Hero at the Fall by Alwyn Hamilton

Author:Alwyn Hamilton [Alwyn Hamilton]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780571325443
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2017-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

‘This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?’ Sam had his arms wrapped around me, pressing me to his chest so I couldn’t escape him talking. ‘Lure me down to the dead end of nowhere with promises of heroic deeds, all just to get close to me.’

‘That’s an awfully convoluted plan.’ I was trying to find a comfortable place to settle my arms that wasn’t his shoulders, but there really weren’t a whole lot of options. ‘If I was going to take advantage of you, I could’ve done it back in the harem.’

We were standing together, chest to chest, trying our hardest to choke out any air between us. It might’ve looked romantic if it weren’t for Jin looping a rope around us, securing us like we were some ship’s anchor about to be pushed overboard.

My brother was in the corner, unconscious and bound up in the shackles we’d taken off Sam after his brush with the firing squad. We needed to get this done before dawn came and Noorsham’s disciples woke up and wondered where he was. They would find him and free him eventually, but I was planning on being long gone by then.

Tamid was fretting anxiously at the mouth of the tunnel. My one-time friend might’ve thought he was done with our rebellion when we got here, but he was the only person I trusted to drug my brother safely. And more than that, I’d needed him to read the words in the first language scrawled over the door.

‘But isn’t this so much more romantic?’ Sam went on wistfully. ‘Braving near-certain death with me.’ The rope tightened so that I was pressed with my ear against his shoulder. I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure he was laughing at me. ‘Just like Cynbel and Sorcha or Leofric and Elfleda.’

‘I have no idea who those people are,’ I said into his shirt.

‘Albish love stories,’ he said. ‘You’d like Leofric and Elfleda. He’s a thief, she’s a powerful sorceress. They both die tragically at the end. That’s what happens in all great love stories.’

‘Well, it’s a good thing we’re not in love, then.’ Sam’s flirting had got a whole lot less outrageous the further south we’d got. Half of me thought it was because he and Jin were actually getting along. Better than I’d seen Jin get along with Ahmed in months, now I thought about it. Sam was only back to flirting with me now because he was trying to lighten the mood.

We were about to walk through solid mountain into unknown territory.

I’d made Tamid read the words carved above the doorway to me. ‘They’re in the first language,’ he had said, furrowing his brow as he read them by torchlight. ‘Something about … a prisoner?’ We all felt that simple word settle over us as he said it.

The man in the mountain. Monster or mortal maybe. But definitely not just myth.

Well, we’d come here looking for powerful help, and we might’ve found it.

‘We’ll need a name to open the door,’ Jin had said.

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