Darkpool
He fell again. This time, when he hit the ground, a heavy silence came with the flash of pain. It was so quiet. And dark. Sebastian closed his eyes and he kept them shut.
The silence resolved into a constant susurration of sound. A sssshhhh that blocked out all other noises, like a curtain. He tried to sink back into the quiet, but awareness kept him afloat. The susurration was rain. Heavy rain falling in thick sheets over dried leaves. It soaked him through and the cold bit him. Muffled voices were breaking through the curtain too, and he knew that pain as soon to follow.
Selena…
He heard Jude. He opened one eye. When lightning flashed, he could see the drops lancing down from the sky like silver needles, drenching Jude and the handful of Bazira who ringed her.
She barked an order and Sebastian felt rough hands under his arms. He was hauled to standing and the pain mauled him at his burnt and stabbed shoulder, at the back of his head. That was the worst. A heavy ache that seemed to burrow deeper into his skull with every passing moment. That pain scared him.
You’re dead already, Accora had told him. She may be right.
Jude appeared before his bleary vision. Her red hair was plastered to her face, like streaks of blood. “You can’t get up? The next time you fall, I’ll impale you.” The fire in her voice had dampened. She sounded nervous. Scared.
Good, Sebastian thought. That means Selena’s still free and that’s all that matters.
A stinging slap across his cheek brought fresh agony.
“You’ll forget how to smile,” she seethed. “Priest Bacchus will see to that.” She snapped at her men. “Take him. I want to get out of this bloody rain.”
The trek seemed interminable. Accora lay slung over the shoulder of some Bazira like a sack of grain, while two men dragged Sebastian behind. The storm did not abate but the rain ceased to fall in driving sheets, and instead pelted them with heavy drops.
After what seemed like hours, the path they walked began to slope downward. The island terrain rose before them and Sebastian presumed Bacchus’s temple was over the rise. The moon kept slipping in and out of cloud cover, and while it floated free for a few short moments, a yawning black hole cut into the hill became visible.
Like the library on Nanokar all over again. Bloody fuck.
They entered the burrow that looked cut into the soil by a very large worm. It was wide enough for three men to walk abreast. Sebastian was shoved inside and the party came to a halt in the impenetrable darkness. He was surrounded by Bazira; they jostled him, closed around him, stole his air. Jude struck flint to tinder and torchlight flared. Sebastian kept his gaze locked on the fire he could see over the shoulders of a dozen Bazira clerics, and tried not to think of the weight of the island that hung over him as it rained little spirals of dirt over his face. Old wooden beams that resembled the planking of a ship were all that separated them from the being buried alive. The beams creaked and groaned at the strain and Sebastian marveled that none of the Bazira paid their imminent doom any mind.
Finally, Jude called a halt. She opened a crude wooden door and one of the Bazira shoved Sebastian into a small room.
It smelled of death and pain, the soil crusted with old blood. A mist hung in the air and he felt as if he had walked into the jungles of Isle Saliz, but this humidity was icy cold and smelled like the sick tents he’d worked in during the war. Sebastian was forced to his knees by a rough hand on his wounded shoulder, and bound beside Accora. When their captors stepped aside, Sebastian’s eye went to the blood-stained slab in the center of the room. Leather straps lolled like tongues at the top and bottom to bind hands and feet, but Sebastian saw no other instruments of torture.
“He is the torture,” Accora murmured. With her head bowed, her silver hair falling in grimy strands over her face, she looked small and old. She looked up at him, and the zealous fire in her eyes was dulled by terror. “All that you have done, Bloody Bastian, is but a drop in Bacchus’s darkpool.”
“So it is,” Jude said, kneeling beside Sebastian. “Is it the darkpool that makes you shiver so? “ She observed him quietly for a moment in the dim torchlight. “Ah, I remember now, when we first met. Isle Kabak, it was. We tried to put you in a small cell and you didn’t much care for that. It feels like the entire island is resting just above your head, doesn’t it? It should,” she smiled at him, “because it is.”
Sebastian spat at her feet. “To the Deeps with you.”
She laughed and her laughter sounded out of place in this chamber that was haunted by pain. “What a silly weakness. Wouldn’t the singers laugh to know that the dastardly Bloody Bastian can’t abide the terrors of small rooms.”
Heavy, stomping footsteps could be heard drawing near. Jude’s laughter blew away like a wisp of smoke on the wind. “He comes,” she breathed.
Sebastian felt the cold first. An icy draft that preceded the Bazira Reverent; it enveloped him, emanated from him, and chilled the room instantly. His skin was colorless, like that of a corpse drained of blood, and stretched tight over bulging muscles. Greasy black hair hung to his chin and parted around his hawk-like nose.
Bacchus stood over Sebastian, a feral beast sniffing new prey. Accora curled beside him, as if trying to make herself small enough to disappear. The movement caught Bacchus’s attention.
“Did you miss me, mother?”
Accora lifted her head with halted, jerky movements, and when she spoke, her voice was like dry scattered leaves. “If I were your mother, I’d have drowned you in the sea as a babe and thanked the gods when your little corpse floated away.”
“Why did you seek me? You were free and now you are trapped all over again. You sent the Aluren to kill me, is that the way of it?”
“You are correct, great priest,” Jude said when Accora didn’t reply. “I found them on Isle Saliz together—”
Bacchus’s hand shot out and his fingers curled around Jude’s throat. Her face darkened immediately and Sebastian thought it was to her credit that she did not struggle, but bore his casual wrath with as much dignity as one who is being strangled can muster. Jude’s face was purple and her eyes bulged before Bacchus let go and sent her sprawling to the hard-packed earth.
“Do not speak of your failures as if they were triumphs. The Aluren was on your ship,” he said, “and in your camp. I come down to take her and instead you give me a broken man and a withered husk.”
“I bring you a valuable tool in the assassin.” Jude gasped, and scrambled to her feet. “I bring you the old one who plots against you and Selena Koren is here, on the island. She cannot escape you.”
But Bacchus had already turned his dead-eyed stare on Sebastian.
“Who is this?”
“Sebastian Vaas.”
“I know this name,” Bacchus intoned. He cocked his enormous head at him, studied him.
“Aye, my priest,” Jude said, with more energy. “He is a great assassin. Or was.”
“He stinks of fear,” Bacchus said.
“Our Vicar wishes that you purge him of that fear and return him to what he once was. What he was meant to be, in service to the Shadow face.”
Bacchus nodded his enormous head. “This I can do.”
Sebastian didn’t want to think about what that meant and fear rattled his bones when it seemed he was about to find out.
A Bazira adherent entered from the door on the other side of the chamber and muttered a few words to Bacchus that Sebastian couldn’t hear. Jude couldn’t hear either; Sebastian lifted his head enough to see the woman stride over to join them with an annoyed, if apprehensive, look on her face. Her irritation vanished as she listened. Bacchus looked pleased as well—a terrible sign—and strode out of the chamber, the Bazira in tow.
Jude returned to Sebastian’s side. Her fingers were cold and hard as gripped his jaw and jerked his head up. The ache in the back of his head flared and subsided back to dullness. He looked at her. She was beautiful like a jungle cat—a beauty that invited you to stroke her sleek softness and find instead sharp claws and tearing teeth. Marks from Bacchus’s fingers stood out on the pale skin of her neck.
She’s probably proud of them, he thought dully. Like Selena feeling blessed despite her wound. To the bloody Deeps with this god and both its faces.
Jude’s grip turned into a gentle caress over the line of his jaw. “This night has been long. Longer than I anticipated, and not half so smooth. But now it shall progress properly. The way it should.”
A scream, muffled but nearby, resounded in the earthen temple. A woman’s scream. Sebastian’s heart clenched. He looked at Jude with wide eyes. Another scream sounded on the heels of the first, jagged with agony.
“Make that stop,” Sebastian breathed.
Jude smiled. “Not yet.”