Jenna Helland - The Fanged Crown

When Harp had turned himself in to the authorities, he had known nothing about the Practitioner or the Sky Tomb, although he had heard fireside tales of a floating prison so brutal that even birds wouldn’t approach its shores. After he was taken from the Moonshae Isles in chains, Harp was put in the hold of a prison ship, which sailed to Amn. Harp expected to face a tribunal and be given the standard punishment for mutiny—a year of hard labor. Instead, he was brought to the Vankila Slab without ever seeing a magistrate. When the hood was taken off, Harp found himself among the notorious and deranged in the very prison that had housed Amhar, Scourge of Tethyr, and Mencelas the Reaper, to name the worst of the worst.

During his first days on the Turf, Harp noticed that the guards patrolled the edges of the mote more carefully than anywhere else. When he asked the emaciated man next to him why that was, the man startled at the sound a human voice. Pawing at the open sores on his neck, the man glanced at Harp suspiciously. His bleary gray eyes darted from side to side with seemingly involuntary jerks that made Harp wonder how the man could see anything clearly.

“Keeps us from jumping, doesn’t it?” the man whispered before returning to his digging.

During his first nights in the Vankila Slab, Harp’s mind settled on Liel in a way that was both comforting and disturbing. He couldn’t keep his mind from replaying the days he was with her and the nights he spent in her arms. Sometimes it was simply too much, like a noose that slowly tightened around his throat. He alternated between regret and anger, and the undeniable hope that she would figure out where they had stashed him and find a way to get him out of the hellhole in the clouds.

A tenday after he arrived, the Vankila Slab still seemed like a brutal dream, and Harp kept expecting to wake up and find himself back in the sun-dappled forest on Gwynneth Isle with Liel and Kitto. He had been digging under the red sun for a couple of hours when an ogre approached him barking orders. Although he didn’t know the language, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the ogre wanted Harp to stand up and follow him. Harp happened to be working near a group of dwarves that morning, and he saw them exchange glances.

The ogre tied Harp’s hands behind his back, and all the while, the clutch of dwarves watched with great interest, surprising and unnerving Harp. One of the gaunt dwarves spoke up.

“Look for me later,” the dwarf said. “I’ll help you.”

The ogre raised his fist and cuffed the nearest face, not caring whether he was the dwarf who had spoken or not. Then they headed for the nearest tower as the ogre jerked Harp along behind him. Knowing the risk the dwarf had taken in speaking up, Harp felt a chill despite the heat of the day. The ogre walked Harp off the Turf and into the darkness of the gated yard below the Sky Tomb. As he had done many times before, Harp tipped his head back to look at up the fortress and wondered what went on so high above the ground. He was about to find out. After climbing the long staircase to the Sky Tomb, the ogre led Harp into a spacious, attractive anteroom—the exact opposite of the conditions on the Turf. With golden struts framing walls of rose-colored glass, the anteroom looked more like a sanctuary than a tomb. The morning light filtered through the glass ceiling and cast the air in a soothing red glow. It would have been beautiful if there hadn’t been such a sinister feel to the silence.

The ogre took him through a door, up a flight of stairs, and into a circular room covered by a rose-colored dome. Judging from the unspoiled view of the landscape and the heavens, it was the highest point in all of the Vankila Slab. An older, gray-haired man sat at a large wooden desk with his head bent over a parchment, the curled ends of which were held flat with blue crystals. He wore a black skullcap and wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. When they entered the room, he peered at them momentarily over his spectacles, but he returned to his reading as if he had little interest in his visitors.

Except for the glass walls, the room reminded Harp of a study at an academy of arcane teaching. There were bookshelves set into trenches along the floor and ladders to get down to them. A long table laden with pots filled with yellow and red flowers ran the length of the eastern window. In the center of the room was a simple wooden chair.

The ogre shoved him into the chair and tied one hand and his feet to the rungs of the chair, which was bolted to the floor. The ogre clamped a leather cuff lined with matted fur around Harp’s other wrist. The cuff was attached to a long chain that was also bolted to the floor. The chain allowed Harp some movement of his arm, but not enough to strike out. As the ogre checked the knots on the ropes, Harp noticed a strange scent like a mixture of burning hair and honey. After the ogre left, the older man continued to sit at his desk, sipping tea and reading until Harp got tired of waiting for something to happen.

“You got problems with birds hitting the glass?” he finally asked.

At the sound of Harp’s voice, the man closed his book and gave him an amused smile.

“So, Master Harp. You made some people very angry.”

“Apparently.”

The man picked up a ceramic bowl from the table and carried it over to Harp. Inside, a white cloth floated in soapy water.

“Please wash your face and hand,” the man said, still looking vaguely amused.

At first, Harp thought about refusing, but decided against it. It was just water after all.

“Are you my judge or my executioner?” Harp asked, tossing the grubby cloth back into the bowl. The man set the bowl next to the flowers and turned back to Harp.

“Maybe a little of both,” the man said, sounding appreciative at Harp’s question.

“Since when are mutineers put in Vankila? It’s overkill, don’t you think?”

The man tipped his head and peered down at his prisoner. “Are you guilty?”

“Of mutiny?” Harp asked.

“Of anything.”

“Are we having a philosophical conversation? Because I’ve got to warn you, I’ve never had much use for books,” Harp said. He had a feeling the conversation wasn’t a discussion on the nature of a guilty soul.

“A pity. Books offer so much. There are some who find enough joy in learning to last an entire lifetime. It’s such a pure way to spend one’s time. Don’t you think?”

Harp said nothing. The man walked over to his desk, rolled up the parchment that he had been reading, and tucked it inside a drawer.

“I expected to devote my life to study, but instead I became distracted by other pursuits. But you haven’t answered my question. Are you guilty?”

“Is my confession necessary for whatever is about to happen?”

“No, I just find it interesting how people handle pain.”

So there was going to be pain. Harp wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.

“Life is pain,” the man told him with the same amused expression on his aged face. “Have you learned that yet?”

Harp took a deep breath. He’d seen Predeau torture enough people to have an idea of what was coming. Oddly, it was the serene surroundings that unnerved him the most. He wondered if the ogre was coming back and if he was bringing tools.

“If someone else is the cause of your pain, you feel as though you are a martyr. But if you have caused your misery through your own actions, then you are complicit in the agony. The men who are murderers, well, they know they deserve it. But the men who are here for their beliefs are different. The pain builds a self-righteous fire in them—at least at first.”

“I don’t deserve to be tortured for my crime.”