CHAPTER NINETEEN - HELP

In the freezing, bone-aching cold of the cell, the rhythm of a small breath changed.

Krazoc lifted his head slightly from the damp wall at his back. For the first time in days, Alister was waking from that deep, sickly, moan-filled sleep. In the bottomless White Void within Krazoc, a small wave of relief rose, the first he had felt in days. He had been restless ever since returning from that hellish shift in the mine. In case the child woke, he hadn't eaten his own share of the moldy mushroom soup doled out once a day; he had carefully hidden the stone bowl in a corner the rats couldn't reach.

Alister slowly sat up. The skin beneath his eyes was bruised, his cheeks sunken. The fever had left his lips cracked; with every breath those thin splits bled. When his weak, trembling gaze found Krazoc in the darkness, the giant leaned slowly forward—taking great care not to let his chains rattle—and pushed the hidden bowl toward the child.

Alister looked at the bowl. The sour stench of rotten mushroom, damp, and mold that filled his nose turned his stomach violently. He tried to swallow, but his body rejected the disgusting liquid. He pushed the bowl back with his weak hands.

His stomach was empty, and it had not spent years growing used to emptiness. Hunger churned inside him like a small, gnawing animal, clawing at his guts. The veins in his neck ached with every pulse. He swallowed. His throat was dry as a desert. He was hungry. He hadn't eaten in days, but he couldn't get this down; even if he did, his body would retch it back up at once.

The body's hunger was consuming a different kind of power.

Just then, his small hands went to his pocket of their own accord. His fingertips brushed a small, soft object he had forgotten there for days, one whose very existence he no longer remembered.

In his mind rose the image of that moment when everything was not yet shattered—the fireless camp in the darkness of the forest. Broc's huge, calloused yet equally tender hands... that little piece the big man had torn from his own portion and tossed to him...

"We've got a long road ahead, little one," Broc had said, with that tired but reassuring smile, big as a mountain. "Keep it in your pocket. Eat it when you get hungry."

With trembling hands, Alister slowly drew the little bundle from his pocket. The piece of dried meat, wrapped in a clean cloth, was clean no longer. In that terrible raid in the forest it had been smeared with mud, with dirt, and most likely with Broc's own blood. The cloth had taken on a dirty, grey, stained, and torn texture. Just like everything else in their lives, that pure gift had rotted too.

Alister stared at the small, dirty cloth in his hand. This was no longer food. The hunger in his stomach was cut off all at once like a knife, replaced by an enormous, unswallowable lump. This was the memory of that kind-hearted giant who had thrown his own body in front of massive tree limbs and merciless spears to protect him. Broc had been a wall of flesh, and now all that remained of that wall was this dirty scrap of cloth. The cloth he held looked like a tiny burial shroud.

From the child's parched throat escaped that silent, broken sob that tears a person apart. The tears sliding from his eyes left trails down his dirty cheeks and dripped onto the shroud-like cloth in his hand. He didn't eat the meat. He couldn't. He pressed it to his chest with his small hands, pulled his knees to his belly, and began to cry, shaking, on the icy floor of the cell. His tears were the overflow not of physical hunger, but of that enormous grief his tiny mind couldn't contain.

Krazoc froze where he was. When he understood the meat in the child's hand and what that meat meant, he felt as though a heavy iron stake had been driven into his chest. He slowly drew his chained arms back toward himself and turned his head away, toward the pitch dark. The child's silent sobs were like no lash he had ever taken; that sound cut straight into Krazoc's soul.

In this mold-reeking dungeon, Krazoc clenched his teeth, trying to hide in the darkness the tear that fought to fall from his own eyes in the face of that mute pain.

He clenched his fist so hard that his thick nails scored his calloused palm. The drop that seeped from his palm was neither warm nor cold; it simply was. Clinging to his own physical pain, he tried to halt that merciless collapse inside him. He caught his tongue between his teeth and bit down so hard that the metallic, rusty taste of blood spread across his lips. A man fights his own body before he weeps. He tightens his muscles, holds his breath, redirects the pain elsewhere. Krazoc was not a man. He was a weapon. A monster. But that night, in that dark cell, against the grief of a tiny child, he fought like a man.

He possessed the strongest hands in the world, a power that could annihilate whole battalions, but those hands could not mend a broken heart.

Alister's silent sobs went on until he was spent from crying. At last, with the heavy exhaustion grief brings, he sank back into a deep and restless sleep, still clutching the dirty cloth to his chest.

But this sleep was no rest. A few hours later, Alister's body began to shake violently and thrash on the stone floor. His breaths came in broken gasps; it was as if an invisible hand were squeezing his throat, choking him. His face was drenched in sweat, and pained, meaningless, overlapping murmurs spilled from his lips.

Krazoc lunged toward the child. His chains pulled taut to their very end. The flesh of his wrists tore, but he couldn't reach the child. Again. Again that damned distance.

In that moment he remembered how, in the infirmary tent, the child had touched his back and calmed him. That warm, silent mental intervention. A small, cool hand that had descended from the heavens into the middle of Krazoc's boiling rage. What the child had done for him, he must now do for the child. Whatever the cost.

Krazoc closed his eyes. He eased open the doors of that blank, snow-white expanse in his mind and, just as the child had done, gently extended his own mental reach toward Alister's nightmare-ridden mind. He wanted to soothe him, to give him the stillness of that White Void, to say, "I'm here, you're safe."

But the instant Krazoc's mind touched the child's... the world shattered to pieces.

Krazoc did not find tenderness, or an ordinary nightmare. What entered his mind was not an emotion; it was an entire deluge. Hundreds of wails, thousands of cracking whips, the existential scream of souls being torn from flesh, hunger gnawing at the stomach, the terror of absolute death, and pitch-black darkness... all of it struck Krazoc's mind at once, with a terrible pressure.

Krazoc's breath caught and his eyes went wide as saucers. A muffled, pain-filled cry escaped his mouth. This was not the child's pain!

This was the present pain of the slaves whipped as they hauled rocks in the mine. This was the existential horror of that old man who had dried up at the Herbalist's fingertips and turned to husk within seconds. This was the silent wail of the Attivs left to rot alive in the cages swinging over the cliffs! It was the mute scream of that young girl whose bones were being broken and reshaped in the Leader's workshop.

Alister's untrained, doorless mind had been left utterly defenseless by Broc's death, by that heavy grief. The death of the squad had torn down every shield in the child's pure mind and turned him, in the middle of this hell, into an enormous lightning rod. All the pain in the mountain, all the corruption, all the darkness crashed ceaselessly into this small body—like water drawn to it—and flooded into his mind.

In the mine he had been coughing. In the cell he shivered. He couldn't drink his soup. Krazoc had taken these for sickness. Fever, hunger, fear. The physical reactions you'd expect from a child under such brutal conditions.

They weren't.

These were the pain of others. The pain of others passing through the child's body, finding no way out, devouring him from within. The ache in the back of the one whipped in the mine, the breathlessness in the lungs of the one turned to husk, the breaking in the bones of the one reshaped in the workshop. All of it was inside him. None of it was his own.

Krazoc's heart clenched with a terrible, crushing realization. The weight of that whole mountain lay on these tiny shoulders.

Krazoc coughed under the pressure of that vast tsunami of pain flooding his mind. A warm drop of blood trickled from his nose and mixed onto his lips. His mind was on the verge of detonating. He could not draw a sword against this invisible assault. He could not throw a punch at it, could not strangle it with his thick chains. He could stand against hundreds of men, but he could not stop a wave of the mind. There was nothing, nothing at all, he could do.

Alister's thrashing grew worse. He was murmuring in pain. The child was getting worse.

Krazoc's unbreakable pride, his endless fury, his invincibility—all of it shattered to dust. He stopped pulling at his chains. His broad shoulders sagged. The great giant sank onto his trembling knees, down to the cold stone floor. He slowly raised his head and looked, in the darkness, at the ash-colored Attiv sitting silently in the other corner of the cell—at Eyes.

Krazoc, who in his life had never bowed to anyone, never knelt, never begged for help, spoke through the needles of helplessness stabbing into his throat. There was no threat in his voice, no command. Only a broken, faltering, whispering tone.

"I can't stop it..." Krazoc said, a stranger to his own helpless voice, the like of which he had never heard from anyone until that day. He fixed his eyes directly on Eyes' large, pale eyes. "Please... Help him... I'm begging you. Please, help him."

In that dark dungeon, the most lethal weapon in the world was begging a being that humanity had thrown away as "soulless"—for the life of a small child.

In the darkness, Eyes did not stir. Whether it understood the words spoken to it was uncertain. There was only the present moment, and in it Krazoc's pleading voice reached the creature like just another sound of the wind.

But seconds later, silently, the ash-colored figure rose to its feet. Krazoc's breath stopped.