I am driven to wonder whether the reader of this account has been assuming that all this business with mental energies and focusing was just an academic’s fantasy.
Now you know.
*
For about three days I lived in dread and mostly in isolation. The other inmates had no wish to go anywhere near me. It was not that I was a murderer. That, after all, was not an unusual thing in the Island. It was the means. Tallan had been quite explicit about what had happened. I had stepped up behind Harro and stared at him, and Harro had died. That made me too much of an unknown factor as far as the Islanders were concerned. If I could kill with a look then I was far too dangerous to be around.
The Wardens watched me very narrowly as well. I made sure that I gave them no excuse.
The fact was that it was all a fuss over nothing. Harro had been something of a fluke, the combination of an unheralded concentration against a weak and wholly unsuspecting mind. The very fact that people were wary around me stymied any power I might have had over them. Now things had gone so far, though, I suspected that I was better keeping that a secret. There was no telling what might happen to me if people discovered I was actually defenceless.
Lucian did not talk to me, when we were locked up for the night. I would have counted this as a blessing at any other time, but I had been in silence all day, and even Lucian’s prattle would have been welcome. As for Hermione, she was never very talkative.
“So you killed someone, then,” she observed.
I admitted that I had.
“One of the people who hit me.”
I said that this also was true.
“Good,” she told me, and that was that. She had no real interest in methodology.
All the way through this, I could feel Gaki watching me. His eyes glittered through the darkness at me, but he held his peace. His expression, when the lamps lit it, was one of calculation. For two nights his silent vigil disturbed my sleep. Only on the third did he say even a few words.
“You have hidden depths, Stefan,” he chided softly. The others were asleep. It was just him and me.
I made no answer.
“I might have to kill you, eventually,” he told me evenly. “I do hate things that I don’t understand.”
I tried to meet his gaze and failed. For three days I had wanted to talk to someone and now I was mute.
“Not yet, though,” he said. “I will make some attempt to understand you, first.”
In the darkness I wondered whether I could force my mind on Gaki, and knew that I could not. His own must be like a knifeblade. I would shred myself against it.
“When I was with Sandor,” Gaki said, “he often speculated about the powers of the mind.” He left it at that, closing the subject neatly. I was left wondering just how far Gaki had gone along that road. The human mind, as I knew like no other, is a tool with a thousand uses. Helman and I had often sat up late discussing just how society might benefit from the powers of the mind.
Now I was faced with the other side of that argument. My own mind had done nothing but kill a man, and now there was a monster in the next cell pondering on how to apply his intelligence. Things did not look good for the advancement of mankind.
*
It was the very next day when they came for me. Two Wardens shouldered their way through the toiling prisoners, grabbed me by the arms and hauled me away. It was not even at night. I had been fearing every footstep outside my cell for nothing. Everything was in broad daylight and before a hundred witnesses, none of whom did anything to stop it.
It was a long walk, long enough for me to give full consideration to the fates awaiting me. The two Wardens escorting me did not speak, nor did they slacken their pace, and I knew neither of them. I had assumed that I would be brought up before the Marshal for swift retribution, but instead I was hoisted beyond the Wardens’ level, all the way to the top. The Governor wanted to see me.
The Governor, I believed, needed me. I was working on his pet project. I should have been reassured to discover our destination. Instead, something told me that things were not going to be as simple as that.
I had run the entire gauntlet of fears by the time we arrived, from leaden dread (of an inexorable fate awaiting me) to knee-trembling terror (of immediate physical peril) through all the little shades and distinctions in between. I am something of an expert on the subject of fear, but on that long journey to judgement, I ran dry. At the end, as we mounted the final stairs, I found all fear gone from me, replaced by a fragile calm. I knew that I was in far more trouble than I had ever been in before. At the same time I knew that it was not the death of Harro that would be laid at my door. I had to try and work out what line I had crossed.
I had at least one bargaining chip. The Governor wanted Trethowan translated, and there was nobody else in the prison who could do it. It was not much. After all, he had gone for years without it. It was the smallest lever for me to exert pressure on.
The Governor’s rooms in daylight were brighter than before, but not much. There was much use of drapes to keep the sun out, and a lot of the earlier gloom was still keeping him company. I wondered whether his hairless skin burned easily. I could see the man himself at the far end of the room, illuminated by something quite unlike natural light. There was a malign, flickering radiance cast across his soft face, and it came from the mirror that I had noted before.
Despite my situation I could not help but feel excited at this discovery. I knew of such devices, of course. There had even been one at the Academy, although it had not functioned in living memory. To find one in working order here was astonishing, as was the implication that another such machine must exist in the city by which the Governor could communicate with his own superiors.
My excitement dimmed somewhat when I made out what the Governor and his correspondent were saying.
“And this is what?” the Governor demanded.
“Something he produced, with a few others. It was in his file,” came the reply. I could not make out the face that the mirror was displaying, the angle was too sharp, but the voice sounded slightly familiar.
“The reason for his conviction,” the Governor suggested.
“Probably. I get the impression it caused a stir at the time. I really can’t remember. I’ve had a clerk go through it for you. Nothing earth-shattering.”
“What about these mind powers you mentioned?”
“Oh, they’re in there,” the unseen man responded. “No detail, but they’re there. The entire thrust was, I am informed, that there was no future in the way we were living and we should seek out alternative lifestyles. There’s a chapter on “The Ancients’ Ancients”, if you can believe that, where your man reckons that there were once civilisations that, and I quote, ‘Did not require physical tools to accomplish physical tasks, instead manipulating the infinitely more powerful forces of the universe with their minds alone. These energies are implicit in the very structure of being and need only to be tapped with the correct mental manipulation. A small push can therefore trigger a prodigious result. To work through machines is to batter a door down, whereas the mind is the key that can open the lock.’ How about that?”
I recognised the words, of course. They were Helman’s, although the final comparison is mine. The book they were talking about was the very volume that my friends and I had produced. They were checking up on me, and had already linked Harro’s death to my studies at the Academy.
“There’s more of the same, unfortunately,” the man in the mirror was saying. “Then it goes into references. Various recovered ancient documents, which supposedly hint at still more ancient secrets, and so on and so forth. Various recent but highly dubious papers claiming to demonstrate the existence of these powers. At the back there’s some kind of experimental log, but to be honest I can’t make much of it. You know I only got my Academy Reds by bribes and good family. There’s certainly nothing about using it as a weapon. Like most idealists they thought that their perfect mind-control world wouldn’t need weapons.”
“What about side effects?” the Governor asked. “There must be something.”
“Leo, Leo, Leo, believe me. I have had some very bored clerks go over every word. It all reads like anyone else’s mystic rubbish. Your man there probably just died. People do just die, especially on the Island.”
“No.” The Governor looked frustrated and fed up. He was quite different to the vague and distant man who had commissioned me before. “She is insistent, Harweg. Something happened.”
“Well, I’ll send the book to you on the next boat. It’s only taking up space here,” Harweg said through the mirror. “Anyway, that’s all I can spare you. Keep up the work and all that, and I’ll speak to you before the end of the week.”
The mirror went abruptly dark, just after I recalled that Harweg was the name of the current Lord President. The Governor, “Leo”, had friends in high places. By that time the bald man was turning on me.
“Now you,” he said, as sharply as his voice would permit. “Tell me what you did.”
I stared at him, trying to work out what it was he wanted. “I was just defending someone,” I started uncertainly. “I know that the man died, but I didn’t have any option at the time, and he was going to—”
“Enough,” the Governor snapped. He looked like a man under pressure, which was odd considering that he was the master here. “I don’t care how many inmates you kill. Why should that matter to me? It’s not my job to count them. What did you do? What effects does it have?”
“Well…” His unpleasant, soft face was very close to my own, and I tried not to meet his eyes. “In theory it can do all manner of things. We never really worked out the limits—”
He struck me. He actually struck me. It was like being slapped with a damp cloth. He probably hurt his hand on my cheekbone far more than he hurt me. The very surprise of it was enough to silence me for a moment, and then I blurted out, “It kills. Obviously. That is what it did. It killed him.”
“I know what it did to him,” the Governor spelled out to me. “What about to… others? What side effects does it have? How does it contaminate?”
“Contaminate?” I asked, baffled.
“This mental radiation of yours. Does it leak? Does it creep out of your head when you’re not using it? When you use it, how does it taint those around you? How does it spoil them? Answer me!”
I goggled at him, utterly bewildered. The conversation had taken a sharp turn and scuttled away from any territory I was familiar with at breakneck speed. The Governor looked as though he might hit me again, and to avoid any contact with that fungous skin I said, “I really don’t understand, sir. I’m sorry.”
He turned away. He was so clearly a man who had never really needed to be angry in his life. He was bad at it. He didn’t think to have the Wardens beat me. He didn’t think to make threats (which he was in an ideal position to enforce). He was quite out of his element. In retrospect I almost feel sorry for the man.
“There was someone else there, when you did this thing,” his voice came to me, more under control now. “Two others, as it happened. There was the accomplice of the man you killed, and there was… another person there. This mental power of yours… it affected them, yes? A fallout. It contaminated them. Yes? Well?”
I really didn’t think that it had; I had really never thought about it. “It doesn’t seem very likely,” I told him, a scholar again for just a second.
“’It doesn’t seem very likely,’” he parroted back to me. “You don’t even know. This unnatural power you have and you don’t even know.” He stomped off across the room in disgust, leaving me none the wiser. The two Wardens were still holding me by the arms, and I hung between them, trying to work it out. I began to feel that the four of us (Leo, myself and my escort) were not alone. It was partly a sense that I was being watched and partly that the whole equation was missing a piece. I started looking into the shadows and the doorways and wasted too much time thinking like a city man. In the Island you could be watched straight through the walls. Even the Governor’s room had chinks and holes enough for a legion of spies. Once I had considered that, I soon saw the shadow behind the latticework, and knew that it must be Lady Ellera, the Governor’s mistress, whom even Gaki respected. It was she who was pressuring the Governor over this. Gaki had said that she had uses for the other women prisoners. Somehow I had interfered with such a use. Either there really was some side effect that I was not aware of, or she just thought there was. I could imagine her, secure in the considerable power she wielded, coming up against something she did not understand. I have known such people and they always throw tantrums on the rare occasions the world trips them. Personally, I did not believe any of that talk about contamination, but people fear the unknown, and those used to control fear that which they cannot.
The woman Gaki feared was afraid of me.
“What are we going to do with him?” the Governor asked, and I did not know whether he was talking to her or to himself. As it happened, he was talking to neither. There was a single light step behind me, and then I felt the cold barrel of a pistol just beneath my ear.
“Simple enough,” said the Marshal.
The Governor looked at me, and at him. The man had been patiently standing in the shadows and I had not noticed him at all. All of a sudden he was about to pull the trigger. My much-vaunted brains and mental powers were going to be all over the Governor’s walls and ceiling.
I think it was that thought which the Governor disliked. It was too immediate and messy. The other thing that saved me was that he was unused to dealing with prisoners face to face. His world was more civilised and far less brutal than the Marshal’s. Indeed, the very brutality of the Marshal allowed him to exist in pampered isolation up in his rooftop abode. When faced with personally ordering a death sentence, as opposed to just knowing that such things went on in his name, I think he was rather shocked.
“Oh no,” he said. “Wasteful. My new clerk has not arrived yet, and I would rather not burn my bridges until I know that his replacement is up to standard.”
Those words, of course, were my death sentence, whether immediate or eventual. Obviously, when the whole of Trethowan was a blank to him, he could take it or leave it. Now that I had given him a taste for it he had decided to go the whole way and hire a professional clerk out of his own pocket. My usefulness to the Governor had just evaporated like the morning dew.
“With respect, sir, I really think that we should make an example of him,” the Marshal said flatly.
“Why’s that? Who to?” the Governor asked, genuinely for information. There was a strained silence from behind me, and I realised that the Marshal was actually trying to find a good reason for killing me. He had never needed to justify it before.
“Because he has displeased you,” was all he came up with, and even at the time I thought it was rather weak.
“No, no,” the Governor said. “Waste, Marshal. Just put him somewhere until we know whether we can spare him.”
The Marshal grunted. “How about Below, sir?”
“Oh, whatever,” was the Governor’s blithe reply. “Just put him somewhere where he won’t get in the way again.”
“Very well.” When I was turned to look at him, the Marshal’s face was the hostile mask he always wore. “Stefan Advani, you are being sentenced to an indefinite time Below for the crime of causing an affray. I invite you to provoke me into killing you.”
It was said in such a flat, callous manner that I did indeed speak. Some part of me really thought, after all this time, that rational dialogue could solve anything.
“I was only trying to save her,” I insisted. “I was only trying to stop it.”
The Marshal raised a black-gloved hand. “Only trying to stop what?”
“You must have seen the tail end of it. You were on the scene quickly enough. I didn’t think I was going to kill him. I don’t know what this side effect you’re talking about is. I was only trying to help her.”
The Marshal and the Governor exchanged a glance I did not like.
“Help who?” the Marshal asked quietly.
“The woman they were attacking. The woman your men took away.”
“There was no woman,” the Marshal said, still very calm.
I stared at him. “You know there was,” I told him, and for once I was just as calm and level as he was.
The Marshal permitted himself the tiniest crinkle at the side of his eyes. It meant that he was smiling. “All the women are held on this level, and they never escape. There could have been no woman there, hence you will be punished for causing an affray and killing one of your worthless fellows. If you start telling everyone that there was a woman there, and putting stupid ideas in their heads, then I will personally come and beat you every morning in your cell Below.”
A long pause. “It’s like that, is it?” I said.
“Just like that. Rest assured your victim’s accomplice has received the same friendly warning.” He looked at me dispassionately and then said, “If you will step back, sir, I’d like to try something.”
Curious, the Governor put some distance between himself and me.
“I don’t like this mind power nonsense. I don’t believe in it. I don’t like people having ideas that I don’t believe in. I want to put this to rest once and for all.” The Marshal’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You. Advani.”
I looked into those eyes and shivered. Possibly I made some tiny noise to indicate that I was paying attention.
The Marshal laid a hand on the shoulder of one of the Wardens. “Kill this man,” he said.
There was a long, awkward silence. Both I and the Warden stared at him.
“You heard me,” the Marshal said. “Use these mind powers. Kill this man. Or,” he continued, drawing a knife, “I will stab you. Wounds go bad easily Below. You don’t want to take one down there with you. Kill him, or I’ll stab you.”
The chosen Warden’s grip on my arm was numbing.
“Just strike out at him,” the Marshal suggested. “Knock him down. Eat his brain. Punch him in the head. However it works. Use your mind.” The blade of the knife was long and keen, and serrated along part of the back, and I could imagine with ridiculous clarity what it would feel like sliding into me and being torn out. I could imagine sitting, half-underwater, with that wound festering in me. The Marshal brought his knife very close to my face. I folded.
I reached out with my mind against the clenched, hard mind of the Warden, and of course nothing happened. I was too drained, or he was too strong or ready for me. He did not even notice. Nothing whatsoever happened.
The Marshal knew. He saw in my eyes that I had tried, and that I had failed. That was enough to satisfy him. He was a very clever man, on a very limited range of subjects. He might not understand or believe in my mental energies, but he had their measure.
Then he stabbed me. After all, he had given himself the opportunity, so why not use it? The blade lanced into my upper arm and I cried out in pain. I cried out even more when he wrenched it out, because the serrated edge made a mess of the wound. A moment later one of the Wardens was roughly applying a tourniquet and bandage, because I was not at that moment under sentence of death. They wanted to keep me alive so that they could kill me officially later.
I can remember very little of the next moments because I was in incredible pain. I was hunched about my torn arm as the two Wardens hustled me roughly down stair after stair. One of them, probably the man I had been invited to kill, continually jogged my wound so that the entire episode exists in my memory as flashes of agony and jolting. When I came to my senses they were bundling me into a cell on the waterline.
It was as Lucian had described. The floor was awash with an inch of scummy water, and there was moss and mould crawling up the bars in a determined effort to reach the ceiling. When I splashed down, countless little leaping creatures scattered from my shadow, and I had all the fun of imagining them running over my sleeping body, and probably sucking my blood in the bargain. What Lucian had not dwelled on was the darkness. There were no lamps down Below. Sitting in the scum on the floor of my cell I could count five separate rays of daylight that filtered in through the torturous maze of the Island’s interior.
In that utter gloom I stumbled to my feet and knocked my head on the ceiling. My injured arm shot out another spike of pain and I nearly blacked out. Only those thin sunbeams told me that I had not done so. The cell was tiny. There was not enough room on the floor to lie out straight on. I could touch one wall with one hand, and the opposite wall with the other. The lowness of the ceiling I had already noticed. I sat down in the water and stared at the sunbeams.
They all had faces. I had a nasty turn before I understood. Those lucky prisoners (lucky being a relative term) into whose cells the feeble light came were making the most of it. They sat with their faces illuminated by the pale rays and drank it in as best they could.
My neighbour had a sunray. His face, flat and lean and pocked with disease-scars, was lit harshly by it. It was not a face worth the lighting, I thought, but in truth he had the barest sliver of the sun and I did not, and I was jealous.
I had a few hours to build on that jealousy, in which that faint ray pined and waned into nothing, and my companion’s unsavoury features were returned to the dark. In that time I sat, shivering with the damp and trying not to move because every twitch and tremor reawakened the fire in my arm. I felt that I could stay still forever down there, in the blackness and the quiet, as the waters rose and fell and the mould grew over me. Then I heard the faintest of rustlings as the other prisoners of Below began to sit up and take notice of something. There was a light approaching. I could see the small glow of it, and the reflections from the faces and the greys of all the other prisoners as they thronged the walls of the corridor. There was no hope in those expressions. They were just trying to snatch a little more light before the night closed in on them again.
It was Peter. I saw his face floating ghostlike above his lamp. And he was plainly regretting being here, a feeling which I shared. He stopped by my cell, and turned down his lamp to the smallest glimmer.
“What the hell did you do?” he demanded in a whisper. I could barely see his lips move. To him I must have been a vague grey spectre in the darkness.
“I stopped a fight. The rest is really too complex to explain, and I don’t feel like it,” I said tiredly.
“I can’t get you out of this,” Peter warned.
“Find another chess partner. I’m sorry.”
There was an unfamiliar expression on his face. I realised that it was sympathy. It had been a while since I had seen it.
“Take this, at least,” he told me, and held something through the bars. I took it and knew it even as I touched it. It was his flask.
“Well God knows I could do with a drink,” I said, almost absently.
“For your wound,” Peter insisted. “Drink some if you need to, but pour it over your wound. Otherwise your arm will rot off you, right here.”
“Rotting in prison,” I murmured. “I never thought of it literally before.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he demanded in a tight whisper. I met his eyes, or at least the lamp-glints where his eyes were.
“The worst has happened,” I told him. “I’ll be in this hole until the new clerk arrives, and then the Marshal will kill me. It’s all over. You’ve been a true friend to me, and I thank you for that, but I’ve finally arranged my own funeral. My good side got the better of me at last.”
Peter stared at me for a long time and his face twisted with helpless compassion. “I’ll—” he started, and then could not think of anything that he could reasonably do. Instead, he stood and walked away. What else was left?
*
That night I had the fourth of my near-death experiences, and by far the most horrible. I had managed to sleep, in fits and starts, sitting back against the lumpy wall. I was terribly tired, worn out from being scared too long. My arm wound, still stinging from the alcohol, kept stabbing me awake again and again, and I would drift between sleep and wakefulness for a while before slumber dragged me down once more.
I awoke from a dream of drowning to hear screams. I was in a world of sound only, confined to my little cell whilst something terrible was happening just next door. As I crouched within my four walls, lost and bewildered, my neighbour was under attack. I could hear him shrieking and kicking and calling out desperately for help. He was dying only feet away from me and not only could I do nothing, I could not even see the manner of his death. All I knew was that it was taking far too long. He was being picked apart in there, dissected alive, screaming and struggling and throwing himself around his cell. Once, something hard and many-legged was cast from him to skitter over my own floor. It touched my hand with cold, sharp feet and I cast it back, heard it rattle from the wall and plop into the water. Still my companion continued to die by degrees.
Then there was something new: a cracking sound of torn cane and splintering wood. I heard myself whimper ever so quietly, because I knew that something was forcing itself through the floor of my neighbour’s cell. There was a pause in which his cries began to fade, although he continued to fight, and then I heard the tortured snapping as something large smashed up from the water. There was one more visceral crunch, and I imagined a huge set of mandibles slicing into the luckless man’s body, breaking limbs and ribs. Finally there was a scraping as the creature extricated itself from the structure of the Island and left, taking its prize with it.
Weaver crabs, the thought came to me. It was something Trethowan had written of. Weaver crabs: the hand-sized males seek out and find food, which they attack, whilst releasing a scent to attract the huge, deadly female. Trethowan had approved of their ingenuity. It had all seemed perfectly innocent on paper.
I had no reason to believe that I was not next in line. The crabs could come back and take me at their leisure. I am afraid I stood and shouted for help. I called out like a man possessed, and nobody came. The other prisoners were silent, and that told me that nobody would ever come. I called out for Peter then, but Peter was three floors up and could not hear me.
I was in the cage of souls, as Valentin Miljus had put it. I was lower than I had ever been, and would ever be. I needed hope like a drowning man needs air.
Shadrapar.
I hoped for Shadrapar. A ludicrous hope, even were I not Below. I was a prisoner of the Island for life, forever exiled. Nonetheless, I thought of Shadrapar. Like poor, deluded Lucian I began to plan what I would do when I escaped from the Island. I tried to recall all the sights and sounds of that city. I let my mind play over the faces of departed friends, because even the old pain of parting and loss was better than that deadly darkness.
I will leave myself there, in that most wretched of positions. The time has come for me to tell you about Shadrapar, last of all cities, about the place I once had in it, and about the events that destined me for the Island.