Location: The Dungeons of Fubar Palace, Levels Two Through Seven
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
The stairwell bled them out into a passage so cold and so black that Nathily’s torch seemed, for one disorienting moment, to illuminate nothing at all — as though the dark down here had a texture and a weight the flame simply couldn’t push against. She held it aloft anyway, waiting for her eyes to adjust, and slowly the shapes of the passage resolved around them: raw stone, unworked and older than the palace built atop it, water beading and dripping somewhere unseen with a steady, patient rhythm that would come, before this night was through, to feel like the pulse of the whole dungeon breathing.
Emcorae said nothing. He hadn’t said much of anything since the reading room door had finally splintered open above them — Nathily could still hear, in memory, the confusion of shouted orders and Holms’s own thin voice pitched to carry a lie, and she prayed with everything left in her that the lie had held. There was no way to know from here. There was only the stair ahead, and the map folded in her fist, and the low, constant drip of water keeping count of seconds they didn’t have to spare.
“This way,” she murmured, tracing Holms’s ink lines by torchlight. “Service corridor runs beneath the kitchens, comes up near the dungeon’s western foyer. If his map’s honest, we avoid the main barracks entirely.”
It was honest, as far as it went. Twice they froze at the sound of boots — once a lone guard, humming tunelessly to himself as he made his rounds, dispatched before he’d finished the second verse by Nathily’s falchia sliding between his ribs from the shadow of an alcove, so clean a strike that he was on the floor before the tune had left his throat entirely. Once a pair, deep in some low argument about back wages, and this time it was Emcorae who moved first — no subtlety to it at all, a hand clamped over one man’s mouth and a katana opened across his throat in the same motion, while Nathily’s blade found the second before he’d even registered his companion was dying. Brutal, fast, wordless. The kind of violence that had become, over these past two months, simply another language they both spoke fluently and without pleasure.
They left the bodies where they fell. There was no time left to be gentle with the dead.
The Foyer
The dungeon’s western entrance, when they reached it, should have been a guardroom bristling with watchmen — every instinct honed across a hundred leagues of Diked’s hunting grounds told Nathily as much. Instead they found it empty. A table scattered with half-eaten food gone cold. A brazier burned down to embers. Chains hanging from iron rings in the wall, swaying very slightly, as though someone had left in a hurry and forgotten to still them.
And beneath all of it, rising up through the stone floor itself like heat from a forge, came the sound.
Screaming. Not one voice, not even a dozen, but a whole chorus of them, layered and overlapping and utterly without rhythm — sobbing bleeding into raving bleeding into something with no words left in it at all, a cacophony that seemed to come from everywhere in the stone at once, as though the dungeon itself had learned to scream on its inmates’ behalf. Nathily’s stomach turned. Beside her, Emcorae’s hand tightened on his katana’s grip until his knuckles went white.
“Why is nobody guarding this?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.” Nathily didn’t like not knowing. She liked it considerably less a moment later, when her torch found the second stairwell Holms’s map had marked — a narrow, spiraling shaft descending directly through the dungeon’s heart, bypassing five entire levels in a single vertical drop from the second floor straight to the eighth. “This. This is our way down. If it’s real.”
“Everything down here is real,” Emcorae said grimly, already moving toward it. “That’s rather the problem.”
Level Two — The Lash
The stairwell opened onto the second level through a landing barely wide enough for the two of them to stand shoulder to shoulder, and what they saw through the bars beyond stopped them both cold.
A warden — thick-necked, sweat-slicked despite the dungeon’s chill, his tunic marked with the palace’s fading crest — stood over a prisoner chained spread-eagled against the far wall, a leather lash coiled in one meaty fist. He struck without any particular urgency, almost bored by it, each crack of leather against flesh punctuated by a wet, ragged gasp from the prisoner that had long since stopped sounding like pain and started sounding like something closer to surrender.
Nathily’s falchia was half out of its sheath before she’d fully decided to draw it. Something about the lash’s lazy, unhurried rhythm — the sheer boredom in it, as though the man on the wall were furniture rather than flesh — had cut through every careful instinct she’d spent a lifetime cultivating, and for one dangerous heartbeat she was already calculating the angle of approach, the two strides it would take to put her blade through the warden’s spine before he so much as turned.
Emcorae’s hand closed hard around her forearm, stopping her cold. “No.”
“Emcorae, look at what he’s—”
“I see it.” His voice was low, rough, and — she realized with something like shock — steadier than her own. “And I want his throat opened every bit as much as you do. But we are eight levels from where we need to be, with a hundred more of exactly this waiting between here and there, and if you mean to put a blade through every man who’s earned it in this pit, we will still be fighting when the sun comes up and Barkla will still be in chains.” He held her gaze, unflinching, though his jaw was tight enough to crack. “You told me this yourself an hour ago. We save Barkla. We save ourselves. That is the only arithmetic that gets anyone out of here alive — even you don’t get to spend us on every soul that deserves saving.”
Nathily’s hand trembled on her hilt. It cost her more than she would have liked to admit to slide the blade back into its sheath, and even then some coiled, furious part of her didn’t want to look away from the warden’s raised arm, from the prisoner’s next helpless gasp. “This is going to haunt me,” she said, very quietly. “Walking past this.”
“Good,” Emcorae said, already drawing her back toward the stair. “Let it haunt you. It should. That means you’re still you.” The warden never saw them at all, too absorbed in his own small, wretched tyranny to notice two shadows passing behind him in the dark.
A mercy for him, that ignorance — though I confess I’d have enjoyed watching Nathily collect on it. I’ve seen what her blade does when properly motivated, and I don’t believe that particular warden’s spine would have survived the introduction.
Level Three — The Legate
The third level’s horror wore a different, stranger face. Where the second had reeked of ordinary cruelty, the third felt, if anything, worse for how carefully it had been dressed up as something else entirely.
A man paced the cellblock’s central aisle in a garment that could only be called a toga — bleached linen draped and pinned with an absurd, meticulous care, a laurel of dried leaves crowning a head shaved bald and gleaming with lamp-oil. He walked with a strange, high-kneed, goose-stepping gait, chin lifted, addressing the huddled prisoners in their cells as though delivering a senate address to a rapt and adoring crowd rather than a row of starving men too terrified to meet his eyes.
“—and so Legate Voss decrees,” the man was saying, in a voice pitched for an amphitheater rather than a dungeon corridor, “that the ration of level three shall be reduced, on account of the disrespect shown yesterday by cell nine, who did not applaud my address on the nobility of suffering as thoroughly as decorum demands—”
Somewhere down the row, a man wept, quietly, without hope, and none of the other prisoners so much as glanced toward him for fear of drawing the Legate’s rapt attention themselves.
Nathily felt something cold settle in her stomach that had nothing to do with the dungeon’s chill. Whatever this man had been before — warden, soldier, some minor functionary handed a floor and a title — something down here had cracked him entirely and rebuilt him into this small, mad emperor of a kingdom four cells wide. He was, in his way, more frightening than the man with the lash. The lash, at least, was honest about what it wanted.
They slipped past on the narrow service walk behind the cellblock, torch shuttered low, and the Legate never broke stride in his address, never once suspecting that two armed strangers had passed within ten feet of his little bald head and its ridiculous crown of leaves.
Levels Four Through Six
What followed, level by level, blurred into something Nathily would spend a long time afterward trying not to remember too clearly. The fourth held silence, worse somehow than either level above it — cells packed shoulder to shoulder with prisoners who no longer screamed at all, who simply stared, hollow-eyed, as the two intruders passed, too broken even to wonder who they were or why they’d come. The fifth held fire — some warden’s cruel invention involving heated iron and a man’s bare feet, and Emcorae’s hand found his blade again before Nathily’s grip on his arm stopped him a second time, the argument between them by now unspoken, understood, a debt they both knew they were accumulating and would have to answer for later, in whatever life came after this one. The sixth held nothing they could afterward describe in words at all — only sound, only the cacophony rising and rising around them, screams and sobs and raving laughter tangled into a single continuous roar that seemed to come from the stone itself, until Nathily found she was gripping Emcorae’s sleeve without any memory of having reached for it.
The stench thickened with every level — waste and rot and something underneath both that she didn’t want to name, a slaughterhouse smell that clung to the back of the throat and refused to leave even after they’d passed the source of it three cells behind. Twice their torch guttered low enough that Nathily’s heart seized, certain the flame would fail entirely and leave them stranded in that black, screaming dark with nothing between them and whatever waited in it. Both times it caught again, some stubborn ember refusing to die, though she would not have sworn to it holding a third time.
Level Seven — The Grasp
The seventh level held no wardens at all — only inmates, and more of them than any cell had been built to hold, six and eight and ten men crammed into spaces meant for a fraction that many, gone half-feral with a captivity that had clearly long since stopped answering to any guard’s authority. They raged and wept and clawed at their own bars with an energy that told Nathily, even before she’d fully taken in the sight of it, that whoever had run this level had either died or fled and left the prisoners to their own small, howling kingdom.
“No guards,” Emcorae breathed. “Small mercy. We scamper past, quick as we can, and find the next stair down.”
Nathily nodded and fell in behind him, torch shuttered low — and it was bad luck alone, she would tell herself after, not carelessness, that put her within reach of the first cell’s bars just as they broke into a run across the open landing. A hand shot out through the gap and closed around her wrist with a grip like an iron manacle, and the jolt of it threw her clean off balance, her falchia clattering from her fingers to skitter across the stone.
“Well now,” the prisoner crooned, dragging her back hard against the bars before she could plant her feet, his breath rank, his eyes bright with a hunger that had nothing to do with the meal he’d been denied. “Ain’t you a pretty thing to come wanderin’ down here. C’mere and say hello to the boys.”
She didn’t have time to answer. Other hands were already reaching through the gaps beside him — one closing over her other arm, two more dragging at her legs, hauling her back against the iron until the bars bit into her spine and her breath went ragged with the effort of simply staying upright. Somewhere in the scramble her dagger left its sheath in someone else’s fist, and she felt its point find the underside of her jaw, cold and certain, while behind the first man a second began fumbling at his own clothing with a leering, unhurried confidence that told her exactly what these men believed the next few minutes held in store. And worse than any of it — worse than the hands, worse than her own blade turned against her throat — was the sound rising from the cells around them, hoots and cackling and delighted, ravenous cheering, an entire level of broken men clamoring for the show to begin.
Emcorae didn’t hear the first word of it. Two months in this world had taught him to let the dungeon’s roar blur into a single wall of noise he no longer parsed for individual voices, and it wasn’t until he reached the mid-landing below and glanced back, from long habit rather than any specific alarm, that he found the space beside him empty.
Her falchia lay abandoned on the second step.
He was back up the stair before the thought had fully formed, and what he found on the landing stopped his heart cold for exactly as long as it took his fury to replace it. Nathily pinned against the bars. A blade — her own — pressed to her throat. A man behind her, exposed, already moving.
He saw nothing else after that. No plan, no caution, only red.
“Hel take you all!” His katana came up in a single vicious arc that took the nearest captor’s arms off at the elbow before the man had even registered a threat behind him, and in the same continuous motion Emcorae drove the blade forward through the bars, catching the exposed prisoner low and hard enough to send him reeling backward, howling, both hands clutched useless between his legs. A third strike, backhanded, found the arm holding the dagger at Nathily’s throat and severed it at the elbow before the blade could so much as nick her skin — the dagger and the arm both clattering to the stone together, and the remaining captors, screaming, scrambled back from her to the rear of their cell, abandoning their prize entirely rather than face whatever had just torn through their number in three heartbeats.
Freed, Nathily didn’t retreat. She snatched up her fallen falchia and her dagger both, and something in her that had been holding steady since Monthaven simply gave way — she drove her blade through the bars into the two maimed, screaming men Emcorae had already ruined, again and again, opening fresh gashes across arms and chests already gushing, past any reasonable measure of what their crimes had earned. The two who’d fled to the back wall she couldn’t reach; she screamed at them anyway, wordless, raw. And the first man — the one who’d started it, still doubled over and wailing where he’d fallen, blood in his teeth as he managed, somehow, one last leering grin up at her —
“Come get me now,” she snarled, “swine — come and try it —”
He never finished whatever filth he meant to answer her with. Nathily’s dagger took him clean through the eye before the words left his mouth, and she was already surging forward, hunting for a way through the bars to reach whatever remained of him, when Emcorae’s arms closed around her from behind and hauled her bodily back from the cell.
“Nat! Enough! Enough!” He had to fight her for it, her whole body still coiled to keep fighting, keep punishing, keep making every last one of them pay for what they’d nearly taken from her. “He’s dead. You’ve killed him. There’s nothing left in there to hurt you.”
“Let me go—”
“Your dwarf friend will be dead too if we don’t move.” It landed where nothing else had — some thread of the mission cutting through the red haze better than her own name had. Nathily went still, shaking, her chest heaving, and slowly let him draw her back from the bars.
She didn’t speak for a long moment after that, and Emcorae didn’t press her to. The cheering around them had curdled, in the last few seconds, into a different sound entirely — dozens of voices now shrieking not encouragement but pure animal terror, recoiling from the carnage in the front cell as though it might spread to their own. Good, Nathily thought distantly. Let them be afraid of something for once.
“Are you hurt?” Emcorae asked, quiet now, his hands still steadying her shoulders.
“No.” Her voice came out thinner than she meant it to. “Not — not where it shows.”
He didn’t ask her to say more than that, and she was grateful for it. There would be time later — if there was a later at all — to find out what tonight had cost either of them. For now there was only the stair, and the dwarf still waiting somewhere below, and no time left to spend on anything else.
Then, all at once, the cacophony around them stopped.
Not faded. Not quieted the way a crowd quiets when its attention shifts. Stopped — screams cut off mid-breath across the entire level, the wailing and the raving and the endless wet sobbing all silenced in the same instant, as though some vast hand had reached down through the stone and closed every throat in the dungeon at once. The quiet that followed was worse than anything they’d heard since the stairwell — a listening quiet, the kind that comes before something, not after it.
Nathily’s blood went cold. Even the maimed prisoner behind them, keening a moment before, had gone silent, pressed flat against the back of his cell as though trying to disappear into the stone itself.
“That’s not natural,” she breathed. “Nothing in this pit stops screaming on its own.”
Somewhere below them — not the level they stood on, but further down, past the reach of their torchlight, past the stair they hadn’t yet descended — came a single sound to fill the void the screaming had left behind: a slow, deliberate scrape of something heavy dragging across stone, followed by a wet, rhythmic thud that repeated three times and then, just as abruptly as the silence had fallen, stopped.
Emcorae’s hand found his katana’s hilt again, and this time Nathily didn’t stop him.
“We need to keep moving,” she said, and her voice, for the first time all night, was not entirely steady. “Alyssa be with us no!”
Emcorae followed Nathily toward the stair — neither of them speaking again, both straining now to hear whatever waited below them in that new and terrible silence, and both privately certain, though neither said it aloud, that they very much did not want to find out what had just made an entire level of Fubar’s dungeon stop screaming all at once.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 