“Why do us the favour?” growled Miko. “From my eyes, easier to have killed me and kept the peace with your captain, Gyr.”
Sket shrugged. “Could have gone down like that, but it didn’t.”
“What are you in for?” Miko asked.
The man sucked in a sullen breath. “I ended up short-changed on B & D’s extortion list. He wanted to gouge funds out of all of us, the cacti smugglers of Arad’s oasis, even though we’re members of a guild. I refused.”
“So, he slammed you in here?”
“He took my wife and kid. Flaunted it in my face. I despise the bastard. I have no idea where my family is. That was a year ago.”
Miko’s fists curled into knots. “He sounds like a complete psycho. Needs to be eliminated.”
“Yeah, a lot of people do. It gets worse. Wait ’till you see him—or her.”
“What do you mean ‘her’?”
Sket gave an ugly laugh. “You’ll see...”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Fenli snorted, looking around the cage with wild eyes.
Sket looked at him as if he were a simpleton. “Don’t you think we’ve already considered that?”
Fenli shrugged off the remark. “Maybe if we surprise the guard, plant Gyr’s corpse by the door. The jailor trips, the others waffle and we—”
“That’s been done before. Oldest trick in the book.”
“At least drag his reeking hide away from the sleeping quarters,” hissed Rast.
Miko pointed to a clear jug on the floor, its fluid a sickly yellow. “Is it drinkable?”
“Be my guest.”
Miko sniffed it and detected a slight odour. He wrinkled his nose.
His mouth was so dry he was tempted to chance it. It felt like years since he had drunk anything, at least since he had last been at the Skull Palace. He took a swig, spat it out in a warm spray in an instant. “Agh! Tastes like piss. I can’t drink this.”
“Then die, idgit. Maybe it is piss. Haha.” Chuckles came from the gathered ragbeards. “It’s the best you’ll get around here.” Sket motioned to a gloomy L-shaped area at the back of the enclosure. “You can take your dumps in the crapper back there.” He indicated a place drowned in shadows amidst the sound of knocking pipes. “Watch your step. It isn’t pretty in there.”
Miko staggered over, holding his aching ribs where he had been kicked too many times. Indeed, the small cubicle was hideous enough to make any man gag. Opening the battered door, he stepped gingerly across a line of trailing slime. Fortunately there was a latch, a dodgy affair, and cracks around the rickety door’s edges admitted some light, but also allowed noxious vapours into the common area.
Bzt. Bad timing. Invisible again! Miko gave a resigned sigh. Best to let sleeping dogs lie. He’d wait it out. He did not relish being branded a full-fledged mutant, to fuel more violence.
He hovered like an old ghost, glad for the freedom of pain from the body. The exhaustion of the last days had slipped away. But he thought he would die if he had to drink foul water like that and live in such filthy conditions with unpredictable villains. If these rogues found out he was an invisible freak...
* * *
“Hey, hurry up in there, would you, chief? I’m close to shitting my pants.” Fists thumped on the door.
How much time had passed? Miko shook the daze out of his astral head. He must have dozed.
“Yeah, me too, I have to piss. You asleep in there? I feel like I’m going to wee all over Sket.” A chorus of rude jeers had Sket bridling.
“Shut your gobs!” came Sket’s angry voice.
Silly sods, thought Miko. Still, he did not particularly wish to be caught in here, buzzing back to visibility while they broke in.
He kept his thoughts focussed on mist, insubstantiality, air, anything to remain bodiless.
When the door finally burst open, Miko, ghost-like, hovered there watching them, deriving a wry personal amusement from their dumbfounded expressions.
“Hey, the silly gilly freak’s gone!”
“What do you mean, gone?” Sket bounced over, squinting in the dimness. He bared his knife.
Miko floated through the noisome air, gliding across the grimy floor, catching a glimpse of Fenli blinking in confusion, a snow daze on his face. An expression of wonder gripped them all. Fenli frowned, as if in his drug haze, recalling an earlier event.
Miko forced himself to remain calm. He tried drifting through the far wall. He bumped nose first into hard material, jarring back into harsh reality. On unsteady legs, he staggered behind Fenli and made a casual remark, “You guys blind as bats? I was here all the time, squatting in the shadows.”
Sket whirled on him. “What’s this, outlander?—a trick?” One of the greybeards endorsed Sket’s argument.
“No trick.”
Fenli looked at Miko with suspicion. “Something funny about you, pilot.” Usk, limping closer to peer through scarlet eyes, clacked his pincers as if to confirm the claim.
* * *
The prisoners gave Miko, Usk and Fenli dark looks and whispered insults. But for fear of Sket, they attempted no further violence upon the newcomers. Some hours later, the door clanked open and an armoured jailor tramped in, backed up by two air-rifle men, to plop a tureen of slop down on the floor. Some type of thin porridge. He quickly closed the door, repulsed by the stench.
The convicts set to eating by necessity without enthusiasm. They took crude bowls and cutlery piled in the shadows and shovelled their fare down with dirty spoons or their fingers. Miko helped Sket stuff the corpse into the lavatory.
* * *
Three days in the cellar and conditions for Miko, Fenli and Usk deteriorated. The air became rank with the odour of decay. Usk slept
