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SOMETHING METAL CLANGED across the floor of Dun’s cell, waking him with a start. He sat huddled in the corner of the cell. It was cold and damp in the cell complex. A smell rose from where the metal thing had come to rest. Dun suspected an attempt at food of some description. It was hard to tell when the smell from the rest of the complex overwhelmed everything else, including his appetite. Dun groaned.
“Hey, you gonna eat that? Because if you don’t...” Dun’s next door cellmate said.
“No,” Dun said. “You want it?”
“No, but I’m just warning you. They feed you once a span. You get mighty hungry.”
“I can’t eat,” Dun said. “I think I might be sick.”
“Suit yourself. You don’t want it? Shove it over near the bars over here, and I’ll reach through.”
Dun did as he was asked. “What’s your name?”
“Fen,” his opposite number said through a mouthful of food.
“Dun.”
“No, not yet.”
“No, I’m Dun.”
“But you’ve not started; I’ve got yours.”
Dun sighed. “I’m called Dun. Dun is my name.”
“Ooooh! Sorry,” Fen said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
Dun let his newfound friend eat. The sound of scrabbling on the metal plate stopped.
“Hey, how long have you been in here?”
“Me?” Fen said. “Not long. Twenty spans, maybe?”
“Where are you from?”
“River-folk.”
“Ah, I thought I recognized the accent. You’re a long way out of your way for a River-folk, aren’t you?”
“Might say the same about you for a Bridge-folk,” Fen replied.
“Good point. Good ears too.”
“Kept me in work as a guard.”
“Guard?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry,” Dun said. ‘Too nosy.”
“For around here? Yeah. Lemme give you some advice in return for dinner, and then we’s straight, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Keep your head down. That way you get hurt less. Don’t hear nothin’. Don’t smell nothin’. Most of all don’t say nothin’.”
“Get hurt?”
“They interrogate people here,” Fen said.
“Oh.”
“Mostly folk they think are hiding something, or might be spies, they’re obsessed with spies. Don’t know who’s spying on them, or who’d be bothered, really. They’re all mad.”
“They?”
“You are nosy. It’s gonna get you into trouble. Just sayin’.”
“Probably.”
“They are the Fiefdom. That’s what they call themselves or this place anyways, but they’ve got lots of tribes like us.”
“Are they, you know...”
“Like us? Dunno, they smell funny if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve never really got close enough to feel one that wasn’t punching me.”
“Hmm... It’s just that I’ve been spending a lot of time around someone who... Well... wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t punching you?” Fen said.
“No wasn’t folk.”
“Oh, you mean like this lot?”
“No, I don’t think so, these lot, Over-folk or whatever, they’re a bit taller and a bit skinnier, but they’re still basically folk. Myrch was something ... different.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Well, no fur, a smell like nothing I’ve ever come across before, really tall, he owned lots of weird tech.”
“Gods, don’t talk to me about tech. These lot are obsessed by it.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, it’s everywhere...”
A loud clanging rattle echoed down the cellblock as something hard, a stick maybe, was run along the bars. Loud-clunking feet followed the noise: three, four guards?
“Quiet down in there, prisoners! You!”
The feet stopped outside Dun’s cell. He froze, holding his breath. The shouting guard clattered around with keys in the lock but it was the door to Fen’s cell that opened.
“Did you miss me?” Fen said.
“Quiet!”
There was a sharp crack and the faint smell of singed fur. Dun could hear Fen hiss a breath in, too proud to let out a shout. The guards scuffled briefly with Fen, there was another crack, Fen cried out, and then Dun could hear them drag him out of the cell and on down the corridor. A door somewhere at the end banged shut. Dun breathed out slowly, his heart hammering. Ten clicks, twenty, then thirty.
Fen’s piercing shriek rent the air. Dun clamped his hands over his ears and squashed himself as far into the corner of the cell as he could go. The bars and the cold stone of the wall pressed into opposite sides of his face. That felt comforting somehow. He kept his hands clamped to his head but only managed to dull the sounds. He felt tears streaming down his face and running down his arms. When did that start?
“No, no, no, no, no, no,” he said to the wall of the cell, although there was no one to hear him. “No, no, no, no, no, no.” The rhythm of the words was calming. “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
Then the screaming stopped.
The door opened at the end of the corridor. Two of the guards marched out, back toward his way, and then past Dun’s cell. Then silence again. The two guards marched back with someone else, soft sounding feet in tow. They went back down to the room. Dun heard distant discussion and some raised voice sounds, none of which was intelligible from so far away. The door to the room slammed again and the soft-footed Feifdom person stomped back down the corridor muttering under his breath, past Dun’s cell and off.
No one else came out of the room for a long time. Eventually, Dun heard the door creak open gently, and a guard, hardly clumping at all, progressed back down past Dun’s cell. Dun presumed he was back off to the guard post that everyone seemed to pass on their way in. Fen did not return that cycle. Or the next. The meals came and went. The third one Dun was hungry enough to eat. It was dry and tasted of plaster and bitter plants. When he wasn’t eating, Dun slept and wept.
He dreamed again, in that vivid way of foretelling, but all he could hear was hissing, like his head had sand pouring in one ear and out the other. There were no emotions at all. He could smell nothing, or everything at once he wasn’t sure. A bit like that feeling when you smell something so strong; it stuns your senses for a bit. Except there was no smell to precede it. And his skin felt sensitive at every point as if he was being held in a snug suit. Not pain, but like being touched everywhere at once.
He woke up with a gasp. The door of his cell rattled. He’d didn’t hear the feet of the guards. Now he was awake he could smell them though. The guard captain, the one called Batcha, that had the fine line in shouting was rattling keys at his cell grill.
“Wakey, wakey. The people in the office at the end want to talk to you.”
“I need to pee.”
“Hurry. Thirty clicks and I’m dragging you there peeing or not.”
Dun didn’t need telling twice. He knew he was in a fix and didn’t need to make things any worse for himself. Play safe and ride it out. Wait for an opportunity.
Dun gulped. The trickling noise of the gully and it’s drain faded away. “Finished.”
“Okay, move.”
To avoid more poking and whatever else came with the sticks the guards were so fond of hitting everyone with, Dun moved quickly. They progressed down the corridor to the end, Dun alongside Batcha and two guards clumping along behind them. The procession stopped at the door. Batcha banged on it with his stick.
“Enter,” came a silky voice from the other side of the door.
“Prisoner for interrogation.”
“Good, bring them in.”
Batcha poked Dun to a place in front of the interrogator.
“Good. Thank you, Batcha. I will call if I need you.”
Dun waited patiently. The room was large and cuboid. It contained some kind of desk between him and the interrogator. There was scratching of some kind of stylus and the faint sound of a regular clicking, weirdly not an organic sound like a clicker-beetle, more like some kind of clicking machine. Everything smelled similar to a kind of plant Tali used for cleaning. What did she call it? Antiseptic.
Two hundred clicks went by. Then four hundred. Six. Dun’s calves were starting to ache. Some instinct told him not to speak, so he stood in silence, breathing slowly and as quietly as he could manage. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Then back. Still, he waited.
“You may go. Guard!”
The door opened and grabbed Dun firmly by the arm. Dun turned back to the doorway, but his feet stumbled on the way out. The guard waited til he’d collected himself, renewed his grip in Dun’s arm, and led him back down the corridor to his cell. How long he’d been in there; he’d lost count. Dun sat down on the floor. There was a flump of something landing gently behind him before the cell gate clanged shut. It smelled organic and stale. Dun reached out. It was some kind of woven blanket.
“Thank you,” Dun said, bewildered.
But the guard was gone. What on earth had happened there? Was that meant to be an interrogation? Was he getting some kind of special treatment? Fen hadn’t come off so easy. More importantly, these people had no idea who he was, did they? So if Myrch’s advice was to be trusted there were a number of factions, and this wasn’t the one that wanted him. Was that a good thing or not? Dun wasn’t sure and all the speculation was giving him a headache.
He lay on his side on the blanket and wrapped the rest of it around him. It was thin but better than nothing. He tried again to collect his thoughts, but drifted off to sleep, straight back into the creepy sand dream he’d had last cycle.
