It came one evening, after just enough time had passed to take the edge off my panic. Some Wardens came down and I felt the hush descend on the prisoners further along the stretch. I saw the dark uniforms, and beyond them a glitter of green and sapphire, underwater colours. Lady Ellera had come down into the dirt for this one deed.
Only when they were almost upon us did I spot Kiera in prison greys, head down. The Wardens had her between them, and kept a distance between themselves and Lady Ellera, who was stalking like a mantis at their backs.
My look to her was mute entreaty.
“She is just one more prisoner. Where else do prisoners belong? Who shall we give her to, Stefan?” she said, loud enough for most people to hear. “Who shall have the privilege? Who hates you enough?”
I said nothing and gave no indication. Kiera was not looking at me, but circumstances were making plain that this development was my fault.
The prisoners were slowly beginning to understand what was being offered. In a place with no rewards save an early grave this was beyond all experience. I saw interest flare in many pairs of eyes. My inspiration remained silent.
“When this whore ran into this vile company before, there were two who apprehended her,” Lady Ellera mused. “One of them is dead, now. But there were two. Who was the other? Which one, among you, has seen this face before?” and she grasped Kiera by the chin and forced her head up, dragging her around so all the prisoners could see.
Tallan shouted out at once, “It was me!” But then a whole chorus of prisoners were claiming to be that man. Everyone, it seemed, had been there when I killed Harro. Lady Ellera was looking only at Tallan, though, staring into his eyes to find the truth. He fell back from the bars at her scrutiny, and made no sound at all when she asked, “Was it you, then? Truly?”
She saw, though; she could read people. “It was you,” she declared triumphantly, and the other prisoners fell silent.
“Throw her to the beasts,” she told the Wardens, who unlocked Tallan’s cell and pushed Kiera in. “Enjoy, Stefan,” the Lady Ellera told me. “I will come back for your secrets and perhaps you will not be so coy, then.”
She left, the Wardens reluctantly in tow. After she had gone, Hermione spat.
A number of other things happened as well. Tallan went for Kiera and she kicked him hard on the knee. The other two prisoners in his cell went for her as well and she danced out from between them. Had she been in a room twice as large, I think she might have kept them at bay. It was a small cell, though, and there were three men trying to pin her down. She kneed one savagely between the legs and caught another with a flying elbow, but Tallan grabbed her and slammed her to the floor.
“Now,” I heard him say, as he got his breath back, “you and I have some unfinished business...”
And I was yelling at him, whatever came into my mind, until I had nothing left and just threatened to kill him then and there. It was a futile threat against a man in another cell, the violence that is even a weak man’s last resort. Tallan’s head snapped up, though, and I thought I saw some residual fear deep in those eyes.
I decided to follow through with everything I had. “If any one of you touches her, then I will kill them like I killed Harro. Tallan, you of all people know that I can.”
The prisoners were suddenly very quiet. All eyes left Kiera for me. I stood, a skinny and unprepossessing creature, and faced them down, leaving no gap for fear to filter in.
“The first man to try anything with her, I will crush that man’s mind like a hollowed gourd. Believe me when I say that I can do this thing. Should she be harmed in any way then I will destroy every wretched man in the cell and know no mercy. Believe me. Every man in the cell, and any other whom I even suspect.”
Dear God, but to my own ears it was the least convincing performance of my life. Under the protection of Stefan the Scrawny? How ludicrous that seemed. I had no confidence that the powers of my mind could be placed at my beck and call for murder.
But they did not know the limitations of my prowess. Tallan had seen Harro die and it was written in large print all over his face. He recoiled from Kiera as though she was venomous, and it was that rather than my histrionics which made his two cellmates keep their distance.
I have looked back on that day many times. A grand gesture, no? Well, no. Honestly? No. What I remember most keenly, apart from the ripe absurdity of the whole rigmarole, was that I was motivated far more by guilt than anything else. Of course I did not want anything to happen to Kiera, but most of all I did not want it to happen and be my fault. Culpability whetted a sharper edge than empathy. My murderous threats were more born of self-loathing than love of any other.
Kiera pulled herself to her feet and put herself in the opposite corner of the cell to Tallan. An uneasy peace descended.
Lucian was looking at me in a very peculiar way, keeping his distance insofar as one could.
“You have nothing to fear from me,” I said, and again the words sounded ridiculous because I was the fearful man, surely, not a man anyone had ever feared. I tried to tell him I would never use my powers against him but the words just tripped over each other.
“It is not that which gives him pause, Stefan,” commented Gaki, looking as though someone had just told him a particularly good joke. “You sounded just like the Marshal,” he explained lazily. “Really, it was uncanny. I begin to wonder whether you are on the right side of the bars.”
I thought of the Marshal’s policy of exterminating a cell for the crimes of an individual. I also realised how little it had gained me. Try as I might I could not imagine being able to keep Tallan and company in awe of me for long. I had bought some small bagful of time, but it was leaking steadily.
*
Of course, it happened while I was working. I was Stefan Advani, not Stefan the Terrible. Whatever fear I could instil my presence with, it would not linger long in my absence. So it was that the very next day we trooped back to the cells and I discovered Kiera had vanished.
For a second I was numb, cold. How had I imagined anything different?
What had happened to her? The obvious conclusion waited at the front of my mind. It was quite clear that Tallan had crept away as the rest of us worked, done his will and then disposed of her remains. I could see it in my mind’s eye in hideous detail.
A shock went through me like someone injecting a drug. Something rose from a hitherto unused depth of my brain and sat at the controls like a toad. “You!” I snapped out harshly. It didn’t sound like me at all. “Where is she?”
Tallan jumped at my voice. I think a lot of people did. I was standing at the bars of my cell, one arm jutting out into the corridor pointing straight at him.
“What?” he demanded.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know!”
“What did you do to her?” I demanded. “I warned you, Tallan.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” he protested.
“Didn’t do nothing?” I snapped back. “Sophistry! If you didn’t do nothing then what did you do?” I remember this scene as though I watched someone else play it out. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you what would happen if you so much as touched her.” I wasn’t raging. Everything in me was cold like a knifeblade. And some of me enjoyed it. I had an excuse to bully another human being and it gave me my life back, just for a moment. It might have started with Kiera but in the end it was about me.
“I didn’t touch her! I didn’t!” Tallan insisted. One of his friends said that they had been together all day, which was proof of nothing in my book.
In that moment I must really have achieved some utter transformation. When I look back on it, I remember nothing but calm, because the all-consuming passion that possessed me was so alien to me that it left no trace.
“I told you but you wouldn’t listen…” I reached out and felt Tallan’s brain, hollow as an egg.
“Ask him!” the wretch was shrieking. “Ask Gaki! He was here all the time! I didn’t do it!”
I think that if I had relaxed my restraint a fraction then Tallan would have died. Instead, I rounded on Gaki with a supreme effort of will.
“Well?” I gritted.
“Don’t let me stop you,” Gaki said mildly. “I’m sure you and Tallan have unfinished business.”
“Tell him!” Tallan almost shrieked. “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!”
“Well?” I grated out again. Gaki gave me a pitying smile.
“Why not kill him anyway? You’re ready to and you’ll never have a better chance. You know you’ll have to deal with him eventually. Why be an academic all your life? These hard choices make one a man of action.”
I stared at him, trying to keep some vestige of control.
“Kill Tallan, and then I’ll tell you,” suggested Gaki, in the manner of a gentleman making a sporting wager.
“Did he touch her?” I gasped out.
“Of course he didn’t,” Gaki said. “But who cares?”
I spun to face Tallan again, finding him cringing back in the corner of his cell. I had a hard knot of hate built up between my eyes and I was desperate to let it fly.
There was a voice saying my name. It was not Gaki’s or Tallan’s but only poor, harmless Lucian’s. He was saying my name over and over, and asking me to please calm down, because all of this was most unlike me and to tell the truth it was scaring the hell out of him, and it would be a terrible shame if I went mad…
When I turned to face him he was ready to flinch, but it was just me, just Stefan Advani. I have no idea where all the cold hate went. “I’m sorry,” I said, and then I said it again, just generally. The words rang out in the silence that had cloaked our whole stretch.
“What happened to her?” I asked Gaki, in tired, ragged tones.
“She left,” Gaki said blithely.
“How? With who?” I demanded of Gaki, of whom no-one had the power to demand anything. He was in the giving vein, however.
“Of her own accord and on her own recogniscence. She escaped from her cell and, after that, for reasons that should be obvious, I lost track of her.”
She had known my protection was a fruit that could not last and she had made her escape. Was she in hiding in some deserted corner of the Island, stealing food and trying to dodge the Wardens? Had she retreated to those chambers she had been cast out from, risking the further wrath of Lady Ellera? Or had she done what she was going to do when I saved her from Harro and Tallan? Had Kiera de Margot gone alone and friendless in a swamp packed with predators? Nobody could survive that. The Island’s security was based on the single fact that the natural world had a lust for human flesh.
Depending on what caught her, it might be kinder than her fate on the Island. The thought did not console me. I felt the previous minutes of high adrenaline sour within me, and all that pent-up rage and fury just curdle. Abruptly I was sitting with my back against the bars, grief and rage making me their plaything.
Was this the tragic passion of the romantic hero, you ask? Did I love Kiera de Margot on such short acquaintance, that the thought of losing her rendered me inconsolable? How grand to pretend that were the case. My emotions were of a more human scale, though. I cannot even pretend that a love of justice motivated me: prisoners forcing their attentions on each other was hardly unknown, though such transactions were more often commercial than aggressive. What racked me was the thought that, if Kiera died anyway, then everything I had been through after killing Harro was for nothing. I had suffered Below and the Marshal’s knife and become a murderer, all to win no more than a turn of the glass. It was a selfish grief, after all.
*
Two days later I was working on the factory floor when Red, the Warden with hair of that colour, stalked through calling names and punching shoulders to get attention. He was recruiting a work detail. Shon and I got punched and called out, and perhaps ten more. Red shouted for us to follow him, raising his voice over the hammer of the machines. He was heading for a storeroom.
“Get the sacks here up on deck,” he said flatly. We looked at him dumbly because most of us had no idea where he meant.
“Where we came in,” Shon murmured. “Follow me.” He took a sack by the top corners, swung it onto his back with a grunt and lurched off with it. We followed his example, under Red’s stern gaze. When it was my turn I was ready for the crushing weight. It had been a while since I had needed to move the bulky sacks around. When I hauled it across my shoulders I was surprised to find that I could move with it, rather than having to drag it across the floor. I was still worse off than Shon, but I was twice as strong as the man who arrived at the Island… how many months before?
I doggedly stomped up a flight of uneven steps, breathing through clenched teeth. The abrupt flare of sunlight caught me unawares and I stumbled and fell to one knee with a painful jar. Red was right behind me, though, and he gave me enough of a push to get me upright again. Squinting and weaving, I stepped out into the sun and air.
It was the broad open area that we had disembarked onto so long ago, and I saw again the heavy iron shape of the prison boat docked alongside it. My companions were making their way to it to load the sacks at the back, and from amidships a tired line of new arrivals was crawling, each of them too shocked by their first sight of the Island to resist its pull.
I got to the boat’s stern and a sailor there tucked a hook into the neck of my burden. A wave from him and it was hoisted high in the air, then lowered gracefully through a hatch to the hold. He looked at me with contempt and I joined the plodding line of my comrades on our way back for more merchandise. I picked up my pace to put me level with Shon. “How many boats, since we arrived?”
“Seven,” he told me. “This is the eighth.”
I felt cold and distant for a moment. Eight boats meant eight months since we arrived on the Island. I had been exiled for a full year, and had never realised how the time had flown. Then I saw that a year was nothing, the blink of a lizard’s eye. I was going to be on the Island for the rest of my life, however long or cut short that was.
We trudged down for another load and, when we emerged again, the Marshal was there to welcome the newcomers.
The captain of the prison boat, the very same foul-mouthed man who had brought me to the Island, had gone ashore with papers. I saw the Marshal open a sealed missive and scan its contents impassively. Beyond him and the new convicts I saw another man. He was a stranger, tall and elegant in very fine clothes of black and green, quite out of place. Red went over to him and asked him something, then gestured for him to step aside to await the Marshal’s attention.
I nudged Shon and indicated the man. “New Warden,” I suggested.
Shon stared at the newcomer thoughtfully. “Why do I think that I know that man?”
Red was striding back over, telling us to hurry it up. As we shuffled back towards the dark for our next load, I saw the Marshal call for a Warden and send him off on some errand.
When we struggled out for a third time there was a roll call in progress. I expected to see prisoners being led off, but someone had changed the procedures since I arrived, apparently. There was the obligatory dead man lying in the centre of the deck, the Marshal’s trademark imposition of authority. Aside from that, one of the Wardens was reading a list of names, and each prisoner was being sent left or right, so that two groups were forming.
I was fascinated, and wanted to ask Shon about it, but he was too busy carrying heavy objects to care. I tried to see what criteria they were using to segregate the prisoners and could find none at first. Perhaps the prisoners to one side were older, on average, not quite so hairy, dirty and scarred as the others. However, arriving on a prison boat makes anyone look like a criminal.
I didn’t notice the familiar face for some time. When our eyes met it was like a physical shock. He did not recognise me, but I knew him. It was one of those faces that stay with you.
Standing there in prison greys, rubbing shoulders with the thieves and the killers, was the Commissar of Angels: the very man who had mown down Helman and abandoned Jon and Rosanna to their fate. The man, too, who supervised my recapture and sent me into exile. There he was. What had brought him so low?
The names had finished, and every new prisoner bar the dead man had been assigned to left or right. The Marshal stalked over to the ship’s captain and conferred in low tones, and a sailor was sent belowdecks. Moments later, three more prisoners were jostled from the hold to stand blinking in the sun. They were women, and the Marshal detailed two Wardens to herd them into line with one of the groups of prisoners – to stand alongside the Commissar.
I think I knew what would happen, then. I had unloaded my third sack, as had my comrades, but we were staying very still by the boat’s side and making no move that would call attention to us. Partly we feared getting caught up in whatever was going on; partly we just wanted to watch.
Some more Wardens came up, and they had a ragbag of guns: chemical projectile weapons; ancient, verdigrised energy guns; flintlocks and matchlocks. One even had a repeating crossbow the size of a six-year-old child. Most were not known to me, but one was Sauven. He did not have his serpent-slaying weapon (Thelwel never had managed to fix it) but had found a suitable replacement. He stood in line with the others and could have been any one of them.
The prisoners crowded back against one wall, the women, the Commissar, all of them. None of them seemed to know what to do. Even the Commissar just looked old and frightened. The prisoners in the other group stood silently, no doubt each one breathing a vast sigh of relief.
“I am ordered to tell you this,” the Marshal spat out to the prisoners under the gun. “‘By the order of Elijah Harweg, Lord President of the Authority of Shadrapar, you have been judged to be traitors to the last bastion of the human race. You have been convicted in fair trial of conspiracy to subvert the right and proper Authority and to install a counter-Authority against the laws and regulations of Shadrapar. You also stand accused of…’” The Marshal paused. “I won’t bore you,” he confided. “There is a list here, and who will care if I read it or if I do not?”
He was robbing them of perhaps a minute of their lives, by sparing them that boredom.
“To resume,” he continued smartly. “‘The President regrets to announce that your public sentence of exile to the Island Chemical Mining Corporation Colony will not suffice to keep the loyal people of Shadrapar free of your tainted ideas, and so has deemed that you shall be executed upon your arrival at that place.’” He shook his head. “What an utter waste of words,” he added, perhaps the only time he questioned anyone’s orders, “But that is what I have been ordered to tell you. Shoot them down.”
There was an unbreathing pause while the meaning of his last words made itself known. Even the firing squad had not been expecting such an abrupt command. One of the doomed prisoners had the chance to cry out some desperate plea for clemency.
Then the first shot was fired, and then all the other shots were fired. It was very brief. Some thirty men and three women died in mere seconds up against the Island’s wall. I heard later that two prisoners had died from shots that passed straight through into the cell beyond. I am sure the Marshal considered it a bonus. Shon and I and the others just crouched there. It put the individual beatings and deaths of the Island into perspective.
Burned into my mind is the sight of the first bullets and beams striking home, the first rank of the prisoners jerking back with the explosive impact, bloody holes punched through prison greys. I saw faces that were only just becoming afraid, and too late. Who were they? What had they done? Painters, merchants, politicians, crooks? Under that fatal scrutiny all were as one. After that I looked away, but I heard the rest of the performance: brief screams and cries cut short by the gunfire, the deafening rattle and zing of the weapons. There was no time for words. Then it was over and the echoes of the guns had died away before the last body slid down the wall to the ground. The firing squad was heading in. The surviving new prisoners were being taken to their new cells. Business was back to normal, now that little unpleasantness was out of the way.
The Marshal looked around and saw us.
“You men!” he shouted, but instead of a punishment for idling, he had a job for us.
“Put the bodies into the water. Let them feed the fish that feed us,” he decided. I would rather have been whipped, just then.
The man in the fancy clothes was approaching the Marshal with papers. I was expecting him to get slugged in the gut as Peter had. Instead, the Marshal handed the man back his papers and looked him up and down. He had an air of respect that he never showed for the Governor or any living thing.
He signalled peremptorily to the nearest Warden.
“Go fetch Drachmar,” he snapped out. “There’s a message here for him.” It was always hard to tell, but I thought he was pleased about it. This did not bode well for Peter.
I found the body of the Commissar and hauled him over my shoulder like a sack. Once I had cast off the emotional baggage associated with death then one load was like another. Whatever had characterised these people and given them their peculiarities and convictions had flown from them, and only the solid, empty prison was left to be disposed of.
The next man I grabbed I had also known. I had not noticed him in the line-up. Only now did I see whose remains I was consigning to watery consumption: Louyere the inadequate transcriber. It shook me a little. Surely justice was something I had forgotten about, but some part of me had assumed that the executed had been in some way guilty of the crime for which such an excessive punishment had been levied. Louyere had surely never been guilty of being anything other than a bad scholar. Perhaps he had become a revolutionary since leaving the Island, but I found it hard to believe. Louyere had been killed as a political dissenter, and that struck me as indicative of some deep unease back home.
I threw Louyere’s familiar face into the lake with the rest of him. What else was there to do? I saw Shon hurl a dead woman after him without pause. The surgeons had made her beautiful before the guns had spoiled her. Then he stretched and wiped some sweat from his brow like any honest workman doing a day’s toil.
“Damn it,” he said softly. “I knew I knew him.”
We looked at the newcomer. He was standing idle, watching us, watching the Wardens, watching the whole Island work. There was something about him that I had not seen for a long time. He was a free man. It was obvious to me that he had not come here to work, and so the Marshal had no more authority over him than he had over the sun.
“It is! It’s Jonas Destavian!” Shon hissed.
“Who?” I asked mildly.
“What do you mean, who? Jonas Destavian, the one and the only.” He was suddenly all excitement, a six-foot, scar-faced ten-year-old about to meet his favourite…
Oh, I thought. That was where I knew the name from. Jonas Destavian, the duellist. I had some vague notion that he was supposed to be quite good. For me to have heard of him, he would have to be quite the notable fighter.
“He’s aces,” Shon said definitely. “He’s won twenty-one blood matches.”
I looked at Jonas Destavian and saw a long-limbed man who was not, after all, as young as his movements suggested. His hair was a dark copper that had greyed slightly above the ears. His face was unlined, but there were cosmetics for that, and he could surely afford them. He had a stance about him that I had not seen before, neither the Marshal’s tense aggression nor Peter’s laid-back ease. Both were profoundly conscious poseurs compared to Destavian. He was ready, and that was the best way of describing him. If some lake monster had lunged for him, or an airborne predator had dived from the clouds, he would have been expecting it. The closest I had seen to it was Thelwel’s strange grace, but that was a passive thing over which Thelwel had no control. Destavian was sheer, harnessed physical ability, and it was something he had honed himself into. He was a self-made man.
Peter emerged into the light cautiously, and he must have known what was going on. He stood, shielding his eyes with one hand, with that slightly deliberate relaxed pose. Destavian smiled slightly, which briefly gave his face back all the lines that cosmetics had taken away.
“Peter,” he remarked, and then, self-mocking, “So we meet again.”
“Jonas,” acknowledged Peter carefully. He had a new black eye, which slightly spoiled his debonair. “You’re here for the sights or the waters?”
“If only,” Destavian said, which put an end to that. “I have been asked to call you out.”
“And if I refuse?” Peter asked, following what I was sure must be an old catechism.
“I have been commissioned by Jon Anteim the Elder and licensed by the Authority to seek permission from the Governor for your execution at my hands. I am sure, though, that such procedures will not be necessary. I told my principles that Peter Drachmar never shirks a fight.” Destavian looked down at the latticed floor beneath him idly. “I am sorry, for what that is worth.”
“It’s not worth a damn,” Peter said, still the casual, easy-going man, but there was a bead of sweat above one eye that was not due to the heat.
“Oh I know,” Destavian said quietly. “I know.”
“What on earth is going on?” I demanded in a whisper.
“Your man’s challenged to a duel,” Shon said, sounding awed, “with Jonas Destavian.”
“To the death?”
“Destavian wouldn’t come all this way for sparring practice. Your man must have got way up some noses before coming here. I think Jon Anteim the Elder was Secretary to the Authority once.” Shon shook his head slowly.
Peter shrugged as easily as he did anything and took Destavian’s hand. They gripped wrist to wrist, as duellists did.
“I’m game,” Peter said. “After all, ‘When the swords call, you always hear it.’”
“‘When once the sword has called they hear it ever’,” Destavian corrected him, and both Shon and I mouthed the words, for it was from Jeffed’s famous poem.
“Whatever,” Peter shrugged again. “Did you bring my gear? I didn’t think I’d need it here.”
“I have a spare set with me. I’ll have it sent to you,” Destavian told him solemnly. “We must meet tomorrow, though, for the boat will wait only so long and I must be back in Shadrapar.”