Bitterwood (42 page)

“It’s not my preferred approach,” said Shandrazel. “But Metron insists it’s the only way to speak to my father without him immediately going for my throat.”

Blasphet stared at Shandrazel, studying his eyes. Shandrazel didn’t turn away from the stare and met his gaze. Shandrazel noticed a family resemblance in the sharp, well-bred lines of his uncle’s face, despite Blasphet’s discolored hide and bloodshot eyes. It was like looking at some dark reflection of his father.

Blasphet asked, “You still think you can use reason to persuade him?”

“I hope so,” Shandrazel answered.

“Truly, your idealism exceeds my own,” Blasphet said.

“How is this poison delivered?” Androkom asked. “Via drink?”

Blasphet shook his head.

“The blood, then?” Androkom asked. “An… an injunction. Injection, rather.” The young biologian’s speech was slightly slurred.

Metron swayed on his feet. He mumbled, “Blasphet, I… I…” The elder biologian raised his talon to rub his brow.

“Yes?”

“I feel… light-headed. The exertion… of the stairs—”

“No,” Shandrazel said, noticing his own breathing growing shallow. “I feel it too.”

Suddenly the High Biologian’s eyes rolled beneath his lids and he toppled sideways. Shandrazel moved quickly, reaching out to catch the aged dragon in his arms before he hit the stone floor.

“The air . . .” Androkom said, leaning against a wall to steady himself.

“Is it too warm in here?” Blasphet asked. “I would open a window but that would let the poison out.”

“Betrayer!” Shandrazel shouted, letting Metron slide to the floor. He leapt toward his uncle, his claws outstretched. But the air seemed too thick, slowing him, as if he were moving through water. The room swayed and where Blasphet should have stood he found only a wall. Shandrazel collided face-first with solid stone.

“Feeling a little disoriented, nephew?”

Shandrazel turned around, his legs trembling.

Androkom now sprawled across the floor, as unconscious as Metron. Blasphet had moved back to the fireplace, once more stirring the coals with the poker.

Shandrazel rushed forward, fighting the fog in his mind to focus on the target of his uncle’s throat. He opened his jaws wide.

Blasphet suddenly possessed supernatural speed. He drew the poker above his head, then chopped it down between Shandrazel’s eyes in a blur.

There was a flash of light, a crash of drums, then darkness. The darkness broke with pale red light as Shandrazel opened his eyes once more. He was on the floor, looking across toward Metron’s slumped body. The High Biologian’s silver-tinted scales seemed surrounded by tiny halos. Why was Metron on the floor? Shandrazel’s head throbbed with distant pain. He braced himself with his claws and slowly rose. The floor was spinning as if on a giant turntable. He could vaguely hear someone saying, “You’re as hard-headed as your father.”

Another crash and the floor raced up to meet him. Everything grew silent and still.

“WAKE UP,” THE
voice said.

No. Shandrazel ached too much to open his eyes. He pulled the blanket of sleep more tightly around his mind.

“Wake up!” the voice  repeated, and this time the demand was met by a strong poke in Shandrazel’s gut. Shandrazel tried to twist away from the pain but couldn’t move. The rattling of chains provoked his curiosity more than the voice did. Then he remembered.
Blasphet!
His eyes jerked open.

“Ah,” Blasphet said from somewhere near. “You’re back. Good. The dosage affected you more than I would have guessed. You barely stirred while I was strapping you in.”

Shandrazel tried to turn his head toward his uncle’s voice but couldn’t. His head was held fast by cold, hard bars. He shifted his eyes and flexed his limbs. His whole body was trapped in a narrow cage in which he lay flat, his wings pinned behind him with crossbars trapping his limbs, allowing not even a wiggle. The cage was suspended so that he faced downward. Below him sat a huge pool of black liquid. He noted that the cage bars weren’t metal but were fashioned from thick rods of glass. He would have little trouble breaking them, if only he could get some leverage.

To the side of the pool he could see a wheel around which was wrapped a sturdy chain. Blasphet stepped into his field of vision, standing beside the wheel, grinning. On the other side of the pool Androkom was chained to the wall, his body slumped over, a stream of drool dripping from his mouth.

“I designed this for your father,” Blasphet said. “But you’ll do fine for practice. This way I can work out any kinks before I try it on my dear brother.”

Shandrazel growled. He tensed and released every muscle of his body, struggling for even an inch of movement. The cage began to sway, but only barely.

“I’d love to stick around,” his uncle said. “Alas, I’m pressed for time. With this device your death will take hours.”

Blasphet turned the wheel. It clicked once and the cage dropped a fraction of an inch.

“The pool beneath you is acid. This device allows me to lower you into the pool using precise measurements, then raise you to examine the results. I’ll do a detailed drawing at each step. It should make for fascinating reference material, as the interior of the body is revealed, layer-by-layer. Practicing on you will allow me to get the subtleties worked out for your father. I have this marvelous vision of dissolving his eyelids without touching the eyes,” Blasphet said. “It probably won’t work, but what is life without a dream?”

Shandrazel kept silent, contemplating his possible actions. His silence prodded Blasphet into talking further.

“This acid cauterizes wounds, so you could live for several hours once we begin. Who knows? I might spend days on this project. Will you still be alive when we reach your heart? Oh, the suspense!”

Shandrazel relaxed his entire body. He tried to allow slack to build in the cage. Unfortunately, some mechanism took up the slack. He managed only to immobilize himself further.

Blasphet looked disappointed. “This is the point where you’re supposed to scream, ‘You’re mad!’”

“Will you prattle on like this the whole time?” Shandrazel asked. “If so, could you dissolve my ears first?”

“I may be able to accommodate you,” Blasphet said. “For now, I must bid you farewell. Your father has some business cooked up at dawn, which fast approaches. I believe he plans to kill Bitterwood. I must attend. It’s important I remind him how shallow and meaningless his vengeance will be.”

Blasphet raised his claw in a gesture of farewell, then turned and vanished from sight. A few seconds later, Shandrazel heard the rattling of a key in a door, then footsteps fading into the distance.

When he was certain his uncle was gone, he said, “Androkom?”

Androkom’s eyes opened and he sat up. “I’m awake,” he said. “I didn’t want him to know.”

“Have you already thought of a way to escape?” Shandrazel asked him.

“No. You?”

“Not yet,” Shandrazel said, trying to turn his head. “My field of vision is limited. Tell me everything you see.”

“You, mostly, the pool and the wheel.The chains holding me, of course. There are two pairs of manacles, one for my wings, one for my legs. They run through iron rings in the wall. They look well made. There are a few lanterns on the other side of the room. My tail’s free but I can’t reach anything of use.”

To demonstrate, he pulled himself as far from the wall as the chains would allow and thrust his hips forward, his tail snaking between his legs and stretching out about a yard across the pool.

“Can you touch my cage with your tail?” Shandrazel asked. “If we can get it swaying enough to bang the ceiling, perhaps we could break the bars.”

Androkom stretched, but his tail failed to reach the cage by several feet.

“Just as well,” Androkom said. “If we did break the bars, you’d only plummet into the acid. There’s not enough distance for your wings to catch the air.”

Shandrazel stared into the acrid ebony fluid beneath him. The stench made his nostrils water. He rubbed his snout as much as he could against the cool, smooth glass. The motion pulled one of the delicate feathers that adorned his snout free. It drifted slowly downward. Against the perfect blackness of the pool, it seemed to fall forever, into a void, until it touched the surface. Then, with a
hiss
, it vanished into nothingness.

“HERE!” JANDRA SAID,
raising papers over her head. “I can’t believe it! After all these hours!”

Bitterwood rushed to her side and snatched the papers from her hand. The cover page read: “An Inventory of Human Slaves Captured in the Village of Christdale.”

The first page contained a list of male children. He recognized the names, but one name was missing. What had happened to Adam? He turned the page and saw a list of names of women, and beside each was marked their fate. The widow Tate: dead in transit. His neighbor’s wife, Dorla: sold to a noble dragon from the Isle of Horses. Then Recanna! Ruth! Mary! All had a “K” marked next to their names.

“What does this mean?” he asked, pointing at the mark. “Please tell me it doesn’t mean ‘killed.’”

“It means ‘Kitchen,’” Jandra said, looking over his shoulder. “They weren’t sold at auction, but were kept by Albekizan to be put to work in the kitchens.”

She took a closer look at the names next to Bitterwood’s fingers. All this time they’d searched for the name of his village; he hadn’t told her the names of his family. Her mouth went dry.

“You can’t mean…” Bitterwood’s face broke into a look of joy. “They’re here! My family is within these walls!”

Jandra didn’t answer. She turned away from him. Perhaps the names were only a coincidence. Perhaps this was a different family. Perhaps…

Bitterwood turned around, the smile falling from his lips. “What?”

“It’s… I knew them,” Jandra said, still with her back to him.

“Knew? What happened to them? Why won’t you look at me?”

Jandra spun around. “Because they’re dead! Every human who worked in the palace is dead. Albekizan ordered them killed in retaliation the day after you killed Bodiel.”

The papers dropped from Bitterwood’s hands, fluttering to the floor around him like dying leaves.

ZEEKY WOKE TO
the sound of voices from below. She had run to the closest building she could find after the dragon dropped her, and spent the day hiding in the attic, waiting for things to calm down so that she could sneak back to the barn.

But during the day, more residents had arrived in the Free City, and it was her bad luck that out of hundreds of empty buildings, some of the new arrivals had picked the building she hid inside to make their home.

It was dark outside. What time was it? Something about the smell of the air hinted that it wouldn’t be long now before the dawn.

The words of the men speaking in the room beneath her were difficult to make out until she heard a now familiar name: Kamon.

“You can’t mean it,” the first voice said.

“I saw him with my own eyes,” said the second. “I would have killed him then but he was surrounded by a dozen Kamonites.”

“I’ll stand with you,” the first voice said. “As will my brothers. Kamon will pay for his poisonous lies.”

The conversation was dropped suddenly as a loud
bang
shook the house. Someone had kicked in the door.

“Humans!” a dragon snarled. “Wake up! You must go to the square! Albekizan will address you!”

The men raised their voices in protest until a whip cracked, silencing them.

Suddenly, the trap door to the attic flew open and the beaked head of an earth-dragon popped through, looking straight at Zeeky.

“Get down here,” he commanded.

There was no exit save for the hole the dragon was stood in. Luckily, she was small and dragons were slow. She leapt forward over the dragon’s shoulder, sliding down his spine as he uselessly grabbed behind his back, trying to catch her. She grabbed his tail, swinging her feet down to land in a running position. But her feet stopped just inches from the floor. The full
weight of her body hung by her collar.
She twisted around to see a second earth-dragon holding her at arm’s length, looking at her as if she were some awful bug.

BLASPHET WHEELED OVER
the scene below. It was early morning; the sun was just peeking over the eastern horizon. All of the residents of the Free City had been gathered in the square, packed in tightly by the guards that stood in thick columns in the adjoining streets. They looked groggy, disoriented. Blasphet’s research had taught him that humans were most sluggish and compliant in the predawn hours. Apparently, his brother knew this as well.

Toward the front of the crowd, a large platform had been hastily erected overnight. The platform was surrounded by dark-green, heavily armored earth-dragons—nearly the entire unit of the Black Silences—separating the crowd from the platform by rows three dragons deep. On the unpainted boards of the impromptu stage stood Albekizan, looking too smug and satisfied for Blasphet’s comfort.

Behind Albekizan stood Tanthia, her eyes dark and sunken with depression, a look that Blasphet found quite attractive in a female.A heavy wooden post protruded from the center of the stage next to the king; beside this stood Pertalon, who was laboring to chain the captive Bitterwood with his back to the post and his arms stretched high above his head. Bitterwood’s wrists were fastened to an iron ring, leaving his toes barely touching the platform. Completing the group on the dais were the hunter, Zanzeroth, and Kanst, dressed in his full ceremonial armor. With a turn of his wings and a rustle of scales, Blasphet dropped to the platform to complete the assembly.

Albekizan didn’t acknowledge Blasphet’s arrival. Instead he checked Bitterwood’s chains as a leather strap was placed around the prisoner’s head. He then tied the strap around the post in such a manner as to ensure that the human couldn’t look away from the crowd.

The crowd murmured in speculation. Blasphet noted one voice in particular in which he could recognize madness, always an interesting quality.

“The prophecy!” the madman shouted. “It is as I foretold! Bitterwood must suffer this hour so that we can be free!”