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The sight of the city gates brought me back to my own head. I had never seen them before. A massive portcullis was pried halfway open to a wide tunnel, another portcullis on the other end, leading beyond the wall. The metal spikes at the ends of the beams were mangled, the wood cracked and jagged. Dozens of Eserenian guards lay slain on the ground, their throats slit, heads severed, viscera spilled. One body was surrounded by so much gore that he had to have fallen from the watch post on the wall two hundred feet above.
“Prisoners!” boomed Vorkalth from somewhere behind me. “Tonight, you begin your journey to righteousness. You begin your journey to holiness.Youhave been chosen by the Saints!” If we’d been chosen, why the hell were we being beaten and killed? “Follow orders and you will receive your next dose of leechthorn.” The crowd reared, cries erupting all the way down the chain. I joined in, throwing my head back like I saw the others do. “Silence!” I heard the sound of fists making contact with bodies. “Tonight you camp in the Onyx Pass.”
My stomach turned leaden as I fought to keep my eyes from widening. There was little reaction from the other prisoners. Had they no idea of what lay beyond the wall? Or were their brains already so gnarled by leechthorn that they weren’t scared?
“Some of you will die tonight,” Vorkalth yelled, his voice flat as he neared me. “That is the Saints extinguishing the weak.” My eyes almost rolled. “But, if you make it through the night, you will be granted your next dose in the morning.” A subdued murmur washed through the prisoners. I felt him behind me, his hand finding my lower back. “I’ll see you in Taitha,” he whispered. Then he retreated, his voice bellowing once again. “Onward!”
And we walked out of the gates of Eserene.
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I’d imagined what life was like outside of the Eserenian walls thousands of times; a desolate, rocky landscape teeming with nightmarish beasts, human remains in various states of decay littering the craggy mountain trails.
I had never pictured the calm openness that lay before me now. I hadn’t noticed how impure the air within the city walls was until I breathed in the air of this unknown beyond. Without the wall to hide it, the sun still had a considerable way to go before it set. Everything the light touched had been dipped in the halcyon of the final hour of sunlight. The Onyxian Mountains loomed in the distance behind a sweeping plain, the Onyx Pass somewhere among the peaks that wore gilded crowns of sunlight.
Had the rattling of the chain, the moans of the other prisoners, and the shouts of the soldiers not destroyed the silence, it may have been peaceful.
We began to cross the plain, the short, dried grass crunching underfoot. Someone in front of me soiled themselves and I did my best to avoid the mess as we continued to walk. But every step was like needles on the sole of my broken foot, the pain becoming more and more unbearable as it finally caught up to me. My limp was so severe that I wasn’t sure how I was keeping up. I had gone numb so long ago that it seemed the throbbing came back with a vengeance, insistent on making up for lost time.
The edges of my vision darkened. I should have lost consciousness by now. What would happen if I did? I’m sure I’d just be unhitched and tossed to the side, left to die on the plain. When I thought about it, it wouldn’t be the worst way to die. Peacefully slipping into oblivion, dying under the biggest sky I’d ever seen. It would beat death by the hands of the wicked men who pulled our chain or by the hand of the Board.
The Board.Ludovicus.
He’d been taken alive. Unconscious, but alive. I let my mind wander through the possibilities of his fate. The more I thought of it the less I thought of my broken body and how it was beginning to shut down. The plain stretched on for about two miles, the flat terrain allowing my mind to leave my body completely as I trudged forward, imagining Ludovicus shackled and gagged.
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“Halt!” a soldier screamed from the front of the chain. I lifted my eyes to see that the golden crown the mountains wore had been exchanged for one woven of darkness. The peaks rose against the sky like a tear in the universe, so black that they had no discernible features aside from the outlines of their craggy peaks.
Pure onyx. My heartbeat picked up as the back of my throat turned sour. Ingra’s words floated through my head.
The beasts of the Onyx Pass prowl the mountains with your blood on their jowls.
The sounds of ragged breathing filled the air. The prisoners in front of me had begun rolling their heads again. My shoulders ached, every matching roll of my head sending pain throughout my body.
“Over this next ridge, we will find ourselves in the Onyx Pass,” shouted a soldier, his voice stern. “You will be unchained for the night. Stay with the group and you should survive. Venture off and face the consequences of the Pass. We will not stop you, nor will we rescue you when you find yourselves in the jaws of an oxbear or the talons of a Rivodian crow.” Goosebumps pricked my skin at the mention of the beasts. “Next dose will be in the morning, if you make it.”
The beasts of Onyx Pass prowl the mountains with your blood on their jowls.
Stay with the group and you should survive.
The chain was pulled forward as we began to climb a slope, the rough plain grass thinning as softer, more forgiving dirt spread before us. A small mercy. The soldiers lit torches, the light casting formidable shadows over the trees and boulders that had begun to line the path. I was thankful for the jangle of chains and the moans of the other prisoners. While silence on the plains would have been peaceful, silence in the Pass would be unbearably eerie.
It was impossible to gauge the distance left to walk as the darkness smothered everything that was not directly touched by the soldiers’ torch light. Some of the prisoners around me began to thrash periodically, quick spasms that jerked the chain this way and that with a force that seemed impossible. Were they beginning to get stronger already? I had no idea how long it would take.
Creatures called through the night, the air filled with howls and caws and cries straight from a nightmare. Screeches so high pitched I thought my ears would explode were followed by bellowing snarls that sounded like they were pushed through sharp, dripping fangs. Wings flapped in the trees. Twigs snapped. I fought the urge to whip my head toward every noise, every ounce of my body telling me to get the hell out of here. No one said a word about the noises as we continued deeper into the darkness.
My Da had told us legends of the beasts outside the wall only when we had enough money for him to overindulge on wine and build a fire in the hearth. Larka and I would beg him to tell us of the world beyond our little corner of it, of what was lurking just on the other side of the wall. Never mind the fact he’d never left Eserene.
Everybody knew of the common beasts like oxbears and wolfhounds and Veridian raptors. But the truly fearsome monsters were the ones Da only spoke of in hushed tones, when Larka and I wore him down with constant begging. Sharpstingers with wings as wide as I was tall and a sting so venomous it would paralyze a human in minutes before ripping limbs away and feasting. Rivodian crows, picking at the bones and flesh other beasts left behind, ruthlessly territorial. Bonehogs with massive tusks and eyes the color of blood. Venomous hell serpents and deadly vulgites and arachnas with eight legs and fangs the size of daggers. There were mountain folk, too — the Onytes, he’d called them, who were hardy enough to survive the monsters that hunted them.
I hoped Da had been very,verywrong.
An hour passed in the pitch black night lit only by the flickering light of the soldiers’ torches as we moved through the mountains. The towering, menacing shadows of the trees seemed to repeat, little variation in their shapes and sizes, all the while animals screamed until it was nothing but threatening background noise.
The soldier in the front stopped abruptly, signaling to the other soldiers that we’d reached our resting point for the night. One by one, prisoners were unlocked from the chain, the freed moving awkwardly into the dark. Most of the prisoners had fallen into a fragile silence. Some let out an occasional cry. The chain rattled and clanked, echoing through the forest.
