Page 105 of City of Stone and Silence

“This is not reassuring,” Meroe says, pacing.

“You were there this morning when we went over this.”

“I know!” She turns on her heel to face me. There’s no anger on her face this time, just worry and pain. “I know. But…”

“Prime wants something from me,” I say. “I have a guess what it might be. Even if I’m wrong, though, I think he’ll keep me alive. You didn’t hear him when he made his offer. He had to know how I feel, but he’s…” I shake my head. “Desperate.”

“Less sympathy for the guy who kills our friends with walking corpses, please,” Meroe says.

“I don’t have any sympathy.” I lace my fraying boot tight. “I just feel like I understand.”

I straighten up, and she comes over to face me. We look at each other for a few moments, in silence.

“You’re leaving me again,” she says.

“We talked about this, too,” I say. “I’m not trying to protect you. I’m going to need you to pull my rotting hide out of the fire.”

“I know.” She closes her eyes. “But it always seems to work out this way.”

“‘To command is to sacrifice.’ Someone told me that once.”

“Smartass,” Meroe says, and kisses me.

We press tight against one another, hearts beating side by side. I never want to stop, never want to leave that embrace. I kiss along the line of her jaw and into the hollow of her throat, tasting the faint tang of sweat.

“This is going to work,” I say. “And when it’s over, we’ll get back on Soliton, and go keep Tori safe from Kuon Naga. And then…”

“And then?” Meroe murmurs.

“You know I have no rotting idea what happens then,” I say. “But whatever it is, we do it together.”

She squeezes me a little tighter.

“And,” I whisper, “when we get Soliton sailing north again, we’ll have some time to kill before we arrive.”

Meroe giggles, and her hands slide somewhere inappropriate. “I might have some ideas there.”

“Really?” I kiss her again. “Such a strange princess.”

She laughs. When I pull away, there are tears in her eyes.

The corpses take hold of me, two to a side. More crowd around, forming a mass of stinking, rotting bodies. I hold my breath, waiting for the move that means that I was wrong, that Prime wants to kill me after all and this was a horrible mistake.

It doesn’t come, at least not yet. The monsters drag me ungently, and I stumble trying to keep up. But they don’t dig their fingers in to rip and tear. We walk arm in arm, like the world’s worst dance troupe, up the steps and in the front door of the ziggurat. After a few turns, a ramp leads down, into the stony depths of the building.

It’s all I can do not to sigh with relief when I see the cage. It’s a crude thing, made from scrap metal awkwardly shaped into floor-to-ceiling bars in an otherwise unfurnished stone room. Inside the bars there’s nothing but a wooden bucket in one corner. Stains on the stone around it hint that I’m not the first prisoner who’s been kept here.

Two of the lizard-monsters wait on the outside of the bars, feathers ruffling as we enter, bones visible through gaps in their rotting, shrunken hide. One bar has been bent sideways enough to make a hole for me to enter, and I step through at the corpses’ prodding. A lizard pads forward, grasps the metal in its teeth, and bends it straight. Up close, it looks like pieces of Soliton, rusted plates twisted into shape.

“Well?” I say aloud. “What now?”

“Now you explain what you’re up to,” Prime says, his sonorous, unreal voice coming from one of the corpses.

“I told you. You offered to partner with me. I’d like to take you up on it.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“You’re the one who said that our kind is driven to rule.”