The march up to his cage led through a spiral stone stair so small that
his shoulders touched each wall, and his head stayed bent. The chain
stayed on his neck, his hands now bound behind him. He watched the
armsman before him half walking, half climbing the steep blocks of
stone. When Otah slowed, the man behind him struck with the butt of a
spear and laughed. Otah, his hands bound, sprawled against the steps,
ripping the flesh of his knees and chin. After that, he made a point to
slow as little as possible.
His thighs burned with each step and the constant turning to the right
left him nauseated. He thought of stopping, of refusing to move. They
were taking him up to wait for death anyway. There was nothing to he
gained by collaborating with them. But he went on, cursing tinder his
breath.
When the stairs ended, he found himself in a wide hall. The sky doors in
the north wall were open, and a platform hung level with them and
shifting slightly in the breeze, the great chains taut. Another four
armsmen stood waiting.
"Relief?" the man who had pushed him asked.
The tallest of the new armsmen took a pose of affirmation and spoke.
"We'll take the second half. You four head up and we'll all go down
together." The new armsmen led Otah to a fresh stairway, and the ordeal
began again. He had begun almost to dream in his pain by the time they
stopped. Thick, powerful hands pushed him into a room, and the door
closed behind him with a sound like a capstone being shoved over an open
tomb. The armsman said something through a slit in the door, but Otah
couldn't make sense of it and didn't have the will to try. He lay on the
floor until he realized that his arms had been freed and the iron collar
taken from around his neck. The skin where it had rested was chafed raw.
The voices of men seeped through the door, and then the sound of a winch
creaking as it lowered the platform and its cargo of men. Then there
were only two voices speaking in light, conversational tones. He
couldn't make out a word they said.
He forced himself to sit up and take stock. The room was larger than
he'd expected, and bare. It could have been used as a storage room or
set with table and chairs for a small meeting. There was a bowl of water
in one corner, but no food, no candles, nothing but the stone to sleep
on. The light came from a barred window. His hip and knees ached as Otah
pulled himself up and stumbled over to it. He was facing south, and the
view was like he'd become a bird. He leaned out-the bars were not so
narrowly spaced that he couldn't climb out and fall to his death if he
chose. Below him, the carts in the streets were like ants shuffling
along in their lines. A crow launched itself from a crack or beam and
circled below him, the sun shining on its black back. Trembling, he
pulled himself back in. There were no shutters to close off the sky.
He tried the door's latch, but it had been barred from without, and the
hinges were leather and worked iron. Not the sort of thing a man could
take apart with teeth. Otah knelt by the bowl of water and drank from
his cupped hand. He washed out the worst of his wounds, and left a third
in the bowl. There was no knowing how long it might be before they saw