Down a Lost Road (8 page)

“
Yatol, is the Ungulion
going to come back?”

“
No. Another will pass in a
few hours to check on us, but by then…”

His voice died and we worked in silence.
Once we had cleared the gap I slithered carefully through on my
elbows. On the other side I stayed in a crouch, not trusting my
shaking legs to stand. Yatol had gone back to sit against the outer
wall by the window, the straws piled beside him. He wouldn’t look
at me, but focused intensely on his work. Somehow he was braiding
the straw into a tight, thin rope. I couldn’t believe that the
moldy wisps didn’t disintegrate as he twisted them. His hands moved
deftly, quickly, coiling the lengthening rope as he worked.

But I couldn’t focus on his hands. I only
saw the bruises and inflamed gashes on his arms, the streaks of
blood dried brown on his shirt and the patches of bright glossy red
where he had reopened some wound. I stared at the blood still
oozing from the abrasions on his brow, and I winced. Blood didn’t
usually make me queasy, but the look of his face did. I couldn’t
say why. There didn’t seem to be an inch of him that was
uninjured.

For a solid two minutes I stood staring,
afraid to go near him. I wondered what had happened to him.
Apparently a lot more than had happened to me – besides bruises on
my wrists and a swollen cheek, I couldn’t tell that I’d been hurt
at all. But Yatol worked calmly enough, as if he were oblivious to
the wounds that covered him. His indifference finally reassured me,
and I crouched beside him to touch the rope.

“
What are we going to do
with that?”

“
We get out.”

“
Get out, how? We’re sort
of locked in here.”

“
I won’t let you be taken
before Azik,” he said fiercely.

He frowned a little, his eyes barely
flickering up toward me. After a moment he nodded toward the
window.

“
See if you can pry the
bars out. All but one, the leftmost one.”

I stood on my tiptoes and took hold of one
of the bars. It seemed a little loose, so, ignoring the ache of my
wrists, I wriggled it in its socket until it started pulling free.
I braced one foot against the wall and tugged as hard as I could,
and collapsed in a shower of dust with the bar in my hand. I sat
stunned, shaking my head to get the bits of stone out of my
hair.

Yatol glanced over with a strange amused
smile – a brief break in his dark concentration – while I tried to
recover my dignity by calmly brushing my hair back from my face. He
was
laughing
at me. I glowered but he had already turned
back to the rope and didn’t see it. I managed to get the other two
bars out, and by the time I finished, Yatol had woven all the
straws into one long, smooth rope. I watched him secure it to the
remaining bar, test the knot, and toss the coil out the window.

“
Come after me,” he said,
and pulled himself onto the ledge.

“
Won’t the bar come out?” I
cried. “We just dismantled half a wall of this stuff!”

“
This bar will hold. Or did
you think I’ve been idle while I waited for you?”

“
Waited for
me…?”

I’d only been gone half a day, and probably
not more than half an hour in the dark chamber. How long could he
have been waiting? But he only met my gaze in silence, then slid
one leg over the edge of the casement.

“
Yatol! Wait, stop. It’s so
thin. It’s just straw! It can’t hold!”

“
Trust me,” he said, and
was gone.

I vaulted up onto the ledge and clung to the
bar, hoping to keep it secure as he made his way down. He soon
reached the ground, but my stomach flipped as I watched the rope
tossing back and forth, the sands rolling like the surf on a windy
day. I shuddered and took the cord firmly in both hands, and
lowered myself out. Sweat beaded on my face, mingling with blood
and matted dirt and streaming down. My eyes stung but I couldn’t
let go to rub them. I blinked fiercely and concentrated on what I
was doing.

I’ve never been one for rope climbing. In
all the gym classes I’d ever taken, I could only remember one time
I’d managed to get to the top and back down again, without making
the teacher climb up and coax me down. I wasn’t particularly afraid
of heights, when I was on solid ground. This was anything but solid
ground.

I stared at my hands and refused to look
down, but my arms began to shake, burning with the effort. My
wrists, sore already, felt like they were breaking. I swung like a
deadweight, while my arms seized with that terrible paralysis.
I
can’t,
I thought, mouthing the words.
I can’t.
But I was
too afraid of the Ungulion to say it aloud.

My gaze strayed downward to Yatol. I could
barely make out his features, pale and worried. My hands were
exhausted, my palms raw. It was all I could do to keep hold of the
rough fibers of the rope. I took a deep breath and lowered myself a
little way, then a little more. The rope creaked, and I thought I
felt the tiny tremor of a breaking strand. I tried to brace my foot
on the wall, but it slipped on the slick stones and the jolt nearly
made me fall. Sheer terror seized me. I had to get down. Or back
up. But I couldn’t go back, no matter how much I wanted to be on
solid ground. Yatol was waiting for me below. And above? Ungulion.
Azik.

I managed to get nearly halfway down when
the hideous sound came again, the droning wail that shook the bar
and made the rope quiver in my hands. An Ungulion leaned over the
casement, face contorted with fury. Its rotten skeletal hands
groped out, plucking at the rope with sharp nails. All fear of the
rope fled and I climbed down at a dizzying pace. Suddenly the rope
snapped. The sand came rushing up at me. I crashed against the
rocky wall and scrabbled at its face, tearing my hands and ripping
two nails before I caught a protruding rock.

The terrible hands swung out toward me, the
plaintive moan rose to a shriek. I took one breath, and pushed
myself away from the wall.

Chapter 6 – Dawn

When I first began to wake, I felt only
quiet darkness, a thick, bodiless calm. Then the shadows began to
recede, and a terrible fluttering brightness burned against my
eyelids. I tried to lift my hands to cover them, but someone
grasped my wrists and gently pressed them back to my sides. I
thought I heard words but could not understand what they said. Then
something moist and cool draped over my eyes, and a spicy soothing
aroma hovered in a cloud over my head. I breathed deeply, letting
the new darkness haze my vision. My head swam, and my body drifted
numbly somewhere between sleep and waking.

“
Merelin.”

I made a noise of protest and turned my
head. The cloth lifted, and I forced my eyes to open. The light
wasn’t so painful now, though everything seemed to bob between
wretched brightness and deepest shadow. I was lying on a coarse
blanket in a sort of cave, low and wide, with pale wind-carven
walls and sandy floor. Yatol crouched next to a small fire, using a
long ladle to stir something in a rough iron pot.

In the light I saw his face marred by a
shallow, broad cut – a new injury. I wondered how he had gotten it.
He had changed his bloodied and torn shirt for a clean one, pale
grey with long sleeves that covered all the wounds I had seen
before. But they were rolled back a little as he stirred, and I
could glimpse the hint of a bandage beneath them.

He stabbed at the pot a few more times, then
lifted out a piece of cloth, wringing it out and shaking it until
it was cool.

“
How do you feel?” he asked
gently, laying the compress back over my eyes.

He held it there a moment, then as he
withdrew his hand his fingertips brushed my cheek. A little flutter
touched my heart. I pushed back the cloth and tried to sit up,
wincing from a whole-body ache and grimacing at the sight of my
bandaged hands.

“
All right,” I said. “Sore,
but all right. What happened?”

He stood without answering, rolling his
sleeves back the rest of the way and going to the mouth of the
cave. For some time he leaned against the wall staring out, and I
could tell from where I lay that it was night.

“
How did you know?” he
asked.

“
Know what?”

“
To jump.” He turned to
glance back at me. “To evade his hand.”

“
I don’t know.” I wondered
why I had – I could have killed myself. My cheeks burned and I
murmured, “I’m sorry. I put you in danger.”

He gave a strange, thin laugh. “It’s not me
you need to worry about putting in danger.”

What is that supposed to mean?

Yatol wandered back into the cave and sat
down against the far wall, drawing up his knees and turning a
curved knife around in his hands. I recognized it from the vision
I’d had of him guarding my tent. That horrible vision. I leaned my
chin on my knees and shuddered.

“
Are you…” I faltered. “Um,
are you okay?”

“
Why?”

I didn’t know how to say it, so I just
gestured dumbly at my own face. “And your arms. They looked
hurt.”

He gave a sort of slanted shake of his head
mixed with a shrug, a gesture somewhere between denial and
affirmation that told me nothing. When he noticed me scowling he
smiled wryly.

“
Don’t worry about
me.”

“
Don’t worry? How am I
supposed to not worry?”

“
Just trust me.”

I stared at him. I wanted to laugh – I was
that confused.

“
How does trusting you have
anything to do with it? I’m supposed to, what, trust you that you
can do just fine getting yourself tort—”

I swallowed the word as it started to leave
my mouth. It had popped into my head as a joke, but suddenly I got
that punched-in-the-gut feeling and the blood drained from my face.
He
had
gotten tortured. Really tortured. Not just the little
intimidation routine I’d been put through. The thought made me
sick. Before this, the concept had only existed for me in spy
movies and depressing news clips.

Yatol turned away abruptly. I wondered if
I’d offended him. For a long time I sat in silence, trying hard not
to stare at him. I couldn’t process the contradiction I saw in him.
The way he sat, the way he carried himself, body lean and muscled
but marred from so many wounds, even the hard impassive look in his
eyes – if that was all I could see of him I would have guessed him
to be much, much older. But his face was so young. I could hardly
imagine a way of life that would force someone that young to be so
strong. And I’d just made light of all the pain he’d suffered – for
me. To save my skin. Idiot.

“
I’m sorry,” I whispered. I
don’t know if he heard me. “Yatol, what are we doing? I saw the
others that night disappearing into the forest. Where are they
now?”

“
We flee the Ungulion when
we can,” he said, and his eyes flared, grim and bitter. “Yes, we
run away. We can’t fight them. Our army doesn’t possess any weapons
that can defeat them. We have only one defense before them besides
flight.”

“
What?”

He stared ahead, jaw tight, then he
murmured, “It is a death gift.”

I knotted my brow, and wanted to ask him to
explain, but the shadow in his eyes stopped me. Instead I said,
“Are we going to find them?”

He shook his head.

“
Why not?”

“
They might wait for us,
but it would be pointless for us to try to track them down. They
can’t help us now, not where we’re going. Master Syarat, whom we
spoke to the first night you were here, he told me where we must go
now.”

“
Where?”

He didn’t answer. I was getting used to his
silence and figured I could expect an answer to only half the
questions I asked – if I was lucky. He got abruptly to his feet,
hauling the cauldron off the fire and settling it in the sand to
cool off. The tiny fire had begun to dwindle. Just as I wondered if
he planned on letting it go out, he pulled a handful of dried brush
and twigs from a mound near the wall, and fed them carefully into
the embers. A fresh brightness filled the cave, with a warmth that
dispelled the night chill.

For the first time I noticed a few other
iron skillets and pots stacked by the far wall, next to a tall
stone urn and a few smaller clay jars. Yatol pulled out one of the
smaller pots, scouring it with sand and then filling it with water
from the urn. I wondered how long the water had been sitting there,
but decided it would probably be rude to ask.