Chapter 2

I

I regained consciousness stage by stage. First, sounds returned. Someone breathing nearby, dripping water, burning gas hissing. Then smells came back, surprisingly pleasant compared to my previous experiences waking up. The pungent smell of excrement was absent, in its place there was a new odour, something earthly, human, sweet enough that I breathed in deep to savour it instinctively. Finally, the rest of my senses came back in a rush. Thoughts, real, dynamic thoughts, accompanied the senses.

I remembered what had happened and gasped.

Something touched my face; it was soft and kind, running from my forehead to my cheek and down over my lips. A voice cooed in my ear.

I calmed down, still trembling with pent up fear and excitement. The absolute darkness, the fear, a fiendish twisted world, and finally the motes of light, the creatures. I had manipulated the twisted world, silenced the whispering voices of the lights. I had changed reality.

But I was no sorcerer, no man of power. I was just a boy locked up in a cell for no reason at all.

For no reason?

I opened my eyes to find Cathy looking at me, concern in her face. She smiled. Her hand left my skin, its absence a hole in my heart. I would have never thought someone else’s touch could make me feel so alive, or that the contact ending would be so horrible.

My face must have revealed something, because her hand came back and she started singing something, a soft lullaby about a fisherman getting lost in the sea. I smiled and closed my eyes, falling asleep.

II

I woke up alone the next time. No one was in the hallway, but I could hear Cathy’s voice from somewhere nearby, a weak murmur, sounding plaintive. She was praying, to the Lady if I knew her at all.

A folded blanket was under my head, another draped over me. It was not cold in the room, on the contrary, it was still quite warm. Still, I was thankful for the blanket. It was a protective layer, guarding against any harm heading my way. Or at least it felt that way. Obviously a blanket can’t protect anyone from anything and I was trying to distract myself from the strange environment. Where was I?

I tried to move around and failed miserably. My muscles felt weak, my bones watery. It took a titanic application of pure will power to turn my neck and look up above my head. To where the iron prison door should have been.

The door was not closed.

It may seem pretty obvious in hindsight, since I was already out of the prison, but at the time, the sheer ludicrousness of nothing barring my way to freedom shocked me. I simply stared at the door and kept staring. The door not being closed was one part of the wonder. The more amazing thing was where the door actually was.

It lay on the ground. A few paces in front of its frame The sturdy iron was crumpled, a piece of valuable paper crushed in a rich man’s fist. The edges touched the floor, the middle held up by them. The door had been blasted from its hinges, bent by a terrible force. The power it must have taken to do so...

A little high-pitched shriek from Cathy shocked me out of my stunned reverie. She rushed over to sit beside me, her hands cradling my head, caressing my dirty black hair with no reservation. She looked happy. Her touch was electrifying and her appearance somehow different.

No. She looked the same, but she evoked new ... feelings inside me. Feelings I had no experience with, feelings I couldn’t decipher.

I struggled to get words out of my mouth. I only succeeded in groaning.

In my defence, it was a loud groan.

Cat looked at me with concern. “Are you okay?”

I nodded, and tried to speak. The groan remotely resembled a word this time.

She looked at me like I was going crazy before breaking into a relieved smile. “Are you thirsty?”

I nodded rather than embarrass myself with another attempt to speak. The nod was weak, but good enough to spur her into action.

She left; an action I promptly chose to dislike. I enjoyed her touch and I wanted to feel it again.

Cathy returned with a pitcher, helped me up, and held the water to my lips. I drank every drop. The liquid did more than sate my thirst, it relieved the roughness in my throat. My voice was still coarse as I struggled to get it out. “Do you know what happened?”

Cat shook her head, putting the pitcher on the ground and embracing me again. I wanted to think, to escape the prison, to ask her more questions. But the embrace was too good, my head resting on Cathy’s breasts and her hot breath running through my hair, her hands on my neck and shoulders. I remained silent and relished it, hoping the feeling would go on forever.

She whispered in my ear after a few moments, breaking the serene, enjoyable silence. “You’ve been asleep for a day.”

I hummed in response, to let her know I was listening.

Her hand stopped its movement on my face. “A soldier checks on this place every week. He’ll be here three days from now.”

I understood what she was telling me. My prison had been breached, and if the soldier was allowed to see the breach, it would not turn out well for me.

“I need to ... no, I have to escape.”

She nodded. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when she finds out.”

I perked up, Cat had just let something about my captor escape. It was the best opportunity I’d had so far. “She?”

Cathy glanced at me, not annoyed as she would have been just yesterday, but rather, thoughtful. Finally, she spoke in a voice filled with trepidation. “I was ... am banned from revealing their identity to you, on pain of death.”

“What are you going to do? About all this ... I mean” I asked, suddenly afraid she’d reported my freedom, perhaps my captors were already coming, ready to kill, or worse, imprison me again.

She saw the fear in my eyes. She ran one hand through my long hair while grasping my arm with the other, her grip firm, painful. She raised her voice slightly, and said in a firm tone, “Atsa! You need to calm down.”

I realized I was trembling and took a deep breath, my brain considering all the possibilities.

Cathy would not betray me, at least not in this. She knew how I felt about my captivity. She cared about me. She was my friend.

But then, before today, she had never let escape a single word about the identities of those who had seen fit to imprison me. She was deathly scared of them. There was a real possibility her fear would overcome any fond feelings she might have for me.

No. I could not allow that.

Cathy knew me, and she was not dumb. She knew my thoughts. Lying to her would be pointless, so I needed a truth to swing the pendulum in my favour, something to convince her not to fear them, the ones holding me captive.

On the other hand, perhaps I could use Cat’s fear of them in my favour. If I could make her obviously complicit in my escape, she would have no choice but to help me. But how would I go about making her complicit? Perhaps I could make it look like she’d opened the prison door, or perhaps I could have her...

I shifted in her embrace, and she let go of me. Some strength had returned to my limbs, nothing much, but enough that I could sit without assistance. I turned and locked gazes with Cat. “Help me escape, please?”

She didn’t hesitate a second before nodding. “Of course.”

The relief I felt at her answer did not last long. Shame replaced it almost immediately. Shame at how I had not trusted Cathy, I’d even intended to blackmail her. In comparison, she hadn’t hesitated a single second before agreeing to help me. In retrospect, the question may not have been necessary at all. Cathy probably decided what to do the moment she saw my prison door was broken.

Catherine saw something in my eyes, her hand came to my cheek, soft fingers grazed my skin. I shuddered and leaned into the hand. She embraced me again.

I wanted to ask her a million questions, to plan my escape, to explore the rest of my chambers, but I did none of those things. Touching another person was too powerful an aphrodisiac, my hands sneaked around Cathy’s waist and grasped tight and I slowly fell asleep to her low murmurs.

III

Cathy was asleep beside me when I woke up again, our bodies pressed against each other, my face nestled into the crook of her shoulder. She was making little noises as she breathed through her nose. Cathy was probably the cutest snorer in the world.

Rather, she was the first snorer I had ever encountered, perhaps all snores were this cute. Which reminded me, this was the first thing I’d ever thought of as cute. Learning the word from a book didn’t mean I knew exactly what it meant, maybe her snores weren’t even cute. Oh abyss take me, but being around too many books on the nature of language can have horrible effects.

Prince Mahmut, and other princes of Karanas before him, were famous throughout the world. Karanas was a rich city, the richest to ever exist. And its ruler, being incredibly, stupidly rich himself, was a source of envy among all. Consequently, they collectively had a need for having things that were bigger and shinier than what everyone else had.

About five centuries ago, a thirty-year-old man by the name of Orvit became Prince in Karanas. Orvit was fond of books, and he was an avid collector. Four years into his reign, with his rule secure and his coffers full, Orvit decided to build a library. As the prince of Karanas, Orvit’s library had to be unique, magnificent, and a beacon of the city’s wealth. But there was a problem. Even back then, Karanas was sorely in need of land. The island was relatively small, and goods from four continents travelled through it, there was simply no space for the massive library the prince wanted. So he decided to construct a building on the enormous stone outcrop almost a league south of Karanas’s shore. The outcrop held a small wooden tower serving as a lighthouse, which guided captains sailing north past treacherous cliffs to the east. Now it was to hold the grand library as well. Calls were sent out for an architect who could build a structure on solid stone, a structure meant to last centuries.

One architect, in a moment of pure genius – and I’m being sarcastic here – decided the only thing stopping him from building a normal building on a large stone was the impossibility of digging a foundation.

Only, Kyrio, the architect, decided boring into the stone for a foundation was not impossible, it was just difficult. For four years, slaves dug into the stone with nothing but pickaxes and their muscles. Unfortunately, sometimes during the fourth year, a stray pickaxe broke open a natural gas cave. A cave similar to the one feeding gas into the Prince’s castle, making him the only monarch in the world with permanently lit hallways. Kyrio and most of his diggers died in the resulting explosion.

Fortunately for the Prince, the architect’s plans survived. Kyrio’s senior apprentice had the gas caves surveyed – paying poor fishers from Braka enough to convince them to risk their lives, and running through men like Orvit ran through books. The surveys showed it was possible to contain the gas flow somewhere deep in the caves. Once the gas was contained, the ascended apprentice oversaw the construction of a library built of stone, with five stories above the ground and another three below. A building Orvit spent inordinate amounts of money to fill, unsuccessfully. It was even said the Ashkan Emperor, to whom kings knelt without batting an eye, coveted the connection.

I knew all this, because years ago Catherine had explained where my weekly books came from. She did not know why I was imprisoned beneath a library and not in the prince’s dungeons, nor did she have the courage to ask my jailers. So I did a considerable amount of reading on the library as a result, to see whether deduction could help me find out anything of my jailer’s intentions. I did not succeed.