“My thoughts exactly,” Mellinor rumbled. “What first?”
Miranda blinked in the pitch dark. “How about some light?”
Mellinor made a bubbling sound, and Miranda felt cool water running through her. At once, soft light, like moonlight seen from deep underwater, began to fill the tiny cell, and she got her first good look at her prison.
“Good grief.”
She was kneeling in a circular pit that might have been an old well. The walls were smooth, so either the prison had been cut into a solid block of stone, or they were deep underground, cut into the bedrock. The walls finally ended fifteen feet up at a metal grate sitting atop her cell like a well cap and held shut by a thick padlock. Above the grate, she could see nothing but darkness. The cell itself was more spacious than she’d originally thought, however. She had enough room to sit down, if not to stretch out. Other than herself there was a wooden bucket, presumably to be used as a toilet, and a great deal of gray dust. It covered everything: the floor, the walls, and even, she realized with disgust, her clothes where she had been lying.
Miranda stood up, slapping at her skirt, but the dust clung to the fabric almost like it was sticky. It was on her hands too now, gray and fine as dried silt. She rubbed at it fiercely, but the powder stuck to her, forming dark little rivers in the creases of her skin. She held her hands to her nose. The dust had an odd scent that was strangely familiar. Very lightly, and sure she was being very foolish, Miranda licked her finger. The stuff had a horrid, alkaline taste, and that was all she got before the tip of her tongue went numb.
“Thought so,” Miranda said, coughing. “It’s graysalt. The servants used to put it down as a rat poison when I was a child.”
“And you licked it anyway?” Mellinor said, horrified.
“Well, it’s not lethal to humans,” Miranda said, scraping her numb tongue with her teeth. “As a dust it’s harmless, but get it wet and it becomes a paralytic. So the rats would run through and then get it wet when they tried to groom the dust off, and bam, dead rat.”
“Good thing you’re not a rat then,” Mellinor grumbled.
“No,” Miranda said, “but I’m trapped like one just the same. Look”-she pointed at the piles of gray dust on the floor-“there must be pounds of it down here. Sure, it’s nontoxic now, when it’s dry, but if we were to get it wet there’s more than enough here to paralyze me from head to toe, maybe for good.”
She peered up at the locked grate, high overhead. Even if she could reach it, she didn’t think she could break the lock without Durn or one of her other spirits. Mellinor could, maybe, if he got enough pressure, but in her experience, lots of pressure meant lots of water, which was precisely what they couldn’t have.
“Well,” Miranda grumbled, “nice and trapped. I must admit I never expected something this ingenious, or cheap, out of Hern. Twenty pounds of graysalt probably cost less than one of those bottles of wine he had with dinner.”
Mellinor shifted inside her. “Actually, I don’t think we’re in Hern’s tower.”
Miranda frowned, and the spirit explained. “Generally speaking, spirits who spend a lot of time around Spiritualists are pretty active, but it’s quiet as the dead down here.”
“That’s no different from anything else in Gaol,” Miranda said. “Hern’s got a stranglehold on this place.”
“You keep saying that,” Mellinor murmured. “But something’s been bothering me. You said before that Hern was always in Zarin, right?”
“Right,” Miranda answered.
“Well,” the water rippled in her head, “whatever’s controlling the spirits in Gaol, it’s acting like a Great Spirit. That kind of control doesn’t work if the controlling power’s not constantly in contact with the land, like a Great Spirit is. A land without a Great Spirit becomes sleepy and stupid, more so than usual. Just look at my old basin. But this land is disciplined, and easily woken. That’s not something you see when the commanding power is always somewhere else.”
Miranda bit her lip. Mellinor made a good point, and he would be the expert on this sort of thing. “But,” she said, “if it wasn’t Hern, then who? Who’s running Gaol?”
“The duke, of course,” said a cheery voice above her.
Miranda looked up in alarm, biting back a curse as she whacked her head again. She knew that voice, she realized, rubbing her poor, abused skull, but she certainly hadn’t expected to hear it here.
“Monpress?”
“Who else?” Eli’s laughing voice was muted, like he was behind something large and heavy.
“What are you doing in here?”
“I was caught.” She could almost hear his shrug. “It happens from time to time. The trouble, as always, is keeping me caught. I was just exhausting my options when I heard your voice. Now, I think I can safely assume, unless your little oration about the powdered poison was a cruel and elaborate ploy, that you are also an unwilling guest of our illustrious host, Duke Edward?”
“Duke Edward?” Miranda stood up. “The Duke of Gaol?”
“No, the Duke of Farley,” Eli said, sighing. “Yes, the Duke of Gaol. As I said, he’s the one running everything. Whose castle do you think we’re in?”
“Nonsense,” Miranda said. “The duke isn’t even a wizard.”
“Who told you that?” Eli scoffed. “Just because a man doesn’t wear rings or have WIZARD written across his forehead doesn’t mean he isn’t one.”
Miranda shut her mouth. Now that she thought about it, everything she knew about the Duke of Gaol came from Hern’s annual reports. This situation was getting stranger by the minute.
“So,” she said slowly, “the Duke of Gaol is a wizard, and he’s the one controlling the spirits, not Hern?”
“I don’t know who Hern is,” Eli said, “but that’s correct. Now that you know, however, I can’t imagine it makes you any happier to be locked up, so how about we work together and get out of here? It’ll be just like Mellinor, only with less enslavement and near-drowning.”
“
“Not in the slightest,” Eli said. “But think on this: I wouldn’t be sitting here talking if I had a way out, would I? I’m proper trapped, same as you. Now, the duke will be back in less than half an hour to take me away, and after that, I don’t think I’ll be coming back. Are you really going to let a wizard who runs his spirits through a system of fear and intimidation be the one to catch me?”
Miranda scowled. The thief had a point. She’d put Monpress to the side while she focused on getting dirt on Hern, and it had landed her in here. If circumstance had delivered the thief, and possibly her freedom, right into her hands, who was she to argue? Plus, she now knew who was behind the strange happenings in Gaol. If the duke had indeed set himself up as the tyrant Great Spirit of Gaol that would certainly fit the West Wind’s concern. If she played things carefully, she could very well walk out of Gaol with everything she’d come here to get, and that was worth taking a risk. After all, she thought and glared at the grimy filth on her skin, what did she have to lose?
“All right,” she called back up. “What do you want me to do?”
“Catch!” Eli shouted, and she heard the jingle of something metal flying through the air before a set of keys landed with a jangle on the grate to her cell. They tottered there a moment, and then fell. She caught them in her outstretched hand.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “How did you get keys? And how did you know what cell I was in?”
“You
“Greatest thief in the world. Yes, I know,” Miranda sighed, looking up at the lock high, high overhead. “How am I supposed to use these?”
“I can’t do everything for you,” Eli said. “Figure it out, and do it fast. The duke could come in at any moment.”
“Right,” Miranda grumbled. “No pressure.” She looked around at the walls for anything she could use as a grip to climb, but they were smooth, almost glossy, and she couldn’t find so much as a hairline fracture. Jumping was out of the question. Even standing on tiptoe on the wooden bucket, stretching with all her might, she couldn’t reach the halfway mark. She put her fists on her hips, scanning the cell. There had to be a way.
Her roving eyes stopped on the bucket under her feet. It was wide and low like a wash bucket, which was probably what it had been before being repurposed. It was made of cheap, light wood, but the joints were tight and waxed to hold water. Suddenly, she began to smile.
