His Hand In The Shadows

Chapter 19: She Sees Me

The orange glow of the torches by each cell lit the aisles dimly. The walls, ground and ceiling were stone, leaving a cold unfriendly atmosphere among the captives. Under the stone were thick layers of anti-magic like the bars that kept them in. The cells were small, holding a single person at a time with no particular order. The tantrums had become less and less as the days went by. Silence became more common.

"Are you okay?" Ayla asked Zayd.

"Can you stop!" Phina shouted at Ayla, having grown tired of hearing them check in on each other.

A quietness took over again and unease started to build. Ayla paced in her cell for a while, gripping her tightening chest. It was dark. She was back in Belcrest. In her room. Alone. The quiet sobs from a distant cell sounded a lot like Reina's sobs. Ayla hadn't realized just how much she did not want to go back there. She was no longer that crying child who stayed up to listen to her mother crying as while she cried along with her from the other side of the wall. Ayla forced down the lump budding in her throat. She was not alone. She grabbed the bars of the cell and she shouted, "Did they say what they needed from us!"

It was quiet. Even the sobbing stopped, then Zayd responded from the cell across the corridor, "They asked the purpose of my visit and my whereabouts during the two months. They asked my family name and questioned items from my room like my ring and halo. And asked names that I knew none of."

"They asked the same of me," she said softly. Her memory trailing back to her questioning, she had picked up on details that made her curious, details she needed to find out. "They asked about books they found in my room... and why I had no ring or halo." She chuckled. "They said if statements do not check out they will return." That she counted on. "But they said nothing of what this is about. They spoke Ikaric among themselves, but I could not understand it all."

"You can write a spell but you cannot understand basic Ikaric?" Phina scoffed.

"Excuse my foolishness, but I forgot to bring my dictionary into captivity with me."

"How useless."

"Well what have you found out, my Lady?"

"I heard them say 'spy'," someone said from their cell.

"Thank you. Most helpful, Lady Anasi," Phina taunted.

"You mean to say they think we are spies?" Ayla asked.

The sobbing continued form an end cell.

"Are you well down there?" Ayla shouted, pressing her face against the bars to look down the corridor. When she got no reply she turned the other way to look at Zayd's cell. Despite the torches, it was too dark to see inside. "Do you have etchings on your walls?" she asked. "Mine says 'Xou ten devoae o ih manisupae mahilat."

"What does it mean?" Zayd asked.

"Xou' is a negative indicator. So 'xou ten'... 'do not' and 'devoae' is... 'die'." 'Perhaps not a good change of topic,' she thought.

"It means to say, 'Do not die to the puppet master," another student said.

The crying started again.

Phina kicked and hit the cell gate. "Can you stop your howling!"

A guard walked through the corridors and placed a student back in their cell after their questioning.

"We have not eaten!" Phina shouted. "It only proves worse for you if I starve here!"

He and three other guards continued down the halls and retrieved a group of students from the second wing of the cells, then escorted them up the stairs for questioning.