“Stop, Harold, stop! Stop thinking about it, otherwise the fear will seep into your very bones! A few more thoughts like that, and you’ll start to panic. You’re a thief. The calm, calculating master thief known as Shadow Harold. A menace to every rich man’s treasure chest. The Harold that little green goblins with sharp tongues call the Dancer in the Shadows. You’ve never given way to panic while you were working, so don’t give way to it now! Keep calm.… Keep calm.… Calm your breathing now, that’s it.… Breathe in, breathe out.… Well done! Now get out of here, before things get even worse.”
I don’t know if I muttered these words myself or if someone invisible whispered them in my ear, but, with an angry snarl and clatter of teeth, the fear retreated.
Wandering about unarmed in the dark is an absolutely crazy idea, so I held my breath and walked to the back wall of the cell, where the bone had fallen to the floor. I felt around blindly with my feet for a long time, trying to find it. My eyes were watering from the stench and my nose felt as if someone had emptied a wagonload of Garrakian pepper into it, but eventually I found the bone and picked it up.
It was heavy! As I weighed the weapon in my hand, I immediately felt safer. If, Sagot forbid, something went wrong, at least I would have a weapon. I stuck it under my belt and cautiously peeped out of the cell into the corridor.
Nothing and nobody. Black darkness.
I couldn’t see the light of the lantern; the old man must have already reached the stairway. After the stupefying stench of the cell, the stale, musty air of the corridor seemed like refreshing nectar of the gods to me.
I couldn’t get those cursed black eyes out of my mind—I knew they would haunt my nightmares forever. Ah, if only Eel was with me.…
Eel! How could I have forgotten about him!
The veil of forgetfulness fell away and all the previous events of the day flashed through my mind. I remembered what had happened that morning.
First the walk to the mansion and estate of the unknown servant of the Master, then the attack by supporters of the Nameless One, our escape on that absurd wagon, and the crash into the wall before we were taken prisoner and I lost consciousness. And then I had come to in the corridors of this underground prison.
But if I was here, then what had they done with the Garrakian? And why had they left me on the floor of the corridor and not put me in a cell, like the other prisoners? And there was another strange thing—I didn’t feel as if I’d gone flying into the wall of that house at full speed.… My arms and legs were all sound, my side wasn’t smarting. I felt as if I could easily sprint a hundred yards with the guards chasing me.
Was I asleep? It didn’t really feel like it. So I had to find Eel and set him free. He had to be somewhere around here. Poking my nose into every cell was pointless—there were too many of them. And I could easily run into serious trouble if I opened the wrong one. I couldn’t tell who might be waiting for me inside. The best idea was to steal into the watch house and take a look at the register of prisoners—there had to be one of those in a prison, even if the warders here were old men with black voids where their eyes ought to be.
I set off along the corridor in the direction of the stairway, but stopped before I had taken ten steps. The women prisoners! How could I have forgotten about them? The women must know what prison this was. And there was no way I could just leave them to the mercy of that cursed old man. Maybe I ought to try to let them out, since the Nameless One’s supporters hadn’t touched the lock picks in my pocket.
A blizzard of contradictory thoughts immediately started swirling around in my head.
“Harold, you’re not a knight on a white horse from some sickly sweet children’s fairy tale,” whispered a voice with a slightly cynical tone. “Take your arms and your legs and scram, get as far away from there as possible! You won’t save the women anyway.”
“Oh, yes I will!” retorted a different voice. “Could you just leave someone to rot in the dark if you had even the ghost of a chance of saving them?”
Oho! So I had not just one, but two inner voices! Plus my own voice, and Valder’s as well! Four in all! It was time to book a room with padded walls in the Hospital of the Ten Martyrs.
“Yes, I could,” the first voice replied. “Wandering around in the dark with two women who are half dead from starvation is sheer lunacy. We’d never make it.”
“Say what you like, but I’m at least going to try to save them.”
“All right,” the first voice said to the second after a pause. “But afterwards don’t say I didn’t warn you. But then … What if we can grab ourselves the ten thousand gold pieces that woman offered the old man? Ten here and fifty from the king when we deliver on the Commission…”
I went back to the cell where the female prisoners were languishing.
Very carefully, so that I wouldn’t make the slightest sound, I put the lock pick with the triangular notch into the keyhole and tried to turn it. It didn’t work. Hmm, let’s try the one with four prongs and the size zero-one-eight groove. Right, now … that was it! Or at least, something in the lock had given a quiet click.
This wasn’t a simple lock, though. It had at least nine springs and two secret ones. Catch one of those by accident and you had to start the job all over again. It must have been made by dwarves. The short folk had done their usual good job, and now it would cost me no end of effort to get the door open. I would have to work on a lock like that for anything from two to fifteen minutes.
“Don’t be in such a hurry. Think. These women weren’t afraid of the old man,” I suddenly heard a voice say inside my head.
I shuddered. It wasn’t one of my own “inner voices,” the sides of a stupid quarrel with myself, it was the voice of Valder, the archmagician who had died several centuries earlier and had now found a refuge inside my hospitable head, which welcomes anyone at all who wants to come in.
“Do you think so?” I thought in fright.
“Yes. Did that old man frighten you?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
“Me, too, although I saw it all with an entirely different vision, but while they were talking the women’s voices didn’t even tremble. So should we really…” Valder’s whisper inside my head stopped for a moment. “Should you really go barging into the spiders’ den?”
“What is this place where I’ve … where we’ve ended up?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.” It was the first time I could recall the magician not knowing something. “Suddenly we were here, that’s all.… As if someone had just dropped us here.…”
“Suddenly we were here? That is, some kind individual just snaps his fingers and bang!—here I am in prison?”
In my mind I wished away the zealous clicker’s fingers, together with the rest of his hand. That would teach him to go sending decent people off to Sagot only knew where!
“What should I do?” I asked Valder, just to be on the safe side.
“It’s your head,” the answer came back. “You decide what you should do.”
“Oh no, I beg your pardon! Thanks to you, it isn’t just my head anymore!” I snapped back at the archmagician. “You climbed into it without asking permission, and now, if you would be so kind, since you have no intention of disappearing from it, advise me. What should I do?”
This time the answer was silence. The damned archmagician had disappeared, just as he had done before. It was as if he didn’t even exist. But I wasn’t going to be fooled like that. Valder only pretended to be dumb until some genuine magical danger threatened my skin. He had already got me out of several really tight corners, and I had no doubt that he would do the same again.
Some people might say that the archmagician and I had a mutually advantageous collaboration going, with Valder saving me from dangerous situations and me offering his soul rest and temporary forgetfulness in a corner of my mind. Well, now, everyone who thinks that’s great can just shut his mouth and keep it shut! They just don’t know what it’s like sharing your own head with another person, even if he did die a long, long time ago and he doesn’t interfere in my business until things are looking really desperate.
It’s a very unpleasant feeling, being able to sense someone else inside yourself and remembering things that never happened in your life. Although I can’t deny that if the archmagician hadn’t been with me, my eyes would have been eaten away by death-worms long ago.
“All right, the darkness take you. You can keep your damn mouth shut until you turn blue!” I swore under my breath.
