Assassin’s Fate. Робин Хобб
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faint. Slow hooves clopping on cobblestones. A woman’s voice lifted in a brief sing-song chant.
‘Is it a prayer?’ Alaria wondered.
‘It’s an early pedlar. She sings, “bread, fresh baked this morning. Bread, warm from the oven”.’ Kerf sounded sentimental.
‘Help us!’ Alaria’s desperate scream was so shrill my ears rang with it. ‘Help us, oh help us! We are trapped!’
When she finally stopped shrieking for lack of breath, my ears were ringing. I strove to hear the bread-woman’s song or the clopping hooves, but I heard nothing. ‘She is gone,’ Vindeliar said sadly.
‘We are in a city,’ Kerf declared. ‘Only cities have breadmongers at dawn, selling wares in the street.’ He paused for a moment and then said, ‘I thought we were dead. I thought that was why you wished to come to the fallen palace of the dead duke, to be dead here. Do breadmongers still sing when they are dead? I do not think so. What need have the dead of fresh bread?’ Silence greeted his question. I did not know what the others were thinking, but I pondered his previous words. A fallen palace. How much stone was on top of our tomb? ‘So we are not dead,’ he reasoned laboriously, ‘but we will be soon if we cannot escape. But perhaps as the city awakens, we will hear other people. And perhaps they will hear us if we shout for help.’
‘So be silent for now!’ Dwalia warned us. ‘Be silent and listen. I will tell you when to shout for help, and we will all shout together.’
We waited in suffocating silence. From time to time we heard the muffled sounds of a city. A temple bell rang. An ox bellowed. Once, we thought we heard a woman calling a child. At that, Dwalia bade us all shout for help with one voice. But it seemed to me that the sounds were never very close, and I wondered if we were on a hill above a city rather than in the city itself. After a time, Vindeliar pissed again, and I think Alaria did, too. The smell was getting worse – piss and sweat and fear. I tried to imagine I was in my bed at Withywoods. It was dark in the room. Soon my father would come to look in on me. He always thought I was asleep when he looked in my room late at night before going to his own bed. I stared up at blackness and imagined his step in the corridor. I was beginning to see dots of light from staring into the blackness so long. Then I blinked and realized that one of the dots was now a narrow stripe.
I stared at it, not daring to hope. Slowly I lifted my foot as far as it would go. It blocked part of the light. When I lowered my foot, the light reappeared, stronger.
‘I can see light,’ I whispered.
‘Where?’
‘Near my feet,’ I said, but by then the light had started to slink in. I could see how uneven the blocks were that confined us. Worked stone, yes, but tumbled in a heap around us rather than something built.
‘I can’t see it,’ Dwalia said, as if I were lying.
‘Nor I,’ Kerf confirmed. ‘My woman is in my way.’
‘I am not your woman!’ Alaria was outraged.
‘You have slept on top of me. You’ve pissed on me. I claim you.’
My lifted foot could barely reach the slot of light. I pointed my toe and pushed. I heard gravel fall outside our prison and the crack widened slightly. I rolled onto my side as much as I could and pushed against Kerf to slide myself closer to the light. I could press my whole foot against the stone below the light, and I did. More and larger rock shards fell, some rattling against my boot. The light grew stronger. I kicked at it savagely. The shaft of light enlarged to the size of my hand. I battered my feet against it as if I were dancing in a hill of biting ants. No more gravel fell. I kicked at the stone that roofed that wall, to no avail. I stopped when I had no strength left and became aware that the others had been shouting questions and encouragement. I didn’t care. I refused to let Wolf Father’s calmness reach me. I stared up at the dimly lit ceiling of my tomb and sobbed.
The Chalcedean moved, shoving me aside to lift his arms past his head to brace them against the stone. He groaned and suddenly shifted hard against me. His hip pushed into my ribs, wedging me against the walls so I could scarcely breathe. Alaria was squeaking and squealing as he pressed her against the ceiling. He drew up his knee, crushing me harder and then with an audible grunt, he kicked out suddenly and hard.
Grit fell and rock dust sifted into my eyes and up my nose and settled on my lips. Kerf was still pinning me and I could not get my hand to my face to rub it away. It stuck to the tears on my cheeks and settled between my collar and neck. Then, as the dust was settling and I could almost draw a clean breath, he did it again. A vertical line of light was suddenly added to the first one.
‘It’s a block of stone. Try again, little one. This time, push, not kick. I’ll help you. Put your feet down low, at the bottom of it.’
‘What if it all falls on us?’
‘A faster death,’ Kerf said.
I wriggled and slid my body closer to the line of light. I bent my knees, set my feet low on the block. The Chalcedean shifted his big boot between and slightly above my feet. ‘Push,’ he said, and I did. Stone grated grudgingly but it moved. A rest, and then we pushed again. The crack was a hand’s-breadth wide. Another push, and the stone fetched up against something. We pushed three more times before the stone moved, and then it slewed to the left. Another push and it was easier. I shifted my body to get more purchase.
The afternoon sunlight that had found us was fading toward evening by the time the opening was large enough for me to wriggle out. I went feet first, squirming blindly out of a gap barely large enough for me to pass, scraping skin off my hip and tearing my tunic. I sat up, brushing dust and grit from my face. I heard the others shouting, demanding that I move more stone, that I tell them where we were. I ignored them. I didn’t care where we were. I could breathe and no one else was touching me. I drew deep breaths of cool air, and wiped my sleeve across my gritty face, and rolled my good shoulder. I was out.
‘What can you see?’ Dwalia was furious with desperation. ‘Where are we?’
I looked around me. Ruins, I supposed. I could now see what our tomb had been and it was not at all what I had thought it was. Great blocks of stones had fallen, first one pillar to the floor and then a great slab of stone had collapsed partway across the fallen pillar, and then other pieces of stones had tumbled around them. Only good fortune had kept them from smashing completely flat against the Skill-pillar embedded in the floor. I looked up the evening sky past the jagged remains of walls, and down at more etched runes. There was another Skill-pillar here, set into the floor. I stepped gingerly away from it.
The others were shouting contradictory orders at me: to fetch help, to say what I saw. I didn’t respond. I heard the temple bell ring again in the distance. I took three steps out of sight, squatted and relieved myself. As I stood, I heard stone grating and saw the Chalcedean’s legs emerging from the enlarged opening. I hastily pulled up my leggings and watched as he braced his feet and levered the stone away. Shrieks from inside of ‘Be careful!’ and ‘You’ll bring it down on us!’ went unheeded.
‘I should run,’ I whispered to myself.
Not yet, Wolf Father whispered in my mind. Remain with the danger you know. The Chalcedean has mainly been kind to you. If we are in Chalced, you do not speak the language or know their ways. Maybe luck will favour us and the stones fall on all the others. Hide and watch.
I moved back amongst the tumbled stones and crouched where I could see but not be seen. Kerf wriggled out on his back, kicking and scraping and grunting as he heaved himself along. He emerged powdered with grey dust and grit, looking like a statue called to life. His hips freed, he shifted onto his side, twisting like a snake to manoeuvre first one shoulder and then the other out, and sat up, blinking in the late afternoon light. His pale eyes were startling in his grey stone face. He licked dust from his lips, his red tongue another oddity, and looked about himself, then stepped up onto a block of stone and surveyed the scene. I crouched lower.
‘Is it safe?’ Alaria called, but she had already