“Step this way, Mr. Hawthorne,” he said suddenly. “Come; don’t be afraid, I shall not hurt you. That is not our way here.”
He had risen from his seat and stepped back a few feet behind the desk. I glanced at the others uncomfortably. There was something cold and collected about his manner that filled me with panic. He crooked a long, pale index finger and oozed, “Come, William, I have something to show you.”
With a swift movement he kicked open the cover of a circular, well-like hole in the floor.
“Come,” he repeated, and his voice was disarmingly gentle. “The rest of you stay exactly where you are. There are guards watching you everywhere.”
I couldn’t see any, but there were windows everywhere, and I didn’t doubt him for a second.
He stepped into the hole and began to descend a spiral staircase, while looking up at me and grinning. His fingers clutched my wrist and pulled me down quickly after him. I recoiled from the strong, fibrous fingers, stumbling down after him until we reached a wooden scaffold from which four evenly positioned staircases descended. Each wound down in a spiral and each was surrounded, all the way down so far as I could see, by softly lit rooms: cells.
“You see, Mr. Hawthorne,” he whispered, “there are no torture chambers or disemboweling knives here such as you would have experienced in Greycoast. No rack, branding irons, or manacles.”
He said each word with relish as if imagining them in use. The hair on my neck rose and for a second I thought he was quite mad.
“But there are no criminals, either,” he said. “All due to potentially continual surveillance. The people never know
“So you see, Mr. Hawthorne, how careful you have to be when you enter a new land. Perhaps you hated Greycoast’s dungeons, but believe me, for a free man like yourself, there is nothing more terrible than continual surveillance. Nothing. In time you would yearn for the rack and the gallows, Mr. Hawthorne. You would plead for a torturer to let you pay your penalty and cover those awful, lidless eyes that watch you day and night. A few months in my cells, and you would never know what it was to be alone again. Even when no one was there you would feel them, watching, listening. Controlled madness, Mr. Hawthorne. Regulated insanity for the good of the state. Go and tell your stories about
He gave me a long, hard look and then snapped, “Upstairs! Quickly!”
I stumbled blindly back up the spiral. The others stared at me when I emerged. I must have looked pretty haggard.
“Now leave me,” snarled the governor, his tone suddenly harsh. “I will summon you after I have decided what is to become of you.”
“We are staying-” offered Mithos.
“I know where you are staying, you idiots. Now get out.”
I tried to tell the others what I had seen in the tower but I couldn’t convey its awfulness. Garnet had just looked bemused and shrugged it off as something that “didn’t sound too bad.” He told rival tales of dismemberment in Thrusia that once would have made me sick. But he understood with his gut what he didn’t grasp with his conscious mind. He developed a new irritation at the way people watched us pass. We all did. Even at night, from time to time, lying there in the darkness of your bed, you thought you could feel the eyes.
It was impossible to tell who was in the pay of the governor, so we locked ourselves in our tavern room and tried to decide what we were supposed to do next. To my mind it was clear: “We’ve got to split up and spread out. We can’t move around Verneytha as it stands. It’s a waste of time. There are people watching everywhere I look. When I go to the bathroom I feel like I’m playing to a capacity crowd.”
“Will’s right,” said Lisha. “We should leave quickly, before the governor decides he wants us to stay in one of his little windowed prisons.”
“But where do we go?” said Garnet to himself.
“God, this is a mess,” said Mithos. Since the meeting with the governor, he had grown dour and unapproachable. “They’ve probably been watching us since we left Adsine. What a bunch of amateurs we must look like! We do have to leave, but I’m coming back, and they won’t see me this time. Will, check the corridor.”
We were all getting a little paranoid. I stood outside, eyes skinned for anyone who could be a spy. There was no one about, so this was one conversation the enemy wouldn’t hear. Come to think of it, neither would I. That was bloody typical of them. They would send me into the line to prove what an integral member of the party I was, but when it came to making decisions, good old integral Will had to check the corridor.
Garnet flung the door open suddenly, and it was obvious that he was unhappy with whatever had been decided.
“Come in, Will,” he sighed.
SCENE XLVII Alone at Last
It was noon. The sun was high and the air still and humid. The wagon felt slow and conspicuous, trundling along like a very large beetle, but I had left Harvest two days ago, had just crossed the border between Verneytha and Shale, and hadn’t so much as glimpsed a crimson cloak. Indeed, I hoped to catch sight of Adsine before sundown. Recently, sundown had become a big deal with me: it reminded me that another day had passed and I was still alive.
They had sent me ahead with the wagon figuring that the safest place for me to be was Shale, beyond the jurisdiction of Verneytha and Greycoast, whose leaders considered me a slightly less welcome visitor than, say, some unpleasant disease that made all your gristly bits fall off. This suited me just fine, because things were getting too grim by half for me to want to stay with the others. So far I’d been lucky and we’d survived all my cock- ups, but it was only a matter of time before something I did got Orgos stabbed or Garnet shot off his horse. The more I had come to like them, the more difficult it was to be Will the Weak Link. I moaned to Orgos that they were treating me like a child, sending me out of harm’s way and all, but secretly I was relieved.
Lisha was to ride south to the villages that had borne the brunt of the attacks. Garnet would ride Tarsha part of the way with her and then return to Hopetown and Ironwall. There he would fume and complain by himself about how little action he was getting while reinvestigating the Razor’s keep. Orgos was going back to Caspian Joseph’s warehouse by the Iruni Wood, the closest thing to progress we’d achieved so far, even if it was still a bit of a dead end. The house was indeed where the raiders had been hiding their loot, but it wasn’t the operations base we had hoped for. Orgos was to go back, skulk through the orchard, peer through windows, and generally creep about (in an honorable way, of course) in the ludicrous hope that someone would tell him, in passing, like, who the raiders were, where they lived, and so on. He was expressly ordered not to try to re-create my little jaunt via the stone circle.
Mithos had moved out of Harvest but he would be back with a different name and face to learn what he could about Verneytha without Treylen’s spies monitoring him. It seemed to me that he was the only one doing anything useful. It seemed that way to Garnet also, who complained loudly about being gotten out of harm’s way. But in one week, barring significant events (which I felt we could rule out), we would all meet again in the Adsine keep.
I was glad to be out from under Verneytha’s watchful gaze. Though I had been there only a couple of days, I still found myself looking over my shoulder to see who was taking notes on the way I ordered a beer. It would wear off in time, no doubt, but at the moment I was as jumpy as a gazelle in lion country. Still, I was away from both Duke Raymon and Governor Treylen, there was no sign of the raiders, and Renthrette was currently asleep in the back of the wagon.
Realized that she wasn’t accounted for, had you? She hadn’t been much fun so far, to tell you the truth. Like
