Cage of Souls, page 12
Tallan spat contemptuously at me, dismissing my presence as both surplus to requirements and irrelevant, and his friend hoisted their victim up for a better look. All the little irritations of the night suddenly condensed within me and I was abruptly resigned to what I would do next. I lurched to my feet and focused my inner energies. When I had them in a tight ball in the centre of my mind, as I had done so many times before, I reached out and pushed with them. It brought a wave of nostalgia for the old times with my academic colleagues, when we used to practise this almost as a hobby.
I was used to exerting my mind against my friend Helman, who would be pushing back just as hard against me. It had been like punching a brick wall. He had been a man of extraordinary willpower, far greater than mine. When I pushed my energies onto the shock-headed man I just felt a horrible giving sensation as I smashed into his unprepared brain. It was like clutching a stone and feeling it crumble to mould under your fingers. The shock-headed man gave out a dreadful inhalation, a harsh gasp for air that would do him no good, and then he convulsed once and flopped onto his back.
Harro. His name was Harro. I remember now.
Tallan looked at his victim, at me and at his friend’s body, and then ran for it. I think that I must have looked quite imposing, with my face a death-mask and my body thrumming with guilt. All the backwash of my mental energies was coursing through me, and I was aware that I had killed. It was not as though I had run him through with a knife. That would have been circumstantial in comparison. I had felt his mind collapse beneath my touch. If you have never done this, you can never know just how hideous a feeling it is.
The next thing I knew with any certainty was that their erstwhile prey was standing before me. Possibly there were words but I was trying to keep my brain together and didn’t hear them. A moment later my eyes focused and I saw before me a woman wearing ill-fitting convict greys. She was small, dark, with a fashionably heart-shaped face and the expensive beauty of the rich, now her hair was not cast forwards to hide it. Possibly she was trying to thank me; possibly she was unsure whether I had actually helped her or just turned up in time to see Harro expire of natural causes.
The obvious ramifications were hammering into me. I was a murderer. Whatever I might say about false imprisonment, I had earned my place here now. All this recrimination stopped me paying much attention to whatever she was saying, and then it was too late.
The Marshal was there, at last, with armed Wardens. He was obviously unsure of what to make of the situation. He stepped forwards to take charge and then saw something in my face that he did not like.
“Take her,” he snapped, after an uncharacteristic pause. The woman was grabbed by two or three Wardens and dragged off. She did not even try to struggle, but she did look back at me.
The Marshal looked down at Harro’s body, upon which there was not a mark. I had come to my senses by then and started backing away. At every pace I thought he would call me back, perhaps even have me shot. Instead I got clean away, although I could feel him staring at me until I turned the corner.
When I rejoined the other prisoners, as we began to trek back to our cells, there was a difference. Tallan had been telling stories about me. He had no inkling of what it was that I had actually done, but he knew I had done it. Most of the prisoners gave me plenty of space, and did not meet my eyes.
That night, I was chased in nightmares by the sensation of Harro’s mind folding in on itself, collapsing like a house of cards.
11
Repercussions
I am driven to wonder whether the reader of this account has been assuming that all this business with mental energies and focusing was just an academic’s fantasy.
Now you know.
*
For about three days I lived in dread and mostly in isolation. The other inmates had no wish to go anywhere near me. It was not that I was a murderer. That, after all, was not an unusual thing in the Island. It was the means. Tallan had been quite explicit about what had happened. I had stepped up behind Harro and stared at him, and Harro had died. That made me too much of an unknown factor as far as the Islanders were concerned. If I could kill with a look then I was far too dangerous to be around.
The Wardens watched me very narrowly as well. I made sure that I gave them no excuse.
The fact was that it was all a fuss over nothing. Harro had been something of a fluke, the combination of an unheralded concentration against a weak and wholly unsuspecting mind. The very fact that people were wary around me stymied any power I might have had over them. Now things had gone so far, though, I suspected that I was better keeping that a secret. There was no telling what might happen to me if people discovered I was actually defenceless.
Lucian did not talk to me, when we were locked up for the night. I would have counted this as a blessing at any other time, but I had been in silence all day, and even Lucian’s prattle would have been welcome. As for Hermione, she was never very talkative.
“So you killed someone, then,” she observed.
I admitted that I had.
“One of the people who hit me.”
I said that this also was true.
“Good,” she told me, and that was that. She had no real interest in methodology.
All the way through this, I could feel Gaki watching me. His eyes glittered through the darkness at me, but he held his peace. His expression, when the lamps lit it, was one of calculation. For two nights his silent vigil disturbed my sleep. Only on the third did he say even a few words.
“You have hidden depths, Stefan,” he chided softly. The others were asleep. It was just him and me.
I made no answer.
“I might have to kill you, eventually,” he told me evenly. “I do hate things that I don’t understand.”
I tried to meet his gaze and failed. For three days I had wanted to talk to someone and now I was mute.
“Not yet, though,” he said. “I will make some attempt to understand you, first.”
In the darkness I wondered whether I could force my mind on Gaki, and knew that I could not. His own must be like a knifeblade. I would shred myself against it.
“When I was with Sandor,” Gaki said, “he often speculated about the powers of the mind.” He left it at that, closing the subject neatly. I was left wondering just how far Gaki had gone along that road. The human mind, as I knew like no other, is a tool with a thousand uses. Helman and I had often sat up late discussing just how society might benefit from the powers of the mind.
Now I was faced with the other side of that argument. My own mind had done nothing but kill a man, and now there was a monster in the next cell pondering on how to apply his intelligence. Things did not look good for the advancement of mankind.
*
It was the very next day when they came for me. Two Wardens shouldered their way through the toiling prisoners, grabbed me by the arms and hauled me away. It was not even at night. I had been fearing every footstep outside my cell for nothing. Everything was in broad daylight and before a hundred witnesses, none of whom did anything to stop it.
It was a long walk, long enough for me to give full consideration to the fates awaiting me. The two Wardens escorting me did not speak, nor did they slacken their pace, and I knew neither of them. I had assumed that I would be brought up before the Marshal for swift retribution, but instead I was hoisted beyond the Wardens’ level, all the way to the top. The Governor wanted to see me.
The Governor, I believed, needed me. I was working on his pet project. I should have been reassured to discover our destination. Instead, something told me that things were not going to be as simple as that.
I had run the entire gauntlet of fears by the time we arrived, from leaden dread (of an inexorable fate awaiting me) to knee-trembling terror (of immediate physical peril) through all the little shades and distinctions in between. I am something of an expert on the subject of fear, but on that long journey to judgement, I ran dry. At the end, as we mounted the final stairs, I found all fear gone from me, replaced by a fragile calm. I knew that I was in far more trouble than I had ever been in before. At the same time I knew that it was not the death of Harro that would be laid at my door. I had to try and work out what line I had crossed.
I had at least one bargaining chip. The Governor wanted Trethowan translated, and there was nobody else in the prison who could do it. It was not much. After all, he had gone for years without it. It was the smallest lever for me to exert pressure on.
The Governor’s rooms in daylight were brighter than before, but not much. There was much use of drapes to keep the sun out, and a lot of the earlier gloom was still keeping him company. I wondered whether his hairless skin burned easily. I could see the man himself at the far end of the room, illuminated by something quite unlike natural light. There was a malign, flickering radiance cast across his soft face, and it came from the mirror that I had noted before.
Despite my situation I could not help but feel excited at this discovery. I knew of such devices, of course. There had even been one at the Academy, although it had not functioned in living memory. To find one in working order here was astonishing, as was the implication that another such machine must exist in the city by which the Governor could communicate with his own superiors.
My excitement dimmed somewhat when I made out what the Governor and his correspondent were saying.
“And this is what?” the Governor demanded.
“Something he produced, with a few others. It was in his file,” came the reply. I could not make out the face that the mirror was displaying, the angle was too sharp, but the voice sounded slightly familiar.
“The reason for his conviction,” the Governor suggested.
“Probably. I get the impression it caused a stir at the time. I really can’t remember. I’ve had a clerk go through it for you. Nothing earth-shattering.”
“What about these mind powers you mentioned?”
“Oh, they’re in there,” the unseen man responded. “No detail, but they’re there. The entire thrust was, I am informed, that there was no future in the way we were living and we should seek out alternative lifestyles. There’s a chapter on “The Ancients’ Ancients”, if you can believe that, where your man reckons that there were once civilisations that, and I quote, ‘Did not require physical tools to accomplish physical tasks, instead manipulating the infinitely more powerful forces of the universe with their minds alone. These energies are implicit in the very structure of being and need only to be tapped with the correct mental manipulation. A small push can therefore trigger a prodigious result. To work through machines is to batter a door down, whereas the mind is the key that can open the lock.’ How about that?”
I recognised the words, of course. They were Helman’s, although the final comparison is mine. The book they were talking about was the very volume that my friends and I had produced. They were checking up on me, and had already linked Harro’s death to my studies at the Academy.
“There’s more of the same, unfortunately,” the man in the mirror was saying. “Then it goes into references. Various recovered ancient documents, which supposedly hint at still more ancient secrets, and so on and so forth. Various recent but highly dubious papers claiming to demonstrate the existence of these powers. At the back there’s some kind of experimental log, but to be honest I can’t make much of it. You know I only got my Academy Reds by bribes and good family. There’s certainly nothing about using it as a weapon. Like most idealists they thought that their perfect mind-control world wouldn’t need weapons.”
“What about side effects?” the Governor asked. “There must be something.”
“Leo, Leo, Leo, believe me. I have had some very bored clerks go over every word. It all reads like anyone else’s mystic rubbish. Your man there probably just died. People do just die, especially on the Island.”
“No.” The Governor looked frustrated and fed up. He was quite different to the vague and distant man who had commissioned me before. “She is insistent, Harweg. Something happened.”
“Well, I’ll send the book to you on the next boat. It’s only taking up space here,” Harweg said through the mirror. “Anyway, that’s all I can spare you. Keep up the work and all that, and I’ll speak to you before the end of the week.”
The mirror went abruptly dark, just after I recalled that Harweg was the name of the current Lord President. The Governor, “Leo”, had friends in high places. By that time the bald man was turning on me.
“Now you,” he said, as sharply as his voice would permit. “Tell me what you did.”
I stared at him, trying to work out what it was he wanted. “I was just defending someone,” I started uncertainly. “I know that the man died, but I didn’t have any option at the time, and he was going to—”
“Enough,” the Governor snapped. He looked like a man under pressure, which was odd considering that he was the master here. “I don’t care how many inmates you kill. Why should that matter to me? It’s not my job to count them. What did you do? What effects does it have?”
“Well…” His unpleasant, soft face was very close to my own, and I tried not to meet his eyes. “In theory it can do all manner of things. We never really worked out the limits—”
He struck me. He actually struck me. It was like being slapped with a damp cloth. He probably hurt his hand on my cheekbone far more than he hurt me. The very surprise of it was enough to silence me for a moment, and then I blurted out, “It kills. Obviously. That is what it did. It killed him.”
“I know what it did to him,” the Governor spelled out to me. “What about to… others? What side effects does it have? How does it contaminate?”
“Contaminate?” I asked, baffled.
“This mental radiation of yours. Does it leak? Does it creep out of your head when you’re not using it? When you use it, how does it taint those around you? How does it spoil them? Answer me!”
I goggled at him, utterly bewildered. The conversation had taken a sharp turn and scuttled away from any territory I was familiar with at breakneck speed. The Governor looked as though he might hit me again, and to avoid any contact with that fungous skin I said, “I really don’t understand, sir. I’m sorry.”
He turned away. He was so clearly a man who had never really needed to be angry in his life. He was bad at it. He didn’t think to have the Wardens beat me. He didn’t think to make threats (which he was in an ideal position to enforce). He was quite out of his element. In retrospect I almost feel sorry for the man.
“There was someone else there, when you did this thing,” his voice came to me, more under control now. “Two others, as it happened. There was the accomplice of the man you killed, and there was… another person there. This mental power of yours… it affected them, yes? A fallout. It contaminated them. Yes? Well?”
I really didn’t think that it had; I had really never thought about it. “It doesn’t seem very likely,” I told him, a scholar again for just a second.
“’It doesn’t seem very likely,’” he parroted back to me. “You don’t even know. This unnatural power you have and you don’t even know.” He stomped off across the room in disgust, leaving me none the wiser. The two Wardens were still holding me by the arms, and I hung between them, trying to work it out. I began to feel that the four of us (Leo, myself and my escort) were not alone. It was partly a sense that I was being watched and partly that the whole equation was missing a piece. I started looking into the shadows and the doorways and wasted too much time thinking like a city man. In the Island you could be watched straight through the walls. Even the Governor’s room had chinks and holes enough for a legion of spies. Once I had considered that, I soon saw the shadow behind the latticework, and knew that it must be Lady Ellera, the Governor’s mistress, whom even Gaki respected. It was she who was pressuring the Governor over this. Gaki had said that she had uses for the other women prisoners. Somehow I had interfered with such a use. Either there really was some side effect that I was not aware of, or she just thought there was. I could imagine her, secure in the considerable power she wielded, coming up against something she did not understand. I have known such people and they always throw tantrums on the rare occasions the world trips them. Personally, I did not believe any of that talk about contamination, but people fear the unknown, and those used to control fear that which they cannot.
The woman Gaki feared was afraid of me.
“What are we going to do with him?” the Governor asked, and I did not know whether he was talking to her or to himself. As it happened, he was talking to neither. There was a single light step behind me, and then I felt the cold barrel of a pistol just beneath my ear.
“Simple enough,” said the Marshal.
The Governor looked at me, and at him. The man had been patiently standing in the shadows and I had not noticed him at all. All of a sudden he was about to pull the trigger. My much-vaunted brains and mental powers were going to be all over the Governor’s walls and ceiling.
I think it was that thought which the Governor disliked. It was too immediate and messy. The other thing that saved me was that he was unused to dealing with prisoners face to face. His world was more civilised and far less brutal than the Marshal’s. Indeed, the very brutality of the Marshal allowed him to exist in pampered isolation up in his rooftop abode. When faced with personally ordering a death sentence, as opposed to just knowing that such things went on in his name, I think he was rather shocked.
“Oh no,” he said. “Wasteful. My new clerk has not arrived yet, and I would rather not burn my bridges until I know that his replacement is up to standard.”
