In between, there was only cruelty and endless work, so much that Sartes could barely believe anyone survived as long as they did there. As young as he was, the guards forced him to carry barrels of hot tar, scoop it up in metal buckets, work until his skin shone with a combination of sweat and cooled tar. Burns covered him now, so that every brush against rock or other people brought pain with it.
He coughed as a blast of fumes came up from the tar, and beside him, he heard Bryant hacking as though his lungs might fall out. When he looked up, there was a guard there again, pockmarked and ready with a whip.
“Won’t be long now before you go to the tar,” the guard said. “A day or two, if I’m any judge.”
He wandered off, laughing to himself, and Sartes couldn’t help feeling a flash of hatred at that. No one should take pleasure in that kind of cruelty.
“He’s right,” Bryant managed between coughs. “I won’t survive much longer.”
“Then we need to find a way out of here,” Sartes whispered back.
“Escape? No, we can’t even talk about it. If the guards hear, they’ll kill us!”
“And how is that worse than what’s going to happen to us anyway?” Sartes demanded. “Bryant, if we stay, we die. If we get caught, we die. So the only thing to do is not get caught.”
“That’s easy to say,” Bryant said. “But they watch the worst criminals here. They’re used to people trying to get away. We’re watched and chained in the day, so we’d never make it out of here. At night, we’re caged, and we couldn’t see the tar pits anyway.”
Sartes did his best to disguise the sinking feeling that came with the realization that the other boy was right. “We’ll think of something,” he promised. “We just have to stick together, and—”
“You two!” the pockmarked guard yelled in their direction. “Get over here! I have a job for you.”
There was something about the way he said it that made Sartes sure he and Bryant wouldn’t like it, but they had no choice. Hobbled together, they made their way over to the guard, who led the way to where a cart stacked with large barrels of tar sat, a driver waiting impatiently with his team of oxen ready to pull.
“There’s space for two more barrels,” the guard said, “so you two get the joy of filling them and carrying them back. And quickly. If this isn’t done within the hour, I’ll feed your bones straight to the pits!”
Just one look at the barrels said to Sartes how difficult the task would be. They were big enough that just carrying them to the tar pits empty would be hard work. Carrying them back filled with hot tar would be nearly impossible. It was a job for a quartet of the stronger prisoners, not for two of the weakest.
“He’s trying to kill us,” Bryant said, paling beside Sartes.
The guard lashed out. “I’ll have none of your back talk, boy. Get on with it.”
Sure enough, the barrel was heavy enough that it took both of them to carry it over in the direction of the tar pit the guard selected, with the guard grinning all the way as they did it. He hadn’t picked the nearest, of course. Instead, he’d picked an out of the way one, with no one to help them. He was enjoying this.
“Get on with it,” he yelled when they stopped breathlessly at the edge. “I didn’t say you could take a rest.”
He struck Sartes then, this blow stinging even through his numbness to it all. Sartes wanted to fight then, but he couldn’t, not chained as he was. Instead, he started work, stooping to gather the first of the tar. Bryant hadn’t started, though. It looked to Sartes as though the other boy could barely breathe.
“Get to work, I said!” the guard snapped, lashing out at Bryant this time. “Oh, I’ve had enough of this. It’s time for you to go in the tar, boy. We’ll see if your friend works any faster when he sees what happens to malingerers.”
“Leave him alone!” Sartes yelled as the guard advanced on them.
“You don’t want to try to tell me what to do,” the guard replied, jabbing a finger at Sartes. “Not unless you want to go in too.”
Sartes didn’t have a reply to that. Worse, he saw an evil smile play across the guard’s face.
“I have a better idea,” he said. “How about this, boys? One of you is going into the tar pit, and you get to fight to decide who it is. If you won’t fight, it’s both of you.”
Sartes considered his options, trying to think of a way through this.
“Now, you scum!” the guard ordered, and there was no more time.
Sartes sprang at Bryant, wrestling close to him. The guard was too big to argue with. Too tough to take in a fair fight, and he could always summon more. He was armed too, with his whip and a short sword that meant even together, the boys would be no match for him. It seemed as though the only choice was to obey, but Sartes didn’t want to hurt his friend.
Bryant might have been thinking the same way, but even so, the smaller, weaker boy still fought. Sartes felt a knee slam into his thigh, a fist strike his stomach. Maybe it was the shock of it, but an idea came to Sartes then.
“Trust me,” he whispered to Bryant. “And be ready when the moment comes.”
He wrestled the other boy around, using his superior strength and pushing him back. He heard the guard laugh as he stepped back to let the pair keep fighting. That was the best opportunity they were going to get.
Sartes darted around the guard, and with Bryant staying still, their ankle chains quickly wrapped around the man’s legs. Sartes leapt up at the big man’s back then, clamping a hand across his mouth so that he couldn’t cry for help. Sheer momentum brought them all crashing to the ground.
Sartes held on for dear life, even though it cost him an elbow to the ribs, and a head snapped back into his face. The world narrowed to nothing more than trying to hang on, smothering the guard’s calls for assistance. He wouldn’t be able to do it much longer though. He was just a boy, trying to fight a man. Only the fact that he was focusing on just one thing meant that he’d succeeded this long. If Bryant didn’t see the opportunity…
He did. Sartes caught a brief glimpse of the other boy standing there with determination written on his face, and then the guard went slack atop Sartes.
It seemed to take forever to move the weight out from over him, not helped by the entanglement created by the chains. By the time he managed to stand, Sartes was breathing as hard as if he really had just carried that full barrel. He saw Bryant holding the sword, staring down at it as if he didn’t know what to do next.
“The guard will have keys,” Sartes said. “He was talking about putting only one of us in the tar. That means he has a key. Help me search, Bryant.”
The instruction helped, because at least it meant the other boy had something to do besides focus on what he’d just done. Sartes remembered the first time he’d killed someone, and even though he’d been defending himself, it still haunted his dreams.
“It will be all right, Bryant,” he assured the other boy while he found the key and undid their chains.
“No it won’t,” Bryant said. “I killed one of them. I don’t even know what they do if you kill one of them. No one dares to do it.”
“We dared,” Sartes said. “Just like we’re going to dare to escape from here. Quick, help me cut up his tunic.”
“What?” Bryant said. “Why?”
“We need something we can coat in tar. Something big enough that it will cover the mouth of one of the barrels.” Sartes tried to think about the confidence Anka showed when she was giving instructions. The confidence Ceres had. “Help me, Bryant. We have a chance, but we don’t have long to make this work.”
Somehow, Sartes managed to inject enough certainty into his tone that Bryant started to help, cutting cloth and dipping it in tar in spite of anything he might have been feeling. They draped it over the mouth of the barrel. It wasn’t perfect, but even so, anyone glancing inside would just see tar, and not anything underneath. Hopefully, it would be enough.
“What do we do with… with him???
? Bryant asked, with a look down at the guard’s body. “If they find him, then they’ll know what we did.”
“Then we make sure they don’t find him,” Sartes replied. It was an effort to move the bulk of the guard by himself, but he didn’t want to ask Bryant to do this. He pushed the dead weight of the body toward the tar, shoving it in with a groan of effort. It disappeared with a wet sound of tar closing in.
If it had been anyone else, Sartes would probably have been horrified by what he was doing, but the guard would have thrown them in there alive without a second thought. That gave Sartes another idea.
Carefully, he arranged the manacles that had been around their ankles, sinking the ends into the tar while leaving the middle snagged on a rock by the edge, where anyone might see it. Hopefully, it would be enough to convince watchers that they’d gone into the tar, enough to buy them some time.
“We need to carry the barrel back now,” Sartes said. “Hide the sword in there so they won’t see it.”
It was a risk. Sartes knew that. If anyone suspected them, they would need the sword in order to fight back. Then again, if it came to that, one sword might not be enough. Perhaps nothing would.
“We can do this,” Sartes said, trying to reassure Bryant, and possibly himself. “We just have to stay calm.”
They hefted the barrel between them. It wasn’t as heavy as it would have been when full, but the need to keep from dislodging their covering meant that they carried it far more slowly than they had when going.
The driver watched them heft it onto his cart with a bored eye.
“Get the other one on there,” he said. “I don’t have all day.”
They lifted it up, and Sartes waited until the driver was looking in the other direction before he gestured. He lifted the covering over the barrel, ignoring the pain of the still hot tar. Bryant seemed to understand, clambering inside. Sartes climbed in after him.
It was a tight fit. Two of the larger prisoners couldn’t have done this, but Sartes wasn’t large, and Bryant was so slender after being worked almost to death that he hardly took up any room at all. Sartes pulled their makeshift covering into place, hoping that it would look the way he’d meant it to.
He waited there, and the silence had a kind of pressure to it that built with every heartbeat. He could just make out the form of Bryant across from him, quivering in the dark. Sartes wanted to reassure him, but they couldn’t afford any sound, any movement.
He heard sounds outside, making out the footsteps of the driver, his grumbling and curses as he checked his load.
“Stupid whelps. Didn’t even fill the last barrel. I’ll see them whipped when I get back. If they’re breathing by then.”
Sartes saw Bryant tense and he put a hand on the other boy’s shoulder to still him. They sat there in the half-dark of the barrel, waiting. Eventually, finally, Sartes heard the snap of a whip, the creak of wood, and then the rumble of cart wheels turning. He felt movement beneath him as the cart came into motion.
The fear didn’t pass just because the cart was moving though. At any moment, Sartes expected the cart to stop as the guards started to look for them. Yet it didn’t. It kept moving. It rolled on without stopping, for minutes, for longer, until Sartes had to force himself to keep his head down.
He found a crack in the barrel, barely enough to let in light. Looking through it, he thought he saw the countryside passing by.
Eventually, the cart came to a halt, and Sartes heard the sound of the driver talking to his animals.
“Stupid things you are. Still, at least you won’t wander off while a man’s about his business in the bushes, will you?”
Sartes heard the sound of the cart driver walking away, and he knew this was their chance. He grabbed the sword, then stood up, blinking in the sunlight even as he looked around to make sure that they weren’t actually surrounded by guards just waiting for them. Instead, he saw empty countryside, a few trees, and the figure of the cart driver with his back to them.
Sartes leapt forward, into the driver’s seat. The oxen were waiting patiently in place, but at a crack of the reins, they rumbled forward. At the sound of it, he saw the driver turn, cursing at them and starting forward. Sartes passed the reins to Bryant, then stood with the sword in his hand, waiting in case the driver caught up. Seeing it, the man seemed to slow, then stopped.
“Whelps! Evil little things! I’ll see you dead for this.”
Sartes laughed and started to cut the ties that held the barrels in place. One by one, the barrels of tar bounced off, rolling onto the rough dirt track and spilling their contents as they went. Freed of their burden, the oxen surged forward, and the cart sped up.
“We did it,” Bryant said. He sounded as though he couldn’t believe it. “We’re free!”
Sartes felt the exhilaration himself. But he knew this road was still filled with horrors, and he could not rest until he reached Delos, found a safe place—and found his sister.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The last time Thanos had sailed into the harbor of Haylon, it had been on one of the Empire’s warships. Now he sailed around a skeletal graveyard of them, burnt-out hulks and half-sunken wrecks sticking out of the water almost everywhere he looked like the bones of long dead sea creatures.
“What happened here?” Felene asked. She guided the small boat around the wrecks as smoothly as she’d brought it to Haylon in the first place. The small boat had been faster even than the galleys the Empire had taken there. “Who did this?”
“I did,” Thanos said, the pain of that memory still as fresh as when he’d set light to the first ships. If he shut his eyes, he could still see the burning wrecks and hear the screams of the men he’d killed. That those men had been there to butcher the islanders hadn’t made it easier.
They drifted closer to the docks. Thanos wasn’t surprised to see armed men gathering there in the colors of Akila’s rebels. Of course they would watch the water, and if they saw an unfamiliar ship, it was only natural that they would want to meet it. They wouldn’t want to risk spies.
“Looks as though we have a reception committee,” Felene said. “Drown me in the deep, you take me all the best places. Grab that rope.”
Thanos had gotten used to Felene in the time they’d spent on the boat. She was tough, and treated Thanos with a kind of bluff directness that made him feel surprisingly comfortable. It was better than the people at court who bowed and scraped all the time.
Getting used to her also meant that he could see the nerves beneath that.
“It will be fine,” Thanos said. “They know me here.”
She didn’t look convinced. “If you say so.”
They pulled their boat up to the docks, and Thanos saw other Empire ships there, far less destroyed than the ones in the harbor. These were ones that didn’t burn in Thanos’s memory, complete with the screams of the sailors, yet he guessed that he was still responsible. These were obviously General Haven’s ships, from the second invasion force.
Thanos felt the bump of the boat against the dock, and leapt ashore to tie the ship in place. He looked up from it to find a ring of drawn weapons facing him. That was one part he hadn’t been expecting.
“You can see who I am,” he said. “There’s no need for weapons. I need to speak with Akila.”
“He’ll want to speak with you too,” one of the rebels said. “And then he’ll decide what to do with the two of you.”
Felene hopped down beside Thanos. “So, when you say they know you, is this in the same way that the bounty hunters of the marches ‘know’ me?”
“Things are complicated,” Thanos said, thinking back to the time Akila had come to Delos. All that way just to warn him that he didn’t trust what Thanos was doing. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to come here after all.
He saw Felene glance around at the rebels as though calculating her odds of running. “Just so long as they aren’t so complicated I lose my head.”
They walked between
the rebels up through Haylon, into an open space surrounded by pillars. There were tables there, set out in the sun, and Thanos made out Akila at the heart of it all, talking to people, organizing and issuing instructions, treating the square the way another man might have used a great hall.
“There are people who would have moved into the castle here,” Thanos said as he approached.
He saw Akila look up, and expected a brief moment of friendly recognition. Instead, Akila fixed him with a hard look.
“Tyrants have castles,” he said. “I wanted a place where anyone could come to me. I thought I told you that you weren’t welcome here anymore.”
“You told me to do more,” Thanos replied. “I did. I did so much that I found myself shipped to the Isle of Prisoners. Lucious outed me as a traitor.”
“But you escaped,” Akila said, looking down at some of the papers before him. Did they contain information on him, or did Akila simply not want to look at him?
“Stephania gave me a way out,” Thanos said. “She hired a boat to take me away from Delos. She was going to come, but Lucious found us, and he told me… things about her I didn’t know.”
“And this is the captain?” Akila asked, with a pointed glance at Felene.
Thanos shook his head. “No, this is Felene, a prisoner I met on the Isle of Prisoners. I went there anyway, because I thought Ceres might be there.”
“The last I heard,” Akila said, “Ceres was dead.”
That brought a flash of pain to Thanos, because the longer he went without finding her, the greater the chances were that it was true. Wherever he went, there seemed to be only the anguish caused by her absence.
“I thought she might have come here,” Thanos said. “Have you heard anything?”