Free The Ale Boy's Feast by Jeffrey Overstreet Page B

her, to ease her back to the stone. “rrMust get stronger.” He turned to the ale boy, fear in his quivering features. “Where did they go? Was Mordafey there?”
    The chamber shuddered. Dust and crumbling stone rained down all around them.
    “Feelers will find us,” said the ale boy. “We need another way out.”
    He looked out across the rising, at these bodies learning to move, these legs struggling to stand, this breath finding a rhythm again. And there was laughter, a regretful sort of laughter, as if they had all awakened from the same glorious dreamand wished they could get it back. He closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids he saw faint, swirling lines of light like fraying threads of color. He felt again as if he were floating. He heard the sound of distant, crashing water.
    “I think I know the way out.”
    Jordam shook his head. “Nowhere is safe now.”
    “You’re forgetting the deep river. Jordam, we were alone down there. The air was better. The water was cleaner. This river won’t help us, but if we follow the deeper river upstream, who knows where it will lead us?”
    Jordam looked too exhausted to lift such heavy hope. “How? Can’t carry them down. Too many. Too far.”
    The ale boy stared at the far end of the cavern where the pool narrowed and became a flowing stream again, pouring into a lightless corridor. Slender wisps of mist wavered all about that passage. “Jordam, when we were down on the deeper river, we heard waterfalls. Do you see the fog there, in that tunnel? If this current eventually falls into the river far below us … you can keep your promise. We’ll get them all out of here.”
    “But … when the river falls … how far will it fall?”
    The boy smiled feebly. “One way to know.”

5
W ARNEY F IGHTS A W OMAN
    arney remembered how the stories had whispered through House Abascar’s streets, implausible as they were. Krawg the Midnight Swindler of House Abascar could break into the king’s unbreakable vaults. He could make off with treasure even if all who knew its secret location had died. He could be in two places at once. Nothing could stop him.
    Lonely, desperate, and wanting so much that was out of reach, Warney had come to see Krawg as a figure of hope.
    When the two had become partners in robbery, most of those claims had proven untrue. Krawg was an awkward, anxious, aging thief; he looked like a fool and sounded even worse. But the myths had worked in his favor. People did not see the legend when he walked into the room, and they all but handed him their belongings. Still, the legends lived on in Warney’s mind, increasing his courage.
    His days of thievery were ancient history now. But on the morning of the day that Tabor Jan and the Abascar company set out from House Bel Amica, Warney found himself the victim of a theft. Consumed with rage and desire, he set out to regain what was taken. He forgot all about Krawg until it was too late. Captain Tabor Jan’s company had gone, leaving Warney lost for days in a world of trouble.
    This is how the story unfolded: Jes-hawk the archer—who would depart later that day with Tabor Jan’s company—woke Warney in the dark before dawn and asked for help. They crossed the long floating bridge, leaving the rock of House BelAmica behind in the Rushtide Inlet like a mighty ship tethered to a dock. The sea-wary Warney felt a deep relief as they passed through the elaborate Arch of Welcome and set foot on the mainland. But then he saw the guards, tense and quiet, standing ready.
    “Why’d you drag me out here before the sun’s done snorin’?” Warney sulked.
    “You’ve got sharp eyes.”
    “Eye.” Warney tapped the new glass sphere that filled his long-empty socket.
    “Also, I need someone who’ll recognize her.” Jes-hawk stood on his tiptoes, anxious.
    Warney looked past him into the fog-thick gloom where the raised torches that approached them bloomed like red flowers. These were miners coming from Mawrnash,