She motioned towards the fierce-looking man Frey had seen before, whom he assumed to be Akkad. A woman and three children were walking near him, picking their way through the undergrowth.
‘Then Akkad had a son,’ she said. ‘I guess that was what did it for him. Suddenly he had something to protect, something to really protect, and he wouldn’t take no risks no more. I mean, he put the brakes on everythin’ Silo tried.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed. ‘Pretty soon it became obvious what he was about. He wanted to stop hittin’ the Sammies. Called it a pointless waste of life, that we couldn’t do no good that way. It was like a fly bitin’ a rushu, goin’ up against the Sammie Empire.’
‘And Silo didn’t like that,’ Frey guessed.
‘Lotta people didn’t. Split the camp. Some reckoned we’d do better to build a new life here in the jungle, try ’n’ make the most of what freedom we had. Some of us, it didn’t sit well that we should be hidin’ while our kin were out there bein’ worked to death. One of them was Silo.’
‘Reckon I see where this is going,’ said Frey. He squinted as a spear of sunlight found its way though the canopy and dazzled him.
‘Yuh,’ Ehri replied. ‘So did Akkad. Silo, he never wanted to kill Akkad. Just wanted to knock him off his perch. But Akkad din’t see it that way. A bunch of ’em, they tried to take over the camp, but Akkad outsmarted ’em. Some got away, but they was all caught or killed in the end. ’Cept Silo. The rest that were still alive, Akkad made an example of ’em. Took ’em to the warrens.’
‘The warrens without the rabbits?’
‘The same.’
Frey steeled himself. He had the unpleasant looming sensation that usually accompanied imminent bad news. ‘And what happens in the warrens?’ he asked, wincing.
‘What you think happens?’ She frowned at him. ‘You get eaten.’
Frey sighed wearily. ‘Bollocks.’
Twenty-Five
The entrance to the warren was a circular shaft, a jagged throat of red stone in the jungle floor, some distance from the camp. There was a wooden pulley off to one side, and a worn rope dangling from it, which split at the end into a pair of stirrups. Frey was put next to Silo, and they stood together at the edge while flies sucked at their sweat. He looked down. It wasn’t so deep that he couldn’t see the bottom, only a dozen metres or so. But that was plenty deep enough.
Akkad gathered everyone around, and he gave a short speech in Murthian. Frey didn’t need a translation. He could tell by the tone that it was some self-justifying horse-arse declaration as to why he felt it necessary to lob his prisoners into a pit full of hungry whatevers. Some of the audience – mothers with sickly children, or the elderly who looked sick themselves – groaned and murmured at one point. Most of them didn’t seem too happy about what was going on. He wondered what kind of deal Silo had tried to cut with the big man, but whatever it was, it hadn’t been enough to wipe away the memory of that failed coup. The engineer was stone-faced as the judgement was rendered.
After that, they were made to put their feet into the stirrups, one foot each, and they clutched onto the rope as they were swung out over the pit and lowered down. Frey caught sight of Ehri in the crowd, standing with the smaller man he’d seen her with earlier. He had an arm round her. Her face was full of anger; his of sorrow.
Then the rock of the shaft obscured them from view. The insects became muted and everything was uncannily quiet. His world narrowed to a circle of dusk overhead. He and Silo held on to the softly creaking rope, so close they were practically hugging, and they sank through the air, which cooled quickly as they descended.
At the bottom of the shaft was an uneven chamber, with several openings at its edges that led into shadow. The light from above, weak though it was, seemed fierce and warm in contrast to the chill darkness that lurked at its edge. Frey looked around without enthusiasm.
‘How do I get into these situations?’ he moaned to no one in particular. He felt like he should be scared, but he hadn’t seen anything to be scared of yet. Vague threats of danger weren’t enough to bother him. Not when he’d seen so much of the real stuff.
He was still looking around when something dropped through the air and hit the ground next to him, making him jump. It was a hemp sack. He could see the hilt of his cutlass within, and the grip of a pistol.
‘We get our weapons?’ he asked Silo.
‘Yuh,’ said Silo, pulling open the sack. He handed Frey his pistols and cutlass, and took his shotgun and dagger. Frey checked the pistols, found they were empty, and then saw Silo counting through a handful of bullets and shells.
‘Any particular reason why they didn’t just shoot us?’
‘Gunshots make noise. They tryin’ to hide.’
Frey rolled his eyes. Silo was feeling obtuse, apparently. ‘Chop our heads off, then! You know what I mean.’
Silo handed him bullets for his pistol. ‘Ten there. I got five shells.’ He started loading them in to his shotgun. ‘Old law. Murthians ain’t s’posed to kill each other. We got enough people doin’ that already.’
‘But they can be abandoned in a…’ Frey looked around. ‘What is this place, anyway?’
‘Ghall warren.’
‘Ghall?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know a word for ’em in Vardic. You’ll meet ’em soon enough. They hunt the river banks at dusk, come back to the warren when the sun goes down. We got till then to get out of here.’ He chambered a round with a loud crunch and gazed steadily at Frey. ‘Best way for a Murthian to die is to die fightin’. Most in the pens don’t get that chance. Free Murthians…’ he trailed off. ‘It’s the way it is. Gotta respect your own.’
The remaining objects in the sack were a pair of flintstones and a pair of wooden torches, their ends wrapped in fabric and covered in viscous pitch.
Frey looked up at the mouth of the shaft. The rope was being winched back. ‘You put a lot of people down here?’
Frey20" align="justify"›Silo knelt and began chipping the flintstones together. ‘There was hard justice in the early days. Some people, they din’t take to the bigger picture too well after all the desperation they was used to in the pens.’ He struck a spark, and a torch ignited. ‘People stole. Hoarded food. Men fought over women, sometimes killin’ one another. We din’t have no courts out here like in Vardia, nor no time for ’em either. Needed a deterrent for the bad folk.’ He straightened. ‘Later it got used on good folk too.’
‘Your friends?’ Frey asked, as he put his cutlass and one of his pistols into his belt.
Silo’s shoulders tensed for a moment. Then he relaxed, lit the other torch and handed it to Frey. ‘Let’s get movin’.’
Silo led the way, with an urgency and purpose to his movements that Frey wasn’t used to seeing. He headed for one of the exits from the chamber, thrust his torch inside. A fissure too narrow to pass through. He tried another, and seemed to like the look of it better. Then he picked up a stone and scratched a mark on the wall.
That’s a good idea. Marking our route so we don’t go round in circles. I should’ve thought of that.
Frey followed Silo into a cramped tunnel. As the light from the shaft faded behind them, the reality of their predicament closed in on Frey, tight and hard as the rock that surrounded him. Away from the jungle heat, he suddenly felt very far from safety. Whatever was down here, Silo clearly felt it was something to be reckoned with. That was all Frey needed to know. That, and the implication that no one had ever come out of here alive.
They emerged in another chamber, kidney-shaped and more cramped than the first. The only illumination came from their torches now, and shadows jumped in the crevices. Frey began to feel claustrophobic. He couldn’t stop thinking about the tonnage of stone all around him, the sheer immovability of their surroundings. Everything around them was dead and tomblike. The scruff and scrape of their boots was an invasion of the silence.