And trembling with excitement, Karina ran to Nikto:
“Nik! Nik! Are you sleeping?”
Nikto didn’t answered her. He lay on his side, not moving, holding one arm under him, the other was twisted up, fastened by the handcuffs to a ring in the wall.
“Nik?” She called him again, already scared. He didn’t seem to sleep, and there seemed to be something very wrong with him. “Oh Gods!”
Nikto really looked like a corpse now. Not a spot on his pale face, cheekbones very clearly defined, facial features sharpened unhealthy. And the complete absence of at least some reaction to her words…
She tried to moisten his forehead with a damp rag, constantly repeating his name, interspersed with affectionate words, and to her joy he stirred, opened his eyes, but his gaze didn’t express anything.
“Nik! Wake up, please! I beg you! I need you!” Unable to see him in such a deplorable state, so exhausted, Karina burst into tears. She began to lift him, because his unhealthy twisted arm scared her. He sat very slowly, still without making a sound. Karina brought a cup of water to his lips:
“Here it is, drink, you need a drink. What should I inject you? Gods! If you need “black water,” she stopped short, because with these words Nikto flinched and recoiled from her, clinging to the wall. Karina didn’t understand him, she continued:
“If you can't do without it… I will try to get it somehow, steal it from my father’s safe in which he stores material evidence. I think it should be there… Or… I don’t know… I will go to the castle, to Arel, and there I will turn everything upside down and find it. I have nothing to lose! You just tell me where to look?”
Nikto seemed to hear her, he somehow strange, frantically ran his hands over his face, over his eyes, over his scar, lips with rings. And his face twisted in such despair, in such anguish that Karina instantly forgot all her problems and questions.
“Gods! What's the matter? Answer me something?! Don’t act as if you are out of your mind!”
Nikto touched his hair, ran his palm along the entire length of his face, it felt as if he were feeling himself, while his eyes looked into the wall behind Karina’s back, past her, and she realized that he couldn’t see anything.
“Are you okay?! Oh please! Stop it! Gods! He moved off his mind! What to do now?”
Nikto turned his head slightly, as if guided by the sound of her voice, and shook his head in a negative gesture, this made her unspeakably happy, since it meant he still heard and understood her.
The chain clanged, Nikto ran his hand along the rough wall, then with his free hand down, he felt the floor slabs and straw as if he didn’t understand where he was and what was surrounding him.
“Nik! Can you hear me? Tell me something! You scare me very much!”
Nikto froze, and slightly bending his head, slowly ran his fingers over his dry cracked lips, as if crossing them crosswise.
“What does it mean? I don’t understand you! Can’t you talk? You have a dumb attack, that’s why you are called “dumb” in Lower? Not only blindness, but also dumbness happen to you? Fuck!” She remembered how the doctor said something about his cropped vocal cords, she then missed it by her ears. Apparently a stone bag, and the non-regular intake of “restoratives” perceptibly violated something in his body.
“I understand that you have not yet returned to normal, you cannot see and speak. I have understood. Now I'll inject you something, just… Wait!” Karina feverishly began to delve into her purse:
“Here! Hold on!” She put a small little book for notes and a pencil in Nikto’s hand:
“Write me as you can. I will understand what to inject!”
Nikto took a pencil and slowly scratched something on the sheet, his fingers didn’t obey him. Karina literally grabbed the notebook from his hands, but instead of the name of the drug and the proportions, it was written on the sheet:
“What is today’s date?”
Karina sat and stupidly looked at these curve uncertain words. Then she looked up and said:
“Three and a half days, if I'm not mistaken, you spent in a stone bag. My father told me so.”
Nikto shook his head, and held out his hand, she immediately returned the notebook to him. He wrote only one word: “Date.”
And stunned, Karina, called him that day’s date and year.
“By the way,” she said, “to believe my father, today is your birthday,” she tried to smile, forgetting that Nikto couldn’t see her smile anyway, and barely said, “congratulations,” and the words got stuck in her throat.
Nikto leaned back against the wall and bowed his head. He didn’t move. She, too, was silent, not knowing now what to say, waiting for Nikto to come to his senses and give her a sign. But he seemed to become numb. So minute passed by minute, and nothing happened. They sat together in a dark and moldy prison casemate, and a stone flower, unlike a candle, could dispel the darkness all around forever. Nikto was cringed, cowering in the corner, and Karina sat next to him, just opposite, on a low bench.
“Nik?” She finally called, unable to waste any more time in vain, her father had probably already been informed of her act in court, and he would soon begin to look for her. Of course, looking for her here would never come into his head, or it would come last, but still…
“Nik?”
He raised his head. And to her disappointment, Karina saw that nothing had changed. His gaze was still frighteningly empty. Only… or it seemed to her in the obscure flickering light of a flower, his eyes shone strangely somehow, and his cheeks were wet.
And Karina couldn’t stand it, she rushed to him, hugging him:
“Dear, darling, don’t do that… Gods, I can’t bear it! Why is my father so cruel to you?! Why does he think you’re a demon?! He should have seen you now! It is unbearable! It is inhumane to make you suffer because of idle gossip and speculation!”
Nikto didn’t pull away from her embrace, and she put the pencil in his hands again:
“Write me something. Write that everything will be fine!”
Nikto obediently took a pencil in his hand, Karina only now realized that his right hand was fastened to the wall, and he wrote all the time with his left! But it seemed that this didn’t bother him and he succeeded.
He handed her a piece of paper.
“I want to die” was written on it.
“I… I will show this sheet to Arel, and he will arrange such a thrashing for you! You mustn’t give up!”
Nikto held out his hand, and again receiving a pencil, wrote as if specifying:
“I'm dying.”
“Do you need black water?”
Nikto shook his head.
“Damn, I will find it, inject you, and you will come to your senses! Fuck! Damn! Can you walk? When will your vision be restored? I’ll get you out of here! I will get you out of here, no matter what it costs me, and I will return you to Arel! Safe and sound! I pulled out Lis, and you are my brother, so I’ll get you out too! I have decided!”
Karina jumped up:
“Let's go!”
Nikto didn’t move.
“Let's go! Either now or never! You make me commit this madness and betray my father, but I can’t see it! I can’t see you like that! After all, you saved my life. Have you forgotten it?! And you smiled there, in Backara, you were a merry villain, like all your friends! I liked you more like that!”
She drew her sword:
“Move back a little…”
With force she slashed several times along the links of the chain, freeing Nikto’s hand. Fortunately,