It turned out to be evening when they got me back to my home away from homes. The Marshal’s procrastinating had made me miss a meal. With an honour guard of three Wardens I trooped down into that familiar corridor. Midds, back in charge of my stretch again, stood at the far end with his hands behind his back and his paunch hanging out.
There was a ripple of reaction through the cells, akin to the prisoners Below when the insect-monster stalked amongst them. For a second, the Island held its breath.
I had not been in favour before they hauled me off to Below. The other prisoners had been ostracising me after I killed Harro. I was not sure what reaction I would receive when I rejoined their company.
I heard a mutter spring up from man to man, cell to cell: “It’s him… he’s back… it’s Advani… he’s out…” The news leapt from mouth to mouth and gathered speed as it went. I stopped dead and the Wardens barged into me, and went no further because things were escalating still.
It was like watching a flood: all those tiny trickles and whispers feeding off each other, converging into a roaring torrent of noise like a river hurling itself upon a dam. Which burst.
All of a sudden they were on their feet, all the prisoners of my stretch. They were standing and cheering and stamping. Some of them banged their food bowls on the doors just to make a little extra noise. They were shouting, and what they were shouting was, “Varny! Varny!”
Memories? Oh, you can be sure. For a moment I was listening to that crowd of factory men chanting “Carter!” outside Emil’s printing house. This was different though. The name being mangled by the mob was mine, to start with, and they were cheering it. It took a moment for me to distinguish that roar of approval from the hate-filled sounds of my memories, but at last I understood that I had somehow become a celebrity. I had scored a victory for the oppressed, and they were delighted.
I had not realised that, when the Marshal consigned someone Below forever, then forever was just what they got. Perhaps I was not the first man to bounce back from such a sentence, but I was surely the first within living memory. Even those sent Below for a week or so frequently failed to return, as Onager’s absence proved. I had been cast down by the Marshal himself, never to return, and here I was. I had beaten the system.
The Wardens around me started smashing at doors, trying to get people to shut up. If the Marshal had been there he would have been killing people, and then maybe he would have got his way or maybe there would have been a riot. None of the Wardens there had guns and they were not going into any cells any time soon. At the end of the corridor, Midds stood impassively, letting the wall of sound break over him.
I have been disparaging about the roar of the crowd before now. Standing there, basking in the adulation of my peers for the very first time, I felt like a king. I saw, at long last, why people sought power over others and why they courted the popularity of the masses.
I passed down the stretch, looking for familiar faces. The mass of cheering men were indistinguishable from one another. Only those who were silent stood out. Tallan, of course: he had no reason to be overjoyed at my return. He refused to meet my eyes, and I knew that I would have trouble with him later, but he was scared of me. I caught Thelwel’s eye too, not cheering but smiling, which I think is as close as he came to it. Then, of course, there was Gaki. As we approached my old home I sensed him by his very stillness. He was standing at the bars of the cell he shared with nobody and watching me, with a faint, amused smile on his face. Even Gaki approved of me, in that moment. He was always a man for a bit of chaos.
They got me to my cell, then had to wait as Midds shambled forward to unlock it. The prisoners were calming down by then, and all eyes were on me, including mine. It was only when I was pushed inside, that I turned to have a look at my escort.
They were three dissimilar men, but they could have been brothers at that moment. The same look was stamped on all three faces. They had felt the statue of authority totter for a moment, and seen a spectre of what might be. If the Marshal’s control slipped, if the iron fist was found rusting, then we would be on them like a pack of animals and they knew it. And I did think “we”.
The Wardens lost no time in putting as much distance between me and them as possible. Midds stayed on for a moment to look at me, without any noticeable expression, and then shambled off into the shadows, pausing to light one of his rollups.
Lucian was right at me with a flood of verbiage that I did not even try to follow. The gist of it was that he was happy to see me, and wanted to know everything that had happened to me, whilst simultaneously not letting me get a word in edgeways. Hermione was content to hang back and squint at me, and I am not sure I could have survived her hearty congratulations in any case. Then there was the third man. He was gangly and thin, and he had long fair hair, which was unusual for a new boy. Long hair was a result of confinement on the Island without scissors or razor, and few prisoners actually arrived with it. His face was closed beneath his high forehead and there was an intensity there I did not like. More of him later.
For of course they wanted to know what had happened.
I swear that I intended to play it down. I was going to brush the whole affair off in a few self-deprecating words. I am, after all, not a performer: an academic by trade and a survivor by experience, but never a man for stand-up entertainment.
Perhaps it was that I could not make a few words stretch to the task, but my version of events became more and more elaborate as I told it. It started simply enough, and I glossed over the business with Harro, but then I got into my audience with the Governor, his conversation with the President and his miraculous mirror. I let dark hints drop about the reasons for my imprisonment (so what are you in for?) and made myself out as a man of mystery. I let on just enough to cast myself as a daring rebel and political prisoner. I described the Marshal putting his knife into me in graphic detail, although I left out the reason why. In their minds the Marshal needed no excuses anyway. Then I descended Below again for them, and did far better than Lucian in bringing the horrors of that place into the light: the darkness, the damp, the dead souls of the prisoners and the lurking presence beneath. You could hear each slight shuffle, so intent was my audience on my every word. Every so often one of them would nod, as though remembering a similar experience and attesting to the truth. Even Midds came close enough to hear, smoking reflectively as I spoke.
I told them of the weaver crabs and how they took their victim. I told them, too, of the monster who spoke, bringing them to laughter with its “Marshal’s gonna toastya,” and then silencing them when the parroting stopped. There were a few nightmares of talking salamanders that night, I’m sure.
I did not mention Kiera de Margot, diverting the headlong rush of my recitation to avoid betraying her and Peter. What I did go into was my treatment at the hands of the Marshal and the Governor. I felt it wise to play down the powers of my mind and therefore (and this is the only reason, honestly) I made the Marshal’s murderous attempt quite the tale of sound and fury, with me leaping hither and yon to avoid the repeated lunges of his gleaming knife. It was what my audience wanted to hear.
When it came to the reason for my release (if being moved from one cell to a better cell within a prison can count as a release) I had to go through it twice, because most of them did not follow it. The idea that the Governor (unseen and unknown by most) was so keen to read some dead man’s writings that he would push the Marshal aside to save my life was bizarre to them. Perhaps it should have been more so to me. I convinced them by painting a picture of the Governor that was perhaps only slightly exaggerated: a grotesque whose strange and insular pastimes occupied all that there was of his life.
Of Lady Ellera I said nothing.
I was going into a blow-by-blow account of the defeat of the Marshal and the victory of good scholarship when the new boy struck up. To tell the truth I had forgotten about him in the heat of the moment, caught up as I was in my narrative. It came as a bit of a shock to be interrupted by this lanky, long-haired creature suddenly standing up and shouting, “Sin!”
I forget the precise words I had been saying because he shocked me out of them, something to do with the value of education and my own cleverness. He had gone from complete calm silence to vibrating fury without any transition and now he was standing in the centre of the cell bellowing at the top of his lungs.
“Sin!” he shouted again. “Most outrageous Sin! For is it not known that the End of the World is brought nearer every time these men of Letters unravel yet another piece of it. Is it not the Truth that the world grows tired of their constant questioning. Sin, I say! Nothing but Sin which is rank in the nostrils of God. If we are to Save ourselves we must cast out these false teachers, these pedants and searchers and Evil men who seek to Know. They Pick at the Fabric of the world and decay it with their never-ending questions. God does not intend us to Question His creation! God will return to His full health only when these Men of Sin and Science have been purged from the ranks of the Right and cast into the barren spaces.”
There was more. He went on for some time and he really spoke like that, with almost random words given an absurd emphasis. The other prisoners were shouting at him to shut up, but he was louder than all of them. It looked as though my tale would rest unfinished.
Hermione loomed over the man, then, and he stared up at her defiantly. “I will not be Silenced by a Mannish Witch!” he declared. “Shall the righteous not stab at Sin when they see it?”
“Not here they shan’t,” Hermione rumbled. I was astonished that she hadn’t pasted him into the floor already. As a matter of fact, on closer inspection half of the newcomer’s face was purpled by a bruise the size and shape of Hermione’s right hand. Now, though, she seemed wary of having another go at him. She raised one hand threateningly, and the long-haired man spat at her but he subsided.
“He bites,” she told me later, when both the newcomer and Lucian were asleep. It seemed odd in such a physically powerful creature, but I think that she somehow thought his religious mania was a kind of disease that she might catch if she had too much contact with him.
“Who is he, anyway?” I asked.
“Mandrac,” she rumbled. “Says he’s the Mandrac.”
“He’s got religion badly,” I said. Talking quietly to Hermione in that old familiar cell was infinitely comforting after all I had been through.
“Gaki says he’ll deal with him,” she said, which surprised me.
“Why should he care?”
“If he makes any more trouble,” Hermione insisted, “Gaki said he’ll deal with him.”
I glanced automatically at the killer’s cell, and with no real surprise saw him awake and at the bars, watching us.
“Does he trouble you, Stefan?” Gaki asked, very softly.
“I… I’m still forming a first impression,” I said awkwardly.
That intelligent face creased with good humour. “Just say the word, Stefan. I grow rusty and must needs practise my skills.”
*
What the Mandrac might have done had he overheard that conversation is unknown. What he actually did, in ignorance of it, was this.
Later that night I was woken roughly by someone trying to strangle me. I felt just the bony hands about my neck, but they were pressing into the muscle, rather than the windpipe, and banging the back of my head on the floor. I saw the hate-ridden face of the Mandrac above me. I realised later that he was probably shouting more about Sin but at the time all I heard was the rushing of blood in my ears and the smack of my head on the boards. If he had been a strangler by nature then I would have died, but he was a theologian by trade and a strangler only by circumstance. When I jerked a knee up in what can only be described as a knee-jerk reaction, his tirade stopped with a wheeze and he convulsed off me.
“Heretic!” he screamed. “Conniver at the world’s destruction. Creature of Sin! You must be destroyed for the world to be Saved!”
I kicked him in the knee and he fell back further. Around us, other prisoners were waking up and telling him to shut his face before he brought the Marshal down on us.
“Are you Blind that you cannot See?” the Mandrac demanded. “For the Salvation of the World this heretic must be Cleansed from the company of the Right! His prying at the Weft of the World brings all our souls into Perdition!”
There was a chorus of jeers from the other prisoners, and one anonymous wit pointed out that nobody there was fit for the company of the right. The Mandrac stared around at them with over-wide eyes and then, faster than can be believed, he was at my throat again, trying to get a grip with his big, ill-suited hands. I went over backwards and smacked him in the eye with more force than I thought I could muster. The idea of using my mind on him never occurred to me. I was too panicked to call on it.
Then the Mandrac was hauled off me and high into the air by Hermione, and slung into one corner of the cell. He recoiled from the walls and bared his teeth at her. “Stinking Whore!” he declared. Lucian helped me to my feet as Hermione and the maniac faced off, and I was very aware of Gaki watching me coolly from the next cell.
“Do it,” I said to him, as soft as he ever spoke and with no hesitation.
“Stefan, you surprise me,” he said, with a delighted look. I slumped down so that my back was to his wall. At that moment I was battered and fed up. I forgot to be afraid of Gaki, and I forgot any conscience I might lay claim to.
“Just don’t kill him here,” I said bitterly. “Or they’ll blame us.”
“Stefan, what did they do to you down Below?” Gaki whispered. I was too tired to reply.
Gaki hunched along the wall until he was close to the Mandrac.
“You fascinate me,” I heard him whisper.
“Stay away from me, demon,” the Mandrac told him, showing that a madman can sometimes see more clearly than a sane one. “I Abjure you.”
“Would you turn down a potential convert so quickly?” Gaki pressed slyly. “I, too, have seen signs and portents. Tell me of yours, for your way is surprisingly persuasive.”
The Mandrac regarded him narrowly for a moment, and then said, in a calmer voice, “Surely it is common knowledge that seventy-two years ago the Lord appeared to the prophet Jarnard as he worked under the Unjust Masters of the Cosmetics Industry…” and carried on in that vein. The conversation between him and Gaki was quickly too quiet to hear, a welcome change. I heard the rhythm of question and answer as Gaki explored the man’s beliefs but, despite the bruises on my throat, I slept and missed what passed between them.
*
The next day, of course, it was back to the grinding mill as though I had never left. I remembered Below, and found that the tough, gruelling work was no longer so terrible in comparison to enforced leisure. The story of my release had crept about the Island and prisoners from other stretches gave me nods and grins and clasps of the shoulder to show they appreciated what I had done for them.
I had done nothing for them. All I had done was save my own skin. That this could somehow become a public service still amazes me. I suppose there were few enough victories against the establishment on the Island.
I saw Shon briefly, enough to see that little had changed with him. I had no chance to tell him that he was now the Governor’s personal calligrapher but that would come in time. I met up with Father Sulplice and we sweated and strained over a broken siphon together, trying to get the recalcitrant machine to stop choking on its own fluids.
“I hear you made yourself a few more enemies, son,” Father Sulplice said to me. “I hear you’ve got yourself a charmed life.”
I shrugged before both accusations and rattled a piece of pipe into the open mouth of the siphon, hoping there was nothing alive down there.
“You ought to watch yourself, son,” the old man said. “Nobody lives forever. Not when the Marshal’s got them on his list.”
“One day at a time,” I assured him.
He nodded into his moustache and the siphon abruptly started up and whisked the rod out of my hand and into the bowels of the Island.
“This place is a hazard to your health without anybody actually wanting you dead,” Father Sulplice observed. “After all, you earned yourself a death just getting sent here.”
“What about Thelwel?” I asked shortly, catching him off guard as the siphon stuttered and died. I watched his lined old face close up like a shellfish.
“The problem’s down the pipe. Must be a fan out of shape,” he muttered.
“He’s your son,” I pointed out. I was sure of it as soon as his eyes narrowed. “I can’t imagine him doing anything to send him here.”
There was perhaps a marginal softening to the glare. “He didn’t do anything, son, but I did enough for two. I don’t regret it, even though it’s put us both in the cage of souls for life.”
“The cage of—” Valentin Miljus had died with the phrase on his lips. “Why do you call it that?”
“I heard it,” said the old man, suddenly evasive.
“Who from?” Miljus seemed unlikely.
Father Sulplice began walking away, tracing the siphon pipe. “There’s a thing that spoke to me once, when I was dreaming. Cage of souls. Sticks in the mind.”
I hurried to catch him up but he was looking past my shoulder. “Someone wants to talk to you, son.”
There was a Warden after me, picking his way through the working prisoners. He was a slope-shouldered, melancholy-faced man with tiny black-button eyes. I did not feel that he was going to beat me or kill me (and you develop a feel for that kind of thing, after a while). Instead, when he got to me, he just stood there looking at me.
Eventually he said, “Advani,” and I nodded, waiting.
“You want to go out?” It was a while before I realised that it was a question, not a statement, and that he was talking about the jungles rather than Shadrapar. I weighed up the pros and cons. On the one hand there were monsters. On the other hand there was the sun. A week Below and you value the sun.
“Yes,” I decided.
“Day after tomorrow, you can come,” he said. He stared at me some more, and I really did not know where to put myself.
“Sauven,” he added, and again it took me a while to realise that he was giving me his name. He spoke with very little inflection.
“Thank you,” I said, and he turned and walked away without another word. Only then, with the light sliding off his shoulders, did I realise that he was the man I had saved Below. In a closed system like the Island, all your sins and virtues come back to you soon enough.
I had little time to think about it. There was a sudden chaos of yelling and complaining machinery from the other end of the workshop. It was that last that had Father Sulplice pelting past me on spry old legs, and I fell into step with him, hoping to reopen our conversation. Then all thought of that left me, for the men ahead of me were covered in blood. Three prisoners and a Warden, and all of them practically painted red from head to foot across their fronts. Many others were splattered too, yet nobody in my sight was hurt. We were close to one of the bigger extractor pumps, and it was still making a shearing, grinding noise, and spitting out… pieces.
People falling into the machines was not an unheard of thing in the Island, with its combination of dangerous technology and untrained workforce. This was different, though.
I was told that it was the Mandrac. I had to take the witnesses’ words for that because there was surely not enough left to identify him even as a human being. Lucian told me that the Mandrac had calmly climbed up the casing of the pump and stood at the rim before anyone had realised what he was doing. There, while Wardens shouted at him to get down, he stared into the rotating blades, spinning faster than he could see, then fell into that man-wide opening without a sound.
*
When I was back in my cell that night, feeling sicker than I had ever felt, I saw Gaki looking at me.
“It really was a fascinating religion,” the killer mused, in the dark spaces when everyone but the two of us seemed to be asleep. “A collector’s item. Delightfully simple in dogma, and yet so complex when it came to the mythology behind it.”
One of Gaki’s unique pauses, into which no words could be put because he had not finished speaking.
“Easy to pull apart, though, once you have a toehold. He should have had the courage of his convictions. If he had seen all questioning as heresy he would have been proof against me, but he was too proud. He had to show off the superiority of his beliefs. His inconsistent, poorly-reasoned beliefs.”
I know that swaying a zealot with reason is a feat beyond even Helman. Maniacs like the Mandrac could happily believe that black was black, white and grey all at once. But Gaki had made him see.
Gaki had murdered the Mandrac, and the murder weapon had been the man’s own mind. The man had been unable to live with himself once Gaki had brought down his house of cards. I could imagine the killer’s quiet voice chasing the Mandrac painstakingly along a chain of logic: if this is not true, then that cannot be true, and if that is not true, then what do you have left? I wondered where the first crack came, the first trivial admission of fault into which Gaki dug his nails.
And I had told him to do it. I cannot honestly say I felt sorry for the death of the Mandrac, homicidal votary that he had been. At the same time my involvement made me feel deeply queasy. After a while I realised that it was not conscience, but fear that I now owed something to Gaki. I had the impression that he, alone in the world, always collected his debts.