Black Salt

Black Salt - Chapter 23

 He woke with a start. His hands flew to his throat, clawing at hands that were no longer there. He gasped, and he put so much effort into breathing that he choked, and wracking coughs shook his body. After a moment he came back to full wakefulness, and he was able to lie back, and let his fighting instinct relax.

He lay on a hard wooden bed, in a little room with a high, slit window; it was too narrow for him to climb out, but it did reveal that Apollo had returned home rest, for the sky was black. An oil lamp burned on a table beside the bed, casting dim yellowish light around the room. It shone on his skin; his clothes and weapons were gone. As soon as he noticed that, he tried to leap out of bed, but the slightest movement cause his back to clench in a solid knot of pain. He fell back down into the hard wooden bed, and that too set off the bruises in his back, and made him jump out of bed in a convulsive attempt to escape.

He slipped and stumbled forward, and fetched up against a rough wooden chair facing the table. He leaned over it, sobbing with agony. He stayed that way for some time, because every little twitch or shudder made his body flare with pain. If it hadn't hurt so much, he would have marvelled to be alive. As it was, he mused, the world below would be a welcome respite.

After a time, he regained enough free awareness to take in his surroundings, and think about his choices. The room was small and clean, and though he might be locked in, he wasn't bound. That came as a surprise. Perhaps he'd looked so battered and pitiful that his captors hadn't thought of him as even a possible threat.

A mistake.

The air tasted sweet, and carried that same pungent aroma he'd come to rely on as a sign of Black Salt. If they were able to hide every other sign, this always marked them. It wasn't a lot of good, though. He knew it himself, but what could he tell his men? You can't hand a man a scent.

"Dogs," he said, surprised at how rough his voice sounded, how dry and sore his throat felt. "We should have run you down with dogs."

He heard a noise from outside, which sounded, to his surprise, like a man laughing.

He had not only been beaten and strangled unconscious, stripped naked, and locked up, but he was also being laughed at. He couldn't take that thought. It made his jaw clench, and his brow furrow, and his hands squeezed the sides of the chair, until his wrists trembled with the tension. He wanted a sword, he longed for his sword.

He cast narrow eyes around the room, but he saw no sign of his weapons, or the rest of his possessions. He did notice a piece of folded white cloth on the seat of the chair, and maybe he could have used it to strangle a hapless enemy, or wrapped a rock in it, and made a flail, but in his current state, he couldn't even have swung it. And besides, his captors hadn't left any rocks lying around.

"This is the neatest cell I've ever seen," he said.

Again, he heard laughter. It made his blood run hotter. He decided to break the chair apart, and use one leg as a makeshift club. It was a good plan, he thought, the best he could come up with, given the materials at hand. But when it came to the effort of reconstructing the chair, his body argued. In fact, it went on strike. He had the chair a little way off the floor, when his back seized up, and a spasm of pain made his hands fall open, and the chair tumbled down on its side, spilling the white cloth over the wooden floorboards.

"Blood of the gods!"

He bent to right the chair, and try again, but this sent another jolt of agony from the small of his back to the base of his skull, and made him jerk so much that his legs gave way, and he crashed down on the floor beside the chair. Everything went black, and he spent an uncertain period in a heap on the floor. When he came back to himself, he saw blue suns burst in front of his eyes, and lightning race up and down his spine. For the first time since boyhood, he felt utterly helpless.