Page 25 of Vasmora

Tears wavered in my eyes. I could almost hear the words spilling from his lips again. “He would tell me to live.”

“Then, live.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

KAZHIMYR

An acrid taste, like a mouthful of coins, lingered on Kazhimyr’s tongue, and he swallowed back the dryness in his throat.

The oubliette’s cold stone wall pressed into his back as he stood facing a smaller, frailer cellmate, the white beard that’d overgrown his face placing him in his six or seventh century.

The narrow hole carved into the ground where Kazhimyr’d been tossed, the width of which allowed no more than kneeling or standing, stank of the rotting corpses left to die there, their decaying bodies no more than bones and cold sludge around his feet. Kazhimyr had spent maybe two days inside the constricted shaft, punishment for having bloodied the face of a guard and nearly busting his skull, after the bastard had bragged about assaulting Maevyth. Only once Kazhimyr had already cracked his jaw did the guard confess through slurred and mumbling words that he hadn’t truly laid a hand on her.

By then, it’d been too late. Kazhimyr had sealed his fate for a lie.

In turn, he’d been strung up and whipped, then tossed into a lightless tunnel to die. No food. No water. And no escape, from what he could see.

He stared up at the grated, iron hatch some four meters above him, illuminated by the inappreciable light of a distant torch.

If only he had a good bit of rope to fasten around those bars.

If only he hadn’t been so hot-headed.

After all, dying certainly wouldn’t help them escape.

His cellmate hacked and coughed, his protruding bones damned near rattling beneath his pale skin. “Ye keep looking … for a way out. I remember … tha’look meself.” The accent was southern Veneficarysi. Clearly a long way from his home.

“How long have you been down here?” Kazhimyr trailed his gaze over the moldy, blackened stones that hemmed him in, noticing deep grooves in the rock, as if something feral had clawed at it.

“T’ree months, by me estimates.”

“How in the gods have you survived three months?” Kazhimyr’s stomach gurgled, a god-awful taste biting at his tongue, as if he’d licked the stones at his back.

After a moment of quiet, the old man coughed again and spat somewhere toward their feet, the errant splash hitting Kazhimyr’s leg. He let out an eerie chuckle. “Ye do what ye have’te, Boy.”

The man’s eyes flickered over him, tongue sweeping across his cracked lips. Hungry.

A dull, radiating pain throbbed across Kazhimyr’s leg, a festering wound where he must’ve cut himself back at that rotted tree in the mortal lands. He couldn’t remember exactly how he’d gotten it, perhaps during the fall, when he’d slipped into some sort of cavern in the tree. An echo of one he’d seen in a nightmare.

Kazhimyr lowered a trembling hand to his thigh. Beneath his tattered leathers, long, slinking movements snaked below his stretched skin and sent a sour tide climbing his throat. He’d felt it before when the wound had been smaller, but it had since grown to the size of a plum, the rancid stench of it only a faint trace beneath the nauseating grip of human decay. Skinny jolts of agony rolled through his stomach, spreading across his abdomen like a lightning storm, and Kazhimyr let out a grunt.

“S’wrong with ye?” the older man rasped. “‘Ye sick?”

The sound of approaching footsteps and mumbled words overhead distracted Kazhimyr from his question.

“Ye look a little piqued, if–”

“Shhh.” Kazhimyr turned his head to the side, listening for conversation.

“Fuck, I hate comin’ down here.” It was the voice of a guard he recognized. “Stinks like the shit casks.”

“Rather this, than be forced to clean out those infernal things every week.”

“D’you hear …” From overhead, curls of white smoke drifted into the small diagonal of light, indicating one of them had lit a pipe. “King Sagaerin sent his advisor, Lord Belthane, and two Magestroli to negotiate the Lunasier prince’s release. Might negotiate men, which means our padded asses might get sent to Kastellias. How many Lunasier men you s’pose is worth the price of one prince?”

Prince Dorjan. Kazhimyr had gotten word that he’d been kidnapped.

“If the poor bastard’s even alive. Heard he was assigned to General Loyce for safe keeping. Ain’t nobody safe from the general.” The guard chuckled, and more smoke curled through the air, though their faces remained out of sight.