“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.”