A Most Spectacular Rift

Chapter 1

The gates creaked open and turned many heads. The person beside stopped applying mortar and limestone. Huncho placed his quoin down, its brittle edge offending his hand.

From the vast forest below, men sidled discrepantly and tiredly towards the gate. They were pushing a trolly of cages and in them, nested in handkerchiefs of white, were snakes.

The men held forked sticks, tongs and knives and their hats bowed gently eastward for the serotinal wind was still present; light was shone by a few large torches, and gimmicked crossly across the sordid walk which was stamped by boot and sandal like hammer to coin, flickering and almost ashen, the wood around torch charcoaled, waxed black.

The carved path of rocks and dirt was only tread by about thirty men, but suspense hung in their eyes as they approached the wall, or was it a lingering fatigue that befell the brutal making of the very dark, and wicked forest yonder.

It took some time before some men started to realize and discern somberly, or in stark fear, their faces churning white and their hands spasming fright at the discrepancy.

Huncho didn't notice yet, though he thought himself an avid, skilled observer.

The boy stared mindlessly at those men below like a sheep being herded towards something.

"What is that?" Norm rasped; he was barfing up the words as if he was chugging ambisinisterly his own lungs out of his mouth, and Huncho limped towards him, shagging his right leg cumbersomely.

What was Norm shocked about? He wasn't the type of guy to dilate his eyes like that.

It took a while, and a long while, before Huncho realized, with all fear, appalling tines of apprehension pronging at his shoulders, where it drooled cold, and climbed up his neck in a swath of foreboding before half-lit his eyes by a nearby bracket, words seldom left when the mind was abeat. A long while before he did realize.

He couldn't move. What he saw. It didn't make sense.

"Why aren't they here? Why aren't they, why isn't the sixth ring here?" Huncho shouted, looking at the men below - the numbers didn't add up. There weren't some of the usual faces. Dread. Nobody, answered him.

Where was Secor? Dawyn? Lior? Cassio?

"What is that?! Look ... There, there -"

Huncho followed the direction where the men pointed and he clasped his hand against his mouth. The portcullis was pulled up, its lattice of iron rust groaned and creaked as the winchmen turned and turned but before them, laid on one of the trolleys, where no bronze cages had been cloistered, was a man, and a man Huncho knew, even in his condition, even with his face half bitten, his hair mangled, and the portion of one eye ripped out, even then, with the tingly trepidation that encapsulated Huncho and froze him in jaws, even then, he knew the person, and remorse didn't come yet; it was fear, a sort of perplex emphatic and enigmatic fear that came when something errant strung about with the wind.

His breaths became shallow and his fingers yearned to spread and fling. Even as he peered into the torn eye, all the nerves sputtering out of the wet bulbous sac of fettering pus, blood dripping out like a claw of crimson, he did not move to help, felt nothing but cold. Even then...

The wheels of the trolley kept orchestrating, and rattled more than the click-clack of a horse hoof that followed outside, like the sound of sticks shook in a match box lengthwise.

A soldier with his head bowed down, his lamellar glinting half black and half emollient and coruscating, approached the snake catchers as custom.

But the sight Huncho kept his eyes on was the man splayed limp in the trolley.