It has to be a drug.
Every day, Alex sleeps soundly, no matter what I do to try and wake her. She only starts to revive as the sun sets, and once the guards spoon-feed her a bowl of soup, she’s unconscious again in moments. I’ve tried to watch them prepare the soup, but I can’t see very much from my chained position.
I start to think about how I can help her.
***
Very little breaks the monotony of the days as the wagons grind north as fast as the roads allow. A week of sunshine dries the mud to hard-baked clay, and we make good progress, but then the rains break and it’s back to probing the muck with sticks.
I now pray for rain. The farther we go, the closer we get to Elysium, and the smaller my chance for escape. Not that I hold out a great deal of hope anymore, but once we reach the fortress-city there will be no chance at all.
So Hunter tells us anyway. Once or twice a week, Alex’s nightly drugging is put off for a few hours so the Penitent Damned can come and lecture us on the life we can expect once we’re interred in the ancient catacombs. A healthy one, apparently, well cared for but ascetic in terms of physical pleasures. Hunter tells us this will be good for our souls, give us time to contemplate the hereafter, though how this squares with his earlier comments about being predestined to eternal damnation I cannot say. Theology was Peter’s subject, not mine. I wonder if these lectures are official Church policy for incoming prisoners, or if the Penitent is simply indulging himself with a literally captive audience.
I look forward to those days, though, because in the time before Hunter arrives, I have a little while to talk to Alex. It tears my heart to watch her struggling toward awareness, the moment of pain in her eyes as she surfaces from whatever dream had captured her and realizes that reality is still the wagon and the chains.
She tells me a little bit about her life in the League cities, and the small details are what astonish me. Newspapers, for example. I try to imagine a place where paper and printing are so cheap they can be put to a single use and then discarded, and my mind boggles. I counted myself fortunate to have access to a couple of dozen books; in Hamvelt they must have every book in the world.
“Did you know about them?” I ask her. “These Penitent Damned?”
She shakes her head. “The old man was always warning me about the Sworn Church, but I don’t even think he really believed there were still Priests of the Black. As far as I knew, I was the only one with … a demon, I guess I have to call it now.” Her face goes hard, and I decide to change the subject.
“The old man—your father?”
“No—I mean, yes, I suppose, in a way. The closest thing I ever had to one. He was my teacher.”
“In a school?” My breath catches trying to imagine it, thinking of the stories Peter told of his days at Elysium.
She chuckles. “No. He was a thief.”
“A … thief?”
“The best thief in the world.”
Needless to say, there were no professional thieves in Nestevyo. If something was stolen, it was never long before the culprit was discovered, and the villagers administered a sort of rough justice measured in shared favors, public shaming, and an occasional beating. I listen in awe as she tells me about Metzing, who robbed from the rich and powerful and was successful for so long he became a kind of hero. It fits perfectly into the world of the cheap romances that had provided so much of my reading material.
“Will he come find you?” I blurt out, my mind suddenly abuzz. If someone like that were to help us, then surely—
But I can tell, at once, that it’s the wrong thing to say. Her expression goes cold and hard again.
“He’s dead,” she says. “They killed him, when they took me.”
We sit for a moment, in silence. I am aware of precious seconds ticking past, these rare guarded moments, but I cannot think what to say.
Time runs out before I can decide. Two guards ride forward from the rear of the caravan, with two strangers in tow. By the state of their clothes and horses, these men have been riding hard, and yet they are clearly impatient to be off. The guards make them speak to the Priest of the Red, an exchange of rapid-fire Murnskai.
“What’s going on?” Alex says, straining against her bonds to see. “What are they saying?”
“They’re couriers on their way north with news.”
“What news?”
I listen for a bit, then shrug. “The King of Vordan is dead.”
Alex blinks. I can see whatever they’ve given her fading, her powers of concentration returning. But not fast enough; Hunter comes, with his speeches, and then the laced gruel that sends her back to her poisoned sleep.
***
It is not only sympathy that makes me want to help Alex. I have a slender reed of hope, a castle built on a foundation of sand. My reasoning runs like this:
She has a demon. I have a demon, too, but I am not kept unconscious day and night. It is a great deal of trouble for them, and they would not do it without a reason. Therefore, Alex’s demon is one that, without the drug, might be able to help us escape.
If I can keep her awake long enough for her mind to clear, we have a chance.
She has a chance, anyway. She might flee on her own and leave me to rot, but I don’t think this likely. Though we have only had a few short conversations, I feel like I know her well enough to make this guess, at least.
In any event, I have no other options.
***
I begin caching the extra bread Tullo brings me inside my filthy shirt. After two or three nocturnal rendezvous with the mercenary, I steel myself and make my move.
“Hey,” I tell the guard who brings Alex soup. “Do you want me to do that?”
He looks at me quizzically. But he is thinking about it, which means another guess of mine was correct—the ordinary guards do not know what sort of people they are transporting. Now I need to hope he is lazier than he is dutiful.
“Can you reach her?” he says.
I nod and shuffle across the wagon bed. Stretching my chains to their limit, I can just about put my hands on Alex. I have to stretch to reach her head. The edges of the fetters have chafed the skin of my wrists into a mass of sores and scabs, and putting pressure on them makes me wince, but I try not to show the pain.
An irony: no matter how I try, I cannot use my demon to soothe my own hurts.
“It’s just that you do this every day, and I imagine you have better things to worry about. Keeping us safe from wolves and so on.” I give him my best guileless smile. “I’m just sitting about here anyway, right?”
Emotions flicker across the guard’s face. He’s not very bright, but even he can see there must be more to my offer than it appears. On the other hand, spooning soup into a sleeping girl isn’t the most pleasant duty, and I’m sure he’d be glad to be rid of it. It might work. It might work—
“No.” Voryil, the leader of the guards, materializes from the darkness outside the wagon. “Feed her yourself, Bokka.”
Bokka looks briefly truculent. “Why should I? If he wants to help—”
“He only wants to steal her food for himself,” Voryil says, looking at me. “Leave the wretch alone and see to your work.”
The guard shrugs at me and goes back to his task. I retreat to my corner and eat the hard, moldy bread I’d been saving.
***
The next time dinner is late, and Alex starts to blink and open her eyes, I speak to her in an urgent hiss.
“Alex. Alex, can you hear me?”
She looks up at me blearily. “Wha’?”
“We have to get out of here. We have to escape.” I keep my voice low. There’s no telling when Hunter will arrive. “Could your demon break these chains?”
Alex stares. “Can’t. Too … too sleepy. Can’t think straight.”
“But if you were awake?”
Her eyes cross with the effort of will it takes to produce a coherent answer. “Yes. I think so.”
“I … I might have a way. But it’s dangerous. It could hurt you badly.” Another pause. “I don’t want to try it unless you’re willing. But if we wait too long, they’ll take us to Elysium.”
The back of the wagon opens with a clunk. Hunter is earlier than usual. But Alex fixes me with her gaze, then glances in the Penitent Damned’s direction, and carefully mouths her words.
I would rather die.
I swallow hard and close my eyes.
***
There are two things I need to do, if this is going to work. First, Alex needs a clear head to break the bonds that hold us to the wagon.
Second, Hunter needs to die. He told us himself that his demon will let him track us wherever we flee. If we leave him alive behind us, we will only be captured again, and he has spoken often of the torments that await the recalcitrant. The lengths the torturers of Elysium can go to while leaving a victim alive and bound to his demon.
If it comes to that, Alex is right. I would rather die. But it would be better to live, and that means killing Hunter. I think I know how to do it.
The mask hides his face, and by day he speaks only Murnskai like the rest of the caravan, but the man’s pride gives him away. It is the Priest of the Red who leads the expedition, who gives the orders, who never hammers a tent peg or pulls a stone from a horse’s hoof. He cannot be Voryil—Hunter is a big man, and the guard leader is skinny as a rail—and I cannot imagine Hunter taking orders from a man like Tullo or the other guards. He must be masquerading as the priest.
And Priests of the Red are trained in medicine …
***
My demon waits, slick and cold at the back of my skull. It feels … eager. I shiver.