On the Island, confronted with Tallan and Harro and prompted by my own ill temper, I acted. I was suffering for it now, of course. I was now sitting in a tiny box waiting to drown or be eaten. At least I had merited the punishment by some bravery of my own, though. My life was so barren of acts of courage that I had to treasure this one. If this sounds ridiculous to you, save your disbelief, for I am about to describe something that even I hardly believe, and I was there.
I suppose I should describe myself again. Some time and much pain has passed since I last did so. I am no taller, perhaps a little bowed, and all folded up in that cell, anyway. My drab prison greys are stained and torn, with a notably large bloodstain where the Marshal stabbed me. Perhaps you see some of that staining on the pages you hold, for some were there with me in the dark and the damp. I am leaner than before – too much work and too little food. I suppose that I am stronger, too, much good it ever did me.
As I crouch in that cell, then, assuming you could see through the darkness, my face is what has changed most. My hair is long, down to my shoulders and infested with wildlife, and that makes my face look even longer. I have the odd small scar. I have lines, more than you would think my face could take. They are lines of hard learning, of growing up. They came from having killed a man, which was new to me; of doing a solid day’s work, which was new to me; of being thankful to someone on a daily basis for not killing me, which was also new to me. My face has aged some several long years in the months that have passed. I am no longer young.
That was the longest night of my life, that first night Below. For all that there was no further move from the swimming predators below us, I was in constant terror waiting for the feel of scuttling little monsters in my cell. I did not sleep at all, although I could tell that everyone else had nodded off as soon as the screaming had stopped. I knew that if I let myself go even slightly from that petrified crouch then I would be smashing at the bars, pleading to be let out and taken far, far away. I would have gone mad, all of a sudden and for good, had I not kept that absolute hold on myself.
On the other hand, perhaps I did sleep, and only dreamed that I spent all night clutched in on myself. Perhaps I imagined it all.
What happened was this: I saw a light. It was not the sun, nor was it the sickly lamps. It was a light in the water. Had it not been pitch dark I would not have seen it: scarcely a suggestion of a gleaming beneath me. I saw it, though, and I saw that it was moving. It swept below me several times, clearly attached to some living thing, and then I saw that it was rising through the waters to meet me.
I moved then: with one twitch I had my back pressed against one wall of my cell to get as far from it as possible. It was heading for the hole the previous monster had made. I am afraid I shut my eyes. I still had that child-part of me that insisted that, if I ignored something, then it would go away. It was a tactic that seldom worked with imaginary horrors, let alone real ones.
I heard the faint slosh of water as it surfaced through the bent floor of the next cell, and then the occasional slap and scrabble as it caught its balance.
I opened my eyes, and for a long time I could see nothing but darkness. I found myself wondering whether this new thing could slide through the slots in the wall to get at me. There were such things. Trethowan had described them.
The faint glimmerings of phosphorescence pieced themselves together one by one, and the illuminated outlines of the creature slowly made themselves known to me. I saw a large, flat head, crescent-shaped with a huge, wide mouth; a frog-like head on a thick, ribbed neck. There were forelimbs just visible, clutching at the edges of the hole in the floor, and the remainder of the creature could be seen only as fugitive gleams deeper in the water. It had swum like a snake, so I assume it was something of that serpentine shape.
I could not see whether it had eyes. There were shadowy spaces that might have housed them, but they had no light of their own. Whether it had eyes or not, it was definitely looking at me.
And then it made a sound. I was so highly strung at that point that I thought it said my name, but that is the sheerest nonsense. It spoke, though. Although I misheard its first words, it was definitely speech. The voice was soft and not of the best diction, scarcely more than a light, throaty whisper in the dark air. It was not formed with the lips – there were no lips and the broad jaws remained slightly open but unmoving. Beneath them, though, the thing’s throat pulsed and wrinkled in and out with the words.
“Sowattay’infor…”
I stared at it. If it had eyes then it stared at me.
“So watta y’in for,” it said again, and the words started to make a little more sense. I continued to stare. The thing shifted slightly in the water.
It repeated itself again: “So watta y’in for.” I could not speak. Those wide jaws opened in a yawn that exposed the chamber of its throat, needle teeth silhouetted against the phosphorescence.
“Marshal’s gonna toastya,” it whispered.
“What?” I demanded, in spite of my horror at the thing.
“Marshal’s gonna toastya,” it said again, and then, “So watta y’in for.”
It was parroting. I saw that clearly then. Here was some monster with a talent for mimicry that had hung about the Island long enough to pick up a few phrases it had heard the prisoners say. So what are you in for? The Marshal is going to toast you. An unusual beast: Trethowan would have been fascinated. I found myself slowly coming out of my rigid horror.
“Marshal’s gonna toastya,” it told me, and I replied, in a faint, weak voice, “Oh I know. I know.”
It regarded me brightly, whether it had eyes or not. I felt more than heard the prisoner in the cell at my back stir, realised that others were awake too.
“Gotta sleep. Gotta work inna mornin,” the thing ventured. “Allus gotta work inna mornin.”
“Right,” I said. It was like talking to some part of my mind. Perhaps it was a hallucination and that was what I was doing.
“What are you doing, man?” one of the closer prisoners whispered. “You aren’t supposed to talk to them. They’re wrong.” There was a raw horror in his voice.
“You want to talk to me?” I asked, in the darkness. There was a silence in which the thing shifted its position again. “You don’t want to talk to me?” I concluded, “then just go to sleep.”
“But it’s wrong,” the same voice insisted. “Listen, man—”
“So what are you in for?” I snapped out. “So what are you in for? It’s wrong. It’s wrong. Your conversation’s no better than its.” Darkness made me bold. The thought of them all sitting in their stupid, apathetic silence and darkness day and night, lapping up the sunlight and growing mouldy in the dark, disgusted me far more than any echoing monster. I thought they were jealous of me disturbing their silence. I thought that they could not tell a mimic from the real thing. As the prisoner lapsed into silence I returned my attention to the monster, which had levered itself another foot out of the water.
“So watta y’in for,” it gabbled again.
“I killed a man,” I told it. “That’s why I’m here.” It seemed simpler than to reel the whole story off.
“Kilta man,” it followed up. “Kilta man. Watta y’in for. Kilta man.”
“That’s right,” I confirmed.
“Ennywun I no?”
It was looking very carefully at me, eyes or no. I had frozen up again and was dearly wishing I had heeded the warnings of my fellow.
“Ennywun I no?”
It might have just been another repeated phrase, thrown in coincidentally where it would make some sense. I suddenly doubted my theory, though.
“Watcha called? Wasya name?” it garbled out. “Watta y’in for? Wasya name?”
“S-Stefan Advani.” I could not have held back the words. I felt that I needed to shut the thing up as quickly as possible, and the only way I could do it was to answer its questions.
“Stefanad Vaani,” it tried. It made a better job than many of the prisoners, even getting the stress on the penultimate syllable. “Stefanad Vaani kilta man,” it followed up. Then, without warning, it was gone, slipping into the waters and vanishing in a streak of phantom light. Moments later I saw the distant glow of a lamp as a Warden trekked slowly through the Below corridors. When he got close, some of the prisoners scrabbled at their doors, saying things like, “It was here again,” “He was talking to it,” “He was encouraging it.” The Warden shone the light of his lamp onto the bloody and mangled floor of the cell next to mine, and then turned the light on me. I never saw who it was, only that painful light. He obviously did not care enough to take any action, for he was continuing his patrol a moment later. The monster did not return.
*
Prisoners Below did not work. You might think this was a blessing, but after a single night I would have done any amount of hard labour to get out of the dark. It was dank down there, gloomy and frankly very tedious. I could have gone mad there quite easily simply from having nothing to do. Nobody spoke. I learned later that the Wardens had instructions to beat anyone who started talking. We all just sat there in that rank layer of water and stared at the scattered beams of light, or at nothing.
I had no track of time. When I was in the Underworld, equally cut off from sun and air, I still had the rhythm of day and night to sustain me. Most of the denizens set their clocks according to the world above, though they inverted them. Below there was no difference. The Wardens came down at irregular times. The prisoners sat or slept as it suited them. After a while the waxing and waning of sunbeams came to mean nothing at all. There could have been people above us turning lamps off and on. It was more plausible than some huge, distant ball of fire expiring slowly for our benefit.
After some time, then, Peter came to me.
I was crunched up into one corner of my cell, folded in on myself like a spider, or that is what Peter said. Only when the footsteps stopped before my cell did I squint into the lamplight.
“Come on,” he said curtly. I could not tell whether he was doing me a kindness of his own accord, or was doing me an injury on orders. I crept forward to the door and he unlocked it. Some of the prisoners nearby began taking an interest.
He let me out into the corridor, and I stretched to my full height painfully. Around us, some of the prisoners were beginning to mutter.
“Take me!” one of them suddenly piped. “You don’t want him. Me! Me!”
“No! I’m the one! Take me out!”
“I’ve been here longest!”
“I know where things are hidden! Precious things!”
“Me!”
“No! Me!”
Peter took a step away from me and smashed his club against a few doors until he had their attention. “He’s going to have the crap kicked out of him. Marshal’s orders. Any volunteers?”
There were no volunteers, no sympathy either. The prisoners Below had all kinds of jealousy but the place leached the empathy out of them in short order.
“Come on,” Peter said to me, and pushed me roughly forwards, so that I stumbled on the floor. He grabbed my shoulder and dragged me back so that I could see his face, made craggy by the shadows of the lamp.
I saw him wink. Peter had come through for me somehow. I breathed a little easier, if only a little. As we ascended from the damp pit of Below he whispered, “Don’t get your hopes up. You’re going back there. Remember to limp a little or something.”
I nodded.
“There really is nothing I can do to get you out,” he continued, sotto voce. “The Marshal flat out hates you. The Governor’s got it in for you. Stefan, you have got the surefire gift for making enemies.”
“I’d kill again just to get out of that cell for a minute,” I said, wondering as I did whether it was true or just a figure of speech. “I know you can’t pull me out for good. Just a little air. A little light.”
“Maybe more than that,” Peter said evasively. We were going to a part of the Island I didn’t know, but we were going up. I kept having to squint as the sun broke in through the piecemeal walls.
There was someone up ahead, at the top of another flight of stairs. A large, bulky man with a faint wreathe of smoke about him.
“Middsy,” Peter acknowledged.
“All clear,” the big man told him. “You better be sure that the Marshal doesn’t even look funny at me, Drachmar.”
“I’m a proper cornucopia of secrets,” assured Peter. “You keep mine and I’ll keep yours. I’ll take it from here. Off you go.”
Midds shambled away past us, without even a glance for me.
“What do you know about him?” I asked.
“Can’t tell you. Secret,” Peter said, and then: “Let’s just say our man Midds likes to take boats out when he shouldn’t. To gather medicinal supplies. The Marshal’s boat, even, when there’s no other choice.”
“That’s all?”
“Oh the Marshal gets very possessive about his little boat. He’s real keen to know who’s been playing with it.”
“And a cornucopia?” I pressed.
“Something you put things in, isn’t it?”
“Try oubliette,” I suggested. We had mounted to the doorway to a small room whose walls were hung with woven reeds. There were small boxes and packages about, and in the centre of the floor the obligatory chessboard balanced on a crate.
“Spare storeroom,” Peter said. “Discovered it a while back. Not really used much now. Nice and quiet.”
“I suppose your game’s getting rusty,” I said, going over to the board. Peter hung back in the doorway, though.
“What?” I frowned at him, and then realised, a moment later, that we were not alone.
It was the Warden’s uniform. They just vanished in the shadows, whereas the prisoners’ greys were brought out in stark relief by the least amount of light. When the figure in black stepped forward I was caught quite by surprise.
Jon fell in love with an Outrider once. He said he loved the sight of a woman in uniform.
It was her, done up as a Warden. It was the woman who – I want to say that I killed Harro for her, but in truth she was more a collateral beneficiary of the act. My face must have been a picture. Certainly I stopped dead and then shot a quick look back at Peter. I had the bizarre idea I was being trapped somehow, that the Marshal and his goons would suddenly appear from the woodwork and execute me for being here. The corner of Peter’s mouth twitched upwards and he raised an eyebrow.
I turned back to the woman and mumbled something to the effect that I really did not know what to say. Thankfully she took the initiative from me, because God knows I didn’t know what to do with it.
“I was named Kiera de Margot. Thank you for twice saving my life,” she said, and held out a hand. I remembered Gaki saying that the women on the Island were given all comforts, and this was certainly a well-maintained hand, dusky of skin, neatly manicured on all six fingers.
To me it was like seeing diamond rings and golden bangles, because here was the body and gene surgery that the extremely rich went in for. Six fingers on one hand was a good indication of exceptionally wealthy family. In keeping with the hand, the rest of her was all about the sort of beauty that is paid for in family money. Her hair was darkly lustrous, falling to the small of her back in a long unfolding of blue-black. She was tall, and they had engineered for a build that was athletic and rounded in turns. Everything about her was designed to be admired, but it came to me that it was not her for whom that admiration was intended. She was an advertisement for her family’s taste and wealth, a prisoner to the whims of the previous generation. Only her eyes were her own, alive with a sharp humour. In this only did she recall my lost Rosanna Paramor.
And about time, some readers might be thinking. All this adoration for some prison girl I barely know, and only a few pages back I was mourning my dead love. But for me, long years had passed, and the sight of this woman struck me hard. Was it love at first sight? I leave that to credulous poets to bleat of. Did I desire her? I confess it. I am inconstant. I have barely even mentioned Faith to you yet.
I took her hand; the touch of a woman’s hand after that much time sent a shock right through me.
“Madam,” I replied, “I was named Stefan Advani, a scholar of the Academy, and I am delighted to have been the agent of your delivery–” Something she had said caught my imagination and punctured the courtesy. “Did you say twice?”
She sat back against the chess table. “First from the prisoners and then from their master’s mistress.”
“Lady Ellera,” I said automatically, and to my surprise I felt Peter start behind me.
“Names best not said,” he muttered low, coming closer. “‘Herself.’ That’s what the Wardens call her.”
“We call her the Witch Queen,” Kiera said soberly. I dared to squeeze her hand as a gesture of comfort and she smiled at me. I was overdoing it, intended charm burlesquing into mummery. “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours of her, and most of them are true. Of the women I met when I came here first, a third are no longer with us.”
“I’ve… heard as much,” I admitted. “That she has… uses…”
“She has a laboratory dedicated to it,” Kiera said outright. Her hand tightened on mine. “She uses us to keep her young and healthy. It’s like she’s taking limbs and organs from us, only it’s tiny parts of us we can’t even see from within our bodies, but things we can’t do without. I was marked for her next companion – that’s what they call it, the ‘Lady’s Companion’. What she didn’t know was I’d found a way out of the women’s quarters. I was going to steal a boat, head out into the jungle. Anywhere was better than becoming a reagent in her lab. There were complications, as you saw.”
“And the Wardens took you back,” I pointed out. “They’re saying you never even got out, now.”
“I got taken before the Witch Queen,” Kiera confirmed. “She… sniffed at me, and I could tell something had upset her. She said I’d been touched by something she didn’t understand. Whatever the hell you did made me unfit for her purposes.”
“And for that I got stuffed down Below,” I noted, a little more acidly than I had meant to.
“We’re none of us doing so well,” Kiera said softly. She leant in a little, and I was acutely aware of Peter’s presence behind me. At that moment I really wished that he would go away.
“They were very angry with you,” she said simply. “They dragged in anyone they thought knew you. The people from your cell, some other prisoners, even a couple of Wardens. That was when I saw Peter. He was different, less scared of the Marshal.” I really should have taken note of that “Peter” so early on, but more fool me, I was too busy looking into her eyes.
“So I got hold of Peter,” she continued simply. “They didn’t find out how I escaped, so I got out the same way. Leontes really does have no imagination. He never tried to have me questioned about it, and the Marshal has some thing about women. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with them.
“Who’s Leontes?” Peter voiced my next question.
“The Governor,” Kiera told us. “You didn’t know his name?”
Peter and I exchanged looks. “I never honestly gave it a thought,” I admitted. “Leontes what?”
“De Margot, actually,” said Kiera de Margot. “A very distant cousin, and it helps me not a bit. If he was still in favour with the rest of the family then he would not have been posted here. He’s forgotten most of everything he left behind. He only has the time for the stars and his Witch now. Certainly not for me.”
“We better hurry this up,” Peter said. “They’ll miss you otherwise, and we’re all sunk if they find us. Stefan’s got to go Below again, and I’ve got work to do.”
“Go Below?” Kiera said, astonished. “But… but I thought you were going to—”
“The Marshal hates his guts and the Governor doesn’t need him. He’s got some flash new Academy scribe to do whatever Stefan was doing for him,” Peter said. He was abruptly on the defensive. “The next time they remember he exists it’ll be for the execution. There’s nothing I can do for him. For anyone. I’m sorry, Stefan.”
“I know how things are,” I told him, and then to Kiera, “At least I accomplished something. You’re safe, now.” I made it sound terribly noble and self-sacrificing. Inside I wanted to cry.
She smiled tightly. “I’m waiting for Leontes or his Witch to realise that if I’m no use to Herself then I might as well be thrown to the prisoners or the Wardens. It’ll come to them eventually.”
“Oh.” I must have looked dejected, because abruptly my hand was held by both of hers.
“Perhaps the prisoners will be kinder.” She did not believe it, I could tell from her voice. It was just meaningless brave-talk. None of us believed it, in fact, but we all let the words lie without a challenge. We bade our farewells, and just as I was about to go she pulled me back with surprising strength and touched my hand to her lips, the way wealthy women do.
I had my own sunray to light me when I returned to Below.