48
~ AKELLA ~
Akella was tired, dirty, and damp by the time she clicked the padlock shut and left the southwest tower. She’d had enough of tunnels for one night. All she wanted to do was go back to the relative warmth and safety of her little dead Wise Man’s cell in the castle, collapse upon the bed, and fall into a deep and dreamless sleep.
With the emphasis on dreamless, she thought. Lately, she’d been dreaming of the white city again, and worse, the ancient man with the grin that froze her blood worse than any Eastern winter could. He was taunting her, daring her to come back to his city. He showed her visions of her missing crew. They had dead eyes, and moved like automatons, puppets on strings controlled by hands that were not their own. Akella shouted to get their attention, waved her hands in front of their faces, but they did not see her.
The old man just laughed and laughed, and she would wake up with that laughter still ringing in her ears.
The easiest route back to the castle would be to follow Pellon’s mostly empty city streets and walk straight through the front gates. It was unlikely anyone would bother her or try to stop her. As her earlier encounter with Sergeant Kerry had proven, Akella was something of a minor celebrity within the Imperial Army. Many soldiers knew how she’d saved the Empress’s ship from near-certain doom during the hurricane that had blown them off course, and in the time since, she’d been more than visible within the Empress’s camp and now Castle Pellon. It wasn’t as though a female Adessian pirate captain could easily blend in amongst the Empire’s soldiers.
But the last thing she needed now was to draw attention to herself. The soldiers patrolling Pellon’s streets might not stop her, but what if word got back to the Commander that Akella had been roaming around the city close to midnight? That spiteful and suspicious Terintan might put Akella under house arrest, confine her to the castle like she had back in Port Lorsin and Tergos. Akella could probably find a way to slip past the guards, but then she remembered the lock on the outside of her door. If she was locked in, she wouldn’t be able to take Megs out of Pellon and into the nearly unscathed cottage she’d found.
It wasn’t worth the risk.
She ground her teeth. Back to the sewers. The stinking, wet, rat-infested sewers.
With a sigh, Akella retraced her steps to the alleyway where she’d first emerged up into the city. She hadn’t planned to come back this way, so she had to take her hands out of her pockets long enough to unscrew the iron grate. Her fingers were blue and numb with cold by the time she was done.
At least it will be warmer underground,she told herself.
A few minutes later, Akella was back in the muck again, lighting her lantern and retracing her steps up the tunnel towards the castle. Fortunately, this tunnel was one of the sewer’s main arteries. It curved slightly as it rose uphill towards the castle, but at no point had Akella needed to take one of the side tunnels branching off to the left or right, so at least there was no real danger of getting lost. A small consolation. Getting lost within the sewers of an Imperial city and dying down there simply because she was afraid of an irritating Terintan concubine discovering her absence was about the worst way to die that she could imagine.
Akella had been trudging up the sewer for about five minutes when she paused in her trek. She’d heard something ahead, echoing above the normal sewer sounds of trickling water and the occasional squeak of curious rats. She cocked her head, straining her ears.
No, nothing. Only paranoia, she supposed. She took another few steps.
But there it was again. It definitely wasn’t her imagination. Akella stood statue-still, listening.
Footsteps. Shite on a sea biscuit. There were footsteps in the tunnel coming from the opposite direction.
Akella hastily extinguished her lantern and pressed her back against the curve of the tunnel wall, heart pounding in time to the rapid splashing of feet heading straight for her.
She flipped through a mental checklist of who else might’ve gone down into the sewers.
Smugglers or thieves? Pellon had none anymore.
Soldiers? Possibly, but why would soldiers climb down into the tunnels beneath the city?
Akella could think of only one possibility that made any sense: mountain men. The tribesmen must have discovered the place where the sewer emptied into the river, and they were sneaking inside Pellon at this very moment for a surprise attack.
Yet if that were true, why did it sound like only one set of footsteps sloshed through the sewer towards her? And for that matter, why was this sole mountain man – a scout, perhaps? – coming from the direction of the castle instead of the river?
Akella would have to figure the details out later. The bobbing lantern light was getting closer quickly. Whoever it was, they were in a hurry.
She drew her long knife, waited for the light to come up nearly alongside her, and then slammed sideways into the figure.
The mountain man gave a surprise yelp and dropped the lantern, which splashed into the shallow water below, pitched sideways, and after one last guttering gasp, went out.
Akella and the tribesman were plunged into pitch blackness, but she didn’t mind fighting in the dark. And she had the advantage – she’d already pinned the mountain man against the opposite wall and held the point of her long knife against the soft flesh of his throat.
This had to be the smallest mountain man she’d ever seen, judging by how his body felt pinned by her weight against the wall. But then Akella understood in a flash: a child. The bastards had sent a child to scout the city for them. If there was one sure way to make an Adessian’s blood boil, it was mistreating children.
The child strained against her, but Akella pressed the knife harder into the pulsing artery.
“I would take no pleasure in killing a child, but I’ll do it if you make me,” Akella hissed, hoping the child understood the Imperial common tongue. She was actually only bluffing; she would never, in a thousand lifetimes, kill a child. But the boy wouldn’t know that.
He must’ve understood, because he stopped struggling beneath her grasp.
Tentatively, he said, “…Akella?”
Only it wasn’t a he at all.
Akella was so startled she almost dropped the knife. Almost. “Little seagull?”
Linna huffed. “I really wish you would stop calling me that.”
Akella barked out a laugh and released her. “What are you doing down here?”
Movement fluttered from Linna’s direction, and when she spoke again, her voice came from somewhere below Akella. “You made me drop my lantern. Who knows if I can even get it lit again now. If you got the wick wet…”
“You didn’t answer my question. What in Preyla’s name are you doing down here?”
Linna fumbled in the dark at Akella’s feet with the lantern and did not answer.
Sighing, Akella put the long knife back in its sheath and reached out for her own lantern. She’d placed it a few feet behind them, careful to keep it from getting too wet. After groping about in the dark for a moment, her hands found it. It wasn’t easy to use flint and steel in utter darkness, but Akella had lit lanterns in worse conditions. The shower of sparks she produced looked like tiny orange fireflies. After a few tries, she managed to light her tinderbox, and from there, lit the oiled wick of her lantern.
The lantern light blinded Akella like it was a blazing midday sun for a moment. She blinked a few times, waited for her eyes to adjust, then picked it up and shone the light in Linna’s direction.
“There, we have light again. Are you happy now?”
“No.” Linna’s tone was sour. “My lantern’s useless.”
“Useless?”
Linna wiped her hands on her trousers. “The oil spilled out when it tipped over. And the wick got wet. Useless. Thanks to you.”
Now that was just irritating and unnecessary. “Thanks to me?”
“If you hadn’t ambushed me, it would still be working.”
“I thought you were a bloody mountain man scout come to let the sharks into the hatchery. It’s certainly not my fault that you were skulking around down here in the dark.”
“I am on a mission that might end the war,” Linna retorted sharply. “There’s no good reason for you to be down here.”
“I had my own mission,” Akella said resentfully. She tried shifting the attention back to Linna. “What ‘mission’ did the Empress send you on this time? Is there a store of tea hidden in the sewers you had to fetch for her?”
Linna’s answering glare was cold enough to make the snow-covered city streets above their heads feel like the summer solstice. Cold enough that Akella actually felt a pang of regret for her ill-timed tease.
“What do you care?” Linna said between clenched teeth. “You don’t give a rat’s arsehole whether the East falls to the mountain men or not.”
Akella was taken aback. She’d never seen the girl so angry before, never heard her use such language. In a gentler tone, she asked, “If I care so little, why did I just ambush what I thought was a mountain man scout, hmm?”
Linna hesitated, and Akella could see some of the anger drain out of her.
“I’m sorry I mocked you,” Akella said sincerely. “Now tell me what you’re really doing down here. Maybe I can help.”
Linna stood back up, leaving the broken lantern where it had fallen. Over the course of the next few minutes, she confessed everything – overhearing the Empress and the Commander discussing again their intention to send her back to Port Lorsin; the planning meeting where she’d learned that mountain men were not only massing north of the city, where the Commander would soon be heading, but also south of the city; then finally, without the Empress’s knowledge or consent, offering herself to Brother Rennus as the spy who could infiltrate the southeastern camp and poison the tribesmen’s food supply just as they broke their fast. By the time General Alric’s brigades reached the camp an hour or two after her, Linna concluded with a note of pride, the mountain men would already be on their knees with illness, and the general’s two brigades would make short work of them. Between the Commander’s surprise attack in the north and General Alric’s surprise attack in the south, the assault on Pellon the tribesmen had probably been preparing for months would be quickly and definitively over.
“But why?” Akella asked when Linna had finished.