The Kingmaker Contest Read online

  Footsteps and shadows came down the corridor toward her cell—a handful of people at least. Nickson was at the head of his pack of Koy-boys. “Aww, drop outta the contest ta come see me?” said Tess. “I'm touched.”

  Nickson went straight to the bars of the cell and reached in for Tess. She was just far enough away to evade him. “Where’s my gun?” Nickson demanded, getting close enough to show that he had a swollen black eye.

  “I don’t remember hittin’ ya that good,” Tess said with a grin. “But now we're matchin’.”

  Nickson pressed himself harder into the bars and managed a few extra inches. His fingertips could just brush the material of Tess’s coat, but he couldn’t reach far enough to grab her. “My gun, you trash-blooded rat! Give it to me!”

  Tess discretely patted her pockets, but found she didn’t have the gun. “What can I tell ya? Oh, I know: no, ya can’t ‘ave yer gun back.”

  “I’ll kill you!” yelled Nickson.

  Tess laughed. “With what gun?”

  Nickson backed off from the cell bars and whistled. “I can kill you a dozen different ways.” Two Koy-boys brought in a large spear and started jabbing it between the bars. Tess was dodging them, but they had her backed into a corner. After they stabbed at her again she grabbed onto the spear and tried to break it, but the wood shaft was too thick. In one swift move, the Koy-boys yanked her forward against the cell bars and Nickson grabbed her. “How easily could I kill you now?”

  “Enough!” boomed an amplified voice from the hall that was so loud, everyone pressed their palms to their ears to block out the painful echoes. Including Nickson, which allowed Tess to scurry away, covering her own ears.

  Emmen was gaunt and grey-haired—yet with a strong hairline for someone his age—and dressed in a simple brown cloak over loose-fitting clothes. He slowly shuffled, hunched, toward Nickson. He was, of course, ancient—but somehow seemed even older than the last time Tess had seen him, just yesterday.

  “Grab the spear,” Nickson yelled, with his ears still covered by his hands, in the general direction of the two Koy-boys closest to the dropped spear. Not one of his horde followed his orders.

  “Leave!” bellowed Emmen, his voice impossibly loud and so forceful it was blowing the Koy-boys’ hair, despite him appearing unstrained by the process.

  Nickson’s cronies started to leave, scrunching against the wall, fearful of Emmen as they passed. “We’re not going to fight the old mage,” one of them trembled as they left.

  “Cowards!” yelled Nickson, going for the spear.

  Emmen put his foot on the shaft of the spear, his voice returning to his usual—yet still deep—tone. “Nickson, you need to leave. You must get ready for the contest. Or would you rather kill an old man than take your chance at the crown?”

  Nickson gave up and looked at Tess. “Consider your cousin dead. Dead!” His voice echoed through the corridor as he left.

  “Even in the dungeon you are getting yourself in trouble,” Emmen said.

  “Don’t start with me, Librarian,” Tess replied.

  “Calm down, lass,” Emmen chuckled. “I’m just having some fun with you.”

  “Just get me outta ‘ere.”

  Emmen found the key. “There is plenty of time, lass.” He opened the cell. “Plenty of time.”

  Tess slammed the door open, knocking Emmen back against the outside of the cell wall, and ran down the hall toward the dungeon exit. The dungeon was only one part of a mass of underground tunnels that wound randomly and endlessly under Ironhead; Tess would need her brains and some luck to avoid getting stuck underground for hours or days. Even though she lived in Ironhead, she was unfamiliar with the underground maze—Pasqual had always been too afraid to explore the darkness, and they had spent most days together.

  Sprinting out of the dungeon corridors, her first observation was that only certain tunnels were lit by lamps, so Tess reasoned she should follow the lamps. After a few turns led her to more lit tunnels, her path dead-ended at the base of a spiral staircase. With a quick glance around, she ascended, and found herself in a corridor bathed in late morning sunlight.

  The Royal Guard

  Nagima led Theo and Dak at a pace that was hard to follow. Theo’s legs were aching and he didn’t know how much more he could take without a break, but he would do whatever Nagima told him for as long as he could manage.

  “Here we stop,” demanded Dak, voicing Theo’s sentiment, although not necessarily with the same choice of words.

  “Further,” replied Nagima.

  “Fine to stop is this place,” said Dak.

  “Not far enough off the main paths are we,” replied Nagima.

  Dak took a seat on the ground and leaned against a tree. “We stop I say.”

  Theo was exhausted and he too took a seat under a neighboring tree.

  “Not you as well,” Nagima said to Theo.

  “I’m just being efficient. If we’re stopping to argue anyway, I should rest,” said Theo.

  “Moving we must keep on,” Nagima commanded, turning back to Dak.

  “Rest Nagima,” said Dak. “Just me it is not.”

  “Safe we must be first,” Nagima replied. “Rest for the night we can, once safe.”

  “Two minutes,” said Dak.

  “Quiet,” Nagima scolded at a whisper.

  “Come on—”

  “Shhhh,” Nagima said, putting her hand to her ear to signal that they should listen.

  Two men were talking in the distance and their voices were getting louder.

  “Calm down,” one said to the other. “We’ll just tell them we thought we heard something over here and that’ll give us a good hour to relax.”

  The other laughed. “I gotta get this armor off.”

  “Go for it my friend. Take a swig of this first, though.”

  “Is that—”

  “Rum. Yeah. My dad just got back from the Brother Cities.”

  “Oh, oh, oh,” he howled. “I bet ‘e ‘ad fun.”

  “Hey, that’s my dad, mate.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I’m just messin’ with you. He had a great time.” They both laughed.

  Nagima turned to Dak and Theo. “Move now we must,” she whispered.

  “Staying put seems the least likely way to be caught,” Theo suggested.

  “No one asked you,” snapped Dak.

  “Brutal are the Royal Guard,” Nagima whispered. “Find us if they do,” Nagima paused, looking down as she breathed out and blinked slowly, trying not to get swept up in her memories of previous run-ins with the Guard. “Risk we cannot take.” Nagima led them away quietly and slowly, and when she felt they had gotten a safe distance away, she allowed them to stop and rest. “Two minutes,” she said.

  “How much further?” Theo asked. “My muscles are quite fatigued.”

  “Very close we are, if to Danaje’s altar we are going,” replied Dak. Nagima nodded in agreement. “One hour—before the sun is down, there we will be.”

  Nagima knelt down by Theo and rolled up the bottoms of his torn trousers. “Bad these scratches,” she whispered. “Feel better in three days you will. Fully healed I think in one week.” She took a salve out of her cloak and applied it to his wounds. “Soothe the pain while you heal this will.”

  “I hope yer Sigandar whore took real good care of ya,” interrupted a Royal Guard, pointing his blunderbuss through the trees at Theo and Nagima. “‘Cus I need a tender woman in my bed.”

  Dak leapt to his feet but felt the jab of a pistol in his back and heard the click of the hammer being pulled. “I wouldn’t get any ideas. We got you well surrounded. Ain’t that right, Captain?”

  Dozens more men revealed themselves, stepping out from the shade of the trees. “Just about gave up on you,” said the captain as he approached Theo. His armor was more embellished than the others, and he was the only man with a sword on his belt. “You look mighty fine for a boy who fell down a mountainside. Here we w
ere looking for a body and we’re going to be bringing back a living boy. What do ya think of that?”

  “Sounds like good eats!” offered one of the men from the back.

  “Indeed,” agreed the captain. “Rope ‘em up.”

  “I’m the ward of the Governor of Rigol,” said Theo.

  “We know,” replied the captain. “Yer daddy's real worried about ya.”

  “I’m not his son. I’m in Losik’s charge; I’m the ward of the king,” corrected Theo. “Stop immediately,” he demanded.

  The guards laughed. “Wouldn’t want you going anywhere, would I?” replied the captain.

  “When Losik hears—”

  “He’ll be so happy yer alive he won’t care how we got it done.”

  The Royal Guards tied up Theo and Nagima without further incident, but Dak tried to fight them off. The men laughed. “Look at the cripple fight!” yelled one of them. Eventually they beat Dak to the ground. The guards dragged them all to a more traveled path where they had horses waiting.

  Five horses were tied up in a stand of trees. Unconscious, gagged, tossed over, and tied to two of the horses’ back hips were the rum-drinking guards they had tried to avoid. The drunks had been battered and bruised since their last encounter. The Royal Guard soldiers tied Theo, Nagima, and Dak to the other three horses in the same fashion. Not even Dak tried to fight anymore after seeing the bloodied faces of the other captives.

  “This is how I lost my hand,” warned Dak. “A group of raper thugs just like these guards. They’ll do whatever they want to whomever they want.”

  “Shut up,” yelled the captain.

  “I’m not going to get locked up,” Dak shuddered. “Not again.”

  “I said shut up!” The captain unsheathed his sword and whipped Dak on the back with the flat side of its blade, all while expertly maintaining control of the horse they were on.

  Dak was terrified. His heart was racing and beating so hard he thought it might burst from his chest.

  Theo could hear Dak’s heartbeat very clearly, and it was slowly drowning out all the other sounds around him. “Don’t worry, Dak, I won’t let them put you back in a cell.” Theo could feel Dak’s fear. He knew everything about it in that moment. Nothing terrified Dak more than the prison he’d lived in for five long years. Memories plagued Dak’s mind: people fighting over food and water, the smell of bodily fluids, holding in his tears at night so no one could hear him. Theo could see the memories, feel them—he might as well have lived them. The pain and the fear were real to Theo, tangible in this moment, and he could hear a second heartbeat growing: his own.

  Theo’s heartbeat was calm compared to Dak’s, but it was growing faster and becoming more erratic with every pulse in and out. His heartbeat became identical to Dak’s, but only for a fraction of a second. As soon as their heartbeats matched, Theo’s heart began to seize. It felt similar to the anger he had felt after he was in the Mother’s mind—his heart was being wrung out by an invisible hand. It was cold, however, and all the fear that he had taken from Dak was fading away from both of them just as quickly as Theo had felt it come on.

  Dak looked relieved as the fear faded, his face muscles relaxing. When his eyes caught Theo’s, a question rose on his brow.

  The horses whinnied and swerved wildly around the mountainous path. The Royal Guard soldier riding the horse Theo was tied to suddenly threw off his helmet and grabbed his neck, gasping for breath. His horse collided with a tree, launching the rider into the air—but the ropes kept Theo in place. The horse hit the ground, flailing in panic, and Theo tried desperately to break free from the binding tying him to the thrashing beast.

  Dak managed to wriggle free from his restraints easily after his rider’s horse also fell to the ground—one advantage of shorter limbs. Still in the seat of the horse, the Royal Guard captain was lifeless. Dak grabbed the captain's sword between his short right stump and his long left stump, and pulled the sword awkwardly from its scabbard. He hobbled over and helped Theo use it to cut himself free.

  “Where’s Nagima?” Dak asked.

  Theo looked around. There were far more guards in the caravan than he had realized. Theo hadn’t seen so many when they started—perhaps they had joined up somewhere as they traveled down the path.

  He thought their caravan was small, but dozens of horses and close to a hundred men lay motionless on the forest floor, dead. Their bodies spread out in all directions. Some of the men had their helmets removed, and their faces were stuck, contorted, in the most horrible positions.

  Dak spotted Nagima a few yards away and immediately ran to her. Both her legs were pinned under a horse, and neither her nor the horse were moving. “Bring the sword!” Dak yelled. Theo picked up the sword and ran after Dak to Nagima’s side. Theo cut the ropes binding her to the horse, and Dak rammed his broad shoulders into the beast, grunting as he pushed the horse with everything he had. The horse weighed a ton, but Dak was making progress and Theo pulled Nagima the remaining distance to freedom.

  Theo turned Nagima onto her back. Dak lifted his long arm into the air and pounded her chest four times with his stump, stopped; pounded four more times, stopped; and repeated until Nagima choked air into her lungs. She coughed before she took several huge breaths in and out. “She’s alive!” Theo exclaimed.

  Nagima looked around at the hundreds of dead men and horses. “Happened here what has?” she asked.

  Dak looked to Theo, his expression a mix of wonder, confusion, anxiety, and relief that echoed many of Theo’s own feelings. “Dak was afraid…” replied Theo, distracted by the horror of death around him.

  “Blame you not this on me,” said Dak.

  “You were terrified to go back to the Wall,” said Theo, his attention turning more fully to Dak.

  “How in Her name did you know I was in the Wall?” Dak asked.

  “I believe I was connected to you,” Theo said. “I’m not sure what the Wall is, but I know that it’s dark, smells like excrement, and people kill each other for sustenance.”

  Dak’s face went blank. “This doesn’t make any sense.” He walked a few feet away and paced.

  “After I connected with Dak,” Theo said to Nagima. “All of his terror flowed out of me and…”

  “To us it flowed.” With a flash of realization, Nagima finished Theo’s thought. “Remember do I. Cold my heart felt and then… like when the hatchet Onqul pulled from her cloak, before she…” Nagima took a breath. “Stretched out over an eternity was this time of coldness. Breathe I could not.” She stepped toward Dak and hugged him tight, stopping his pacing. “Saved me you did.”

  “The technique you taught me at Bottomless Lake I used,” said Dak.

  “The diver technique?” Nagima asked. “Brilliant!”

  “To you returns the thanks.”

  Nagima stood up, a clear resolve wiping the pleasant surprise from her face. “Move we must, if before dark we are to arrive at the altar.”

  Theo was distracted by something off to the left in the trees.

  “Wrong is something?” asked Nagima.

  He pointed, turning right to Dak and Nagima for only a second before he was struck by the realization. “We need to travel there,” he announced. Through the trees, a mountain peak dominated the view, rising from the surrounding trees like a monolith. “The Mother showed me that mountain, and I know we must go there.”

  Dak laughed. “Well if you hadn’t killed all these guards, that’s where you would have gone. That’s Ironhead.”

  Theo gawped at Ironhead in the distance. “I knew people called it the mountain fortress,” said Theo in awe. “That is literally an entire mountain. I believe no drawing exists of it from this angle.”

  “The greatest fortress ever built,” said Dak with a slight tinge of admiration. “And it’s filled with royals and rapers and all the worst kinds of people.”

  “Losik will provide safety,” said Theo.

  “No one cares what happens to us,” said D
ak. “You’ll be fine, but we'll be killed.”

  “I won’t let them lock you in prison,” Theo said.

  “She's Sigandar and I'm useless to them—”

  “Matters not this chatter you make. Move we should before dark,” Nagima interrupted. “At the altar will be time to argue.”

  “We weren’t arguing,” said Theo.

  “Great,” replied Nagima with a flat tone. “No excuse you have to not move.”

  The ground was treacherous, rocky, and steep the further they got from the forest path. When they came to the edge of a cliff, Theo started to slow down but Nagima kept going at the same speed all the way to the edge, spun around on her knees, and climbed over. Theo carefully peered over and saw her drop to a thin ledge below, just barely wide enough to stand on.

  “How are we going to do this?” asked Theo.

  Dak turned his back to the cliff. “I don’t know how you’re planning on getting down,” he said before hopping a few inches back, edging his heels off, then springboarding himself back while leaning slightly forward, his nose nearly scraping against the mountainside as he dropped. Dak landed on the thin ledge below; Nagima was ready to grab him, but Dak didn’t need any help.

  “Hang off and fall,” Nagima yelled up. “Good handhold I have. Pull you in I will.”

  Theo looked down and his vision narrowed. The hundred-foot drop looked more like a thousand feet as memories of falling from the carriage filled his mind. Although a lifetime of events had happened between, it had only occurred earlier that day. The trauma was still fresh, and the ledge below seemed to stretch even further away from him the longer he stared.

  “Good grip I have got,” said Nagima, more emphatically this time. “Catch you I will. Promise I do.” She was trying to be sensitive, but Theo could feel the urgency buried in her tone.

  Theo’s eyes stayed glued to the massive drop below.

  “Theo,” Nagima commanded. “Theo, at me look.” Theo wrenched his eyes over to her. “Trust you can in me.”

  Theo’s eyes were falling away from Nagima’s. Jagged rocks poked out from the mountainside, and trees littered the rocky floor below. “Look at me you must,” she yelled. Theo snapped back to attention. “Catch you I will. Chance to live you have if you climb down. Death is guaranteed if you stay. Find you Onqul will.”