Sneak Peek Wednesday: Makerborn by Daymon Ashcord

Bez woke in darkness, deep in a pit, having failed his parents yet again. The night air was heavy and damp. The acrid stench of feces had lessened, but his nose still burned with the stink of decay. He felt like he would never wash the smell from his body. What does it matter now?The moist earth offered scant relief from the Southern Waste’s merciless heat. Sweat slicked his body. His skin felt on fire, reminding him of how the Salvians slowly roasted meat on spits. He pinched his right nostril and blew out a thick wad of phlegm.

How long? How squalling long have they left me down here to rot?

He traced fine grooves in the earthy wall of his cage with long, dirty fingernails. Twenty-seven days he’d scratched before he’d given up counting. Then the real fun began. Weeks of wading in his own shit like a rutting hog once the pit guards had stopped retrieving his privy bucket. Weeks more of starvation when the obvious solution to avoid living in a hog pen penetrated his addled mind: no food, no feces. His only companions were self-pity, nightmares, and maggots gorging on his noxious filth.

And the moans of indentured miners, likely years past their freedom date, and Collared All-Tribe—his people—drifting down in his dirt tomb.

“Water,” cried a pit prisoner.

“Bread, just a heel of bread for Seal’s sake,” whined another.

“It was Tuftson,” someone sniveled. “He made me do it. It was him. Please, let me out.”

“Shut your gobs!” bellowed a voice.

The sounds washed over him, had become part of him, familiar as his gnawing hunger or the ever-present worms wriggling against his hot skin. Even without starlight, his people’s blessed vision allowed him to penetrate the mirk. He watched his sunken stomach rise and fall. Each rib pressed against his skin. Sour spit filled his mouth.

He wasn’t surprised that an army of worms assaulted the sides of his stomach and shoulders while he dozed. The slimy little grubs coated him with a sticky sludge, but he was past caring. Hands trembling, he brushed the vanguard away that had reached his chest. His legs were a lost cause. Scores of grubs covered them so only his toes peeked out.

Bez yawned. Heat-induced spans of intermittent sleep kept him drowsy and muddled. Sometimes his parents sat beside him in the dirt, back from the dead, singing and laughing. Other times, he was in the mountains climbing crags, or swimming in crystalline lakes so clear he could see rocks at the bottom. Moments ago, he was a boy again, running barefoot with his cousins through Uncle Darian’s fields, the tall grass whipping at his legs. Then a cry from a prisoner or the damp air clogging his nose had awakened him, shattering the vision. What was real or imagined blurred. Maybe I’m with my uncle still and the pit is only a nightmare.

Hesitantly, he stretched his hands to either side, fingertips brushing the cool, root-tangled walls. Feet firmly pressed against damp earth. Not a nightmare. He moaned like a wounded animal.

“Guardian spirits above,” he wheezed, not wiping the hot tears streaking down his cheek. “There’s no way out.”

But that was a lie. There was a way. His fingers searched for the gouge in the wall, finding the sharp-edged shard of obsidian he’d hidden there. My final escape.

He pried it free, hand shaking, and pressed the jagged edge against the soft flesh of his right wrist. A bead of blood sprang from the tip.

“I’ll do it this time,” he said to the crude face carved into the wall. A pause. “I know that’s what I said last time. By the All-Spirit, I can’t—” His throat tightened. “I can’t take it anymore.”

“Enjoying your new home, demon-blood?” asked an unwelcome voice from the pit’s metal cage above.

“Dorota,” he rasped, tongue clumsy from disuse. “What a pleasure.”

He hated Yan’s henchwoman, but at that moment, his life in the balance, he clung to her words like a drowning man to driftwood.

Her chuckles echoed in the earthy tomb. “Liar. Play it friendly as you like, slit-eyes, but we both know what you are.” She crouched, damp hair plastered to her face, mouth hooked in a grin that never reached her eyes. “I saw the demon in you when we caught you on that ridge. Thought you were clever, didn’t you? Thought the aqueduct workers wouldn’t notice you and your two friends? What is the count? Your third?”

It was his fourth failed attempt to escape the Makersmetal mining camp, but he didn’t bother correcting the murdering bitch. I failed them just like my parents. Tala dead. Marcel beaten or worse. Anelia missing. And Bez… well, he would die in darkness, dooming his parents’ souls to wander the Shadowlands forever, never to reunite with their ancestors. He choked down a sob, not wanting to give her any satisfaction seeing him broken.