Down a Lost Road by J. Leigh Bralick Read Free Book Online Page A

through space. Empty desert, moldering bones.
I felt the clawing fingers in my mind again, the hellish eyes
seeing inside of me. Felt the terror, the shifting sand that
wouldn’t let me run. Darkness. I reached up to rub my burning eyes,
found them wet with tears.
    “ It’s not supposed to be
this way,” I gritted, slamming my palms against my thighs. The
sound of my voice in the viscous silence made me jump.
    “ Merelin?”
    “ Way to think you could
just come back and save the world. You got caught! It just
figures…”
    “ Merelin!”
    This time I heard the low, rough voice, and
I caught my breath. Someone was here who knew my name. Now that I
thought of it, I couldn’t remember telling it to anyone here. Not
Yatol, not the silver-haired elder. No one. But I wasn’t alone, and
somehow I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or scared. I edged
away from the wall, heart pounding, and crept to the cell door. My
head splintered with pain, almost making me retch, but I choked
back bile and let my weight sink against the grate.
    “ Who’s there?”
    “ Yatol.”
    Yatol! His voice came muffled from the other
side of the wall where I’d been sitting. My heart leapt, sending a
shivery chill all through me. Butterflies, really? Now? I tried to
force the feeling away. Somehow I made it back to the wall,
kneeling and resting my hands against the rough stone.
    “ You’re here? I saw what
happened…somehow, I don’t know. I’m so sorry! I tried to tell you I
had gone.”
    “ I knew.”
    I swallowed, hard. “You sent me back, didn’t
you?”
    “ Yes.”
    “ Then why did you stay? You
could have gotten away. I don’t understand.”
    “ It’s my task. They would
have followed you if they’d found the way you’d taken.”
    “ The way I had
taken?”
    “ Yes.”
    Wow, that helped a lot.
    “ But why did you send me
back?”
    A brief silence, then his voice, low, “So
they wouldn’t catch you.”
    That shut me up for about a minute. My face
flushed with regret and dismay. He had risked himself to get me to
safety, and what did I do? Turn around and get myself caught.
Win.
    “ Yatol, what are
they?”
    “ We call them the Ungulion,
but I don’t know what they call themselves.” I heard a scrabble
against the rocks and he said, “No time now for history lessons.
Look, by the floor.”
    I found a small dark hole in the wall. “The
hole? What about it?”
    “ These walls are centuries
old, and the heat makes the stone weak. It crumbles
easily.”
    I put my finger into the gap and tugged at
the stone. As Yatol had hinted, once I pulled hard enough a large
piece of rock broke away. I shivered, then laughed, a weak and
quavering little laugh. The idea that the rock could be dismantled
by my puny strength made me suddenly nervous about being surrounded
by it. I heard Yatol pulling rocks away on his side and figured I
ought to help with whatever plan he had hatched. The work got more
difficult as the gap got deeper, but I found that kicking worked
fairly well to dislodge chunks.
    “ Well, this is really
convenient,” I said eventually.
    “ Yes.”
    Mentally I groaned. “What exactly are you
planning on doing?”
    “ You’ll see. It’s almost
large enough now.”
    “ And I’m sure the whole
wall will cave in over us when it is,” I said, trying to sound
funny but only sounding sardonic.
    “ That would make things
easier,” came Yatol’s voice. I could imagine his wry
smile.
    “ So, why would someone
build a building out of rock that you can break?”
    “ There was no need to use
anything stronger.” A pause, then, “Most people don’t try to pick
apart buildings. Not generally.”
    I grinned and worked faster, ignoring the
rawness in my fingers where the rock had abraded them. Yatol must
have had a good deal of the hole already broken up from his side,
because the work went faster than it should have. We broke through
at almost the same time, I kicking rather too viciously at the wall
and narrowly