Legionary(81)

A sharp pain stabbed into his hip and he stifled a cry just in time, then adjusted the slat of sharpened stone tucked in there. It was Khaled’s shaving stone. He had found a whetstone of sorts to grind it to perfection. Indeed, he had slept little in between shifts in this last week, honing at the blade over and over instead. All for this moment.

He smashed his pickaxe into a shard of salt crystal, then scooped up the pieces that fell away and pressed them into his near-full basket. He heaved the basket to the pulley and hooked it onto the ropes, stooping to pick up an empty basket. Gorzam and his men had grown complacent in these last days, thinking the brutal murder of Khaled had cowed the spirit of the slaves. Indeed it had – many of them visibly trembled and cowered when Gorzam strode past. Pavo had elected to feign fear too, cowering and pleading to be excused of his daily beatings. And it had worked, for now their eyes were not upon him. They thought him broken. They were wrong.

In a heartbeat, he stepped into an empty basket on the downwards pulley and crouched to conceal himself. The basket swung and squeaked as it settled and began to descend. The fourth chamber disappeared and the jagged rock of the main shaft rolled past. He held his breath as the rock opened out again into the fifth chamber, then glanced up to the rim of the basket. This chamber was darker and had a lower ceiling than the one Pavo had worked in all this time. It also had pillars of rock and salt blocking the view across the space – fortunately one such column part-obscured the area around the pulley from the rest of the cavern. He looked to the stack of baskets near the pulley. A single, dark figure stood there, hunched and still. He had not heard from Sura since their foiled escape attempt. He peered at the figure, and was sure he could see a blonde lock.

‘Sura,’ Pavo whispered.

The hunched figure stood upright and spun round. It was not Sura. The albino guard wore a menacing scowl and grasped for his spear, resting nearby.

Panic gripped Pavo’s heart. He leapt from the basket, the pulley juddering behind him, and swung a desperate right hook into the guard’s jaw. The blow was fierce, and his knuckles cracked. The guard staggered back, stunned, then sucked in a breath to raise the alarm. But the words never left the man’s lips, a hefty salt shard crashing down on his head from behind, splintering into dust and a thousand smaller pieces. The guard crumpled and Sura stood in his place, coughing at the salt dust.

Sura looked at him with an incredulous glare. ‘Pavo – what in Hades? What are you doing down here?’ he hissed, shooting glances either side of the salt column; slaves chipped away there, heads bowed. Guards stalked amongst them, snarling and cracking their whips. But nobody had witnessed the incident, it seemed. He grappled the prone guard by the arms and nodded to the feet. ‘Grab his ankles; we need to get him out of sight.’

They lifted the guard back into the shadows by the column and crouched there. Their dry, rasping breaths quietened for a moment.

‘I didn’t mean to get you involved, or for this to happen,’ Pavo said, gesturing at the guard. ‘I just wanted to tell you, I’m going down. To the very bottom of this place.’

‘The seventh chamber?’ Sura gawped, then drummed a finger against his chest. ‘And they say I’m the demented one?’

‘Sura,’ he grasped his friend’s forearm. ‘Legionaries were sent down there, legionaries who knew the whereabouts of the scroll. Some thirteen years ago. And my father may well have been one of them. Khaled told me, before they . . . ’

Sura gulped. ‘Are you sure?’ His brow knitted in a frown. ‘Pavo, thirteen years down there,’ he started, shaking his head.

Pavo gazed at him, unblinking.

Sura fell silent and nodded. ‘I understand.’ His eyes darted across the ground before him, then he looked up; ‘But I’m coming with you. When this one wakes up or is discovered, I’m a dead man anyway, he was assigned to watch me specifically,’ he said, rising from the shadows to pull a coil of rope from the topmost basket in the stack. ‘And we’ll need this. I’ve heard the guards talking: there’s no ladder in or out of the seventh chamber, just darkness and a sixty foot drop.’

‘I don’t want you to get hurt for my - ’ Pavo started.

Sura grasped his arm, stopping him. ‘You’re doing this for your father, Pavo. Let me do this for you, brother,’ he finished with a trademark grin that belied his fraught, weary features.

Pavo clasped his arm to Sura’s. ‘Come on.’

He slipped into a basket on the down pulley and crouched below the rim, Sura doing likewise in the next basket. They remained crouched and undetected as they descended to the sixth chamber. Here, the pulley slowed. The downward rope rolled around a polished timber wheel and the baskets began to rise again. Pavo peeked from the edge of the basket – there were no guards nearby in this, the darkest of the chambers he had been in so far. He leapt out, starting as he came face to face with a gawping slave carrying a full basket of salt. The man was probably only in his early forties, but the mines had rendered him a pitiful sight – more like a man twice that age. He was rake-thin. Tendrils of dried blood stained his wiry moustache and beard. Pavo’s lips flapped to say something as Sura leapt from the other basket to stand by him.