Phoenix Unbound
Page 76

Gilene yanked her arm away and scooted back on her haunches. Her fingers tingled at the perceived threat, her magic coursing hot through her veins. Restored to its full strength over the winter, it flowed under her skin, a vast pool of power she conserved for just this day. “Go away,” she all but snarled.
The bird woman remained undeterred. “I speak for the dead, not the living. Whether you choose to believe or not is no concern of mine. I’ve done what they asked.” She stood and brushed off her skirts. “Pell wishes to tell you, be brave. All is forgiven.”
Her words might have been arrows shot from a Savatar bow at close range. Gilene gasped and surged to her feet. “What did you say?”
Bird Woman backed away, her farseeing eyes the color of dull steel. “I’ve delivered my message,” she said, voice soft once more. “Treat it as you will.” She picked a path back to the spot she’d occupied earlier, and this time she cast her gaze on the tiny window high above them where the sun streamed through.
Her knees shaking, Gilene resumed her seat before she fell. She wouldn’t weep, though she breathed in pained staccato pants. She didn’t want to believe the shade speaker, but her mention of Pell convinced her of the truth of her words.
Were the ghosts around her those of the women who had burned in her fires? She had never asked for forgiveness for her part in their deaths. She didn’t feel she deserved it. However fate chose to judge her after she died, it would weigh her intentions against her actions and decide her punishment. She expected no less and hoped for no more.
A woman’s wails suddenly filled the cell, yanking Gilene out of her melancholy. “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”
A chorus of shushing noises and more strident commands to be quiet fell on deaf ears as the woman worked herself into a frenzy. Gilene marched toward the screamer, prepared to shake her into silence. She didn’t get the chance.
A catacomb guard sprinted down the hall, keys jangling on his hip. He slammed into the bars at a run, rotted teeth bared in a snarl. “Shut your racket, ye stupid cunts!” He grasped the key ring attached to his belt and pulled a key from it to unlock the cell door.
Gilene shoved the two women closest to her toward the back wall at the last second, narrowly avoiding the biting kiss of the whip as the guard flung the door open, whip arm already arcing toward them. The whip’s serpentine leather split the air with a warning crack. The screaming stopped.
“Unless you’re sucking my cock, you keep your mouths shut,” he commanded. “If I hear so much as a cough out of any of you, I’ll drag you out, fuck you in the hallway, then strip the skin off your back with this here toy. Understand?”
No one answered him. Satisfied, he coiled the whip and retreated from the cell, slamming and locking the door behind him.
Gilene watched him leave, keeping her tingling hands hidden in her skirt. Hatred boiled inside her. Her fire burned the wrong people. That guard and those like him deserved to stand in the Pit and beg for mercy.
The silence continued once he’d gone, his threat vile enough to keep the most terrified Flower of Spring mute, until the shade speaker spoke. “Before I die, I’d like very much to see that weasel hanged by his whip.”
Enthusiastic ayes accompanied a few gasps and bursts of swiftly muffled laughter. The murderous humor served to break the tension if not the gloomy fear filling the cell. Gilene eyed Bird Woman with newfound respect.
She made to return to her spot in the corner, when a commotion broke out at the far end of the corridor where the guard had gone. He returned, ahead of a crowd of silhouettes that seemed to jostle and tumble around each other as two more guards on either side of them pushed and shoved them toward the cell where the Flowers waited.
The guard opened the gate and, to Gilene’s horror, herded at least a score of frightened prisoners into the already crowded cell.
The new additions ranged in age from baby to grandmother. Mothers clutched nursing infants to their breasts while adolescent girls cradled siblings on their hips. All were female, all terrified, and, if they were brought here, all condemned.
Some sobbed while others stared around them in mute, wide-eyed terror. Sick to her soul at the sight, Gilene approached one woman who didn’t cry or look to be on the verge of fainting. She clutched the hand of a small girl who clung to her skirts and sucked her thumb.
“You can’t be part of the tithe,” she told the newcomer, hoping she was right. Certain she wasn’t.
The woman hugged the child close. “We weren’t. Not at first. Then soldiers came and brought us here.”
Gilene frowned. Soldiers, not slavers. So much was different this year from the last. Still grim and horrible but also changed, and she very much feared the arrival of the attacking Savatar had brought about that change. “What did they tell you?”
The woman took a shuddering breath. “The armies needed the favor of the gods, and such favor demanded more Flowers for the Rites.”
Magic, scorching, eager to burst forth, tumbled through Gilene’s blood. Was there no quenching the Empire’s thirst for killing?
She thought of Azarion, a slave of the Empire who embraced its brutality to survive. His people clashed with the Kraelian army outside Kraelag’s walls and died in the fields outside the gates.
Another voice spoke up, this one from the original Flowers brought to the capital. “The Empire is more afraid than everyone thinks. Afraid of the horse clans, so it will sacrifice more of us.”
An idea took shape in Gilene’s mind, inspired by a resolve as cold as the magic inside her burned hot. Enough. She’d had enough. Enough deception, enough guilt, enough bitterness. She would no longer protect Beroe’s cowardice, not even for the family who took her for granted and accepted her fate long before she ever did. Her gaze slid over the crowded cell, packed to the walls now with terrified women and children whose only crime was to be born as citizens of an empire that would see them die agonizing deaths.
She made shushing noises until the quiet murmurs of conversation halted and she could be heard by all while speaking in a softer voice. “Who among you knows anything about these catacombs? Such as a way out that isn’t through the main passage?”
Gilene had always walked out of the maze of hallways through the main entrance, but she’d been one woman with the benefit of an illusion spell to aid her. Getting a large group of people out without being noticed required another plan.
Bird Woman raised her hand. “I do. There’s an even lower level than this one that can be reached through a storage chamber. It’s from when the first capital stood, when it was still just a fortress. Three tunnels lead outside the walls. Two are impassable, full of rubble. The third is narrow, and you have to crawl in places, but you can get out of the city that way.”
One of the other women spoke, her tone and expression both hopeful and suspicious. “Are you certain?”
A shadow passed over the shade speaker’s features, a grief blunted but not gone. “My father was once a Pit gladiator imprisoned in the catacombs. He told me.”
Gilene wondered whether such knowledge had been passed on while the woman’s father was alive or if she spoke to his shade the way she’d spoken to Pell’s. “If I could get us out of this cell, could you lead everyone to the tunnels and out of the city?” At the other’s nod, a spark of hope ignited.