The news of the murder was only the faintest breeze before the storm. Even as we were talking it over; even as Thelwel’s cries of grief were dying away, someone got the news to the Marshal. He wasted no time in letting us know of his displeasure.
Why should he care that some old prisoner had met his end? Because Father Sulplice was irreplaceable. Not even his son knew the machines of the Island as the old man had, and the Island was more reliant on technology than its parent city ever was.
The Marshal came to our stretch just before dawn, on fire with rage. It leaked from his eyes and the corners of his mouth and every movement he made. Behind him came a pack of Wardens, beating on doors and making sure everyone was standing to attention. Every man of them had guns and there was blood in the air.
“Which of you did it?” the Marshal demanded outright. “One of you scum killed the old man, the only wretched inmate on this Island who was worth anything to anyone.” I thought he had narrowed down the killer to our stretch, but he was going through the stretches in turn, spreading his anger as far as it would go. All of his homicidal moods to that point were nothing to the state we saw him in then. He was a hollow man. There was nothing but hate in him.
“I will know the name of the man who did this,” he promised us flatly. “You will tell me. You will give him up to me. One or more of you knows who it was that ended the old man’s life. I am sure you think that you will stick together and keep silent. This will not be the case.”
He stalked back and forth down the corridor, incapable of standing still even for a moment. The Wardens skipped to get out of his way. They were as scared of him as we were. He had shot two dead, Peter told me later. On hearing the news, he had quite literally shot the messengers. He said they were derelict in their duty, but it was just his rage pulling the trigger.
All the boundaries and rules and regulations that he lived by were straining to hold his fury, and I could see them buckling. He, whom the least challenge to his authority had sent into a killing rage, had been driven mad by the immense presumption of someone taking a thing of value from him. Father Sulplice had been under his protection. It was not for the old man’s sake that he was here with his threats, but because of the challenge to his rule.
“Do you know why you will give up the killer to me?” he demanded of us, and we said nothing. Not one man moved. Anyone attracting the Marshal’s attention would be a dead man in that instant.
“For each day that passes,” he spat out, “I will kill a man on this stretch. I will kill a man on every stretch. What are your lives to me? Have I inspired you, now, to give the murderer up? Perhaps you are asking yourselves what happens should I kill the murderer by random chance, or if I kill the only man that can name him? Then I go on shooting you until not a man of you is left! Do you understand? It is a risk I am prepared to take.”
“Can you afford to do that, Marshal?”
The Marshal froze, his general loathing crystallising into a specific hatred. He stalked over to the cell next to ours: Gaki’s cell.
“What did you say?” he demanded.
“I asked whether you could afford to deplete your charges here,” Gaki said lazily. “With the prison boat gone, you won’t get any more toys to play with.”
The Marshal stared at him. Their faces were less than a foot apart, separated only by the bars. It was a strange contrast to see the calm and sardonic face of one madman across from the rage-bleeding mask of the other. Without warning, the Marshal put out an arm and shot a man across the corridor, dead on the moment.
“It is a risk,” he repeated, “I am prepared to take.” He spared a glance for his victim. “That was for your insolence,” he stated, and then his gun swung in our direction. “This is today’s quota.” He fired. The bullet lanced through our cell and missed Lucian by a hand’s breadth before ploughing into the shoulder of a man in the cell behind.
“I will be back tomorrow,” the Marshal stated. “You can be sure of it.” Then he was gone to the next stretch with his nervous gang of Wardens filing out behind him. We heard more shots soon enough.
The man with the injured shoulder was unable to work that day, of course, and was gone when we returned from the workshops. Most reckoned that the Wardens had taken him, because when the Marshal said he would kill a man a day, he meant it.
*
In the workshop that day, each man was watching every other. Even the slowest had worked out that not only murderers but scapegoats might be offered up to the Marshal. I think the only reason that the man had not been deluged with them was fear of his reprisal if he chose not to believe the accuser. It was simply not wise to be anywhere near the Marshal right then, even to give him what he wanted.
I wondered what the Governor thought of it all, whether he even knew.
Thelwel got into a fight in one of the storerooms. Someone from our stretch came and told me that he was brawling, begging me to stop him before he brought the Wardens down on us. I ran along and discovered Father Sulplice’s son locked in a grapple with none other than Tallan.
I assumed that Tallan had attacked him, but a moment later I saw Thelwel had one hand about the man’s neck and the other twisted in the collar of his prison greys, and Tallan was struggling to get away. The larger man struck Thelwel twice across the face, without achieving anything. Thelwel was panting for breath, but between gasps he was saying something.
“You killed him! You did it!” He had let his face go slack and expressionless as a rubber mask. He was concentrating on other things. Tallan was making a half-strangled denial but Thelwel was not listening, forcing him back against a wall. “You did it! I know you! You’re evil! Why not you?”
“Thelwel! Thelwel, leave him!” I grabbed his shoulders and tried to prise him off his victim. “It wasn’t him. Thelwel, listen to me!”
His face turned to look at me, and for a moment there was nothing human in it, no admission of any common ground at all. He was, for a brief span, a killing machine who would not allow that we had shared conversations and expeditions and secrets together.
“Stefan,” said the thing that was Thelwel.
Then it all flowed back into him from wherever he had penned his humanity. For Thelwel was human, more so than many born to the title. His grip loosened and Tallan bolted away without a word.
“It wasn’t him,” I said again. “Much as I am loath to defend Tallan in anything, we were all locked up in our stretch, and Lucian kept me awake most of the night. There’s no way he could have got out, and besides, why would he? I know he’s a bastard but I can’t see him deciding to kill your father just for the fun. It must have been someone from another stretch. Who had a motive?”
“Nobody,” said Thelwel in a small voice. There was no sign of the energy that had filled him. “Nobody. He was so careful. Everyone knew they needed him. Who would do such a thing, Stefan?”
I had no answers for him.
*
The next morning we were once again woken before dawn as the Marshal grimly followed through with his promise. I could see that the strain of the situation was beginning to tell on him. Not the killing; there was never a man more able to deal out death with a clear conscience. In the light of a new day, he was beginning to realise the situation he had created for himself. He stormed in and demanded that we turn over the killer, and he got his wish. Three prisoners in one cell called him and told him that their fourth was the killer. I heard the trio of strident accusations and the solo of terrified denial. The Marshal was over there at once. I heard him say, “So, he did it, did he?” clearly over the pleas of innocence.
“How do you know it was him?” the Marshal demanded. The cell went very quiet. They were so shocked he was actually asking them for proof, they could not even come up with the obvious: “he told us” or “we overheard him boasting about it”, or even “we saw him do it”. The Marshal gave a snarl of frustration and his Wardens killed all three of the accusers and wounded an innocent man in the cell behind them. I heard the accused man thanking the Marshal again and again.
“But maybe you did do it,” said the Marshal, and the Wardens shot him too. When the Marshal turned back down the stretch there was a fear to him. He had lost control. He could never know whether a man was the killer: we were all liars to him. Nor could he be seen to be going back on himself. He had trapped himself in a bloody spiral and I could see him thinking through the maze of it, trying desperately to find some way out. I was afraid that the only way that would occur to him would be to kill everyone and have done with it.
He had done his killing for the day, and he was about to make for the next stretch, when I visibly saw an idea take him. It came out of nowhere at all. I never saw something so strange before. I felt the ripples of the surface of his mind as the alien object struck home and made itself apparent to him.
He stopped dead, and the Wardens almost walked into the back of him.
“Advani!” he barked, and my blood stopped in my veins. There was nothing I could do but stand and wait as he approached. Lucian and Hermione melted from my side and fell to the back of the cell.
“Advani. You claim to be an educated man. Would you explain to these ignorant scum the meaning of the word, ‘decimation’?”
My heart sank, but beyond that immediate fear for my life there was an almost cringing sense of embarrassment for the man. It was the poverty of his imagination, his ability to solve problems only in the same tired way, over and over again.
“It means to remove one in every ten,” I said, as calmly as I could.
“Exactly so,” the Marshal confirmed. “I see that you are all irredeemable, and the true killer will hide amongst you forever whilst you betray each other in turn. Sulplice’s death shall be punished and the punishment shall be felt by you all. I shall bring you out one mob at a time and I shall remove, as Advani puts it, one out of every ten. Each and every one of you has that chance to die, and it shall be today.”
He stared about him, and there was less of a reaction than he was expecting. Deep inside, I was not the only one who was becoming jaded. One can only live with random violence for so long before the shock wears off. At least this new terror would be over and done with soon enough.
*
The sun was uncompromisingly bright, as we were herded out onto the open dock. I had watched Peter fight his duel there, first set foot on the Island there, first seen the Marshal claim a life there. Now I would see the logical continuation of his policy of fear: his decimation. Where, I wondered, had he even learned that archaic word? Or did he have an infinite vocabulary where death was concerned?
I think there were five stretches worth of prisoners blinking and cringing in the harsh sunlight. We were packed in, shoulder to shoulder, backs to the water. Around two-thirds of the Wardens were between us and the dubious safety of the Island’s innards. They had all been issued with firearms of one kind or another. I saw balding Harkeri there, and Red, and the resolutely brooding Sauven.
The Marshal kept us waiting. We had ample time to reflect on that one-in-ten chance. We were all wondering how he would make his selections. Would he count from the left, the right, the front? There was a constant silent eddying amongst our ranks as people tried to jockey for some position that would be absolutely safe from all directions.
I was close to Thelwel and I saw that he was looking out past our fellows to the line of the jungle. He was making the most of the view while he could. I had assumed that with Father Sulplice dead, they would need Thelwel to carry on his work but, the way the Marshal was behaving, nobody was safe.
Some tugging at my mind made me look up, and I saw a gallery high above us, set into the Island’s wall. I had never known it was there from the outside, but I realised I had seen it from within: the Governor’s window, from where he measured the waning light of the stars. Squinting into the sunlight I could just make out two faces in the shade there, looking down on us. What could the Governor and his lady think of this pointless butchery? Did they approve of the Marshal’s firm hand or were they powerless to stop his rampage?
The Marshal emerged. Something had prompted him to give the event a sense of occasion. He was in some bizarre dress uniform that I had never seen: a half-cloak trimmed with gold and some decorations across his chest, with braided epaulettes at the shoulder. It was a piece of the Island’s history from generations back, unearthed to commemorate his latest act of destruction. He adjusted his headband and then marched out, a one-man parade, to give his orders.
“You convicts have conspired to conceal the name of Sulplice’s murderer,” he called out. “You have nobody to blame but yourselves for this justice.” His cold stare bit into the warmth of the afternoon. “The survivors will learn to know their place. I will have no murder done in my prison.”
This was such a grand piece of illogic that I nearly choked. It was clear that the Marshal saw no inconsistency. To him, executing political prisoners or randomly shooting inmates was not murder. Lawful authority was all, and moral authority merely its shadow, to be forced into whatever shape the law adopted.
His gaze was hovering over us, seeking victims. I decided that he was going to use this opportunity to take care of a few grudges. I wondered if the Governor’s writ still held. I was surely for the axe otherwise. I had a recurrence of my calm resignation. The matter was beyond my control.
“Oh stop this charade!” called a voice from the ranks. Several of the Wardens flinched and guns came up to cover us. It was a miracle that no-one was shot there and then. The Marshal waited, though, and I saw some part of him had been expecting this.
Gaki stepped through the massed inmates as though he was walking through an empty room, and came to stand in front. The sun gleamed from his shaven head, his lean, bare chest.
“Marshal, you disappoint me,” Gaki said, and the temperature dropped. The Marshal was still as stone.
“Decimate the whole prison to cover up your own fear? Kill one man in ten to hide your own inadequacy,” Gaki prodded gently. “And from the moment the body was found, you knew the name of the killer. You never had a doubt and yet you have gone through this ridiculous puppet show. Who are you trying to deceive, Marshal? The Governor? Yourself?”
The Marshal never moved, but I could feel something building in his mind, as one might see a swift dark mass of cloud and know that a storm was on its way.
“You’ve always known that I killed the old man,” Gaki said lightly. I felt a current recoil through the collective mind of the listeners, prisoners and Wardens both. I gripped Thelwel’s arm convulsively because I had visions of him leaping fatally at Gaki’s back. Thelwel’s eyes were dead, face loose. Of his mind I could feel nothing.
I had not thought of Gaki. He was a madman, but not without method. He killed for a reason, even if his reasons were insane. Why would he destroy a harmless old man? I saw it now. He did it to draw the Marshal out. He did it to force this confrontation in a time and space of his liking. That idea, that had struck the Marshal so unexpectedly, had its origin in Gaki’s brain.
“Now,” said Gaki, as if prompting, and the Marshal dragged a pistol out and fired at him, point blank. There was a second’s hesitation, though, and Gaki had sidestepped away to let the bullet slam into a prisoner behind. With the gunshot, everyone moved. Inmates tried not to be in the way of the next shot. People pushed and jostled and fell into the water. Wardens ran forward, trying to aim at Gaki, who was circling the Marshal. No, not circling, spiralling in. I was slammed from behind and people trod on my feet and struck me, but I could not tear my eyes away. The Marshal was trying to track him, firing again and again. Each time there was that second’s pause before his finger closed on the trigger, and each time Gaki was elsewhere. I saw Harkeri go down with a bullet in the leg, and a prisoner take a graze across the side of the head. Many of the Wardens were keeping a line of guns between the prisoners and the doorway, still acting on their last received instructions. The men in the water were crying out for aid, and I heard the bellow of a river monster as it scented their fear. All this was background.
Gaki tucked and rolled and came up nose to nose with the Marshal, the gun pointed at his chest. He was smiling serenely. I saw a musician once, confident in his skills and caught up in his performance, wearing just that expression. He stood still for the next shot and the gun clicked, emptied out.
I recall the next moments in silence, although surely the same commotion was going on all around. I hear nothing, in my memories, see only the two men, law and chaos, the powers of the Island.
The Marshal lashed the barrel of the pistol at Gaki’s face, reaching for the knife at his belt left-handed. Gaki blocked the gun with a forearm. His other hand had something in it that glinted like glass, and I could not tell what it was save that I had seen it before.
He made a graceful pass across the Marshal’s stomach as bullets and beams of energy from the Wardens passed soundlessly around them. The Marshal lunged forwards with his own blade, but it stuttered still before it could drive in. Gaki turned away, kicked off into a backflip over the Wardens’ guns and was gone into the depths of the Island before anyone could stop him.
That stutter, I had seen it before. I had done it to the Marshal myself to throw off a killing thrust by that very knife. Gaki had been holding the Marshal’s mind between thumb and forefinger, squeezing every time the man tried to kill him.
He had learned Helman’s techniques.
There were Wardens moving after Gaki, but they slowed as they reached the doorway, because the darkness within was suddenly populated by a real monster.
The Marshal stood very still, very straight, and I saw a thin line of red appear across his torso, like another decoration. He clutched at it and at last I saw an expression on his face, like marble cracking; an animal expression; pain.
The glint in Gaki’s hand had been Father Sulplice’s diamond-bladed knife, his tiny metal-shaping tool. In all the uproar over the old man’s death, who had thought to look for it?
The Marshal lurched, then forced himself to stand straight. A Warden came to him, offering support, but he waved the man off with a stilted gesture and turned from us to go inside. His steps were too fast, disjointed. He kept having to stop and re-pace himself. We massed prisoners watched his back and thought about the future.
He gave some order to Sauven, at the door. I thought it might have been “Kill them all,” but it turned out to be nothing more than, “Get them inside.”