He went with the young guard straight down a set of steps. Metal-white, perforated with many coin-sized elliptical holes, descending in wider spirals until the staircase ended at a metal doorway. There they stood in awkward silence, until Marvel used the knocker to rap five times. The door opened and that smell washed over them. Fecal and rotting. Each cell had a drain, and each drain was a horror. Marvel had grown used to it; the guard looked on the verge of fainting. Marvel smiled, shrugged. The jailer’s face, when it appeared, was like a tree trunk, the bulbous nose and knotty lips eruptions on the rough skin. He was neither old nor young but struck Marvel as both bored and uncruel, qualities he supposed were desirable in a jailer.
“Here for a prisoner.” Marvel withdrew a small bit of paper from his pocket and unrolled it. He and the guard stepped into the anteroom where the jailer had a three-legged stool set up in a corner, and next to it a bucket of oysters, some shells on the floor. “William Tygo II.”
“Right,” said the jailer. He held a brain-pink liquid in a thick, dirty glass mug. “I put him in the last cell. A real stick up his ass, that one.” His eyes like wild malarial marbles. How could one bear this stench all day? The jailer seemed to have long ago lost some essential function of his brain—Marvel wondered how anyone could spend a lifetime sitting feet away from ranting lunatics. Yet apparently the jailer found his posting unobjectionable: he had performed his duties competently for many years.
Marvel and the guard followed him through the anteroom into the winding circular hallway that housed the cells. This was the most intense displeasure of visiting the jail. The incarcerated men and women called out to Marvel before the jailer shushed them with a poke from the back end of his pike. They screamed their innocence, threatened to have Marvel’s daughter killed, insulted every feature upon his own body and hers. He didn’t listen. The vulgarities had bothered him, until they had stopped bothering him, and he thought now that there was nothing the prisoners could say that could hurt him. Their words and spit misted him, but it was only a hygienic nuisance.
The young guard swayed uncertainly when the prisoners began their chorus. He had a boy’s way about him, a boy’s eagerness to please. It was not irritating, though in others this quality could seem calculated. He attempted to cover his alarm with a look of nonchalance until Marvel rapped him again on the shoulders encouragingly. “We’re in this together now.” He pushed the man in front of him. After hesitating a moment, the guard walked ahead.
Not too many months before, a woman had lunged at Marvel through her cell’s bars. She’d starved herself until she fit between them and had thrown herself onto him like a cat of the jungle leaping from a tree, tearing the sleeve of his cassock from shoulder to wrist. Her face a firepit of insanity. Marvel was exhausted of ordering executions—instead of killing her, he’d had her forcibly fed and freed the next day. From his own apartments on top of Endeavour Tower, one of the other spires, he’d watched the jailer cast her into the sunlight wearing nothing but the rags she’d arrived in months before. He couldn’t see her face, but she turned in a slow circle, blind to the commotion of the courtyard market. After a few moments, a servant woman brought her a brown dress, laced it up right over her rags, and held out a pair of shoes for her to take. The woman threw the shoes to the ground and kicked dirt over them. After the servant left, the woman returned to the shoes, dusted them off, and slid her feet into them.
Marvel did not often free traitors. He let that woman go because she was too insane even to question the circumstances that had set her free. Marvel had grown tired of exercising his power—even acts of mercy wearied him. He had watched the woman’s expulsion from the jail from the safety of his balcony, uncertain of what he hoped to observe. Their eyes had not locked. She hadn’t gulped the fresh air like a person thirsty to live. She simply went out through the nearest gate and drifted away.
“What’s your name?” Marvel asked the young guard as they walked down the hallway, over the whoops and wails of traitors. The jailer clanged his pike on the bars, screaming at the prisoners for silence.
The young guard winced at the racket, as though sprayed with cold water. “Juniper, sir.”
“That’s a woman’s name.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “No one’s ever mentioned that to me before.”
Marvel snorted. “I couldn’t care less what you’re called. But why would a spy choose a woman’s name?”
“Because I’m not a spy.”
“Ah.” Marvel folded his arms behind his back. The man’s knife was still in his belt. “Forgive me.”
“If I were a spy, you’d lock me in here with the loonies, right? Or worse?”
Marvel shrugged. “You may have caught me in a season of tolerance.” He pushed a thumbnail into the tough skin around his forefinger, watching the thick callus spring back after he’d pressed it. Suddenly he was imagining that wide land between Florida and Kansas again, those endless spoiled fields grown over now with grasses and trees but just as deadly as in centuries past. The precarious passage over the saferoads: he dreamt of walking the spindles through the wilderness, obscurely marked by scratches on tree trunks placed there by the Walking Doctors. Which reminded him to unfold the paper with the prisoner’s name on it again. William Tygo II, Walking Doctor. He closed the paper and said to the guard. “You’re not from a
