of the cells, on this level, might be filled with such merchandise, whatever it might be. Each of the cells was locked.
I heard the guard calling out from near the stairs. 'The prisoner is in Nine Corridor.'
I strode back to him, stepping aside not to brush against a wet, silken, blazing-eyed urt scampering along the edge of the corridor wall.
'My thanks,' said I to the guard. I put my hand on the bottle but he retained it long enough to take yet another swallow, and then two more, and then he reluctantly surrendered it.
'I will bring it back,' I assured him.
'There is too much paga there for one prisoner,' mumbled the guard, rather groggily.
'True,' I said. 'I will return the bottle to you.'
I saw him close his eyes and slump a bit against the wall.
'The Forty Cell,' he said.
'Where is the key?' I asked. The other cells had all been locked.
'Near the door,' he said.
'The other keys,' I said, 'were not near the doors.'
'The other keys,' he mumbled, 'are kept somewhere above. I do not know where.'
'My thanks,' said I.
I began moving down the Nine Corridor. Soon, in the flickering light of the torch, I could read the Forty on the tiny metal plate over one of the cells.
I slid back the observation panel. It, like the others, was about six inches in width and about an inch high. A man could do little more than thrust his fingers through. Inside, very dimly, I could see a slumped, dark figure lying near the back wall, chained.
The key box was about a yard to the left of the keyhole; and about four feet from the observation panel; it is a small, heavy metal box bolted to the stone of the wall; it opens and shuts to the left, by means of a round-knobbed screw, which must be turned several times before the small metal door opens. I rotated the screw and opened the box, and removed the key. I inserted the key into the keyhole and swung back the door. Lifting the torch I entered.
Startled by the light an urt scurried from my path disappearing through a small crevice in the wall. It had been nibbling at the scrapings of dried gruel caked in a tin pan near the prisoner's foot.
I could smell wet straw in the place, and the excrement of urts and a human being.
The slumped figure, that of a small man, naked, white-haired, stinking, skeletal, haggard, covered with sores, awakening, cried out in misery, whimpering. He crawled to his knees, squinting against the torch, trying to shelter his eyes with manacled claw-like hands from the sudden, fierce, painful blaze of fire that his world must have then been for him.
'Who are you?' he whispered.
I saw that he was not actually an old man, though his hair was white. One ear had been partly bitten away. The white hair was long, white, yellowish.
'My name is Kuurus,' said I, speaking to him from the light of the torch.
Each of his limbs, and his throat, was separately confined, each chained individually to the wall, each chain running to a separate ring bolted in the stone; any one of the chains would have been sufficient to hold a man; I gathered that this prisoner must be unusual indeed; I observed, further, that the chains gave him some run, though not much, just enough to permit him to feed himself, to scratch his body, to defend himself to some extent against the attacks of urts; I gathered it was intended that this prisoner should, at least for a time, survive. Indeed, it seemed probable that he had lived under these miserable conditions for a long time.
I rose and found a torch rack in the room and set the torch in the rack. As I did so I saw four or five urts run for various small crevices in the stone.
I returned to the prisoner.
'You are of the black caste,' he whispered. 'At last they are done with me.'
'Perhaps not,' I said.
'Am I to be tortured again?' he asked, piteously.
'I do not know,' I said.
'Kill me,' he whispered.
'No,' I said.
He moaned.
I looked on that small, trembling, skeletal body, the straggly hair, the sores; the mutilated ear; angrily I rose to my feet and searched about, finding some loose stone which, with my foot, I wedged into the several crevices through which the urts had darted.
Unbelievingly the prisoner with his sunken eyes, now accustoming themselves to the light of the torch, regarded me.
I returned to him; beneath the iron on his ankles and wrists, and on his throat, there were scars, like white bands, pale shadows of the dark metal; it would take months to form such scars, superseding the fearful sores that must first have been inflicted.
'Why have you come?' he asked.
'It is Kajuralia,' I said to him, simply.
I held the bottle to him.
'Kajuralia?' he asked.
'Yes,' I said.
He began to laugh, softly, hoarsely. 'I was right,' he said. 'I was right.'
'I do not understand,' I said.
He began to suck at the bottle. There were few teeth left in his mouth; most had rotted and, apparently, snapped away, or had been broken off by him and discarded.
I forcibly drew the bottle from his mouth. I had no wish that he killed himself on the paga. I did not know what its shock would be to his system, after apparently months of torture, confinement, fear, poor food, the water, the urts.
'I was right,' he said, nodding his head.
'About what?' I asked.
'That today was Kajuralia,' said he.
He then indicated behind himself, on the wall, a large number of tiny, regularly formed scratches in the stone, perhaps cut there by a pebble or the edge of the tin drinking dish. He indicated the last of the scratches. 'That is Kajuralia,' he said.
'Oh,' I said, regarding his crude calendar. There were a very large number of scratches.
'Like any other day,' he laughed.
I let him have another small swig at the paga bottle.
'Somedays,' he said, 'I was not sure that I marked the wall, and then I would forget; sometimes I feared I had marked it twice.'
'You were accurate,' I said, regarding the carefully drawn scratches, the rows methodically laid out, the months, the five-day weeks, the passage hands.
I counted back the rows. Then I said, pointing to the first scratch. 'This is the first day of En'Kara before the last En'Kara.'
The toothless mouth twisted into a grin, the sunken eyes wrinkled with pleasure. 'Yes,' he said, 'the first day of En'Kara, 10,118, more than a year ago.'
'It was before I came to the House of Cernus,' I said, my voice trembling.
I gave him another drink of the paga.
'Your calendar is well kept,' I said. 'Worthy of a Scribe.'
'I am a Scribe,' said the man. He reached under himself to hold forth for my inspection a shred of damp, rotted blue cloth, the remains of what had once been his robes.
'I know,' I said.
'My name is Caprus,' he said.
'I know,' I said.
I heard a laugh behind me, and spun. Standing in the doorway, four guards armed with crossbows with him, stood Cernus, of the House of Cernus. With him also was the guard to whom I had given the paga. In the background I could see the lean Scribe whom I had thought for these many months to be Caprus. He was grinning.
The men stepped within the room.
'Do not draw your weapon,' said Cernus.
I smiled. It would have been foolish to do so. The four men with crossbows leveled their weapons on me. At his distance the bolts would pass through my body, shattering against the stones behind me.
The guard to whom I had first given paga came over to Caprus and tore the bottle from his hand. Then, with the sleeve of his tunic, the guard distastefully wiped the rim of the bottle. 'You were to have returned this paga to me,' said the guard, 'were you not?'
'It is yours,' I said, 'you have earned it.'
The man laughed and drank.
'You, Killer,' said Cernus, mocking, 'would never make a Player.'
'Apparently it is true,' I said.
'Chain him,' said Cernus.
One of the guards, putting his crossbow in the hall, brought forth heavy steel manacles. My hands were thrown behind my back. I felt the heavy steel close on my wrists.
'May I introduce to you, Caprus,' said Cernus, looking down at the piteous chained figure by the wall, 'Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba?'
I stood stunned.
'Tarl Cabot,' I said, numbly, 'was slain in Ko-ro-ba.'
'No,' said Cernus, 'the Warrior Sandros of Thentis was slain in Ko-ro-ba.'
