The Truth

 The first task was to gather, as quickly as possible, as much as possible of what they would need and could carry: food, a few small tools, knifes and spades, unassuming clothes, satchels and waterskins and a cooking pot, along with notched and gold bars notched and stamped so a piece could easily be cut off. Neteth sent Tex with these supplies to the stables while he marched, briskly and with the dreadful resolve of one committed to what he knows will be a painful ordeal, into the underground warrens which, like a spider's web, had held so many and released so few.

It was a cramped space with no concessions to comfort. Unlike other parts of the palace there were no quarters for the workers there, the torturers and executioner and gravedigger reserved for the king's service alone, who lived in the same quarter of the city as the butchers and other practitioners of unclean trades. The prince had been down in the cells only two or three times before, yet those visits left such an impression that he found them immediately. The guard at the entrance stepped aside, admitting him to a long room consisting of a narrow gallery flanked on each side by deep pits, some covered and others awaiting their next occupant. He walked to one of the cells and peeled back the edge of the heavy cloth.

Hati lay there, reduced to a filthy wreck, his eyes resembling those of a cornered animal more than a man as he looked up at the prince. Pale tracks stood against his cheeks where tears had cleared some of the grime.

“What did you tell them?” Neteth asked, his voice low and insistent.

The bandit only stared and at length Neteth understood there would be no answers and he stretched the cover back to its former position. A strangled, wordless sound of fear rose from the pit.

He found Asphodel in the next and lowered a rope to her. He told her to tie it around her waist and that he was going to make this right, that he would take her to safety and the act of saying it was enough to make him believe. Despite the mistrust plainly written on her face, she obeyed him. Their combined efforts were enough to pull her out, after which he tossed the rope into the hole and covered it again. There was another cry from the neighboring pit, muffled by the cover. He started to move that way, but Asphodel gripped his arm tightly.

“He can't tell you anything. He's gone mad.”

But the price pulled free and opened a space just wide enough to look at the man who was no longer an enemy, only an object to be pitied.

“I told them the truth,” the man sobbed.

“We should go.”

“She wants you dead, boy. It was her plan.”

He truly had gone mad, the prince thought. He must have named a hundred people in his desperation to escape punishment, had answered the torturers with whatever he thought they wanted to hear. Such is the way of trapped men. Neteth dismissed the words and moved on. The guard at the door did not try to stop him.

He hurried into the dim passage that led upward to freedom and all the uncertainty and hardship thereof. Asphodel ducked into an open space that was as much a niche in the wall as a room and he turned, telling her with a voice at once frustrated and placating that they couldn't waste time poking around, like a man trying to reason with a cat.

“My things are here.”

“What do you need those for?”

“They're mine,” she said, putting on the bracelets that had been taken from her, the rings and golden circlet, all of obviously foreign make. The sole concession he wrested from her was to put on a hooded cloak he had brought with him.

In the stables three mounts were waiting, loaded and harnessed. Each rider led their respective gorgonid on foot, Neteth and Asphodel and Tex, and only the latter seemed at ease, whistling as he sauntered down the corridor as though immune to the hardships of the world. Only the ignorant and the strong could so easily dismiss all thought of consequences and Neteth was not yet sure which his ally was. As they left the palace gates behind the prince fought the impulse to mount up and race away at a gallop, which would serve only to draw unwanted attention and exhaust the animals early.

Thick clouds blanketed the sky as they passed through the outer gate, towering thunderheads like the bulwark of some infernal fortress, and it was toward this storm front that they angled when at last they climbed into the saddles and left the road behind. Hours passed with no sign of pursuit, though surely their absence had been noticed. This time they would have no choice but to continue through the night, toward a horizon where lightning sparked fitfully. They had to gain as much distance as possible on the first day. The most gruesome fear Neteth had was not of being caught, but that he would stop and be unable to continue nor return, lost and trapped by some deficiency of will. He said little as they rode and if the others spoke to him he didn't notice.

The ground over which they fled seemed as open and boundless as the sea, plains over which man might sow his crops but never master for in that vastness any creation of human scale shrank to insignificance, even the great city that in time rolled beyond the horizon and was gone. The prince thought his people were pious above all others and that this must have something to do with the slice of the world they had carved out for themselves, a place mercilessly exposed to the eyes and hands of their pantheon and where the life-giving rivers were thin and sparse. The country did not forgive those who took it for granted. Even so, he had taken into his custody someone he should have despised, someone abhorrent to his gods and he wondered what they would make of him when the time came to weigh his sins on the scales of death. Unlike his excursion into the dungeon not all judgments could be so easily countermanded and some he would never know until their proscription was already executed.

Such is the nature of the beast, he thought and rode on.