[fieldbox="-, red, solid, 10"]
D
orgrad never slept, lit by the ever glowing central furnace. The column of iron, rust, and stone rose needle-straight from the bedrock to the sky, and it threw out light from the thousands of furnace holes that lit all the shafts shooting straight from its center. Those on their sleep shift found peace in cubby holes or bends in the corridors.
Chelena tossed in the throes of another nightmare. Her nook was close to the furnace, and its roars echoed down the hallway as iron sluiced from its twenty-five spigots. A bowl of herbal distillates from Pette, half empty, sat nearby. Next to her crouched Nu, nearly naked and sweating in the waves of heat flowing down the corridor. Her pale, white skin contrasted with that of Chelena, who had stubbornly remained dark in all their months of time in Dorgrad, bad juju for a sun forsaken underground city. Nu wiped the sweat off Chelena and nudged the blindfold over her eyes. Tattersal's assassin hated waking up blind, another prison that prolonged her nightmares, but Nu found that she slept better that way, and turned her towards the wall, where light did not glare so much.
"This is for our land. For ... Sunne." Tattersal unwrapped the bloated, spotty slug, and lowered it between her legs.
Chelena threw her sweat soaked blankets to the side, and squinted through the blindfold before tearing it off. She glared at Nu, who, as always, remained quiet. Nu patted the sweat from her body, running the towel along curves in a way that she would have protested, before the illness take her outrage; she felt a small death for how casual their routine had become. Chelena let Nu tip the rest of the drink into her mouth, the herbal infusion fouled by the hard acquifier water. Pette had done well, in a way, allowing her enough life to feel the slow death creeping.
"It was another nightmare ..." They rose as one and left to wander the hallways.
Some time later, they sat near the top of Dorgrad, where the sun sometimes peeked, each with a warm bowl of slop. Nu ate her food with measured precision, taking small bites and chewing thoroughly for digestion, working her way from the rim to the center, carving out a small column just like the Dorgrad furnace. Chelena stirred the gruel.
"Eat ... Strength."
"I'm not hungry." Nu's spoon made a slow, periodic knocking against the bowl until she finished scraping out the last bits. Turning her attention to Chelena, she raised a full spoon, tracing her lips top and bottom. She opened her mouth to protest, but the taste of the oatmeal whet her tongue, and she meekly accepted the spoon, until her bowl was as clean as Nu's.
With the meal finished and the bowls returned to the mess hall, they set on their long walk to the top of Dorgrad, Nu wrapping more and more layers as the sun slowly overwhelmed the light from the central furnace. Pette said strong exercise would help to stir the herbs in her body - Nu thought that it would also circulate the poisons. Chelena did not seem the worse for it, and her dark skin helped her warm in the sun before she began to flake. Nu remembered a time when Lut studiously avoided sunlight, as did all Nocturnes. Perhaps Chelena's illness was changing her body.
At the top of Dorgrad, they passed through the small pedestrian checkpoint, the main railway roaring day and night with carts filled with oil-soaked iron ingots. The comrade up top waved her past as a familiar face. Chelena sat on the same rock that they had been using for the past few months, and Nu placed two fingers on her pulse, palpating her kidneys, lungs, and abdomen. The results she scratched into small pieces of slate in shorthand - some sort of code that the secret servants of Kaustir once used, she had explained to Chelena.
"You are well." Chelena chuckled, and Nu pursed her lips, apparently not possessing enough humour to humour her. "Well enough. We will leave in a week." That earned Nu a choking cough, and if that amused her, she hid it entirely behind a face carved from stone. She packed her notes and started back for the long descent, Chelena stumbling after her.
Later that night, they settled into a deeper nook than usual, and Chelena began to sweat, fearing the return of sleep and her nightmares, while Nu carefully packed bundles of dried and compressed herbs, nestled among thin oilskins bulging with water and crumbly vegetable cakes. Questions buzzed unanswered in her mind, breaking through the dull ache in her abdomen. In a way, she had accepted her death, and passing to the Waters Below, as Nu called it, did not seem a bad way to go. Nu seemed to have a plan for her from the moment they first met. She had hustled them through Avarath like a ghost, and somehow bartered their way into Dorgrad. Now, defying her expectations of hospice, she was fattening her for the next leg of their journey. The last thing she remembered was her silent companion squatting next to her, squinting into the central forge with her lips working over some litany.
At the end of her sleep shift - there were no concepts of days in a sun-less place - Chelena was shaken from her fitful sleep by a somewhat haggard looking Nu. The sleep seemed to help, and she did not complain over their breakfast, or their trek up the road to the top. The city-mine continued to ring the way it always did, with the roar of molten iron meeting the sharp pitched hammers and anvils.
"I thought you said in a week." Nu surely heard her, but she continued forward, slightly panting with the bug-out-bag slung to her back. Chelena thought she saw a subtle head shake, but could not tell with the strain of the climb. She was pushing them hard today.
A short while later, they were back in the dunes again, right before dusk. Nu did two things that Chelena would later clearly revisit in her memories over and over. One, she spoke to a man and handed them a roll of parchment, delicately stamped with an intricate wax seal, and two, she unfolded a compass and studied its motions for a long time. The man would never deliver his message, butchered in the dark by Dorgrad's comrades and scattered to the sands, but she did snap the lid shut with an air of confidence, and when they set out, there was not much difference between now, and when they were leaving Avarath. So they continued east, beyond the maps.
That night, Nu caught a desert hare, allowing Chelena the rare luxury of a meal of blood.[/fieldbox]
End of Chapter 10.