They slid his dinner plate halfway to this woman at every meal, with an insolent shove that left part of the contents behind on the floor. Isiq had to pounce on it, kicking at the rats that hurled themselves on the food the instant it appeared, stumbling quickly behind the choking woman with his prize. A metal plate with three sections; he had licked it clean after every squalid meal, saying 'fourteen', 'fifteen'; struggling thus to keep count of the days he had lain in Queen Mirkitj's private hell. But what if they did not come at regular times? What if they fed him twice in one day and skipped the next altogether? He had only the cycles of his body to judge by, and they were becoming erratic. To breathe on one's hand and be unable to see it. To rest one's chin on a stone shoulder and have no idea of the face.
Someone's name engraved on the back of the plate. Isiq had caught himself licking the signature, over and over, for his tongue was more sensitive than his fingertips, though not sensitive enough to feel out the tiny letters. Had an earlier prisoner used this plate, etched his name in it somehow, declaring, I still exist, you have not reduced me to perfect nothingness for I remember myself, you have not erased me, you have not won.
More likely it was the name of the manufacturer. Do not believe it. Believe it was defiance, stubborn will, blazing on like a mad candle in the dark.
Such were the orders he gave himself. He who had commanded fleets, abolished nations with a word, shaped the lives of thousands with a sharp decision, was now reduced to praying for obedience from an army of one.
He succeeded for a time. With the edge of the plate he was able to scrape a thin groove in the floor, a barely perceptible scratch, from the doorway to the choking woman, from the woman to the room's central pillar, from the pillar to the pit. When Isiq got lost, when the smothered feeling rose in his chest and threatened obliteration, he dropped to hands and knees and sought out the groove, and followed it like an ant from one marker to the next, until he returned to the door. And with his forehead pressed to the crack between door and frame he could actually detect a light, the palest imaginable gloaming, a microscopic flaw in this perfection of darkness, this black stomach in which he was being digested.
That is why they wear stone. It makes them harder to digest.
Madness. He took deep breaths, forcing the air from his lungs over and over, as if pumping bilge from a hold. What if the light is imaginary? The light is not imaginary. And he did not need a speck of light, a name on a food plate, a companion in agony. I am a soldier, I solve problems, I will go about my tasks.
Leaving the plate near the door he had set off on a tour of hell, groping left along the wall. It was a slow and frightful business. He had not gone forty squatting, creeping paces when he nearly died. A pit, yawning beneath his outstretched foot. He had teetered, then let himself fall sidelong, landing on the edge of the pit and just managing to twist back onto the floor. He had lain there, petrified. Cold air flowed from the pit like some fiend's long and rapturous sigh. At last he had risen to hands and knees and groped on.
The pit was shaped like a tongue. At the point where it curved furthest from the wall his fingers had brushed a knobby protrusion. A foothold. He had extended his arm and found another below. One could climb down, deeper into hell. He had lain on his side and reached farther. And then screamed with pain and rage.
The rat's bite was deep; its jaws had locked onto his flesh with a starved thing's ferocity. 'Damn you! Damn you! ' Isiq had rolled away from the pit with the creature still attached to his hand, swung it writhing and squealing over his head, slammed it down on the stone floor beside him. Again. And again. Only on the fourth blow had it released his finger, slashed to the bone by the rodent's teeth. Even then it had refused to die, but had leaped on his stomach and thence back into the pit, splattering him with his own blood.
For two days he had urinated on the wound: Dr Chadfallow's field trick for avoiding infection. Miraculously it had worked; the cut was painful but clean. Gangrene in this festering hole would be certain death.
That night as he pawed at his food, a flaky substance met his fingers. Ashes? Not quite. A herb, sprinkled on his half-raw potato? He touched it with his tongue. And dropped the plate in a panic. And squatted, and scraped together what food he could. And flung it down again, howling in rage and hunger. They were the beasts, his jailkeepers. They had dusted his meal with deathsmoke.
A time came when he knew he must enter the pit. He realised that Ott could not have left such an obvious means of escape; he knew also that the rats came from the pit, and that he risked being gnawed alive. Somehow none of that mattered. A sense of the physical space around him was one of his few holds on sanity, and the pit was a blank spot on the map.
He swept each foothold with his boot. There was a great smell of dung. He eased himself down and felt the air grow fouler; a mould-heavy dampness bathed the walls. Far-off noises, drips and splashes. After twenty footholds his boot met the ground.
An ovoid pit; a low-roofed passage; a shattered door. And then rubble. He knelt and groped. Big rocks, sand, masonry, utterly filling the corridor. A large part of the ceiling must have collapsed.
He felt every inch of the rubble-mound before him, and met with no rats at all. Near the top of the mound, however, he located the fist-sized tunnel by which they surely came and went. He plugged the hole with the largest stone he could lift, but the earth was soft around it, and he knew it would not slow even a single animal very long.
But for many days the rats did not come.
He flexed his finger: it was almost healed. He had an idea that this was his twentieth day among the statues. He had a pair of weapons, now: an iron bar and a vaguely axe-shaped stone, both of which he had pulled from the detritus at the bottom of the pit. The bar had not been worth the trouble: it was too heavy to swing, too thick to pry into cracks. Since heaving it up from the pit he had found no use for it at all.
But the stone was another matter. He swung it experimentally, thinking again of the blow he had not landed on Ott's face, when the arrogant old killer sat beside him. Maybe what Ott said was true, and the attack could only have failed. Or maybe that was pride: perhaps there had been a window between his inspiration and Ott's awareness of the danger, when he might have struck. Why do we wait? thought the admiral, suddenly on the point of tears. For his daughter's face had risen before his eyes.
What had they done with her body? They were not going to Etherhorde, so Thasha would never lie beside her mother in the family plot on Maj Hill. The best he could hope for was that she had been buried at sea, with honours, like the soldier another world might have let her become.
Sudden noise from the middle of the chamber. Clanging, rasping — the same horrid mix. Isiq left the dancer and shuffled towards the central pillar, taking his time. He did not much want to see what awaited him there.
The pillar was six or eight feet in diameter. It was made of heavy brick, not soft stone like the rest of the chamber. Gaps the size of half-bricks had been left intentionally, and from them crept a smell of ancient coal. The pillar also had a great iron door.
It was unmistakably a fire-door, of the kind installed on furnaces. It had a small square window that must once have been glazed. The door was rusted shut, the heavy bolt and staple fused with age into a solid thing, but there was no lock his fingers could detect. For several days he had struggled to open the door, to no avail. Then, on the third day after the rat bite, the noises had begun.
Isiq bent his ear to the window. Crashing, hissing, scraping. All from below — the pillar must have contained a shaft of some kind — and blurred by echoes and distance, but soul-chilling nonetheless. He was hearing the rage-stoked violence of living creatures, battering and biting whatever they could find. And speaking. That was the true horror of it. Most of the voices (he had noted at least a dozen) spoke only gibberish, a snarling, whining, moaning, murderous barrage of nonsense sounds. They suggested some horrible perversion of babies trying out their vocal cords for the first time — but the throats that made those sounds must have been larger than a grown man's.
And some were using words. Simjan words; he caught no more than the odd interjection. Mine! Stop! Egg! Isiq was cross with himself for not following the meaning — he was ambassador to Simja; he had been tutored in the tongue — until he realised that the words were not arranged in sentences. At most, two or three were strung together and repeated endlessly, with a kind of agonised inflection. Hagan reb. Hagan reb. Hagan hagan hagan REB! Reb reb reb reb reb-' The words broke off in screeches of lunacy.
All save one. A nattering, sorrowful, sharp-edged voice. Penny for a colonel 's widow? Just those words, gabbled and blurted and wept. Penny for a colonel 's widow? The voice appeared never to tire.
'Rin's mercy, what do you mean?' groaned Isiq.
At once he clapped a hand over his mouth, silently cursing. He had never uttered a sound near the pillar. The creatures fell absolutely silent. Then they all began screaming at once.
'Hraaaar!'
