The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [168]
At first he thought it was the daily meal that woke him, but the footsteps were too loud and numerous and only one rat pressed its cold nose against his neck—they came by the dozens when food arrived. Then the lock clicked, and the door that hadn’t opened since his cellmate died scraped inward. The unexpectedness of it stunned him as badly as the onslaught of light and sound.
He lay still as rough hands seized him, though the touch of skin made his flesh crawl. The iron they closed around his wrists was easier to bear. Vermin scurried through rotten straw as the guards hauled him up. He was glad to be rid of the roaches, but he’d miss the rats.
Was he going to the headsman after all? The thought made him stand straighter, though gummy tears blinded him and he already ached from the weight of the chains. Had they forgotten him while bureaucrats shuffled paperwork? He chuckled, and the guards startled at the sound. Three of them—one for the torch and two for him. Once he might have tried those odds, but it would be suicide now. Or just pathetic.
His eyes adjusted as they led him past the row of iron doors, the row of tombs. Deep beneath the city, these cells, the bowels of the Çiraan. A place to bury murderers and violent madmen and unlucky mercenaries like him. Screams and curses rose up as the guards’ boots rang on stone, taunts and pleas for attention, protestations of innocence. After the silence of his cell, the noise drove spikes into his skull. The smell of his captors’ sweat and leather and garlic-and-paprika-steeped skin dizzied him after the unchanging stench he’d grown accustomed to.
The guards didn’t speak. A small mercy. It took effort enough making his legs work. No sun in these halls, no wind or seasons or any hint of time, but Adam knew he’d never been confined so long before. To die like this would be a miserable joke—the gods’ favorite kind.
Down the hall and up a flight of stairs. The guards carried him by the top of the steps, bruising his arms and stubbing his toes as they dragged him. The slighter one cursed and Adam nearly laughed—all the weight must have wasted off his bones by now.
He dreaded more stairs, but instead they unlocked a door—bronze-bound wood instead of rusting iron—and shoved him inside. He fell with a rattle of chains, scraping hands and knees on the cold stone floor.
The guards spoke and a woman answered—the timbre of her voice sent prickles of familiarity across his nape. He couldn’t see her face, though there was nothing in the room to cast the shadow that hid her. “Leave us,” she said, her Skarrish heavily accented.
“Are you certain, effendi? He is dangerous—” Adam could smell the man’s nerves. They couldn’t be afraid of him, not like this.
“Does he look like a threat now?”
Adam couldn’t decide whether to laugh or snarl at the dryness in her voice, the casual dismissal.
“As you wish.” The door slammed shut as the guards retreated.
He knelt, head down, letting his eyes adjust to the candlelight. The sight of his hands sickened him: bone-gaunt talons, ragged and embedded with grime. Soft where they had been hard with sword calluses. The manacles hung loose around the knobs of his wrists. Matted cords of hair fell in his face; he was crawling with lice, and for once glad he couldn’t grow a beard.
“I know I’m pretty,” he said when the silence stretched, “but did you have me brought up here just to stare?” His voice cracked with disuse and he spat thick phlegm.
She laughed and stepped closer. Her scent cut through his own stench: clean skin, cool and bittersweet, threaded through with poppy oil and cloying myrrh. Recognition came with it, quickening his pulse.
“Isyllt?”
“Saints and shadows,” she said, in Selafaïn this time. “You look like you crawled through all nine hells, and a sewer besides.”
“Or a war and an Iskari prison. What are you doing here?”
“Rescuing you.”
The light was unkind when she cast aside