PART THREE

Chapter Sixteen

SECOND FALL

Yes. Alright. Fine. After Moonmoth, I swore I would never end up in a prison again. The first time had been quite enough, thank you. But what the Venerance wants, the Venerance gets, and currently, that was my arse firmly planted in a prison cell.

With me kicking and cursing, spitting and biting, the Venerance lackeys dragged me down into gloom-filled and noisy corridors, each darker and grimier than the last. When at last they found my cell, they quite literally threw me into it.

‘Good riddance,’ one prosecutor muttered to me as he nursed the spot on his skull where I’d elbowed him. He gave me a trio of savage kicks in the stomach in revenge. While I wheezed and retched, he grabbed a fistful of my hair and brought his spit-wet lips far too close to my ear.

‘You’re Catacrone’s now, urchin. The dark brings all kinds of nightmares,’ he whispered in a sadistic chuckle. ‘Better start praying to the Watcher for forgiveness.’

He recoiled when Tasparil was thrown in next to me. The drake opened his jaws wide at the man, putting a protective wing over me. The prosecutor gave me one more kick before he slammed the door to my cell.

Speaking of my cell, I stared at it through watering eyes.

Whatever pride the Venerance architects took in their spires and cruisers, they had clearly run out of imagination by the time they hollowed Catacrone out of the earth. My cell was nothing but a cubic hole of stone with a stinking and soiled trough in one corner to piss in. The door was a crisscrossed net of black steel with Venerance scripture carved into its thickness.

At least my drake seemed happier than I was with our cage. Tasparil settled in just fine, either clinging to the bars with his long claws and squawking at the receding prosecutors or scrabbling across the crumbling ceiling. Between the pieces of plaster falling on my head, I glared between the bars at my fate. Moonmoth had been silent. The noise of Catacrone was constant and harrowing. I heard the whimpering and whispering of prisoners babbling prayers. Screams of pain and insanity came from the deeper corridors sloping down to my right. It sounded like somebody was pulling their eyes out with their bare fingers. After barely half an hour, I was already trying to plug my ears with cloth.

A year. A whole year of this place was what I faced. A month was cruel. A year was incalculable. I worked my hands raw prying at the bars. All my rage was useless against the steel and stone. All my plans and ambition were left to rot alongside me. And all the while, I already felt the Realms charging on above me, forgetting me as quickly as I’d forgotten the clean air above.

When my hands bled and the wound at my side was a searing fire, I slumped to a heap against the bars. The frustration would have brought tears streaming from another soul, but I had already cried enough over Aberan.

I found Tasparil nudging my arm, sneaking his slender head under my limbs and resting it against my chest. Right where the godgear lay. Everything else they had taken from me, but the drake and shard were still mine.

Outside my cell, a lone shaft of weak sunlight fell upon the dirty floor. Bars broke its glow into faint patchwork. I watched two beetles fight over a morsel of gone gods knew what. Tasparil stared at them alongside me, flicking his tongue back and forth.

‘You wouldn’t eat me now, would you?’ I asked him.

The drake looked too hungry to answer, and I took the silence as an uneasy ‘We’ll see.’

A year. A fucking year. Aberan would be a swordsaint by then. Canarva would have forgotten its flames and the death of Wrekham. And me? Most likely a raving wreck if the noise continued as it did. A distant rattling of chains preceded a scream whose echoes did not die for far too long. A clanging took its place. It sounded like hands or cups smacking on bars. The noise built into thunder until a sonorous bell put a stop to it.

A year. And all I had to occupy my time was to rot. That’s what Catacrone was. Not a place of rehabilitation or repentance or retribution, but a place the powers that be sent those it deemed unworthy to rot until they either withered or died.

I told myself that would not be me, but for the first time, I doubted myself.

*

Whereas some stories of incarceration might spin you a yarn of each day spent in godsforsaken places, I won’t do any of that. What was there to tell you besides the monotony of the stench and the racket of other unfortunates like me? Fuck all is what! The only interesting thing about a prison is escaping from it, and that’s what I set my mind on.

The first few days were spent treading every inch of that cell back and forth in a dark mood. I poked at every word of carved graffiti. I tested every knotted bar. I glowered at every prosecutor that patrolled the corridors. They were few and far between. Catacrone seemed a place left to the prisoners, not its prosecutors. Their patrolling seemed more like bored or morbid intrigue. What I did notice was the fact they took a blightlamp wherever they strolled, and any that went deeper than my cell carried a brazier burning with sickly-smelling herbs and yellow blightpowder. I’d seen clerics use a similar contraption when sowing their sermons amongst the Blighted or plagued of Canarva. There was no such preaching here. Prisoners like me were left to their own redemption.

I needed none of that shit.

On the second day, I pressed my fist into a dimple in the wall in a slow and ponderous punch. After a moment of staring at my hand, I did it again. Once, twice, thrice, I hit the stone, and each time I hit harder. I continued until I thumped the wall with my fists as if it was Crabluck, or Gurt, or Lectra. I kept doing it until my knuckles bled, and even then, I pressed on. When I couldn’t punch anymore, I started to kick, taking steps backwards and lunging with my feet. I suppose I hadn’t the finesse of a fighter, but I fought the wall as if I was one. I kept going until my body shook and blood dripped on the floor at my feet. Maybe it was rage, maybe it was boredom. Me? I called it practice. What else were you supposed to do with a year of time in a stone cube besides spending it whimpering, sleeping, or shitting in a trough?

And so it went. Day after day until a week had passed. I counted the days by the fade and glow of the shaft of light. The noises of Catacrone ebbed and flowed like infuriating tides that kept me from sleeping. You would have thought the suffering of others might have eased mine. I simply wanted them to suffer quietly.

By the end of the week, my knuckles were scabbed and bruised. My bones felt broken, and yet I continued punishing both the wall and myself. Tasparil watched my futile practice, copying my pacing back and forth whenever I took a break from my self-penance. We trained together, girl and beast. I soon had him following my every order.

Every other evening, the slop came. Try as I might, I couldn’t tell you what in the nether that slop was made from. Even years later, I still had no idea whether it was made from meat or vegetable. I couldn’t have cooked something as foul if I had tried. It tasted like it looked: grey and gelatinous. The prosecutor that brought the clay bowl always seemed in a rush. Most of my servings ended up on the floor but I was so hungry I found myself swiping the mush off the dirty stone. I always gave Tasparil half, just in case the prosecutors had been right. Somehow, he seemed to enjoy the slop. He tried to repay the favour by catching the occasional rat or skink or beetle that dared to wander through the bars, but I wasn’t that hungry. Not yet.

A week became two. Two weeks became four. The knife-wound Voldo had given me healed into an ugly welt despite the grime of my cell. I spent the days breaking myself on the wall or slashing the shadows with a pretend blade. After a month, I could feel the wire of muscle beneath my skin. I grew faster and more vicious. Part of me wished I could face Forince in the street again just to see how I had grown.

The only visitors I had besides the vermin was a bald, poxed prosecutor. He said nothing and had a habit of standing beyond spitting distance away with a hand down his white trews. I gave him no satisfaction, but my insults only seemed to spur him on in a depraved way. I made a mental note that when I escaped, he would be the first throat I slit. Let me tell you: there are plenty of people in this world – and likely yours – that deserve a blade to the throat. I began to scratch a list of my murderous intentions in the plaster wall alongside my counting of the days. Even though I had yet to take a life with my bare hands or blade, I dreamed of all the ways I would kill my chosen. I started to read the list aloud every day.

Prosecutor Crabluck. Prosecutor Gurt. Ganner. Swordsaint Orzona. Reverent Lectra. And let’s not forget the pervert.

When I scratched three months of mind-crushing banality into the walls, I gained a new visitor. And one I never wanted to visit again.

It began with a rattling of chains and metal scraping slowly across the stone floor. Whimpered prayers came from cells far down the corridor. Screams of horror soared over the constant rumble of Catacrone. I heard one voice shout, ‘Begone, devil!’ before a snap of chains clanged. The yells fell silent. Scrape by scrape, the chains drew closer to me. Tasparil hunkered down, backing into a corner with a scrabbling of his little claws.

‘What the fuck?’ I whispered, pressing myself closer to the bars in curiosity. Something passed through the faint glow of the nearest skylight. It was a thick night in Catacrone and the city lamps were faint in the depths. The scraping crept closer still, accompanied by a beastly sniffling and snorting. I felt the hairs stand up on my arms as a silence fell. My heartbeat filled the darkness.

‘Watcher’s balls!’ I yelped as a thick limb came smashing against my bars. Skeletal claws pierced the holes in the steel, and had I not darted backwards they would have stuck me. I clenched my bruised fists as the creature hauled itself into view. I felt my breath catch in my throat.

The nightmare might have once been human, long ago. The malformed hunk of flesh that hunched before my cell was a burned pink, swollen like a tumour, and dripping with sweat. Rusted chains wrapped around every one of its limbs. In some places, the skin had grown over the links, becoming one with its meat and bone. Spare chain dragged behind it like broken tails. One of its arms bulged with veined muscle, while the other was withered and bore bare bones for fingers, and each had been carved or worn into toothed spikes. Its face, however, was what put the fear in me. A grimace of filed fangs and puckered flesh formed what you might call a mouth, and it reached halfway around its crooked head. Where the nose had long rotted away, skin flapped back and forth as it sniffed at me. Where its eyes once were, gouged craters remained. Chain dug into its skull.

I had no idea what this horrific creature was or what it wanted, but it made the water witch in the marshes look like a princess.

You’ve probably guessed by now, but what it wanted was little old me. The steel bars clanged as the nightmare hammered against them once more. I backed away into the recesses of my cell and wiped at the sweat on my forehead. Tasparil hissed at the creature as it clawed at the bars. For a moment, I was glad I was locked away tightly. Far too brief a moment, if you ask me, for as soon as the claws withdrew, the nightmare reached out its withered arm and reached for the lock to my cage. With an impatient snuffling, it began to poke at the keyhole with its bone fingers, and I realised with horror that they were carved like the teeth and notches of a key.

The rattling stirred a panic in me. I lunged for the bars with a kick. The grotesque grin only grew as the nightmare tried another finger and another key. I heard an ominous click in the door and tried shouting at the beast instead.

‘Fuck off!’ was all I could think of to say, and it worked about as well as throwing petals at a hungry salamander. I heard the clanging of plates and cups against bars further down the corridor as if my fellow inmates cheered it on. The bars began to shudder as the nightmare raked them over and over.

‘Fuck off, I said!’

This time, the monster paused abruptly. Its withered arm fell away from the door.

‘That’s right! You heard me! Go bother somebody else,’ I snarled at it, and I don’t mind admitting it was more in fear than swagger. But the nightmare was paying no attention to me. It turned its head to the shadows of the corridor, forgetting me. Its ghastly nose sucked in the air, and within several frantic heartbeats, a faint light showed the welts on its skin. With an exasperated whine, the creature turned from my bars and dragged its hideous self back the way it had come.

‘And stay away!’ I told it.

I crumpled to the floor with abject relief. My vision shook with my pounding heart. Tasparil came to claw at me and refused to let go.

The light grew until I could hear footsteps escorting it. They were no dragging of malformed feet and chains but the patter of Venerance boots. Before I saw who they belonged to, I caught the stink of bitter herbs in my nostrils and almost retched.

An armoured prosecutor, painted yellow by the blightlamp she held aloft, stood before me. Beneath the white metal mask, I could see her wide blue eyes searching the darkness of the corridor. There was a pale sword clutched in the hand that held the lantern’s chain.

‘It’s gone now. You needn’t worry,’ she whispered in a clipped northern accent.

‘I’ll worry all I want to after what I just saw!’ I snapped at her. ‘What in the bloody nether was that?’

‘A nightmare is what they are, and that’s what we prosecutors call them.’ There was no fear in her voice. She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, as if these nightmares were a daily occurrence. ‘They were once prisoners. Tortured by the clerics and piouses for blasphemy. Fed blightpowder until they weren’t human or Esfer or Drola anymore.’

I approached the bars to strangle the steel. ‘Them? They?! There’s more than one?’

‘Oh, there’s many.’

‘And you let them just roam free around here, picking locks and eating prisoners?’

‘We don’t have a choice. They infest the oldest tunnels. And they don’t eat you. They just take your eyes for their own.’

‘Oh, how fucking delightful.’

‘It’s the others that eat you. The ones the nightmares have taken to serving. They’ll drag you right down to the depths. You better hope you bleed out before that.’

‘Others? Actually, no. I don’t want to know.’ Sometimes curiosity isn’t worth it. ‘I suppose you want me to thank you for saving me.’

The prosecutor turned her gaze to me, looking me up and down until she sheathed her sword. Putting aside the brazier and lamp, she removed her mask with a clawed hand. She was an Esfer beneath her armour, with golden feathers splayed around her eyes. Her short hooked beak protruded above a thin mouth. A thick scar cut across her head. Traditional beads of Esfer iron and runes hung defiantly around her neck. I recognised her as one of the prosecutors who had helped drag me to my cell.

‘Thank me or not. All I care for is that you’re alive. I’d feared you’d been taken already. The nightmares don’t often come up this high unless they’re unusually hungry. I’m glad I came when I did.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you. Why would you care if I was alive or not? You put me in this Watcher-forsaken place.’

The prosecutor took a thick scroll of parchment from her belt and unfurled it officiously. ‘Crabluck and Gert put you in here, not me. For a year, if this scroll is correct. And I don’t care about you.’

I crossed my arms, falling back from the lamplight. ‘Do tell.’

‘They say a year, but that’s only to give you hope. They’ll likely give you ten before they feel like freeing you. That’s if you haven’t become a shivering wreck or been taken by a nightmare. Most don’t ever see the daylight again.’

The dread grew in the pit of my stomach. ‘Why would they do that?’ I asked, already knowing the answer was simply because they could.

‘Why not? Better to have a sinner like you here than on the streets causing mischief.’

‘So what are you, a prosecutor with a conscience?’

The Esfer bared sharp teeth in annoyance. She tapped her scroll. ‘Hardly. You’re a sinner like all the rest down here. A liar. A powder-smuggler. A petty criminal, by the looks of your record. Destined to rot here.’

I didn’t like the description of petty. I tapped my foot, waiting for an absolution that was irritatingly slow in coming.

‘However,’ she said. ‘You have your uses beyond taking up a cell. All I ask is a favour.’

‘A bargain.’

‘A debt,’ the prosecutor corrected me. ‘Crabluck and Gurt are weak. Pettier than you. A prosecutor’s calling is to lay down the Watcher’s laws and justice. They do a terrible job of either, and yet time and time again, it’s them that rise above the rest of us. Above me. Soon enough, they’ll be out of Bashkar’s ports. We’ll be calling them Pious Crabluck and Pious Gurt. Give them enough time, they might even be made devoters. Bashkar will be the poorer for it.’

A smile grew across my face. ‘You’re jealous of them, aren’t you?’

The Esfer’s feathers bristled as she fought with my honesty. ‘It makes me sick. I’ve been kept at the same rank for years. I’ve watched corruption and nepotism spread like the Blight because of those like Crabluck and Gurt. All the while, the city rots from within, and I’m kept powerless and trodden on. Crowface, they call me. Worm-eater. I’ve had enough of it.’

I settled down on the cold floor of my cell and felt the cold of the sweat on my back. I put my hands behind my head and sighed. ‘And somehow, you need me to help you. Am I right?’

‘You are.’

‘How?’

‘You’re a criminal. A common gutter rat and a feisty one at that. You can go where I can’t. You can see and hear things I can’t. You can tell me what you find and give me the evidence.’

‘You want me to be a snitch,’ I replied.

‘That I do.’

‘All for your own advancement and glory.’

The prosecutor held up a finger. ‘For the Venerance and the Watcher’s glory,’ she corrected me. ‘And for others like me.’

I smirked. ‘What’s your name, Prosecutor?’

‘Quintessi. Quintessi Highclaw.’

‘A very Belégan name for an Esfer, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘And what little help it’s given me. And you have a very Esfer name for an Ashlander, Yver Brokenshell. If that is your real name.’

‘What do I get in return?’

Quintessi put away her scroll and dangled a key in front of my bars. ‘A simple gift of freedom.’

‘And if I say no…’

‘Then you can take your chance with the nightmares, child. I’ll find another sinner. Somebody with more sense than you. I have plenty to choose from.’

My bargaining power was weak and my options were few, but I weighed them anyway. A smear of still-drying sweat on the floor outside my cell made up my mind. I could be a snitch. I could work for the Venerance if it got me out of this rotten place. Call me a coward or a traitor if you must, but I called it common sense. Some fights are best left to the foolish and Catacrone was a fight that couldn’t be won.

I left Quintessi dangling with hope all the same as I bobbed my head back and forth in thought. I waited so long she came to grip the bars.

‘Well?’

‘Fine. You have a deal, Quintessi Highclaw. But I want all my belongings, and I want out tonight.’

The prosecutor turned at the sound of a slamming door somewhere above us. ‘No. You’ll wait until tomorrow,’ she said as she donned her mask. ‘The other prosecutors watch me closely.’

I felt the clamminess of my hands as I clenched them. ‘You better hope I’m not eaten before then, or I’ll come back and haunt the fuck out of you. That’s a promise.’

Quintessi snorted behind her mask as she walked away, taking the precious light and foul-smelling brazier with her.

I should have felt fearful to be back in the wailing dark. But it was too funny, I thought, how Quintessi was oblivious to the kind of criminal she had hired. No idea the shortcut to glory she could take if she delivered me to Lectra.

Grinning at my drake, I pressed my fist to the blood-smeared wall once more and hammered it as hard as I could.