Arves died in his sleep that night, perhaps the kindest thing that could have happened to him. The Island would not have permitted him to live long.
The story of the end of the Underworld spread out through the Island: from our cell to our stretch; from our stretch to the other prisoners; from the prisoners to the Wardens. A great cloud of gloom settled over the inmates as a whole; many had dealt with the Underworld and others had sheltered there, as had I. When I next saw Shon he remarked, “There goes half my client base.”
The news reached the Marshal eventually. We knew this because he came to our stretch a week or so later.
“All still mourning the loss of your thieves’ nest?” he remarked, stalking between the cells. We stared at him sullenly and he singled a man out at random. “What about you? Are you sad that such a place has been exterminated?” Silence. “I’m talking to you!”
The man, whoever he was, looked away and said nothing. The Marshal gestured for a Warden, holding out one gloved hand for his gun. He shot the man dead through the bars of his cell. The thunder of it broke the spell and fearful normality returned with a vengeance.
“Anyone else feel like ignoring my questions?” the Marshal asked. There was a moment’s fraught silence and then a muttered chorus of negatives. The Marshal stalked two doors down the line until he was looking into the cell the other side of Gaki.
“You with the scar,” he directed. “You tell me whether our Authority’s righteous victory makes you unhappy.”
There was a murmur from the accused prisoner that I could not catch, but it must have been an affirmative. The Marshal did not shoot the man as expected, but looked around at the rest of us. “And I suppose you others feel the same. How about you, Advani?”
I started. The Marshal skipped Gaki’s cell and was bearing down on me. Hermione and Lucian contrived to fade into the background.
“I had friends there,” I said, in as steady a voice as I could. “So, yes, I do mourn for Underworld.”
“Do you really?” There was a change in the Marshal’s tone, although not in his face. “Let me make you all an offer, a special celebratory offer in honour of our victory. If any one of you will stand now, and pledge that you are glad to be rid of the Underworld, then I will let that man off tomorrow’s work. How about that, you wretches? Everyone who forswears the Underworld, come to the front of your cells. This is your one and only chance.”
Everyone was staring at him. Nobody could tell what he was about. He gave nothing away, standing with the gun still clutched in one hand. “Nobody?” he said, in the same light, sardonic voice.
Someone, I cannot say who, stood up and moved to the cell door, then seven or eight others, all at once, and then twenty more. Tallan was right there, and I saw Thelwel too, who had never known the Underworld, barely even known Shadrapar. Hermione muscled past me ponderously. A moment later, Lucian was there too, and all around us was the shuffle of traitorous feet scuffing over the memory of Underworld.
I cannot say if I was the last man left, but the thought had long before occurred to me that the Underworld and Sergei and Giulia and the rest were gone, and no amount of stubborn pride would bring them back. Before the Marshal could revoke his offer I joined my two cell mates at the door with a shrug. The Marshal’s eyes gleamed.
“Is this not a disgusting thing?” he remarked, although he looked anything but disgusted. “Look at this, men; look at them all. Their Underworld not one month dead and they’re ready to betray it for the sake of a day’s leisure.” He stalked closer to our cell until he was staring directly into my face. “Even the vaunted Stefan Advani will drop his lordly airs for another crumb. Whenever I have doubts about the rightness of what we do here,” and his voice made it clear that he never had such doubts, “I will remember this little display.” Hermione could have reached out and broken his neck. It would have been the work of a moment. She never thought of it or never dared to.
He strode away down the stretch and his words carried back to us. “I lied. Of course I lied. There are no holidays on the Island. But I did want to see that, just for the purposes of morale.” Then he was gone, leaving us all in a foul mood. All bar one.
Gaki laughed lightly. He was watching the Marshal’s back, though, and I thought I saw his lips move slightly. It almost looked as though he were counting.
*
It was a hard month, all told. The Marshal’s humour set the pace, and it was obvious he was making life miserable for the Wardens, for they were not shy of passing it on to us. Shon got beaten for some imagined infringement, and a weaker man might not have lived through it. One of the Wardens got into a blazing row with Father Sulplice and, because the old man was too precious to risk, they dragged out Thelwel and whipped him with canes so that inch-high welts rose on his back. I knew he would heal as soon as he was left alone to do so, but the pain was real, for him and for his father. I saw tears in the old man’s eyes.
Lucian fell ill.
It was quite unexpected; he was a robust enough little man. Something came in off the waters, though, and about one in seven prisoners were suddenly hacking their lungs out, shaking and shivering with a rainbow sheen of sweat slicking their skin. I was spared; Lucian was not. Soon enough his rasping coughs were keeping Hermione and me awake and I began to fear for his life. It was not uniformly fatal, but a few had died from it already, and the Warden running our stretch then was not a man to allow people sick leave. If anyone lingered in their cell of a morning, he would march in and kick them out into the corridor. Not that Lucian did. He was more than eager to go out and work each day, far more eager than when he was well. His manic optimism drove him to show how healthy he was. After all, was he not going to be sent for when the very next boat arrived? A few paltry germs could hardly stand in his way when he was a man of such manifest destiny. He forced himself to greater and greater extremes of exertion, all the time trying to explain how healthy he was and why people should not have any concern for him, in between great bouts of choking that doubled him over.
I made sure that he had a little extra food for each meal, and I think Hermione did the same. I tried to stay close in the workshops and keep him out of the way of any vindictive Wardens. I was not the only one looking after him. He had been on the Island longer than most and many of the staff, let alone the prisoners, had conceived a vague fondness for him.
An odd result of me being kept awake at night by his sporadic hacking cough was that I was put into closer contact with Hermione than I otherwise would have wished. It was not that I disliked her, but she could have folded me in four without effort, so I was wary. Normally she would sit like a stone in one corner of the cell while Lucian rattled on at her. Now, awake and past midnight, she began to sit by me, a massive brooding presence. For the first two nights I ignored her. It seemed inconceivable to me that an introvert like Hermione might actually desire companionship. On the third night, though, I looked at her and she looked back.
“Can’t sleep,” she said, and to make the point Lucian launched into another great barrage of phlegm. I admitted to the same problem.
She continued to stare at me and it was obvious something was on her mind and, equally, that she was not going to bring it into the light of her own volition. I tried to out-stare her, a doomed venture. At last her weighted silence drew the words from me and I asked, “What is it, Hermione?”
The voice, when it came out, was tiny. I never knew that she could squeeze it so small. The people in the adjacent cells could not have heard it.
“You’ve been here a while,” she said. “You know how people here are.”
I put my social scientist’s hat on and admitted that I did, though to be honest I hadn’t been there much longer than her, and not generally to my benefit. She, however, seldom mixed with our peers, a privilege that I lacked the heft and demeanor to enforce.
“People,” she repeated awkwardly, “together.” I guessed where her ponderous drift was going and nodded. It was a topic I’d rather have dodged, but we were moving in that direction with the same iron momentum as the prison boat, and I had not the strength to change our course. The thought of her folding me in four for a poorly chosen comment was still in my mind.
She started her next sentence several times and then subsided. “People,” she got out eventually. There was no expression visible on her face save her habitual sullen scowl.
“What is it, Hermione?” I tried again.
She shrugged her rounded shoulders. “I wanted to ask about someone.”
I took my life in my hands and said, “I don’t think he feels the same way.” I remembered her talking to Thelwel and had seen that he had nothing for her, even before I discovered what he was. Hermione slumped into herself a little and I persevered. “I don’t think Thelwel feels that way about anyone.”
There was a strange kind of grunt from her that I really could not interpret. For a horrible moment I thought she was going to cry. Then came another, and I realised that it was a deep, gruff chuckle. I was about to ask her what it was when we heard a Warden’s footsteps and both snapped silent. I put my head down again and pretended to sleep as the man passed, despite Lucian’s choking refrain that nobody could have slept through. The man stopped at our cell and looked in to see Hermione sitting by me, staring up at him balefully. The Wardens gave Hermione a wide berth. She was one of those dangerous people who might not be put off by the threat of instant reprisal, should she choose to tear a taunting Warden’s head right off. Those times when she was beaten or punished she took it like a stone. There was no joy in her for them to take. Besides, she was a hard and uncomplaining worker, asked no questions, gave no trouble, and the Marshal steered well clear of her because of his almost phobic misogyny.
The Warden decided that the curfew was not that important and walked on. By this time, I was wide awake and only too eager to continue our conversation. Hermione, though, yawned mightily and was about to lumber over and try to sleep again. Her curiosity was a short-lived beast.
“Who, then?” I hissed at her. Now she had lost interest I found I had to know.
She did not say anything, but her eyes led her face in the direction that her heart was pulling: towards that shadowed cell where Gaki sat alone in one corner, perhaps asleep and perhaps not.
Gaki? How could anyone found any attraction on the homicidal madness that bubbled in every word and deed? But then I found myself thinking that at least he was genteel, and that he had treated Hermione with courtesy, even kindness, more so than the outside world. I remembered them playing games together and talking in low voices, and at the end of it the idea was not so unthinkable. I hoped that it was a mutual thing, but I couldn’t imagine Gaki having any affection to bestow. I was left with the twin unhappy options that it was all in Hermione’s mind, or that Gaki, for reasons of his own, was leading her on.
And there we have it: what I see now as my greatest failure. I was scared of Hermione: she was strong and unpredictable and different and I stayed away from her. She gave me no cause but the potential threat she posed was enough. And if I had spoken to her, if I had got to know her and brought her out of herself, how things might have been different. I was no better, in the way I looked on her, than the Witch Queen.
*
That month the whole Island was out of sorts. People walked around as though their skins were a size too large or too small, tormented by an unscratchable itch. The one Outing we had was so obviously going to turn into a brawl that I just stayed put and chatted to Thelwel. Later we listened to the sounds of fist on flesh from down the corridor, and five men ended up Below.
Even Leontes de Margot, the Governor, was afflicted by the strange malaise. When Shon and I were working on the Trethowan manuscript he suddenly appeared behind us like a bulbous ghost. Licking his moist lips, eyes darting nervously, he craned over Shon’s tense shoulder at the translated text. The two of us avoided the sight of him and stared at our hands like scolded children, but he would not go away.
“When will it be finished?” he asked us without warning. A pudgy hand slipped between us to paw at the completed sheets. Shon deferred to my expert judgement, which is to say he turned away slightly and left me to deal with the situation.
“Hard to say, sir,” I managed. “The writing is very dense and difficult to transcribe.” I was hedging outrageously and for the first time he seemed to know it.
“It must be finished soon,” he whispered. There was an awful significance in his voice, a man who knew some great fact that overshadowed us all. “Soon, Advani.”
“I am working as fast as I can, sir,” I continued to hedge.
“You. Go away a moment. Wait in the next room.” He dismissed Shon with a gesture while I watched him nervously. I was used to his dreamy and bland moods, his occasional ineffectual rages, but this was different. Something was gnawing at him.
He made to sit down beside me, checked himself for propriety’s sake, then paced off a little. One stubby hand fingered the rich weave of the robe he was wearing.
“You are afraid of the Marshal,” he said. I replied promptly that I was and the line of a frown furrowed his otherwise unblemished forehead.
“Don’t play games with me. You are afraid he’ll kill you as soon as you finish.”
I had not realised he had appreciated this; he was an easy man to underestimate, really.
“You have been delaying the work,” he continued. I could not tell if it was an accusation or only a suspicion. “You have been stretching your life out. That is what you have been doing.”
“No, sir. Of course not.”
He did not seem to hear me. “You must finish. Finish soon, Stefan.”
I did not trust myself to reply but just waved at the ambiguous stack of papers of the desk so as to indicate the magnitude of the task. Abruptly he was face to face with me, that bald and pallid circle blotting out my world and fixing me with its narrow and watery eyes.
“Stefan, I have to know if he had any hope at the end. Trethowan was a wise man. You must finish it soon, Stefan. Within the month.”
It was not my fear that gripped me, but his. There was a dreadful, creeping horror that had grown through the man like a disease. Dead stars and ancient sciences had given place to some modern and terrible vision. Such fear is contagious.
“I will finish it as soon as I can,” my mouth said.
His loose lips opened to impart something else, and then he broke and was looking, abruptly, through one of the walls. That was the Lady Ellera waking, or moving, or watching. Instead of the mingled anxiety and anticipation it had provoked before, though, the Governor’s face showed only that unnamed dread. He left the room uncertainly, as though the place was unfamiliar to him. Shon asked no questions, and I was not minded to enlighten him.
*
The first sign of the Thing that everyone was so manifestly waiting for was Peter turning up in the workshop and telling me it was time for a jaunt.
“We’re going out,” he said. It was the middle of the morning and the mining expeditions were long gone. I raised an eyebrow at him.
Peter glanced at the working prisoners, many of whom were eavesdropping. “Just out. Grab Thelwel and that lawyer mate of yours to make up a boatload.”
He clapped me on the shoulder and then launched off across the workroom floor. I saw him meet Midds at the far end of the room and exchange a few hurried words with him. As I was recruiting Shon a minute later I saw Midds, too, grab a couple of prisoners, and another Warden I did not know seemed to be doing the same thing. Something was afoot.
Peter led the three of us down to a low-ceilinged room on the waterside, open to the river on one wall with the floor sloping away so that the far end was lost underwater. Nudging their way up this slope with the action of the waves were half a dozen boats. One was the Marshal’s personal skiff, and another was a monster, a giant version of the mining vessels with metal-plated sides and some large weapon bolted to its front deck. The other four were to the mining ships as young water-beasts were to their overweight adult relatives. They were low, sleek craft with little but the arms of their point generators and an additional contraption astern to disturb their shallow profile.
“This is what the miners were converted from, decades back,” Thelwel murmured. “Beautiful, aren’t they?” He was already up to his ankles in water, trailing a hand over the boat’s polished lines. “They must be over a century old. My father and I, we keep them in good shape.”
Peter swung a canvas bag of his gear into the boat, and I asked him, “So what is it this time?”
“The boat,” Shon guessed, and Peter nodded seriously.
“Which boat?” I demanded, apparently the only person who had not realised.
“The prison boat,” Shon told me.
“It cannot be that time already.”
“Been and gone,” Peter confirmed. “Damn thing’s not been late for twenty years, they reckon. Search party. Thelwel can fix it if it’s gotten broken, and your mate there has a good pair of arms.”
“And me? What can I do?”
“You’re welcome to go back to the workshop,” Peter pointed out. I felt generally useless but said nothing.
We put out with two other boats and cruised round the Island’s bulk at an easy pace before scooting off downriver. The constant and disquieting vibration of the mining boats was here transformed into a thrumming of power and, I think, joy. The boats, soulless metal as they were, leapt over the water with the sheer glee of motion and the feeling was contagious. I have never cared for machines in general and boats in particular, but I will not deny that I enjoyed that journey. The speed and nimble steering gave at least the illusion that we could escape any monster the river could throw at us. Thelwel, at the helm, was grinning into the breeze like a child.
There are only so many places on a river for a lost ship to be, and the prison ship was some two hours downstream. We all began slowing as it came in sight, because it was obvious that there was something badly, even fatally, wrong.
It was canted at an angle and the nose was buried deep in the trees of the shore where it had drifted and beached. No human beings were in sight.
Other things moved. Other things flapped over the ship or crawled with many legs up the side of the hull to pick with claws at what was on the deck. There was little left by then: the efficiency of the jungle’s scavengers gave us no clue as to how long it had been. What we saw, coasting closer, were remains of some score of men strewn across the prison boat’s deck. The foul smell of carrion came to us with the buzzing of the flies.