19. To Serve Sarmalans (Gadarien)¶
When he’d agreed to be smuggled into the kitchens in a barrel, Gadarien hadn’t given much thought to what kind of barrel it would be. A wine or ale cask would have been fine. But the one he was crammed into, his knees pressed against his chin, had once contained yellowrush, a grass that grew in stagnant water. It was a strong laxative, well-known for smelling like the effect it induced. Gadarien couldn’t fathom why anyone would need an entire barrel of it. He had gagged as he crawled in, and was trying his best not to contribute to the stench by vomiting on himself. Ruelso, who was currently wheeling the barrel into the kitchens on a cart, had probably picked it out.
Gadarien stifled a groan as the barrel came to a jarring halt, slamming his head against the planks. One day, he’d find a way to pay Ruelso back, but at the moment he couldn’t afford to dwell on revenge. He needed every bit of concentration for what he was about to do.
Ruelso pried the lid off and grinned down, waving the smell away from his face. “Enjoy the ride?”
“Go deaf, asshole,” Gadarien said wearily. Ruelso laughed and extended a hand to help him out.
The kitchens were empty, pots warming on vents of hot air piped in from below. Gadarien massaged the cramps out of his calves and popped his neck while Ruelso stowed the barrel.
“The night crew will be here soon. Better get moving,” the older Feiçeira said cheerfully, handing Gadarien a coil of rope and a set of climbing spikes. “The steam makes the rocks slippery. Use the spikes before you think you need them. The fall might not be high enough to kill you, but you’ll probably burn up in the lava anyway. So don’t fall.”
“Very helpful, thanks,” Gadarien replied sourly, flicking invisible earwax at Ruelso in the Cantereian gesture of disdain.
The tunnel leading away from the kitchen was annoyingly bright, lit by smoky green flames. There was nowhere to hide. If he hadn’t been dressed in solid black, with lampblack covering his face, he might have been able to pass himself off as a servant. As it was, he couldn’t afford to be spotted.
It was hard to hear anything over the howl of the steam. At one point, he caught the echoing clank of armor and froze, unsure whether to run back to the kitchens or try to find a dark corner. But the guards turned aside before coming into view.
He stopped just before the crimson glow of the Hall spilled out of a doorway and closed his eyes, dropping into the focus trance. Carefully, he clicked his tongue. The echoes bounced off the guards who stood to either side of the opening, but with all the noise, he couldn’t tell which way they were facing. If they happened look toward the hall, they’d see him for sure.
Crouching down, he peeked around the corner at knee-level. One of the guards was leaning against the wall, staring off into the red mist. The other was sitting on the floor and appeared to be asleep. Gadarien caught a confusing whiff of something that smelled like Baranaathi cuisine. Odd, since the kitchens hadn’t smelled like food at all.
Staying low, he crept past the opening. The benefit of the Hall’s roar was that he only had to worry about been seen, not heard. Beyond the doorway, a ladder led down to a narrow ledge that encircled the central chamber. The service walkway provided access to the anchor points of the witchglass apparatus the Orumir used to control the steam.
Just as he dropped below ground level, a servant came around the corner, humming a Cantereian work tune. The attendant was focusing on what she was carrying, so he risked a quick glance over the top to see if it was someone he knew. He almost slipped off the rungs when he realized it was Vaye. What was she doing down here? And how did she know a Cantereian melody well enough to pass for a native singer?
It was a mystery for another day. Descending the rest of the way, he sidled out onto the ledge, glad that the steam blocked him from the view of the opposite side. He took out his resonator and gently tapped it against the rock, painstakingly adjusting the damper until he had a sense of the localized harmonics. After jotting down the measurement on his notepad, he donned his climbing gear to move to the next ledge. As Ruelso had warned, the rock was slippery, and the sweat on his palms didn’t help. He winced at the noise as he tapped the spikes into the rock face, but was saved once again by the rumble and hiss of the steam. Had the guards been Cantereian, they would have heard him anyway.
He glanced down as he moved to the next ledge. Far below, the underground river emerged from the wall and cascaded into the roiling lava, refracting its orange glow through gaps in the steam. Below the waterfall, the melted rocks spilled fiery light from the seams where they broke apart and re-formed, wavering with heat. He wondered what it would be like to fall, what would go through his mind on the way down, how it would feel to strike that churning surface. Teira had once told him that the surest way to fail was to focus on failure, so he listened to the minute details of the soundscape instead, bringing himself back to the present.
By the time he got to the eighth measurement point, his arms were shaking, his hands and feet beginning to cramp up. As much as he wanted to hurry, he forced himself to rest at each ledge, drinking from his water skin and shaking out his limbs. By the fourteenth ledge, he had to urinate so badly that he gave in and mingled his own stream with the river, forcing all the Sarmalans breathe it in. If he hadn’t been so exhausted, he would have laughed.
He didn’t run into trouble until the last measurement point, which was directly across from the observation deck where dignitaries gathered to hold religious ceremonies and executions. He frowned at the numbers, cross-checking his math. Teira’s suspicions had been correct. The focal point of the chamber was in the dead center of the observation deck. The Cantereians who had built the hall generations ago had probably designed the whole thing around it.
As he put away his equipment, the steam column billowed into transparency. Through the wavering gap in the mist, he saw a pair of guards emerge onto the observation deck. They were in the midst of a heated debate, but he heard a lull in their conversation and saw them turn toward him.
Praying to the Deucanta, Gadarien jumped off the ledge onto the balcony below. He landed hard, shock radiating up his legs, but managed to roll with the momentum, coming to rest in a crouch directly behind one of the Orumir.
The Oruma was naked and shaven bald, sitting cross-legged on a hollow stool with a pot in the base. He was young, around the same age as the novitiates, and his skin glinted oddly in the ruddy light. Stretching over his head was an elaborate structure of long, flexible poles terminating in a huge, gossamer sail of witchglass. He moved his hands as though playing an invisible harp, pulling the delicate threads that changed the sail’s shape. The witchglass cables were buried in the Oruma’s skin from fingertips to shoulders, anchored to him the same way the structure was anchored into the rock. Larger cables led away from the sail toward identical contraptions mounted above the other Orumir, the whole of it beating like a vast white heart.
The Oruma had heard Gadarien land and turned his head, the only part of him that was free to move. Gadarien was certain the boy would raise an alarm, but he simply stared with an expression of rapture, his unblinking eyes reflecting the scarlet glow. Almost against his will, Gadarien inched closer.
The Oruma opened his mouth, and Gadarien stifled a horrified gasp. The youth would be raising no alarms. His tongue, like his scalp and the soles of his feet, was pierced with tiny witchglass thorns, so many that they might have been a coat of fur. Even his eyes were pierced, the silvered pupils turned red by the glow. Gadarien wasn’t sure whether the Oruma could see him or anything else, and had no wish to find out.
With even greater horror, he realized suddenly that the smell of Baranaathi food had been coming from the Orumir. They were being cooked alive. The thorns and whatever weird medical concoction they were being fed must have allowed them to constantly heal, only to be burned again and again.
There was a clank from the doorway. With nowhere else to run, Gadarien looped his rope around the base of the witchglass sail and scrambled over the edge of the balcony, clinging to its underside like a fly.
He didn’t dare peek his head out, but from the quality of the footfalls and the lack of armor, he surmised it was a servant rather than a guard. The servant opened a latch, and suddenly the air was filled with the horrific stench of a fouled diaper. That explained where all the yellowrush had gone. Clinging to the rock with all four limbs, Gadarien couldn’t even cover his nose with a sleeve. He breathed shallowly, praying the chamber pot would be taken away before he lost the fight with his stomach. He had definitely not trained for this.
Finally, the servant finished and carried the horrid odor away. Gadarien waited a few more breaths before clambering back over the edge. The Oruma stared into the void once more, all distractions forgotten, lost in the terrible, rapturous dream in which he was imprisoned.
Gadarien didn’t know the Sarmalan boy the Oruma had once been. He had no reason to care about him or any of the others, all of whom had most likely been devout believers in Vargashi and the Sarmalan Empire.
He leaned in close anyway, whispering into the Oruma’s witchglass-pierced eardrum. “I will end your suffering. I swear it on the Holy Harmonies.”
But the boy’s blissful smile didn’t change.
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