“Have you got a plan for the trial of stealth yet?” Yanis whispered. “I haven’t got mine.”
Anoor shook her head.
“Maybe we can help each other?” he suggested.
“Really?”
Someone shushed them and they returned their concentration to Uka.
“So follow me and I will lead you to your trial of mind.”
The competitors each hurried to be closest to the front, but Yanis and Anoor stayed a step behind. Anoor knew what was coming, and Yanis seemed in no rush to prove his worth by competing to walk in the lily-perfumed trail of Uka.
“If we both make it through, maybe we can meet and consider ideas?” He touched her shoulder, the way a comrade might.
“Definitely.”
“What do you fight best with?”
“The jambiya, actually.” She looked up at him sheepishly, remembering that he’d watched her practice with it the first time.
“You must have improved then.” He laughed, not unkindly.
Uka was leading them toward the back of the Keep, where the building faced the cliffs that preceded the Marion Sea.
“She’s taking us to the Old Nowerk Jail,” someone murmured ahead of them.
The old jail had collapsed over a hundred years ago due to the poor integrity of the structure. It housed Dusters and Ghostings, away from the Embers’ jail near the army barracks. Hundreds of prisoners died.
Anoor thought back to the ripping she’d witnessed. The barbaric execution was brought in shortly after the prison collapsed. Those sentenced to lesser crimes were condemned to whippings. She was still shocked by the disparities between Ember trials and those afforded to Ghostings and Dusters. Though the books she read were biased, Anoor began to piece together a picture of the system that the Warden of Truth called “justice.”
They went down two staircases toward the tunnels under the city. But instead of heading inward toward the Ruta River, they walked toward the Marion Sea, though they couldn’t see it or hear it this deep underground.
They passed many officers on patrol, but Anoor didn’t notice. She was concentrating on breathing.
Runelamps cast the small corridors in red light. Anoor spotted a slight flaw in one of the lamps. One of the runes was positioned slightly higher than the other, unbalancing the friction. If you looked closely enough the light it emitted pulsed like a heartbeat.
Finally, the echo of their footsteps changed, and the corridor opened out to an atrium in the shape of a hexagon. At each corner of the hexagon stood a cell carved into the limestone. Anoor looked up.
Row upon row of cells stood five stories high with ladders on wheels on either end. Like a library of cells. One could swing through the shelves and pluck a prisoner at random. But as her gaze curved around the hexagon, Anoor saw the destruction the tidewind had wrought on the limestone frame. More than half the cells had collapsed into rubble.
And in the middle of the atrium stood the three other wardens, Uka joining them.
“Urgh, the air smells of sour piss,” Yanis said.
“Fear,” Anoor said. “It smells of fear.”
It was the last thing she said to him as they were separated and allocated to different cells.
“You are to stay within the darkness for as long as you can. The top fifteen will make it to the bloodwerk trial.” Uka had softened her voice, recognizing the darkness carried more menace than anything she could say. “Knock three times on the door when you are ready to leave.”
One by one the competitors were locked in their cells. Limestone doors, limestone walls. Not one crack of daylight. Forty doors closed, forty locks turned.
The darkness consumed her in moments. Panic rose in her throat when she heard the key turn in the lock, but she quashed it. Block by block, like Sylah said. Take each piece and build a castle, a fortress, to lord over.
The bricks fell into place, then the walls. She added furniture and filled the bathroom with scented oils. Finally, she imagined hundreds of plates of fried yams. Just for her and Sylah.
—