Page 46 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“But I probably wouldn’t have anyway, ‘cause he’s got enough problems,” he added, sliding those dark eyes over at me.

And yeah, I got it. I was the problem, at least in Alphonse’s eyes. I didn’t know what to do about it because feeding into Pritkin’s freak-out wasn’t likely to help.

“How did you get past it?” I asked him.

“Get past what?”

“Worrying about Sal?”

“She died,” he said grimly and pushed open a door.

Chapter Fourteen

I had shifted us into the main corridor leading to the dining hall, as I didn’t know this place well enough to go anywhere else. Alphonse had taken over at that point and been steering us along winding passageways and up endless staircases as he’d said he had a quick errand to do. And I guessed it involved food since we’d just entered a kitchen.

It was a big one without the subtle elegance of the halls outside. Which had been becoming steadily less refined as we went on, with brilliantly colored mosaics giving way to bare walls, intricate tilework becoming rough slabs of stone underfoot, and expensive spell light dropping away in favor of copper lanterns, the heat of which had stained the plaster behind them in places. I hadn’t paid much attention until now, though, when Alphonse pushed through a rough, scarred wooden door, and we stepped into a blast of heat.

That was thanks to a long, whitewashed wall full of bread ovens on this side of the room, tended by an army of women with stained aprons thrown over their tunics. There was a mass of sturdy wooden tables in the middle of the space, being worked on by another hundred or so people, and a row of enormous stone fireplaces along the wall opposite us. Like the bread ovens, they were going all out and blasting the workers in between with a double dose of heat.

That might have been why the spit-turners, sitting on little stools to the right of each fireplace, looked exhausted. They were all men drenched in sweat, to the point that they looked like they’d been in the dining hall with us. Only I didn’t think so.

The servants there had been freshly scrubbed and pristine, with their tunics plain but clean and pressed to fall in elegant folds. These guys were in rags, and not many of those, because who would want to ruin decent clothes with that job? And they were decorated with ash from the fireplaces, which had clung to all that sweat and created almost a paste over their skin.

They looked like chimney sweeps after a hard day and were busy cranking haunches of meat and huge, trussed-up fish over the flames, why I didn’t know, as dinner had been canceled. Only maybe not. A bunch of teenagers were rushing around, grabbing platters of food, throwing wards over them that immediately became steamed up, and rushing out again.

Ye olde room service was booming tonight.

“They gotta have the kitchens above the water line so that the smoke has somewhere to go,” Alphonse explained as we skirted around the edge of the room. “So, the nicer areas are all below the sea, with the workspaces above it.”

“Seems like a strange choice since most of the court breathes air,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but so do their enemies. This place was built for defense. The palace is basically a hollow mountain, and the fey got ways of flooding whatever parts of it they want. They know how to survive that kind of thing, having done it for thousands of years. But their enemies—”

“Don’t,” I finished for him.

He nodded. “Armies come in, but they don’t come out. Or at least, they used to. They don’t come in so much anymore.”

I thought back to the flooded ballroom and the people who had been busy fleeing the attacking monster. But none had seemed overly worried about all that water. And then I thought about the twisty corridors outside and how much fun it would be to meet a trident-carrying bunch of fey while lost in the maze and busy drowning.

No, I didn’t suppose armies came in much anymore, either.

But this part of the palace seemed like another world, being bone dry and without the cool breeziness of the rest of the complex. There weren’t even any windows to open, giving the tiniest bit of fresh air. Just massive expanses of smoke-blackened chimneys above the roasting stations, their scars getting steadily darker from the heat.

The air shimmered with it to the point that the room seemed to ripple, and within seconds, I was sweating up a storm under my armor. I glanced at Alphonse, who wasn’t perspiring because vampires didn’t, but he also wasn’t looking comfortable. Even in minimal tunics, I didn’t know how the servants took it.

“Slaves,” Alphonse said when I voiced my thoughts.

“What?”

“Oh, they don’t call ‘em that, but that’s what most of ‘em are. I mean, they don’t technically have to work for the Green Fey, but there’s not a lot of other options around here if you wanna eat.”

“Then why not leave?” It didn’t look like they had anything to lose.

Alphonse snorted. “How? They’re not allowed to use the Green Fey’s portals, including the one to Earth. And the other light fey houses are hostile to anyone with human blood trying to settle in their lands.”

“There are other portals—”

“Yeah, but even if you can get to one, and that means battling across hundreds of miles of hostile territory, what are you gonna use for money? Slaves aren’t rich, and those things are expensive. Not to mention that even if you somehow beg, borrow, or steal your way through, there’s a whole world on the other side that you don’t know how to navigate, and there’s no one to help you.

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