The Sword of Red by Jackie Marchant

Author:Jackie Marchant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BLKDOG Publishing
Published: 2020-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

C

urse their Fort and its maze of passageways. It was even worse than trying to find his way around the City. Curse those early Rebels everyone thought were so clever for building it like the old Kamorian forts – designed for the enemy to get lost in, when they couldn’t find their way around themselves. Curse the blasted Forest for helping them build it with added secret passageways that were so full of dust, everyone knew when he’d been lost in one. And curse his leg for aching fit to drop, just because he’d had his first go with a decent sword at last, and proved he wasn’t quite as fit as he wanted. Curse Neekra for being far better a fighter than he thought she’d be.

He peered through an arrow slit. He was high over the assembly yard with the rear Fort wall rising up to his left. He saw arrow-slits above a row of shutters opposite, all of which were closed, apart from three – his. He was on the wrong level in the wrong wing. He turned back the way he’d come. Two more turnings and he stopped dead.

This wasn’t the way he’d come – not past that door, he’d have remembered. It sat squat in the wall, a gap above it in the shape of an arch. A thick door, dark with age, and studded with a pattern that brought the bile right up his throat.

That door.

But it wasn’t that door, even though it was filling him with the mix of revulsion and dread worthy of a beating if he dared show it.

He banged the side of his hand against the catch, nearly sending the bolt out of its holder. Shoving the door open, he strode in. The room had stone walls, no windows, with only a weak light from the gap over the door – the same square size. But it smelt of dry dust and disuse. There was no stink of effluent from the latrine hole in the corner, no damp from a dripping pump, and no sorry heap of filthy furs. And it was silent, not a single moan or scream from the corridor, no thump of boots going by, no limp-limp of a slave in disgrace, and no sound of the lash-scream of a flogging.

And no slender figure in shackles.

Pool would never know why his father had chosen to show her to him at that particular moment. Whether it was because he was in a good mood or a bad one, or if it was spite or punishment or plain curiosity at how Pool would react. But Pool stood there like a stone as her thin arm stretched out to him and her long hair fell away. He saw huge dark eyes looking at him like a slave-mother being torn from her child. But it was her smile he had to close his eyes against – and hope the light was poor enough for his father not to notice. A smile of fondness that made his bile rise.

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