“Steady the light!” Varik shouted. His grey wisps of hair were weighed down against his scalp by layers of sweat and dirt.
Kisvir did his best to hold the lantern higher, but its flames were so dim and his arms so exhausted. “I’m trying.” The defeat in his voice echoed softly against the moist rock walls surrounding the duo.
“They don’t care for trying, none, Lightyboy. You know that as well as I do.” Varik huffed as he shoveled rubble that was hopefully more iron than dirt into a waiting bucket. “A loaf of bread for two pounds of iron. And nothing for two pounds of trying. There, take it.”
Kisvir put the lamp down and made for the now full bucket, but as he was doing so Varik keeled backwards and hit him on the neck with the business end of his shovel.
“Damn!” Varik hissed as blood began gushing out of Kisvir’s neck. Seeing his warm blood commingle with the cold dirt caused instinct and training to take over and the youth quickly put his hands over his throat and said (or rather gurgled) an incantation. Kisvir felt his flesh mending beneath the palms of his hands and glanced up guiltily at the man who had struck him. The sudden realization of what he had done came to him as quickly as his flesh healed.
“It must have not been that bad…” he explained, albeit rather poorly.
“Bullshit. You magicked yourself up. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. There are worse things than having someone around that can stitch me up. Now take that gravel up and hope we eat tonight. That’s what’s on my mind right now.”
The lantern had to stay with Varik. Kisvir had to be able to navigate his way back up by rote memory, often feeling for the corpses of lantern boys whose memories had failed them as guides. Having been trained to heal, he was above rearranging their skeletal limbs to point towards the exit. Fortunately for him, other lantern boys did not hold themselves to such moral codes.
When the light of the surface did greet him, Kisvir thought it was such a shame that all it had to illuminate was the gaunt faces of other miners shuffling up and out of this pit. Once they were men, but now they shoveled dirt. Maybe some iron too if they were lucky, as it happened Varik and Kisvir were today. Three whole loaves of bread were theirs after all was said and done. The Mine Sergeant had even given him one that wasn’t badly burned.
Kisvir could have devoured one and pretended to Varik that they’d only gotten two. This thought went through his mind every day, some days more urgently than others. But it always passed by the time he got back to their bunk. They had set up camp in a shaft that they dug out a few months ago. Setting up their bunk was always about balance: Too near the surface and they might get stabbed. Too deep and they risk dying in their sleep from asphyxiation by gas.
This was the truth behind the mantra one could find etched into surfaces all across this mine-turned-prison. “The only exit is down.”
He stared at the iteration of that phrase that he himself had carved above his sleeping sack as he ate his bread. Varik whistled quietly while making his own scrapes in the wall before they agreed by unanimous vote of silence that it was time to sleep. Sleep always came quickly, but it never ended as quickly as it did on this night.
“Wake up.” someone hissed. Varik.
“What is it? Surprise search?”
“No, we’re getting out of here.”
Varik’s attitude was noticeably different from his generally careless demeanor.
“You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep.”
“Up. Now.” Varik grabbed Kisvir by the scruff of his neck and began dragging him up and off of his sack. Standing was out of the question, but Varik could drag him to a relatively upright position.
“You can’t be serious, they’ll kill us!”
“Look around you, boy! They’re already killing us! I have a plan and you’re a part of it.”
You should hit him.
“No, I’m not. My plan is sleeping.”
But Varik didn’t let go. “You’re helping me or I’m telling the Sergeant about your little magicks and your ass will be on a pike in the morning.
Definitely hit him. People die in these mines all the time. He’d be just another one.
Kisvir sighed. “I guess I don’t have a choice.”
“Come on, go.”
They wound their way back up past sleeping prisoners and what Kisvir suspected were a few fresh bodies. Finally, the glow of the Mine Sergeant’s torch greeted them as they neared the exit. He was seated at a table counting hunks of iron that had been blasted down from gravel, no doubt trying to calculate his pay. Varik inched closer to the wooden grill that separated the miners from freedom. The Sergeant noticed them but paid no mind. Prisoners came up at night all the time to beg for freedom, after all. They came up to explain why they were different. And every last one was back in the pit the next morning.
But Varik tapped something against the wooden gate that got the Sergeant’s attention. A large piece of near solid iron. How long had he been saving it? It was worth at least a few loaves of bread.
“Forgot to turn that in?”
“Fell out of the bucket. Must have.” Varik grinned obsequiously. “Any bread left?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a couple loaves.” The Sergeant got out of his chair and grabbed a few stale pieces of bread. He walked them over to swap for the iron, but as his hand touched Varik’s an odd expression came over the Sergeant’s face. And then he started to scream.
“Heal me, boy!” Varik shouted over his shoulder as the Sergeant reached for his knife and began stabbing at Varik’s hand, his arm, anything he could reach. As Kisvir crept closer, he saw that not only was Varik holding onto the Sergeant’s hand like a vice, but a strange stiffness was creeping up their warden’s arm.
“What are you waiting for?!” Varik shouted again. Kisvir sprung into action, waving his hands over Varik’s arm and muttering his healing spells. While the results would have been more satisfactory if he’d been able to touch Varik’s wounds, he bought Varik enough time to do what he needed to do. As Kisvir finished his last incantation he looked up to see the Sergeant’s very dead face frozen in a look of anguish. The man crumpled and fell back, landing amongst the loaves of bread he had been prepared to hand Varik.
Kisvir was stunned by what had just happened. His shock turned to dismay when he realized their predicament.
“What good did that do?” He cried plaintively. “The keys are on the table and we can’t reach them!”
“Oh don’t worry about that.” Varik said, giving the boy a wry smile. “I’ve got a man on the outside. Shut up, though, I need to concentrate.” Varik turned and splayed his palms towards the table that the Sergeant was slumped beneath.
“Come on, pookie.” He said affectionately as his brow furrowed in concentration. Kisvir focused on the keys, assuming that Varik was using his hitherto unknown magical prowess to summon them to him. Much to his chagrin, it became clear that the target of his concentration was their deceased captor. The Sergeant’s unblinking, unfeeling body rose up from the ground, walked clumsily over to the keys, and used them to unlock the door himself.
“Free as a bird.” Varik grinned. “Come on. Oh, shit. Wait, one more thing.”
Varik dashed back over to the mouth of the mines, mustered all his breath, and shouted.
“Sergeant dead! We’re free!”
He dashed past Kisvir. “Run or they’ll trample you, boy.”
Kisvir noted that the man was quite spry for his age. They grabbed some loaves of bread, stuffed them into their shirts, and ran like men who were paid by the mile.
They ran until Kisvir’s lungs were on fire and kept running still. When they got to a river, their bodies must have taken that as a cue to give up because they both collapsed almost simultaneously, coughing and catching their breath.
“Think we’re home free?” Kisvir asked between hacking coughs.
“Oh, gods no. They’ve got horses. Freeing the other prisoners bought us time, but a party is going to catch up to us sooner or later. Which means we have to trust each other because I’m going to have to deal with them.”
Kisvir was taken aback. “Trust each other?! You had gifts and kept that a secret this whole time!”
“Kind of like how you did? At least you tried to.”
“You knew?”
“Well, I was pretty sure. About a year ago I saw you take a cut when you thought nobody else was watching. I didn’t see you heal it then and there, but I noticed you didn’t have a scar later.”
“So you just waited til I was your Lantern boy to test the theory?”
“Waiting is foolish. I... expedited you becoming my Lantern boy. If I went through enough Lantern boys and you went through enough miners, it was a mathematical certainty I’d get you eventually.”
Kisvir fell on his back and closed his eyes. He was seeing stars. “Go through? How many did you ‘go through’?”
“I… look, kid, I just don’t keep track of things like that. When you do what I do you view death a bit differently.”
“Well, I’m a healer!” Kisvir shouted. His lungs immediately made him regret that. “I view death as an enemy.”
He opened his eyes and looked towards the river. It was choked with clay and mud. Varik chuckled. “I mean, to be fair Necromancy really is healing taken to its logical conclusions. If death is just a temporary affliction, why shouldn’t we relieve the dead of that affliction?”
“You know that’s not a proper analogy. The dead that necromancers raise are soulless. Thoughtless.”
“Well now you’re just getting philosophical. Either way, we do need to trust each other like I said.”
He parted the gray strands of hair that covered his eyes.
“So… I need you to tell me what you did.”
“Excuse me?”
“To land in that hellhole. What did you do? What did a buoyant, gods-loving, cock-sucking little healer like you do to get there?”
“I pissed someone off.”
“You? Never. You’re not the pissing off type. Could have tried to hit me on the back of the head with a rock down in the mines. I’d have killed you, but you didn’t know that at the time. Tell me what you did. Now.”
Varik’s voice had taken on a chill that made it clear he was not trifling. Suddenly, this question being asked of him next to a river didn’t seem like such a coincidence. Kisvir took a deep breath.
“I… I was healing two wounded people. One of them was, well, that is to say, both of them were dying.”
“And?”
“Well. One of them was in worse shape, but the other could maybe make it if he just had a bit more time…”
“You didn’t.”
Kisvir buried his face in his hands. “I stole life from the weaker to help the stronger live.”
“Okay, so you killed a man.”
“No!”
“Yes! You did a thing that made him dead. You killed him. End of story. Come on, let’s go. Thank gods you did some fucked up shit or I’d have had to kill you.”
“Why would you tell me that? And where are we going?”
“It’s not so much about a destination so much as it is a sort of ‘I’ll know when I’m there’ thing.”
“But that’s just something charlatans say!” Kisvir protested as he rose to his feet to follow his elder runaway.
“Just come on. We need to get to a place where we can lose the guys they’ll send after us. That’s what we’re looking for. We’re close to somewhere, I think. This river feeds an estuary. The ground gets softer on the other side. Usually a good sign. Take a drink here, the water won’t get any cleaner. Clay won’t kill you, but salt will.”
They trudged for miles. The ground did indeed grow softer until it sucked the cloth off of Kisvir’s feet and he had to trod barefoot. Not that this was substantially worse than just having cloth on his feet.
“A salt marsh? How are we supposed to lose them here? And besides, the sun’s coming up.”
“Yup. This is the place.”
Varik had a tendency to not answer questions he didn’t like.
“There’s some dry ground over here. Well, dryer. We can wait here.”
“Wait?” Kisvir tilted his head “Why not keep moving? Wouldn’t that improve our chances?”
“Nah, here is good. Just wait and I’ll tell you a story.”
As soon as he stepped onto the relatively dry patch of ground, the exhaustion of the night caught up with him and Kisvir lay down. He pulled some reeds together to form an ersatz pillow and laid his head on it.
“You ever hear of Olion the Conqueror?”
“Of course. He founded Turia.”
“Right. The magnificent Empire of Turia, whose particularly magnificent persecution we are fleeing presently. Well, when he invaded all the petty kings in the area pooled their armies together to throw him back into the sea where he landed. And you know what happened?”
“Well, I’m assuming that he probably won given his epithet as ‘The Conqueror’.”
“... Yeah.”
“Was that it?”
“Well, it was supposed to be a reveal. Stories have a build-up and you kind of killed it, but it’s fine. Look, here come our friends anyway.”
Indeed, two men on horseback were trotting their way through the muck and the mire of the salt marsh. Their demeanor was anything but friendly.
“Good thing for you they’ve got two horses, eh?” Varik nudged Kisvir with his elbow.
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Varik brushed him off before hailing their pursuers.
“Gentlemen! You’re just in time! They went that-a-way!”
He pointed off behind them. The man leading the horsed duo did not seem amused.
“You make me follow you out into this fucking marsh and try to jape with me? I’m taking you both back to that hole and leaving you with plenty of scars to remember me by.”
He scraped mud off of his face before reaching behind him for a nasty looking whip with his right hand and drawing a dagger with his left. “If you want to live to see the lashes, come quietly.”
Kisvir glanced nervously at Varik who was still sitting calmly on their semi-island.
“Alright. Back to my prison in chains, then.” the rugged catcher muttered as he dismounted, shelving the knife temporarily between his teeth, and approached them.
“Actually, you’ll be going to my prison.” Varik said calmly. He waved his hand and the otherwise still and mosquito-ridden ground in their vicinity started to shake.
“Varik?” Kisvir asked as he stood and started to back away.
“I told you, kid, stories are all about the reveal! Say hello to Olion’s enemies. And… probably some unrelated murders.”
Writhing skeletal arms in decaying ancient armor reached up and out of the mire, grasping at the overseer. A man so accustomed to weak submission from his victims was now slashing hopelessly at the dozens of decrepit arms grabbing onto him and pulling him down, down into the mud.
His comrade was similarly pulled off his horse by the writhing mass of mud and bone. The horses whinnied and would have doubtless bolted were it up to them. But the only will that mattered here was the will of the dirt and bone that Varik ushered around and on top of the two men now screaming and begging for their lives.
“The thing about my prison is that it only hands out life sentences.”
He got up and started walking over to the horses as the cries of their previous owners still gurgled up from just inches beneath the surface of the marsh. “Two horses. Two men. We’re sorted. Let’s go.”
“We don’t have shoes.”
Varik mounted his horse. “Sure we do.” He made another gesture and the arms of his servants bore the shoes of the overseers up towards him. They were, of course, drowned in mud, but then again so were Kisvir’s feet.
“Which do you want? I think either will fit me.”
Kisvir picked his way over, trying to avoid the places where he thought men might still be drowning in muck. He looked at the shoes and sighed.
“I guess I’ll take the ones that don’t have feet in them still.”
“You sure? They don’t have soles.”
“Didn’t seem to bother you before.” Kisvir muttered as he snatched the muddy prizes from their skeletal bearers and climbed onto his new horse.
“Good call. Best to wait for the mud and feet to dry out before we put them on.” Varik commented before spurring his horse onward.
Kisvir shook his head and urged his horse to follow the mud-covered man.
