Jenna Helland - The Fanged Crown

“I’ve never seen half these tracks before,” Verran said, kneeling down and poking at the ground with a stick. “See those hoof prints? I’d say they’re wild boar. But look, they’ve got an extra toe.”

“What do you know about wild boar?” Boult said dubiously.

Verran looked embarrassed. “My father liked to go hunting. Before he died, he used to show me things.”

Boult glared at Harp, who avoided his gaze. It would take an act of outright treachery for Harp to see that there was something suspicious about a boy who could unintentionally melt the skin off a man. Boult wasn’t fooled by Verran. He might act like he was lost and confused, but he was taller than Harp and built like a blacksmith. A youth didn’t have muscles like that unless he had done something hard to earn them.

“I can see … six different cat tracks,” Verran said excitedly. Kitto knelt down beside Verran to inspect the mud.

“I used to have a cat,” Kitto told Verran.

“So did I,” Verran said. “It was a fat tabby.”

“Mine was gray,” Kitto said.

Boult couldn’t believe what he was hearing. At this rate, the boys would be skipping stones and laying out a picnic. Boult looked at Harp incredulously and saw that Harp was trying hard not to smile.

“Is that what you wanted to show us, Verran?” Harp inquired gently.

“There are human footprints. There,” Verran told him.

Boult looked closer and saw a series of tracks that were unmistakably from a barefoot humanoid, and a smallish one at that.

“Another dwarf?” Harp asked. “Like the one we saw in the hollow?”

Verran shook his head and crouched down for a better look. “I don’t think so. Usually they have a lower arch and the bone below the big toe sticks out more. Look, they go back up.” Verran followed the tracks up the muddy slope in the direction of the door.

“And just what was young Master Verran doing tracking dwarves through the wilderness with his father,” Boult said in a low voice.

Kitto frowned. “Verran’s all right,” he said.

“Yeah, Boult,” Harp said. “Keep your wits about you. Maybe it was perfectly innocent.”

“Sure, they were all going to frolic together like wood nymphs,” Boult snapped.

“Can’t a man just stalk a dwarf for the joy of it?” Harp said. “Why do you have to make it sound all nefarious?”

“Why don’t you go chew on the pointy end of your sword, Harp?” Boult growled.

“I lost my sword, remember?” Harp replied.

“Quit it,” Kitto said sternly. They trudged up the slope to where Verran was waiting.

“Well, there’s nothing to do but go inside,” Boult said after Verran pointed out how the footsteps disappeared on the dry ground in front of the door.

“Someone needs to wait out here and watch the door,” Harp said. “Any volunteers?”

“I will,” Kitto said.

“No, I will,” Verran said. “I don’t like dark, enclosed places.”

“All right,” Harp said. “Shout if you see something.”

Stepping off to one side, Harp pushed gently against the door. It wasn’t locked and swung open with a loud squeal.

“Another stellar move by Captain Harp,” Boult sneered as they stared into the gloom of the cavern. “Nothing like rusty hinges to announce your presence.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Harp said sarcastically. “Of course, you would have thought to put a spot of lamp oil on the hinges first.”

Harp took a step forward, but Boult shook his head. “You’ve got the night vision of an old man. Let me.”

Harp put out his arm to stop Boult. “And you’re about as stealthy as a cat in heat. Let me.”

They hadn’t gone more than a few steps down the passageway when they saw an open doorway on the left side of the corridor. A long line of thick-barred, low-ceilinged cages lined one wall of the dank room. Shackles were bolted to their slick floors, and bones and hunks of fur—some of which still had rotting flesh clinging to them—littered the cramped cages. Harp’s haggard face had gone from tan to pale, and the ruddy scars crisscrossing his features stood out against his wan skin. Harp leaned one hand against the wall as if he were trying to regain his balance. Boult understood—he was having some unpleasant recollections of the Vankila Slab himself.

“I swore I’d cut out my own eyes before I’d go back to prison,” Harp said to Boult. “Particularly before I’d go back to prison with you.”

“But then you’d be stupid and ugly,” Boult replied. “And if you’ll notice what side of the bars we’re on, we’re not in prison.”

“Yet,” Harp said grimly.

The Vankila Slab was a prison in the sky. Built by a joint effort of the Houses of Amn, it had been constructed on a barren mote, a massive slab of earth floating above Murandinn. The ogres who were charged with running the prison were given enough gold and slave labor to construct four sky-scraping round towers connected by raised walkways. Without anything except the sky to offer perspective, the towers looked taller than they were, almost as if they might slide off the edge of the mote and go smashing into the ground hundreds of feet below without turning once. More than one prisoner held onto that fantasy—that the filthy walls of their prison tip into the airy abyss, taking their captives with them.

Originally, the Vankila Slab housed spellcasters who had defied Amn’s ban on using magic or members of well-connected families who had fallen out of favor with Amn’s ruling houses. But within ten years of building the prison, the political sensibilities in Amn shifted, and the Vankila Slab fell into the hands of a single faction that had its fingers deep in the murky politics of both Amn and Tethyr. Soon the prison became a mercenary operation that took the most dangerous criminals off the hands of the law and political prisoners off anyone who would pay.

Around that time, the wardens of the Vankila Slab discovered that the floating mote under their prison was filled with gemstones, and with an endless supply of free labor at their disposal they began to unearth the unexpected riches. From then on, the prisoners spent their days mining the gems with hand tools or spoons or their bloody fingernails—whatever they had on any particular day. Within a few decades, the gems were mostly mined out, but the overseers didn’t want idle prisoners, so they kept them digging. On average, a prisoner came across a gem once a month, which earned them a hunk of meat with their gruel and little else but an early death from constant work in the scorching open ground known as the Turf.

By the time Harp left Liel and Kitto in a cove on the Moonshaes and turned himself over to the Amnian agents, the Vankila wardens were pursuing other uses for their prisoners. The faction that controlled the prison allowed select mages access to their prisoners, but only mages who practiced a certain kind of magic that might be useful to the wardens in the future. The mages needed space to study and conduct their experiments, so the wardens constructed a fortress high above the surface of the mote using the four existing towers as a foundation. From the ground, the prisoners could see only the bottom of the fortress—a rectangle that spanned the distance between the towers and cast half the mote into darkness. The prisoners resented the loss of the sun, and soon rumors of dark rituals and sacrifices swept through the inmates, who called the soaring fortress the Sky Tomb.

It was in the Sky Tomb that an elder mage known as the Practitioner set up shop. He wasn’t always in residence at the Vankila Slab. Rather like a traveling scholar, he came and went, but his experiments were legendary. Like most of the mages, he wasn’t interested in the criminally minded, who were too hard to handle. Rather he turned his attentions to the inmates who were in prison for political reasons, almost all of whom were some race other than human.