Denaos, who sighed and pulled a dagger out, gesturing with his chin.
“Go. Get him,” he said. “Be quick about it, though, I don’t want to be standing here forever.”
She nodded, took off after the boy. The corridor was darkness so dense she couldn’t even be sure she wasn’t about to collide into a wall. But she kept her pace steady, following the sound of Dreadaeleon’s voice as it echoed up through the darkness between screams.
“Ah-ha,” he said from up ahead. “That would explain it, wouldn’t it?”
“Man-eh. . waka-ah, man-eh. .” another voice replied, weary and rasping.
“Hang on, let me see if. . no. They’re on there pretty tight.”
“O-tu-ah-tu-wa, man-eh. Padh, o-tu. Padh. Padh. Padh.”
“I guess it makes sense, though I am sorry.”
“Ah-chka-kai. . ah-te-ah-nah. .”
She couldn’t understand the words, but she recognized the voice. It had been screaming for hours now. And she knew the desperation held within it, a breathless echo of what Nai’s was.
Had been.
The thought of listening was unbearable. Though, as she rounded a corner and was washed over in a tide of bloodred light, it turned out to be infinitely more preferable to seeing it. But by then, she couldn’t look away.
A sweltering gallery of skin and iron met her. They hung in haphazard exhibit, choking on chains attached to the wall, strung up on every bare patch of stone. Some wept, some gasped, only a few screamed. More simply hung, staring blankly into the bloodred haze that drowned the cavernous chamber, waiting for death.
They were Gonwa.
They once were alive.