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Eighth Beat
Day 14
Soft warm comfort in Dokugakuji's arms carried him along into sleep and stayed with him as the dream took him. Memories of a little child held curled up in his mother's lap, head resting against her breasts with her heartbeat in his ears. As she stroked his hair and sang songs he couldn't remember now.
And it was the same. The same touch, that hand in his hair, that a small human child felt lying across his master's lap with sickness clouding his senses. The echoes of voices overhead whose words were all but lost on him, but whose meaning he could understand. Don't waste your time on this child, Lord Sanzo. He'll only die.
We'll see, his master had said.
And eyes could flutter closed in complete belief that it would all be all right.
It was that feeling, that assurance that warmed his heart straight through and spread through every inch of his body and enclosed him. That healed everything and left him whole and complete, no gaps in which fear could take root. A total peace.
That a thirteen-year-old boy felt kneeling in meditation across from his master in the darkness of his quarters, air silent but for the soft pattering rain, but a silence that didn't need to be filled. The middle of his forehead ached for the new mark left there.
Peace. Just that. At the moment it seemed every last problem in the world had disappeared, for no other reason than that the calm, contented smile on his master's face suggested this be so. He would believe it.
Movement outside. Ears twinged with the sound, but the mind dismissed it.
And then the door ripped open, as violently as if it ripped though the air itself, jarring and dischordal. His eyes snapping open to see first his master with alarm on his face for the first time in his life, and then to the door just to see a gaunt shape racing toward them.
And. Everything.
Too quick to see. Too quick to understand. The chaos and the panic and the blood spraying everywhere, brain siezing, unable to think or to realize anything until he was done and he stood drenched in red. And the crumpled, shredded remains of his master in a growing pool at his feet.
Tears cascading down without sense or purpose, lungs clamped shut, every muscle shaking and locked, somehow eyes drifting to the assassin still standing there, blood-stained seiten sutra in his clawed grip and eyes on him as though in careful study. Fear under that gaze so total, and yet it seemed, he had a way so familiar somehow that could not be recognized, for the blood on his face and the blood in his own eyes.
And watching, found himself looking up into his own face, his true face, the face of the demon prince Kougaiji with the blood of a dead Sanzo streaming down cheeks and collecting at his mouth, the blood of the boy's master, his master, their master, this sin on his hands. Their hands.
The newly-named Genjo Sanzo screamed.
Kougaiji awoke with the scream in his throat, lunging forward before a strong arm shot out and pulled him firmly back down, pressed his shoulders into the mattress as he struggled, thrashed, shouted incomprehensibly. Until his muscles screamed with the effort and his throat was raw, and the terror seeped out of him, his movements slowed and he stopped fighting his restraints. Fell limply back against the mattress and panted silently, stared at a dark ceiling.
"Holy shit," Dokugakuji, beside him, said weakly. He carefully removed his arm from over his prince's shoulders.
Kougaiji said nothing for a long time. And when he did it was only barely his own voice.
"It wasn't me. Tell me it wasn't me."
Dokugakuji watched him for a moment but resolved it was not the time to ask questions. "Whatever it is, I'm sure it wasn't you."
"How do you know?"
"Because you wouldn't be asking otherwise." He waited, but silence was his only response. He'd have wished that was there was to it, but Kougaiji wasn't calming down.
Then, "It couldn't have been me. Right? I couldn't have killed him, could I?"
"Who?"
He shook his head and the movement turned into sitting up, pulling off the sheets and letting in the cold of the room as he thoughtlessly stood up and went to his wardrobe.
"How long was I asleep?"
"Only an hour," Dokugakuji told him, hopefully with enough of an edge to his tone to indicate he should really be coming back to bed. Hell, he didn't feel like moving yet. It was fucking midnight and warm beds were sadly inviting, as worrisome as lover's behavior might be.
"Really just an hour?" Kougaiji demanded.
"Yes, really. Oh no," the warrior said with a groan. "You mean you didn't notice-- Was he the one behind all that?"
"No. Well. Yes," the prince admitted. He was unconscientiously disrobing in full view of Dokugakuji, who wasn't going to voice any objections. Tearing at those dinner robes like they represented some sort of sickness. "It's not just him. But he's probably the one that tipped things over."
"What the hell is he doing to you? Does he know this is happening?"
"There wasn't much choice. His options are limited."
"How about finding one that doesn't involve fucking you up?" Dokugakuji suggested angrily, earning him a prolonged glance over a bare shoulder. That made him involuntarily swallow a dry throat.
Kougaiji tore his gaze away again, returning to folding up the old robes, then getting sick of this and just tossing them into a corner.
"It's not going to be much longer," he said, digging through his closet and selecting an article almost impulsively. Another robe. Dokugakuji's tired brain had to wonder if he was ever going to see his master in something form-fitting again.
Something dawned on him, and he could have smacked himself for taking until Kougaiji was halfway in his clothes to think of it.
"Hey-- you're not thinking of going out?"
"There's something I need to see to. Sorry."
And a very clear hint he didn't want to go back to bed. Gods, since when did Kougaiji get nightmares? This bad?
"Does it have to mean midnight?"
He stopped then, as Kougaiji turned around to face him, straightening out his collar.
Dokugakuji realized his mouth was open, and closed it. Then managed, "Um. White."
Lords, he wished for some proper light in this room. Even by the dying candles the scene before him was so completely unbelievable, the bright cloth bringing out the darkness of his skin so elegant and so hypnotizingly intense that it had to be a sin somewhere. In fact, he could even think of one.
"Are you sure? Um. Mourning color and all..."
Kougaiji looked down at his garments as though seeing for the first time what he'd pulled out of the closet. But after a period of bafflement and what seemed like confused suspicion for some person not present, appeared to reconcile it with himself.
It was appropriate, the look seemed to say.
"...You didn't kill anyone," Dokugakuji reiterated, when he couldn't stand the expression anymore. "Not who you're thinking, anyway."
"If it wasn't me it was one of ours," Kougaiji replied without looking up, attention focusing instead on his hands, those claws he had such a love-hate relationship with. "So, it may as well have been."
And before Dokugakuji could say anything, make any sort of reply, denial or challenge or reassurance or anything at all, Kougaiji was gone out the door.
~*~
You didn't kill him.
Then why are you shaken?
...It's a scar I don't like touched.
No one else would ever hear such honesty. Kougaiji knew it somehow, without the actual thought crossing his mind. He relented, did a turn-over.
It wasn't you, Sanzo said again. You'd remember if it was. I'd have recognized you when we met later on. You wouldn't be alive right now if that had been you.
You were supposed to get around to killing me anyway.
Sorry. Should I have tried harder?
Why didn't you?
I wonder.
Kougaiji snuffed the cigarette out under his shoe, exhaling slowly so that the smoke came out in a thin trail. He hadn't really wanted to start up again, but the shared taste of tobacco appeared to help Sanzo focus. The pang of guilt for what Dokugakuji would think was almost strong enough to counteract the effect, though.
Shouldn't have run out on him like that, the priest noted.
You're giving me relationship pointers now?
There was the sensation, somehow, that if they had been physically speaking with one another, and Sanzo had happened to have his reading glasses on for whatever purpose, right now he'd be peering at Kougaiji over the top of them. Pointedly.
Kougaiji mentally recoiled in defense.
Speak for yourself. You've got a couple failed relationships on your end.
Failed is different from killed. I'm saying just don't botch it up without thinking. You're not the type to run into many people that can give you the warm fuzzies like that.
'Warm fuzzies.' Aren't you the romantic.
I'm not the one who swooned at dinner last night and was carried back to his room in his boyfriend's arms.
Oh-- you just-- Don't you even start on that!
He tried to shout it over Sanzo's emoting amusement and knew that he failed. Growling, he sufficed with replacing the second cigarette he'd started to withdraw from the pack.
Sanzo quieted obediently.
And then, cracked up again.
We're hopeless, aren't we?
A sad downward spiral, Kougaiji agreed wryly. He secreted the cigarettes within the depths of a sleeve, as some transplanted instinct seemed to dictate, and he set off up the stairs again.
You'd think, given the situation, we wouldn't find anything that could be amusing.
Humor's a coping mechanism. Usually people just keep it to themselves when it isn't appropriate. This is all very unprofessional of me, the priest added, as Kougaiji reached the old wooden portal to the top of the stairwell and gave it a tug.
I'll say. It's like you're drunk. Remind me to kick myself for suggesting you try that honesty thing out for size.
Tug. Pull. Push. The door wasn't budging.
We'll need it for right now. Might as well keep it around.
Frustrated, Kougaiji gave the door a kick. There was a distinct crack as ancient deadbolts gave way, and a satisfying squeak of hinges.
The narrow balcony of the high tower lay beyond, and for a moment Kougaiji hesitated to step out onto it, the weathered stone and half-disintegrated wood not reaching him as the most inviting structure. No one had been this far up in a long time.
Beyond it, far below and bathed in the sterile light of a half moon, were the palace walls, and the vast wasteland bounding Houtou Castle more effectively than any moat, the claw-like mountains trapping them in a valley. And past even that, the untamed forests it was all but impossible to survive.
Sanzo's party had survived it. And through some means unknown to Kougaiji, they had gotten past the mountains and the wasteland and even breached the south gate, before it all went downhill.
You cross thousands of miles and come up against every imaginable form of opposition, and at the end of it all, it just crashes to a halt.
And sticky aftermath, Sanzo muttered darkly, in what Kougaiji hoped was agreement.
But we're not done yet.
Kougaiji let the door swing shut behind him, and touched the rain-beaten stone of the balcony guard.
So how do we do this?
Probably best to focus on one of them. Goku would be our best choice, since you know him better than the others.
Focus how? Picture him in my mind or something?
No, that's useless here. Focus on his voice. Better yet, his thoughts.
Thoughts? How am I supposed to know what Goku thinks about?
...Are you trying to be funny?
In the end, after adamantly refusing to believe anyone's thoughts could really be that obsessively focused on the subject of food, Kougaiji settled on Sanzo's suggestion to focus on Goku's voice instead. Not his real voice, Sanzo clarified. The other one.
Open up your mind, clear out the clutter, and listen. That was the trick.
The third-quarter moon had just arced above the mountain tops when Kougaiji had reached the top of the tower.
By the time it was halfway to zenith, things had not improved.
What am I doing wrong? Kougaiji asked in exasperation, clutching the robes tighter around them as the wind picked up for a moment. Or are they just not here?
I'd sooner believe we were doing something wrong, Sanzo told him, the undercurrent acknowledging this was a reversal of many long-held principles, and that he couldn't bring himself to care right now. Knowing them, I just can't see them going into retreat. Or dying stupidly.
Kougaiji couldn't either. It ran counter to everything Sanzo had ever said about them, and that aside, the confidence in Sanzo's tone was absolute. It was a certain, direct thought that he could have communicated clearly even when their link had been at its weakest, weeks ago. From Sanzo, who claimed atheism though he was a high priest, who denied attachment to anyone though he could tell when someone else was in love, sure thoughts like these were few and far between. Where there was no doubt. None.
An inkling of an idea, a prethought, seeped in through Kougaiji's brain. And he realized it was worth a shot as much as anything.
Tell me why, he told Sanzo.
What?
Why you're so sure. What makes you so confident. Why you know they're there to find.
If they had been speaking face to face, Sanzo's cheeks would have flushed pink.
What are you asking, Kou?
The thing that can lead me to him.
~*~
Yaone awoke to a knock at the hall door. Loud and booming and urgent.
She stayed frozen on her side in her narrow maid's bunk, until whispers arose around her and the head maid of the unit got up and answered.
Yaone winced when she recognized the voice on the other side.
"What?" the matron hissed. "It's not even five. What business could she have with you at this hour?"
Around her, murmurs. She tried to hide further under the blankets.
"Look, this is important," Dokugakuji stressed, the inflection hinting that he heard the same mumbled hints that Yaone did, and was just as embarrassed. "It's about our master--"
Yaone threw off the covers and started looking for her shoes.
~*~
Kougaiji shielded his eyes from the morning sun.
There. In the south.
He blinked.
I understand what you mean now. The voice you heard from Goku, the one in your head. The one calling out.
I was so annoyed, Sanzo said, but without much effort for anger. You think what I do is intrusive, but at least you get some time out. His was like a gnat buzzing in your ear, all the time. I heard it in my sleep.
Never questioned why you heard it? When you had no claim to telepathy otherwise?
I was too busy being irritated, Sanzo explained lamely. Then, abruptly, Wait. The south? What are they still doing there? The guards would still be looking for them in that area.
Why'd you attack from the south anyway?
Ran out of time. The way we'd figured it, you had the most troops by the east gate, and substantially fewer at the north and south, and probably nothing by the west gate. So we wanted to loop around and hit from behind and-- why am I telling you this?
Kougaiji wasn't really hearing him anyway. Now he had a third voice sharing space in his head, though it was very little more than a hum at the edge of mental hearing.
He really is crying.
Anxiety. I wish he wouldn't. He should grow up.
You can't blame a person for worrying about you.
You can blame them for letting it destroy them.
But what's that say about you?
Sanzo fell silent.
Which allowed Kougaiji to hear without effort the voice behind him, ordering that he not make any sudden moves.
~*~
Eyes burned, slit retinas squeezed to thin lines, squinting eyes painfully under the glare of the hot lights. All around her. Everywhere. Ohhh it hurts it hurts mommy turn them off...
She twisted a stiff neck, trying to shift away from some of the light until her head could stop throbbing, and finding no means too. She squirmed, voice spilling out in a stilted, useless series of whimpers, as her body began to register all the little pin-pricks littering her body.
"Nnnh..."
She'd woken up somewhere strange again. She missed her bed. She didn't want to keep finding herself here in these strange rooms with all those people in the white coats around her. Wahhthe lights mommy stop them--
Lirin forced herself to sit up, despite the aches all over her body and stomach feeling like it had disintegrated from its own acid. And a head that felt like it was about to burst. She wanted to be sick and wondered if she even had the food in her to even manage this, or if her body could even take it if she ate.
Every bone felt brittle, as if the simple pressure in their movement might snap them like water reeds. Atrophied muscles whined pathetically with the effort to yank the wires and tubes out of her skin, feeling over her sides and back to find if she'd missed any, and finally her head where everything hurt most.
She bit her lip as her hand enclosed on that last thick cable above her ear. Clamped her eyes shut and yanked hard before she could lose her nerve.
Only the sterile white laboratory as audience for her sobs of pain.
Why, why was this all happening to her? Why did she wake up every time in these rooms? Why was no one ever telling her anything?
Fumbled with twitching, fragile fingers for the metal tray, winced as a wrist graced the cold edge before she could palm some gauze into her grip, bring back to dab at the blood seeping through her hair.
They said tests, always more tests, Mommy wanted to be sure she was healthy. But doctors were supposed to make you better. This wasn't better. She didn't know what it was.
She had felt the best she had in weeks when she'd gotten to see her brother last night, before he went and fainted. Then she'd started crying and hadn't known why. And then her mother had looked at those scientist-people and said something about being hysterical and then someone came around to her chair and shot something into her arm just as they were carrying her brother away. And then she'd woken up here and it was all happening all over again.
Couldn't stand it. Had to get out of here, even if her legs felt like jelly under her as she lowered herself out of the operating chair, and the cold tile was like ice and made everything lock up on her, and everything was so, so cold, and all her clothes had been taken away and replaced with one of those paper medical gowns. She wrapped her arms around her not for the warmth but with the hope it could stop some of the violent shaking, and it didn't.
Staggered, held on to a near table for support until the table ran out and she had to walk under her own power, and all but collapsed on the first attempt. Her head was swimming and vision was spinning, nausea clouding up the senses that it seemed only by some miracle that she finally stumbled her way to a door, and out into the freezing hall.
There were murmurs of voices far away but she couldn't tell from where or by whom. The sound echoed inside her poor skull and only made the dizziness worse, until she all but collided with a wall and slithered gratefully into an open door to a different room. Didn't matter what it was.
It was dark and empty, but for a strong green light emanating from a tank near the rear center wall. Large canvas had been draped over another wall, and it swayed as from airflow. Computers whirred like the buzzing of insects in her ears and made her stomach twist for reasons she couldn't understand, but somehow suddenly not wanting to be around another machine ever ever. But still drawn to that green glow despite her hazy fear.
When she got close enough her head was swimming with a different sensation, as recognition ran through her and she found herself looking up at what was not Genjo Sanzo, had at one point been Genjo Sanzo, was now barely more than a doll full of wires just as she had been, lungs rising and falling on the command of a respirator. Eyes dead and glazed over, even as they stared at her.
"Sanzo--"
~*~
Kougaiji ripped his arm out of the guard's grasp and all but tripped on the wires underfoot.
"What's the meaning of this?" he demanded of Gyokumen Koushu, standing at base level not even ten feet from him, clipboard in hand and with a fucking smug little smile on her face.
She didn't answer, just let a hand go to her clipboard and extract a slightly crumpled sheet of paper with holes in the corners from where it may until recently have been nailed up. She let it fall to the floor.
Yaone's faked messy handwriting looked up at him.
"I believe that's a question for me to ask," she told him icily. "What have you been trying to do under my nose, Kougaiji dear?"
He bared his teeth, knowing that his fangs showed, and not caring. "What about what you've been doing under mine?"
Gyokumen spread her hands, long sleeves of her stolen dress swaying elegantly. "I'm merely cleaning house like any good wife would, I should think. I do have such a distaste for garbage left around the place." Her smile widened and grew even more unpleasant. "And yet the thing about trash is, the more you dispose of, the more there seems to be to find. Wouldn't you agree?
"Take the guard. A fine body of men supplemented by uncouth locals will survive the dilution sufficiently, but introduce one alien substance and suddenly things don't seem to be getting done. Likewise the help. Under your thumb, aren't they, those girls? I do commend your efforts."
"What kind of paranoid bullshit--"
"I mean your little servants," she snapped at him, cutting him short. Long red nails curled around the edge of that clipboard. "What subversive stunt do you think you're pulling, boy? Do you think you can turn this house against me? Do you think you can manipulate a castle full of people at your will, break apart our little revival with the help of that priest friend of yours?"
shit.
"What do you--"
"We know everything, you little brat! Don't even bother to deny it! I'll bet you thought yourself rather clever to have set this up all on your own, this secret alliance for you to share in your heads. You think it's a fluke, a chance of fate, this little partnership of yours sprouting out of nothing, your cute little romance? That you achieved stealing thousands of joules of energy meant for your father, to feed your little love affair?"
He thanked the gods for long hair to hide the sweat on the sides of his temples.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
The clipboard clattered on the floor, Gyokumen jabbing a finger at him in shaking accusation. "You harbor the priest Genjo Sanzo in your head!"
"I do not!" he snapped back immediately, the lie forced out as a complete knee-jerk reaction. "Quit shouting nonsense."
"We have every conceivable proof against you. Every second of you in that room on our cameras, the data sheets of hundreds of thousands of joules of lost energy. Your brain waves in his body."
He took a step back, heel catching on a cable, and all but stumbling. Suddenly feeling all the eyes of the room on him, the pressure of a dozen bewildered, scrutinizing looks.
"This is lunacy--"
"Silence, you rat!" she yelled. The insult slicing right through in the ways that high vulgarity never could. Knowing what he thought of his appearance. "You stink of lies and villainy and your sex from four days ago!"
He tripped backwards again, lungs rising and falling heavily, unable to stablize himself. Voices in the back of his head, who knew whose, begging him to calm down and couldn't, no, not under that voice and the glare of all these people--
"You call me the villain?"
They weren't his words.
"I call you insubordinate. Insurrectionist and defiant of the youkai crown."
"I deny it."
"You claim, can actually claim in your state that you serve your father the king? That you work to his service? That you too toil to bring forth his return?"
Big language. Oratory. For an audience.
There was more than a dozen or two faces in the room around him. There was the entire world.
"I support the crown. But not my father," he said, voice so quiet it would not have been heard at all but for the death-gripped silence of the hall. "And certainly not you."
He wasn't answering her. He was answering everything he had ever questioned.
~*~
"Sanzo... Sanzo Sanzo Sanzo Sanzo..." Lirin wailed, hands pawing at the glass. "Do you see me? Do you hear me? Answer me. Somehow. Please. Sanzo..."
He only looked down at her, something flickering in his eyes but besides that no movement, no sign that he heard or understood, that he was doing anything but staring dumbly as a bird might watch a shadow on the wall.
She was sobbing openly now, the silence getting far too much to take. "Who did this to you? I'll-- I'll hurt them. I'll get them back. I'll get 'Niichan to kill them all. I'll-- I'll--"
A hand twitched, as though some minute spasm. And then again, stronger and more purposeful, fighting against the wire restraints a second time. But this time forward, toward the glass where Lirin's hand was pressed. Cables and tubes ripping, blood clouding around the tears in the skin of his wrist, but still struggling toward her--
~*~
Gyokumen Koushu lifted her chin and smirked. "Childish."
~*~
Lirin saw that hand freeze up first, the sudden seizing of every muscle before she snapped her head up in shock, watched as his back arched in pain as the cables ran rabid with electric energy, blue crackling light arcing over and through pale skin.
"SANZO!" she shrieked, slamming hands on the glass until her weakened bones ached. As Sanzo's scream died into a thousand bubbles in the water.
~*~
The high-arched halls of Gyumaoh's throne room echoed with the prince's cries.
He rolled to a halt, grappled on the flagstones for purchase, every muscle shaking with leftover electric current running wild in his system as he tried to stand, only for Gyokumen to deal another blow.
Kougaiji screamed, could not help but scream, the horrible pain wracking every nerve of his body and siezing up his brain, breath dying in his throat, muscles spasming out of his control.
"Do you know better than to defy me now, you little rat child?" Gyokumen shouted above his voice and the crackle of lightning. "Will you submit to the will of your betters?"
He clenched his eyes shut, gritted teeth until he tasted blood, as she grew tired of his lack of response and struck harder. As behind his eyes purple flashes scored his vision and blood seeped out from his ears. And a pain in the center of his forehead, like his skull would split in two.
He tried to get up.
~*~
Through the pain and the blood clouding his tank, Sanzo saw.
Face. What. Who?
You.
Sister. My. Sister.
Reached out with every ounce of strength that shaking, bleeding arm, to touch the hand pressed on the glass.
As the shock ripped through him again.
Cried out, head swinging back as every muscle locked, as pain like nothing anywhere shot through him and kept coming, no thoughts to think, brain sparking and fizzing out, dead and useless. Ten thousand volts running right through him over a thaumic line.
And then he saw it. The path laid out before him.
~*~
Sanzo's body slowed. And went limp.
"SANZO! SANZO!" Lirin screamed, willing her voice to block out the wail of flatlining vital signs.
Someone. She had to go find someone. Who could...?
~*~
Ten thousand volts over a thaumic line to send to him what his other felt. To forge a link that surpassed anything else, that opened every last pathway, unchecked every last floodgate. And let him in.
Hands not his own, dark and clawed, wrapped around a frantic beating throat and squeezing, pushing thumbs into the windpipe, closed fingers in until the veins showed blue on her skin and oh lord what a feeling to finally get to have, the pulse underneath his fingers, the mad, fanged grin on a mouth that wasn't his, eyes that didn't belong to him wide and glowing, seeing the little dips into the infared that human eyes were not granted, watched the actual heat rise in the blood around that crushed neck. Loved the smells of burnt hair and sweat and blood, the tang of it in his mouth, the scent of it off her as it dribbled down poison lips. And the pulse. The pulse. This was what he had wanted most, after so long, the dying heartbeat under his grip--
~*~
"You have to do something!" she shrieked at him, leading him in and jabbing a finger wildly at the flatlined screens. "Please, please!"
Dr. Nii surveyed the scene. "What... the... hell..."
Looked at the control panels. At the body, at the blood. Sniffed the acid smell of burnt wire.
~*~
Everyone in the grand hall stood frozen. Could not, no, not ever, bring themselves to move, stood rooted to the spot in abject terror at the creature, at whatever the hell the prince had become. Nothing but animal.
~*~
"Heavy electric surge? How? From where? I don't--"
~*~
The animal that was losing its hold. And slipping.
The link that it had forged so solidly was beginning to disintegrate from under him. Edges of sensation fading out, vision and touch and smell and sound leaving him behind, letting to linger, just for a moment, the taste of blood. Until even that left him.
He was slung back.
~*~
Vital monitors started to beep.
"You fixed him!" the girl was squealing through tears.
"I... No I didn't..."
~*~
Two scientists in the room saw the shift, the moment when Kougaiji's muscles relaxed and his eyes flickered, and there was an immediate shout for the guard.
Hands were on him in an instant, pulling him from his grip around Gyokumen's neck, restraining him, pushing on his head, someone stabbing a needle into his arm. No point to tell them everything was already fuzzing around the edges and going dark.
~*~
The blackbox's body began to move.
And choke.
Shit-- Rains, it pours, Nii thought grimly.
~*~
And Gyokumen sat up.
"To the dungeon," she rasped, rubbing her throat. "Now."
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