“Aric.” The outline of the head vibrated in the dark.
“May I bring the light, Aric? Dimmer this time?”
A scuffling sound; the head retreated.
“Nay! Nay!”
Beyond him, in the tunnel ahead, a rustle of movement.
“Aric, wait! I’ve come to take you out of the darkness—all of you.”
Silence.
Desperation was beginning to claw at her throat. “Aric?”
There was no reply.
Rhapsody slid her hand over the hilt of the sword. She gripped it tightly, then gently pulled, loosing the blade from the scabbard just a little. She exhaled slowly, gathering control of herself; with the return of her calm, the sword burned evenly, and only the slightest of flickers issued forth from the scabbard.
The nightmares of the tunnel receded, leaving just the tiled aqueduct once more in dimmer light than before. Up ahead at the edge of the glow, two even smaller tunnels branched out, no doubt the area in which Achmed had said the children were sleeping.
She inched forward slowly, keeping the sword by her side, and peered into the branching tunnels. They ended in alcoves, where dirty scraps of cloth, perhaps used at one time for blankets, now floated in the filthy water. Rhapsody tried not to recoil from the overwhelming stench of sewage.
Huddled at the end of the alcove was a yellow-haired child, long of bone and translucent of skin, trembling in fear. Rhapsody’s throat went dry in memory; it was the same ethereal complexion, the same slender angles that had once graced her mother’s face. And yet there was something more, something almost feral, a hint of his inhuman father.
“Aric,” she said gently, “come to me.”
The child shook his head and turned his face toward the wall.
Rhapsody crept forward another few paces, then looked down at her arms. The water on the floor of the tunnel was now up to her elbows.
Impatience, spurred by fear, took over. “Aric, come now!” The child only quivered more violently.
A thought suddenly occurred to her. She pulled back out of the alcove and began to move backward on her hands and knees; once she was a short way away she began to sing a children’s song from Serendair, a tune with which she had once jokingly serenaded Grunthor.
She continued to back away, weaving her call into the lyrics and tones of the traditional song.
At the edge of the tiny sword flame’s glow, Rhapsody could hear movement, could see a few faces appear. She nodded slightly and kept backing away, still singing.
Deeper down the tunnel more faces appeared, haggard, like the wraiths that sometimes stalked her dreams, blinking in the weak light. She continued to crawl backward, singing her song of summoning.
By the time Rhapsody reached the well shaft, a small herd, perhaps a score in all, of ragged boys, all heights, all thin, had crawled along after her, filling the tunnel until she could not see anything past them, just more heads, more faces, sallow beneath their smeared masks of red dirt, bulging, cloudy eyes, all but naked—human rats, Achmed had called them. She had had no idea how apt the name was.
A ramp of a sort had been constructed in the well shaft to take the place of the hook—she wouldn’t find out until later that it hid the body of the journeyman who had fallen down the shaft headfirst—from broken pallets and other debris of the firing room. Achmed’s face glared down at her from above. He took one look at the seemingly endless line of filthy children, exhaled, picked up a nearby rope, and threw one end of it down the well shaft to her.
“What’s taken so long? Here, start passing the brats up; we have to get out of here.”
Rhapsody took hold of the dirty Liringlas child, who shrank from her touch but didn’t pull away, and grabbed the rope that Achmed had tossed down to her.
“Did you have any trouble with the demon-spawn?” she asked as she looped the rope around Ark’s waist and helped him onto the ramp, holding on to him until Achmed began to haul him out of the shaft. “Only a bit,” he said nonchalantly. “He’s in the kiln.” Rhapsody whirled around from sorting out the other slave boys and stared up the well shaft. “In the kiln?”
“Sit there,” Achmed directed the first child, pointing to Omet, still hog-tied but back on his cot. He leaned over the well shaft again. “Yes, in the kiln. Like you, and some other accursed minions of his demonic father, he appears to be impervious to the effects of fire; has quite a tolerance for pain as well. But he should be all right, as long as his air holds out.”
With a new urgency Rhapsody pulled the next youth forward and looped him with the rope. “How long has he been in there?” she asked nervously.
Achmed yanked on the rope, dragging the child rapidly up the ramp. “A while. I’d hurry if you want to get him out before he turns into a vase.”
One by one the children, utterly silent, ascended the ramp. Finally, when the last one was out, Achmed tossed the rope down one last time and hauled Rhapsody back up the shaft and into the alcove.
“What on Earth happened?” she said, looking around the firing room in dismay at the mountain of hardening slip and the neat stack of bodies by the outside wall of the alcove. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Couldn’t you at least have hidden those? Look at how frightened the children are.”
“Good; that was the point. You’ll notice none of them bothered me or made any noise while I was hauling you out.” He sliced through Omet’s bonds with his dagger, then came next to her and pointed at the doorway through which the journeymen had come. “There are close to one hundred more where these came from, sleeping in shifts in the barracks beyond that entrance. In addition I would suspect that someone is watching this place very closely, given how near they are to their goal. We have no time to sort these children out—they’re witnesses, and I would guess whoever owns this place is not going to be particularly pleased with our emancipation of them.
“Now that you know our situation, let me suggest that you pull the demon-spawn out of the oven—he should be nicely browned by now—and we’ll leave with all due haste. The chance of any of us making it out of here alive grows slimmer with each passing second. And I mean that, Rhapsody—you know I am not given to hyperbole.”
Rhapsody nodded and hurried to the closed kiln, pulled the bolt, and swung the door wide open. The demon-spawn was slumped at the back, unconscious, breathing shallowly. Those slave children whose eyes had adjusted to the flickering light watched in amazement as she climbed into the red-hot oven, seized the boy, and pulled him by his feet out of the kiln. She checked him perfunctorily, then dragged him over to Omet’s cot, where the slaves were huddled together.
“Don’t touch him unless you need to; he’s hot and you’ll burn yourselves, at least until he cools down,” she said to the boys in the Orlandan dialect. “But if he moves at all, please jump on him, all of you, and sit on his back.” She looked back at Achmed. “How are we getting out of here?” she asked in Bolgish.
“The same service door through which we came. We can go down the inner alley—there are no windows on that side of the building—and get out of the city through the backstreets. We can take them to the northern outposts of Ylorc—” He raised a hand to silence her protest. “We can argue about this later. There’s no time now.”