Free The Ale Boy's Feast by Jeffrey Overstreet

guarding the Core anymore. So the feelers are rising to protect this place
. He grabbed Kar-balter’s wagging beard and held a finger to his lips.
    They let the current carry them.
    The tentacle slowly retreated into the water. Then a swarm of limbs rose and slithered against the current back toward the tunnel’s entrance.
    The raft rounded a bend. Kar-balter reached into the sludge and hauled up a two-ended oar. He snapped it over his knee and gave half to the boy. Without a word they paddled, propelling themselves into the Core.
    The river broadened, and they drifted into a swirling pool, then came to rest against the edge of a stone plate that jutted out over the water. Jordam waved a torch from the edge of it. The ale boy could see that the beastman had recovered two of the damaged boats from their failed escape.
    He kept his eyes on his scowling friend. He did not want to see what torchlight revealed in the shadows. As Jordam had carried him up from the river at the bottom of the abyss, he had glimpsed the stacked bodies of those who had fallen when the red-armored Strongbreed attacked.
    One image burned in his mind’s eye—a white face and a white arm, fallen outward from the bodies as if reaching for him. Nella Bye’s golden hair spilled down. Nella Bye, who had moved among the Cent Regus slaves as a gentle comforter.
    He had seen her arrested in House Abascar. He had come to collect hajka peppers from the garden alongside her house, only to find a duty officer stuffing his pockets with them. The officer fled, but Nella Bye pursued him, demanding that he empty his pockets in front of onlookers. Instead, the officer arrested her for growing the peppers in plain sight—he insisted that the colorful array was an open act of rebellion against Abascar’s “wintering.” Due to his high rank, he was given permission to cast her outside the walls to live as a Gatherer, condemned until she could earn her way back into safety.
    Living among the Gatherers, Nella Bye might have withdrawn in bitterness. Instead, she had served the others with motherly grace. Now she was cast aside like rubbish.
    As Jordam secured the raft, he saw their anxious backward glances. “rrTrouble?”
    They heard a rumble like an avalanche upriver. Black dust wafted downstream, and they shielded their faces.
    “Feelers,” Kar-balter squealed.
    Jordam’s teeth gleamed in the torchlight. “rrNeed a new way out.”
    A feeble sound like a cough silenced him. Kar-balter turned and squinted toward the darkness where the dead were piled.
    “Don’t look at the bodies,” whispered the boy. But then the cough recurred, and there was a rustle of cloth.
    Kar-balter’s emaciated face twitched as he tried to make sense of what he saw.
    Jordam knelt beside the boy. “rrDon’t run.”
    “Nella Bye?” Kar-balter said.
    When a feeble voice answered “Yes,” the ale boy turned, astonished.
    Like weary travelers rising before dawn, shapes were crawling from the pile. Nella Bye’s hands were flat on the stone, her hair trailing to the floor. As she crawled toward them, she patted the floor before her cautiously, unseeing.
    “It’s the Curse,” hissed the boy.
    “No,” said Jordam.
    Nella Bye raised her head. Her eyes were bright, and while her face was still grey as a fish, a thin and ragged breath escaped her lips. Then she came to her knees and clasped the arrowshaft protruding from her belly, looking surprised.
    “rrWait!” Jordam shouted. He thrust the heavy torch at the ale boy, then hurried to kneel beside the struggling woman. “rrWait.”
    “Beastmen. Arrows.” Her hands closed on Jordam’s forearm. “Save us.”
    Others—the boy counted eleven—squirmed and wheezed, trying to rise. They stared in confusion at the arrows bristling from their bodies and their bloodied rags. They fingered the edges of deep gashes. Some sucked in air as if they had been drawn from drowning. And they looked about with the bewildered expressions of