Page 16 of Six of Crows (Dregs 1)
Now Kaz gave her a nudge. “Lower your veil.” He pulled down his own mask; the long nose and bulging eyes looked doubly monstrous in the fog.
She was about to give in and ask why the costumes were necessary when she realized that they weren’t alone. Through the shifting mists, she caught sight of other boats moving through the water, carrying the shapes of other Madmen, other Brides, a Mister Crimson, a Scarab Queen. What business did these people have at Hellgate?
Kaz had refused to tell her the specifics of his plan, and when she’d insisted, he’d simply said, “Get in the boat.” That was Kaz all over. He knew he didn’t have to tell her anything because the lure of Matthias’ freedom had already overridden every bit of her good sense. She’d been trying to talk Kaz into breaking Matthias out of jail for the better part of a year. Now he could offer Matthias more than freedom, but the price would be far higher than she had expected.
Only a few lights were visible as they approached the rocky shoal of Terrenjel. The rest was darkness and crashing waves.
“Couldn’t you just bribe the warden?” she muttered to Kaz.
“I don’t need him knowing he has something I want.”
When the boat’s hull scraped sand, two men rushed forward to haul them farther onto land. The other boats she’d seen were making ground in the same cove, being pulled ashore by more grunting and cursing men. Their features were vague through the gauze of her veil, but Nina glimpsed the tattoos on their forearms: a feral cat curled into a crown—the symbol of the Dime Lions.
“Money,” one of them said as they clambered out of the boat.
Kaz handed over a stack of kruge and once it was counted, the Dime Lion waved them on.
They followed a row of torches up an uneven path to the leeward side of the prison. Nina tilted her head back to gaze at the high black towers of the fortress known as Hellgate, a dark fist of stone thrusting up from the sea. She’d seen it from afar before, when she’d paid a fisherman to take her out to the island. But when she’d asked him to bring her closer, he’d refused. “Sharks get mean there,” he’d claimed. “Bellies full of convict blood.” Nina shuddered at the memory.
A door had been propped open, and another member of the Dime Lions led Nina and the others inside. They entered a dark, surprisingly clean kitchen, its walls lined with huge vats that looked better suited to laundry than cooking. The room smelled strange, like vinegar and sage. Like a mercher’s kitchen, Nina thought. The Kerch believed that work was akin to prayer. Maybe the merchant wives came here to scrub the floors and walls and windows, to honor Ghezen, the god of industry and commerce, with soap and water and the chafing of their hands. Nina resisted the urge to gag. They could scrub all they liked. Beneath that wholesome scent was the indelible stench of mildew, urine, and unwashed bodies. It might take an actual miracle to dislodge it.
They passed through a dank entry hall, and she thought they would head up into the cells, but instead they passed through another door and onto a high stone walkway that connected the main prison to what looked like another tower.
“Where are we going?” Nina whispered. Kaz didn’t answer. The wind picked up, lifting her veil and lashing her cheeks with salt spray.
As they entered the second tower, a figure emerged from the shadows, and Nina barely stifled a scream.
“Inej,” she said on a wavering breath. The Suli girl wore the horns and high-necked tunic of the Gray Imp, but Nina recognized her anyway. No one else moved liked that, as if the world were smoke and she was just passing through it.
“How did you even get here?” Nina whispered to her.
“I came earlier on a supply barge.”
Nina ground her teeth. “Do people just come and go from Hellgate for fun?”
“Once a week they do,” said Inej, her little imp horns bobbing along with her head.
“What do you mean once a—”
“Keep quiet,” Kaz growled.
“Don’t shush me, Brekker,” Nina whispered furiously. “If it’s this easy to get into Hellgate—”
“The problem isn’t getting in, it’s getting out. Now shut up and stay alert.”
Nina swallowed her anger. She had to trust Kaz to run the game. He’d made sure she didn’t have any other choice.
They entered a tight passageway. This tower felt different from the first, older, its rough-hewn stone walls blackened by smoking torches. Their Dime Lion guide pushed open a heavy iron door and gestured for them to follow him down a steep staircase. Here the smell of bodies and refuse was worse, trapped by the sweating moisture of salt water.
They spiraled lower, into the bowels of the rock. Nina clung to the wall. There was no banister, and though she could not see the bottom, she doubted the fall would be kind. They didn’t go far, but by the time they reached their destination, she was trembling, her muscles wound taut, less from exertion than the knowledge that Matthias was somewhere in this terrible place. He is here. He is under this roof.
“Where are we?” she whispered as they ducked through cramped stone tunnels, passing dark caves fitted with iron bars.
“This is the old prison,” Kaz said. “When they built the new tower, they left this one standing.”
She heard moaning from inside one of the cells.
“They still keep prisoners here?”
“Only the worst of them.”
She peered between the bars of an empty cell. There were shackles on the wall, dark with rust and what might have been blood.
Through the walls, a sound reached Nina’s ears, a steady pounding. She thought it was the ocean at first, but then she realized it was chanting. They emerged into a curving tunnel. To her right were more old cells, but light poured into the tunnel from staggered archways on the left, and through them she glimpsed a roaring, rowdy crowd.
The Dime Lion led them around the tunnel to the third archway, where a prison guard dressed in a blue-and-gray uniform was posted, rifle slung across his back. “Four more for you,” the Dime Lion shouted over the crowd. Then he turned to Kaz. “If you need to leave, the guard will call for an escort. No one goes wandering off without a guide, understood?”
“Of course, of course, wouldn’t dream of it,” Kaz said from behind his ridiculous mask.
“Enjoy,” the Dime Lion said with an ugly grin. The prison guard waved them through.
Nina stepped under the arch and felt as if she’d fallen into some strange nightmare. They were on a jutting stone ledge, looking down into a shallow, crudely made amphitheater. The tower had been gutted to create an arena. Only the black walls of the old prison remained, the roof long since fallen in or destroyed so that the night sky was visible high above, dense with clouds and free of stars. It was like standing in the hollowed-out trunk of a massive tree, something long dead and howling with echoes.
Around her, masked and veiled men and women crowded onto the terraced ledges, stamping their feet as the action proceeded below. The walls surrounding the fighting pit blazed with torchlight and the sand of the arena floor was red and damp where it had soaked up blood.
In front of the dark mouth of a cave, a scrawny, bearded man in shackles stood next to a big wooden wheel marked with what looked like drawings of little animals. He’d clearly once been strong, but now his skin hung in loose folds and his muscles sagged. A younger man stood beside him in a mangy cape made from a lion’s skin, his face framed by the big cat’s mouth. A garish gold crown had been secured between the lion’s ears, and its eyes had been replaced with bright silver dimes.
“Spin the wheel!” the young man commanded.
The prisoner lifted his shackled hands and gave the wheel a hard spin. A red needle ticked along the edges as it spun, making a cheerful clattering noise, then slowly the wheel came to a stop. Nina couldn’t quite make out the symbol, but the crowd bellowed, and the man’s shoulders drooped as a guard came forward to unlock his chains.
The prisoner cast them aside into the sand, and a second later Nina heard it—
a roar that carried even over the excited baying of the crowd. The man in the lion cape and the prison guard stepped hurriedly onto a rope ladder and were lifted out of the pit to the safety of a ledge as the prisoner seized a flimsy-looking knife from a bloody bunch of weapons lying in the sand. He backed as far away from the mouth of the tunnel as he could get.
Nina had never seen a creature like the one that crawled into view from the tunnel. It was some kind of reptile, its thick body covered in gray-green scales, its head wide and flat, its yellow eyes slitted. It moved slowly, sinuously, its low-slung body sliding lazily over the ground. There was a white crust around the broad crescent of its mouth, and when it opened its jaws to roar again, something wet, white, and foaming dripped from its pointed teeth.
“What is that thing?” Nina asked.
“Rinca moten,” said Inej. “A desert lizard. The poison from its mouth is lethal.”
“It seems pretty slow on its feet.”
“Yes. It seems that way.”
The prisoner lunged forward with his knife. The big lizard moved so quickly Nina could barely track it. One moment the prisoner was bearing down on it; the next, the lizard was on the other side of the arena. Bare seconds later, it had slammed into the prisoner, pinning him to the ground as he screamed, its poison dripping over his face, leaving smoky trails wherever it touched his skin.
The creature dropped its weight on the prisoner with a sickening crunch and set about slowly mauling his shoulder as he lay there shrieking.
The crowd was booing.
Nina averted her eyes, unable to watch. “What is this?”
“Welcome to the Hellshow,” said Kaz. “Pekka Rollins got the idea a few years back and pitched it to the right Council member.”
“The Merchant Council knows?”
“Of course they know, Nina. There’s money to be made here.”
