Despite his pains no bones seemed broken, – he got to his feet and found a doorway leading away from the room. A long corridor was out there, alarmingly with torches mysteriously lit all down its length. He held onto the door’s arch, pressed his hot head to the cool marble, listened one more time for anything human, and then began sliding himself along the wall. Water, there had to be water!
Other rooms were there; he passed a scroll library, then a number of locked doors, all of it making a many-chambered home meant for someone who wasn’t staying there, yet who strangely was still managing to keep it lit. His eyes kept going in and out of focus in his dizzy state, but when he was able to make out the trophies and statues in niches about the place, the sort they were, he felt sick!
Only the horned devil itself would treasure such things!
So, he hadn’t just found this cave. No, this was surely the devil’s own hideaway! And that would mean that this place had been kept waiting for him. Every step of his had been planned! Despite the awful realization Hamar’s great thirst drove him to keep looking for water.
He staggered from doorway to doorway, until in one big room a solitary tray of steaming food was waiting there, just as had first met him all those years ago. A fire was blazing away in a brazier on the floor, and blessedly his eyes locked on a big silver jug!
He rushed to struggle it up to his mouth and drank it all. Then he looked across the room and saw folded clothes laid out on big cushions, apparently in readiness for him. With a clearer head now, he ignored the clothes and went over to look out a window-slit in the stone. Where was he!
He could just make out a moat of cloud glowing below him. In that moment he realised he was being kept prisoner, another kidnapping, – this time, high up a mountain!
He was saved, but he hadn’t escaped. He stood panting in weakness and rocked there as he looked around himself. He could feel he was alone, very alone. In seeing more awful artifacts around the room the truth kept repeating about who had him, and that he’d only been transferred from the Fiend’s underworld trap to one up near the sky.
Within hours he was visited by an ugly servant and his worst fears were confirmed when the man gave formal greetings on the creature’s behalf and an assurance that this place would be Hamar’s new home from then on. Hamar didn’t presume to question him further, – could only await whatever else he’d be told, himself but another servant, one carefully being kept for an unknown fate.
The strange man told him of the rooms of the place, but didn’t tell him the secret way into or out of it, and once the man disappeared he never came back. In the days after that, a squealing chain in a sunken alcove in the main room summoned Hamar to lift a hatch there and collect a basketful of fresh food and drink every few days.
A short set of footholds led down to the alcove, but it offered no chance of an escape route: the opening at the end of the short space stopped over a black chasm. Out on the balcony there were only sheer mountain walls beside it and a frightening drop underneath.
His fate was truly sealed, then. There’d be no getting out from his cage this time, its geography of rooms was to be his only world.
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