The Webbing Blade

GAOLED IN THE CRYSTAL CITY

THE GAOL CELL was ripe with stale air. There were no windows Lou could see. He sat slumped on the floor with his back pressed up against the brick wall and listened to the gentle breathing of his cellmates, of Rut and Sully. His mouth felt all dry too, and he thought about how he hadn’t had a drink of water in several hours now. He’d thought that once they’d got into Ilsnare they’d be able to drink all they wanted. But no.

As Lou sat there, his head still spinning from the rough treatment they’d got off the guards, he tried to piece things back together again in his mind. They hadn’t taken their uniforms off them. Yet. He wondered if they might be coming back soon to do that, to issue them with whatever clothes they were supposed to wear in Ilsnare.

Lou glanced about the cell again, his eyes coming to rest on Sully, he remembered just what he was supposed to tell him. Despite his aching body, his bones seeming to complain that he was sitting up rather than lying down, he shucked the weariness from his voice and faced up to him. “Sully?” Lou said.

Sully glanced over to him, those black eyes of his, and that hair slicked right down the back of his neck, glistening just a little in the weak torchlight in their cell.

Lou continued. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

As Lou met Sully’s eye, he noticed Rut stirring too, coming out of his own daze. He guessed that was for the best with what he had to say. One of them would be able to put him right, one of them would be able to tell him whether or not he had gone totally mad. “Back there, back at Gwindermere, when we set up camp, before the bears came, I had a run-in with a hobblesman.”

“A hobblesman?” Rut said, raising his eyebrows.

Lou nodded and stared down at his tunic, still drench with sweat, in thought. “Yeah, in a cloak and everything.” He strained his mind, trying to work out just what they’d said to one another—what the hobblesman had said to him.

Lou looked back over to Rut and Sully. “I asked him if he was okay, he seemed pretty stunned, didn’t really seem to know just what was going on. Didn’t reply to me. I told him we were going to Ilsnare, asked him if he wanted to come with us, where he’d be safe. And then, . . . and then . . .” Again, Lou found himself adrift in thought, trying to get the wording just right. “He said, ‘You’d better run, skuller.’” He stared long and hard at Rut and Sully. “And then he just disappeared, faded into the air. And the bears stomped out from behind him, from out in the woods.”

The cell descended into silence for a while.

Somewhere close by, Lou could hear the drip-drip of a pipe leaking, and the air in the place seemed to get thicker, moister, with each one of their exhales. He tasted their mixed odours getting up his nose, sticking at the back of his mouth. A shudder passed over his skin.

On instinct, he clasped his arms across his chest to ward off . . . well, it wasn’t a chill, more of a . . . a sense of apprehension. They still had no idea what was going to happen to them and talking about magic wasn’t doing much to help.

It was Rut that spoke first, his blond hair and blue eyes looking the most out of place here amongst all of them. His jolly, rounded figure, too, seemed to grate with the irrepressibly dank and grey cell. And there was no brightness in his voice, none of that jubilance which Lou had noted when they’d first met. “You think it was a mage?”

Lou thought that over for a moment or two. Of course, all throughout the Kingdom of Shellacnass, people talked about mages, and wise women, all of that. But no one had ever actually seen one, or that was what it seemed to Lou.

And, looking from the quiet contemplation of Sully, as he sat slumped there staring between his knees, to the slight look of confusion on Rut’s face as he stared back, Lou knew that he’d made himself out to be some sort of crazy person. That his childish sighting would forever mark both Rut and Sully’s judgement of him. Even after what he’d shown in the battle back at Gwindermere, with the cursed bears.