Thomas Gown and his companions have escaped from captivity, but only by fleeing deeper into the unknown, to face new dangers. They are carrying a secret that could save the world, though, and they have a duty to take it to those who can make use of...
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When Lirenna regained consciousness, she was in the cage with the two men, her head in the lap of one of them who was gently wiping the blood from her forehead with a damp rag. Her head was splitting with pain, but it was a different kind of pain from the kind she’d become accustomed to lately. It was the kind of pain caused by a stunning blow rather than dehydration. There was a damp rag in her mouth, which the men had kept wetting with a water skin and which had fed moisture into her mouth by capillary action. It had been a dangerous thing to do, as she could easily have choked even on that tiny quantity of water, but the alternative would have been to just watch her drying out until she died from dehydration.
It had saved her life, but she was still light headed and feverish from lack of water and she grabbed the water skin and drank deeply from it, every cell in her body crying out in rapture as her strength flooded back. Only when she'd drunk her fill did she stare around at the cage, wondering where she was and why she was in it, and it was several more moments before full memory returned, making her sit up in fear.
The cons had returned to their positions around the cage, lazing around and dozing while one or two gnawed at bones, trying to pick off the last bits of raw meat. Nearby lay a bare, bloodstained human skull, and the full horror of her situation came home to her.
“They’re going to eat us,” she said in flat hopelessness.
“Yes, I’m afraid they are,” replied the man. They were both dressed in clothes made of leather and homespun wool and had thick, bushy beards. They reminded her of the wild mountain men who inhabited the wide, deep glacial valleys of the Copper Mountains a couple of hundred miles north of Haven, with whom her people had occasional contact. They lived rough but were trustworthy, and the comparison comforted her. They must be renegades, she thought. People who’d fled the city to live freely in the caverns.
“How do you feel?” asked the other man. He was taller than the first but looked as though he might have been a member of the same family. His brother, perhaps.
“About as well as could be expected,” replied Lirenna. “I don’t suppose there are any more of you around, are there? Any chance we might be rescued?”
“I’m afraid not,” replied the first man. “Nobody knows where we are, and even if they did, they’d think twice about attacking a con encampment. There’s just a couple of families in our band, you see, and they have to think about the safety of the children. What about you?”
“No,” replied the demi shae. “My friends are either dead or dying. I was supposed to be looking for help.” Suddenly she collapsed in tears, and the man hugged her gently as her tiny, fragile body was wracked with sobs.
When she had no more tears to shed, she spent some time talking to them. There was nothing else to do. They were called Richard and Henry Briarson and they were the grandchildren of a man and his wife who’d fled the city fifty years earlier after being accused of treason by Lord Dynas, patriarch of House Rautha. They hunted the grey gibbons that the Agglemonians had brought up to Kronos and released to breed in the caverns as an emergency food source in case the Lifegiver failed, and the agile apes provided them with everything they needed to live. Overhunting had made them scarce in the caverns near their home, though, so the two of them had gone further afield looking for more, taking with them Daniel Amberd, the son of the other family with whom they lived.
