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T
he Emperor was dead. Red knew that. Even if Ahamay’s blow had missed the man’s heart, she had poisoned the blade. She had told him so. She hadn’t told him what was inside the carving, but now that he knew, he saw it all clearly at last.
She’s an Erebian, he thought numbly as his captors dragged him away. That’s what all this was about. They killed Itzcóatl and took his skull, an’ she didn’t just want to take it back. She wanted revenge. Revenge on all of ’em.
Now she had taken that revenge, and Red had been her lackey. The Emperor was dead, along with his entire family, and Ahamay had fled.
Red wondered briefly if she had always meant to abandon him like this, to leave him to take the fall for what she had done. But he found that he didn’t even care any more. Because what he had helped her do wasn’t just for the sake of her revenge – it was for his own as well. He had avenged the massacre at Withypool and the fall of the South, and with the Emperor and his family dead, his home country might finally have a chance.
Chaos would take hold of the Empire now. Amoran would be forced to withdraw its troops from Cymria, and with them gone...
Red knew that his time was up now. He knew it as his captors hurled him into a cell with the rest of Ahamay’s surviving slaves. As a slave he had been almost worthless, but now he was worth less than nothing. They would kill him, most likely as painfully as possible. But that didn’t matter, not any more. He had struck a blow for the South and its people, and would die knowing that no matter what happened, that blow could not be taken back.
He lay on his back on the floor of his cell, not even noticing the crazed smile that had spread over his face, not feeling the pain of the cuts on his arms and chest.
Nothing matters, he thought. Nothing matters any more, not a damn thing.
Fear would not come back to him until later, after things had calmed down and some Amorani official came and gave some orders to the guards that he couldn’t understand. Not until after that, when he and the others were chained together and taken away.
He thought they were being taken to their deaths at last, and his heart beat fast, expecting that at any moment he would emerge into the daylight and find a scaffold waiting for him, or a chopping block.
But none of those things came. Instead he and the others were taken downward – down into the bowels of the palace, where the only light came from stone lamps, and several heavy wooden doors had to be unlocked to let them through.
The prisoners started to mutter uneasily among themselves.
Then, when the last door opened, the smell hit Red’s nostrils: the heavy, sickly stench of rotting flesh.
He retched and stumbled briefly, and the first real stirrings of fear came back to him then. He realised where he must be going now. Not to a public execution, but to a torture chamber.
‘Shit,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Oh shit.’
He started to struggle against his chains, along with several others who had caught the stench and probably realised where they were going. But they didn’t stand a chance. Their guards quickly beat them back into line, and they were dragged on down the passageway and into another room – a long, low stone room with a cage along one wall, already filled with prisoners.
One by one, the new additions were unchained and thrown into the cage.
Red stumbled in and nearly fell, his nose now filled with that sickly rotting stench. The cage was crowded and dirty. The prisoners in it barely looked up at his arrival. They stood or sat, all hunched and gaunt, staring at nothing, many of them caked in filth.
Red managed to find a spot in a corner and pressed himself into it while his fellow prisoners came in after him, some of them still fighting back before they were shoved through and the door slammed and locked behind them.
There was already a small group of guards there to watch over the cage, and the ones who had brought them down walked out, leaving them to continue their duty.
Red stared dully at the men who stayed behind. He wondered if any of them felt any pity for their prisoners, but then... had he ever felt pity? He had never been a prison guard, but he had arrested people in the past and taken them to be locked up. Some of them would have been executed. Maybe even tortured.
Had he ever felt any guilt for that, he wondered? Any sympathy?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember. He didn’t know if he even deserved sympathy any more.
He turned to look at the prisoner next to him – a miserable looking Maijani who shivered constantly where he stood.
‘Why are we here?’ Red asked gently. ‘What’re they gonna do with us?’
The Maijani said nothing. He didn’t look as if he’d even heard what Red had said.
Red looked around the cage. ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ he asked again, not sure who he was asking, or if he wanted to know the answer.
One of the Amorani prisoners stirred. ‘When they take you, you will know,’ he said in a dull, flat voice. ‘Pray that you die first.’
Red said nothing, but that was when the true fear came.
Later on, while some of the other prisoners slept, he fixed his gaze on the lamp flame nearby and offered up a final prayer – but not to his own god.
‘Night God,’ he muttered. ‘You ain’t my god, I know. But you’re the god of death. So I’m prayin’ to you now.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Kill me. Kill me now, so it can be over. Kill me...’
*
Kraego and Kullervo had been in the cages underneath the Hall of Suns for a long time.
When they and the other griffins captured in Cymria had come to Amoran, they had been brought straight to Xanthium, and then to the prison they had occupied ever since. None of them had seen the sun in that time, and by now none of them expected to survive, let alone escape.
They occupied a huge cage that filled half of the chamber they were in, all of them chained to the floor by collars around their necks, to stop them from turning on each other. Not that any of them had the strength by now. Their water was drugged to stop them from using their magic, and the drug also served to keep them sleepy and weak.
At first, none of them could guess why they were there – but it didn’t take long for them to find out. All they had to do was wait until they were fed, and then the truth began to dawn on them all.
They knew that there were other chambers down in this place. Every other day, a griffin would be taken out of the cage and dragged away. None of them ever returned. There were humans being kept down here as well – unseen at first, but sometimes the griffins would hear their screams.
When food came, all of them soon realised why.
Griffins would be taken away, and returned dead or dying, with pieces of their bodies hacked off or organs removed. They were thrown into the cages to serve as food for their fellow captives who, with nothing else to sustain them, tore the remains to pieces.
But there was worse.
The human prisoners were dying as well, and their bodies were also thrown into the cages as fodder. And they weren’t just dead, but mutilated, sometimes grotesquely so.
It was Kullervo who first guessed at the truth. The other griffins were too crazed by hunger and captivity to care much; they snatched the corpses thrown to them and tore them apart in a frenzy without bothering to inspect them.
Kullervo refused to touch any of it, and when the first human corpse came within his reach he gently pulled it towards himself and turned it over.
Even in griffin form, he felt the horror freeze in his throat.
The man was an Amorani, and it was obvious what had killed him. Someone had cut him open and then sewn the hole shut again, as if he were a piece of clothing to be altered. The shock of that mutilation had obviously been too much for the man; the wound hadn’t even begun to heal before it killed him.
Kullervo didn’t have long to look. The griffin beside him snatched the body away and ripped it open, gulping down the organs inside.
Kullervo could only stare. ‘What have they done?’ he rasped. ‘What are they doing?’
Kraego had been chained beside him. ‘I do not know,’ he said, sounding as if he didn’t care either. ‘They must be torturing these humans for some crime.’
‘But why?’ said Kullervo. ‘What crime? And why us? Amoranis worship griffins.’
Kraego snorted. ‘It is food. Eat, or die. When I am unchained, I will teach them to fear me.’
Kullervo gagged at the very thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I won’t. I can’t. Not people. Not other griffins.’
‘Then you will die,’ said Kraego.
‘I would rather die,’ said Kullervo.
‘Then you are a fool,’ said Kraego. ‘There is nothing more important than to live.’
But Kullervo didn’t believe him, and as the weeks dragged by, he refused to eat the corpses offered to him.
With nothing else to eat, the flesh slowly wasted away from him until his ribs showed. Much longer and he would die. But by the time he finally understood just what was happening here, he started wishing for it.
More human corpses arrived, day after day, all of them cut open and sewn back together. Then others came, and these – these had been altered on the outside. Kullervo saw the first of them for himself, and that was when the truth dawned.
Someone had hacked off a griffin’s wings, and sewn them onto the man’s back. The wounds had festered and the wings had rotted, and the man was barely alive.
Kullervo watched as the man was devoured by his fellow prisoners.
‘It’s me,’ he said, barely audibly. ‘They’re trying to... they’re trying to create me.’
Kraego lay beside him. His fur was bedraggled by now, and his feathers dull. He stared blankly at Kullervo. ‘What is it?’
‘They’re trying to create the Winged Man,’ said Kullervo. ‘A man like me; both human and griffin. They want...’
He trailed off there, but he could see it all now – see it with horrible clarity. When he himself had gone to Maijan as his human self, with his griffinish wings in plain sight, the Amoranis who saw him wanted to worship him. They had believed he was the legendary Winged Man – a messenger from the sun god.
He wasn’t, of course. He had turned his back on both gods long ago. But the Amoranis still believed, and now they were trying to recreate what they had lost. Out of desperation, perhaps, or insanity.
‘They want their guardian back,’ Kullervo said, mostly to himself. And now he could see the depths they were willing to sink to. That was when he truly wanted to die.
But as time dragged by and he lay there, suffering in agonies of hunger and listening to the screams of butchered men, he knew what he had to do.
‘I have to make the change,’ he said aloud. ‘I have to change back into a human. Then I could be... I could be their guardian. But...’
But his magic gland had been numbed by the drug, and if he changed now, in his weakened state, it would kill him.
He still refused to resort to cannibalism, but now he stopped taking the water as well. If he waited long enough, the drug might wear off. Maybe.
*
Kraego watched Kullervo as the next few days dragged by, and felt contempt for him. But mixed in with that very normal griffish emotion was some admiration as well.
At first, when the shapeshifter refused to eat the dead humans and griffins offered to him, Kraego thought it was simple stupidity. No true griffin would ever choose to die rather than live, no matter what the cost. If he must eat humans or fellow griffins, so be it.
But over time, he began to feel disgusted with himself. He ate the corpses offered to him because he had to, but he didn’t take any pride in it. He was a griffin, a predator, and should be hunting for himself – not lying here in chains, eating this foul food thrown to him by human captors. When he thought that, he found himself admiring Kullervo just a little, who had been offered the chance to live in the same way Kraego had, but had the pride to refuse. Their captors wanted to force him into this, but he wouldn’t bow to them.
When Kullervo stopped drinking the water, Kraego finally saw what had to be done and he too stopped taking his water. Maybe, he realised, he could wait until the drug wore off and use his power to escape. Unlike Kullervo, though; he didn’t go thirsty – the blood of the bodies he ate was enough to stop him declining too quickly. In fact Kraego, as the largest griffin in the cages, was strong enough to seize plenty of food for himself and had kept himself in better condition than most, despite the lack of exercise.
‘You are right,’ he said softly to Kullervo one day. ‘You and I must regain our magic. Then we shall escape.’
And then, he added to himself... and then, when he was free, he would make these humans pay. Until he had come to this place he had never known what captivity was truly like. He had never felt such humiliation as he did now, and that humiliation only fed his hatred.
I am the dark griffin, he thought obsessively, over and over again as the time dragged out unbearably. I will not die here. I will not be kept prisoner. I will escape this place. I will break free. And then I will kill them all.
Leaving the water untouched worked; he could feel it. Little by little, the numbness in the magic gland which sat in his throat began to fade. Little by little, the faint burn of magic returned. He could feel it. Soon, he thought. Soon it would be strong enough to use.
Beside him, Kullervo lay on his belly. Perhaps his own magic was starting to come back to him, but by now it was already too late. Starvation and thirst had all but killed him. He barely had the strength to raise his head any more.
‘Do not be afraid,’ Kraego told him one night. ‘I will find a way to escape from here. I will kill the ones who have done this to you.’
Kullervo’s voice was a low moan. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No killing, no...’
Kraego didn’t listen. One more day, he thought. One more meal, and one more day without that drugged water. Then I will be ready. Then I will be strong enough.
The next day came, and the next meal arrived in their part of the cage. It was a human body, and Kraego snatched it away from his fellows before they could touch it. He hissed to himself in satisfaction as he pulled it closer. It was a good, big one with plenty of meat on it. It would make a solid meal.
He pinned the corpse down with one huge forepaw, and opened his beak to bite into it. But then, as it turned over under his weight, he froze.
The man under his paw was a Cymrian, a Southerner. His red hair had been shaved off, but it had begun to regrow down here. That, and the scent of him, was enough to make Kraego hesitate.
‘Red,’ he said softly.
Beside him, Kullervo slowly opened his eyes. He peered at the body. ‘Red?’ he rasped.
Red lay at their paws, scarcely breathing. He was naked and vulnerable, like a baby. The collar was gone, and his throat was hideously swollen, the rough stitching along the front of it barely holding the wound closed. It oozed black, stinking pus.
‘Red,’ Kraego said again, blankly.
Kullervo managed to drag himself upright, and he leaned forward as far as he could, reaching his front paws out to touch Red’s burning hot chest. ‘Red,’ he said in a low, dull voice. ‘Red. No. Oh no...’
Neither griffin wanted to eat him. Even Kraego balked at the idea. They held onto him instead, protecting him from the other griffins who tried to snatch him. Kullervo managed to splash some water out of the trough and onto his face to try and cool him down. But there was nothing either of them could do for him.
They sat there together for a long time, watching in silence as Red’s breathing grew more and more laboured. Ugly, swollen veins had spread out from the infected wound on his throat and put poison into his blood, and fever had consumed him.
Both griffins kept watch over him, neither one speaking at all, keeping up a vigil for what they both knew would happen.
Eventually, as the night drew on, they heard Red give one last feeble gasp, and then stop breathing.
‘Goodbye,’ Kullervo said softly. ‘You’re away from this cruel world at last, Red.’
Kearney Redguard did not move, and little by little they both saw the colour drain out of his skin and leave it white and ghastly, while his limbs began to stiffen. He was dead, and his sufferings were over.
In that moment, a sound came from the void – a sound that no-one heard. Somewhere beyond the mortal world, the dark spirit that had once been Arenadd Taranisäii chuckled softly as he dragged Red’s soul away into the void.
