Cage of Souls, page 5
“Stefan.” He sounded genuinely surprised I had survived that long.
“Haven’t killed me yet,” I confirmed. I saw a new bruise on his face, and he saw Onager’s work on mine. Shon had got the better of his engagement and was now top man in his cell, at least for the moment.
“I’ll find you again,” he said. “There’s a break to eat soon.” I grabbed a piece of metal at random and ran it over to Father Sulplice.
The old man seemed satisfied with it. Still balanced on the ladder he took out a knife and, with a few easy movements, whittled the part into shape. When I expressed surprise, he beckoned me up the ladder again.
“Take a look, son,” he invited. The knife had a dull metal handle but its blade was almost transparent.
“It’s a diamond,” Father Sulplice explained. “Darned thing cuts anything to size. This is the only one on the whole of the Island, and they trust me enough to give it to me. Says a lot, doesn’t it.”
“I wonder that the other prisoners let you keep it,” I ventured.
I thought the old man would elbow me off the ladder. “Now you’re new here so I’ll let that go by, but let me learn you a few rules that’ll help you stay healthy. One is that nobody touches me, because if the big pumps seize up without me to fix’em then everyone goes down with the ship. Secondly, this isn’t some place where the prisoners go against the Wardens. The Wardens are too strong and they kill far too easily. In this place, if someone’s got a Warden as a friend you stick right close to’em. Last off, take a look at the knife.”
He showed me the handle of the knife. There was a circle of some lighter metal there, sunk into the butt.
“All the Wardens’ stuff that could get into the wrong hands has one of these sunk into it. Knives, clubs, anything. They’ve got two machines that detect these, and if something goes missing then they may well kill everyone in the cell where they detect it. I know. I keep those detectors working. It’s in my interests to preserve the status quo, son. I’m an old man and I don’t want any riots or revolutions to trouble me and mine. Be warned, the Marshal’d be happy to kill every last man on the Island, and by ‘happy’ I don’t just mean he’d do it. He’d enjoy it.”
Eventually I asked him the question that had been nagging at me all day: what was the work that went on here, and what was it in aid of. The answer surprised me.
“This here swamp in which we’re sat is a mine,” Father Sulplice said. “It may just look like muck and water to you, son, but it’s packed with minerals, different ones at different points all over the place. They send boats out that fill their tanks with water, then trek the tanks back here, where we distil the minerals from’em. Works a treat most of the time. This pump here is part of that process. The minerals we ship back home and they get used for all sorts. Weapons, medicines, science, cosmetics, even as flavourings for food. Who back home’d think they relied on their prison for so many things, eh?”
I would have made some socially relevant comment, but right then a quartet of prisoners heaved a huge tank across the machine room floor, and one bellowed up at the old man, “The tank’s broke. Needs fixing. Marshal says to do it first.”
I could see Father Sulplice’s wrinkled face developing new lines as he frowned. “How can a tank be broken?” he demanded. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Blocked,” the other replied, and I could see Father Sulplice working up to some scathing comment when the source of the blockage made itself apparent.
It was a snake, and it forced its way from the broad opening of the tank all in a rush, faster than I would have believed. The four prisoners holding the tank dropped it really fast and made a run for it, but the snake struck one of them, sinking its fangs into his leg, and he went down screaming. The others were trying to get out of its way as it reared up. It was thirty foot long and must have filled the tank almost completely, green and black in irregular mottlings. Very little that lived out in the swamp looked pleasant.
Its head was level with mine as it swung around, and I was up the ladder. I saw that the Wardens were standing idly back, waiting to see what it would do. If it killed a few of us and then made its getaway they would probably have been happy. Unfortunately the machine room had a solid floor, unlike most of the Island. There was nowhere the snake could go save past us.
It made a determined push in one direction, and the prisoners scattered. I saw Lucian, a small man of no athletic prowess, pelt across the room with a speed that should have won medals. I chose that point to get off the ladder to prepare for my own getaway.
It was a mistake. The serpent turned its head sharply even as my feet hit the ground, and I saw that, like the river monster, it had no eyes, though it knew I was there. I heard Father Sulplice whisper, “Bugger off, son. I don’t want that thing coming anywhere near me.”
Its jaws were directed straight at me, and when I took the smallest step to one side it followed me and swayed closer. I tried to muster my inner energies, but was too scared to hold them together, and besides, I had no idea whether they would work against a snake. The jaws opened slightly and I saw two fangs as long as my fingers, coloured a dirty yellow. I resolved to make a break for it.
That very instant, before I could make a fatal mistake, the snake’s head whipped away from me as Shon charged into the room. Charged is the wrong word, really. He was swinging in wide circles, one of the sacks held in both outstretched arms. His feet moved in a complex pattern which turned him about on the spot faster and faster until he gave out a great cry and let the heavy sack fly away from him. It struck the serpent on the nose and exploded in a cloud of red powder and a sharply acrid smell.
The snake recoiled, literally, twisting and writhing in knots on the floor as it tried to scrape the foul chemicals away. Shon was beckoning frantically, and I bolted for him. I felt it through the floor as the snake suddenly stopped twisting and snapped up again, and I knew it was focused on me. I recall quite clearly expecting those fangs to sink deep into my back and jerk me high in the air. Terrified by the thought I cannoned into Shon and we both went down. The snake loomed high over us.
There were three light steps on the wood of the floor, and a shape launched through the air to cling to the serpent’s neck. I saw a blade flash once and the head of the creature was cut cleanly off, the body flinging itself in great agonised loops across the room. My unexpected saviour landed awkwardly, but was quickly on his feet, dusting red powder from his knees. It was Peter Drachmar, of course.
“Bloody hell,” Shon muttered, and pushed me off him. He and I struggled to our feet even as the other Wardens moved in.
One of them said, “You want to watch yourself. The Marshal doesn’t like heroics. He’d rather twenty of them died than one of us.”
Peter shrugged.
“You want to deal with him?” the Warden enquired, pointing at Shon with his club.
Peter looked at him blankly.
“You want to beat him?” the Warden pressed. “He needs beating. That’s a whole sack of produce he’s wasted with that stunt. He’s yours if you want him.”
Peter stared at the man with the same blank expression, as though dazed. Finally he said, “Don’t be stupid.”
The other Warden gaped at him. “What?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Peter told him again.
“Well if you won’t do it, I will,” the Warden promised.
“No you won’t,” Peter said quietly, so that I could hardly hear him. The Warden looked murderous, but something in Peter’s face obviously warned him off, because he walked away, trying to make it look as though nothing had happened. Peter and Shon regarded each other coolly, but Shon nodded eventually, conceding the point. At the last, Peter shot me the smallest grin and went on his way.
I knew then that either Peter or Shon had recognised the other, but they were too busy sizing each other up for me to work out who knew who.
The man who had been bitten was quite dead. The eyeless serpents were not uncommon in the swamps and their bite was invariably fatal.
The rest of the working day passed uneventfully. When I returned to the cell, I discovered that Valentin Miljus, former Lord Financier, was awake.
He stared at us and at his surroundings in a raw, frightened way, a damaged man. I could see that he was burning up with the fever, and the wheeze in his voice could be heard across the corridor. Gaki was hunched like a vulture at the latticed wall of his cell, and I think it was his presence that had sent Miljus into such a fear-ridden state. Lucian and Onager both kept away from him; a dying madman was capable of anything. I had the impression that this kind of thing had happened before, and that the results had been bloody. The final stages of Island Fever could be spectacular, enough that my cell mates were content to sit right up against Gaki’s adjoining wall just to stay away from the feverish man.
Being unversed in the ways of the Island, I went to him; a risk I would not take today. Valentin Miljus had no thoughts of violence, though. He needed to talk. He had a lot to get off his chest. He had no idea who I was and would not have recognised his own mother, but there was a story coiled inside him like the snake had been within the tank, and I came close enough to trigger the strike.
“Harweg came to me,” he said, without any introduction, “And he told me they were coming for me and that I had to prepare.” It was some time before I intuited that this Harweg must be our Lord President. “He told me just what was going to happen to me. I didn’t know why. I didn’t understand.”
A pause, with his eyes fixed on some point in the cell where his memories were invisibly inscribed.
“The Authority met a week before and everything had been slightly out of line,” he continued. “When I made my reports, nobody would meet my gaze. Everyone said how well I’d done but their voices were hollow. Only the Prelate and the Lord Justiciar were silent. When I look back I can see someone with them, who was not there when we met. I think it must be their guilt. I think they must be responsible. I didn’t realise at the time. How can everything be so much clearer when I think back. Why was I blind then when I can see so clearly now?”
There was another pause and I was tempted to answer, but I had no answers and he surely would not have heard.
“They’ll have forgotten about me now. That’s the reason for this place. People who come here are forgotten instantly. They pass from the mind of the city. This is the oubliette, the cage of souls. The whole city knew my name once.”
Another blank pause. Aside from the movement of his lips, no part of his face had any life or motion in it. He may not even have blinked. He had become cadaverous through his sickness. Even in repose he looked as though he was screaming inside.
“I talked with Alarisse, in that week,” he continued. “We were repairing all the wounds that had been made between us. I met with Misa. She is going to the Academy. She had not spoken to me for half a year before. My family was coming together just as everything else was fraying apart. My family was speaking to me and everyone in the Authority was suddenly strange. They all had to think about their answers when I questioned them. The Prelate and the Lord Justiciar. I had never done anything to them. I had never curbed their spending or torn open their accounts. I can think of no reason that they should have sent me here. All I did was support Harweg.”
He stopped again, and something more lucid passed behind his eyes. One bony hand gripped my wrist hard enough to leave white marks. His next words were heavy with destiny.
“It’s all falling apart,” he said through gritted teeth. “The Prelate and the Lord Master and the Justiciar and Harweg, and I was caught in the middle. I was too caught up in my figures. I didn’t notice what was going on. I was only doing my job, and suddenly that was the wrong thing to do.
“Harweg came to me,” he told me again. “He said that soldiers were coming to take me to the Island and I didn’t believe him. I thought he had come to warn me, so that we could get together and turn things around, but he was there to accuse me. They had met, the Authority had met without me and decided I was guilty of something. I only did my job. I only did what they told me to do. I thought Harweg would help me. I was always a friend of his. Instead he talked to me whilst the soldiers came. I could have run then, but I never thought of it. I was just thinking about how we could make a victory out of a defeat, just like we had always done. Then the door opened and two Angels were standing there, and they took me away from my home, and then it was on the boat and away without ever being able to defend myself. People must have missed me, but only until I arrived here. Now they’ve forgotten. I am nothing but a lost dream of Shadrapar.”
The last long pause came here. It stretched for some time, but it was obvious that he had something more to say. Onager and Lucian were staring at me, and I wondered how much they had heard. In the end, Lucian came over, having decided that Miljus was no danger to him. He said quietly that he had never known that Miljus was a minister of state, and who’d have thought it. He also said that some fever victims grew worse than this and still recovered, but even Lucian’s rambling and eternally optimistic delivery lacked conviction on that point. Lucian, who routinely expected to be shipped off home on each boat that came in, had given Valentin Miljus up for lost.
“I spoke to my daughter,” the failing man said at last. “But I couldn’t think of anything important to say to her. I didn’t have any advice. We just made idle conversation. We never spoke of our disagreements, or of her mother, or any of the important things that I wanted to talk to her about. Now it’s too late, and she doesn’t remember her daddy, and she’ll go through life with a gap in her life and always wonder who it used to be.”
That was the last will and testament of Valentin Miljus, such as it was. He lapsed back into silence, and there was no more from him that night, or ever. The idea that the inmates of the Island are forgotten by their former friends and foes in the city is a common one amongst prisoners and Wardens alike. After all, nobody returns from the Island. Sending an enemy to the Island was as good as killing him. Better, because the Island could deal out years of suffering. Miljus, however, spoke of such blanket forgetfulness as though it was a literal, physical thing, and although he was deranged and dying, his words cut far too close to my heart. Sitting in that cell with him as he wheezed his last hours away, I could feel my presence eroding, the desert wind smoothing over all the footprints I had ever made.
5
Symptoms of the Fever Victim
What happened next, of course, was that I came down with the same fever that had just finished off Miljus, and of the next week or more on the Island I can tell you very little. I took scant heed of my surroundings and had nothing intelligent to say. At the beginning and at the close of my invalidity I was hot and cold all over, shivering, coughing, cramped in my lungs and my bowels. In the middle I was oblivious to my pains as I was to the rest of the world. From one perspective it might be called the most peaceful time I ever spent at the Island.
Perhaps I should go straight to the moment when I finally recognised a human face again, although since that face was Lucian’s it hardly seems worth it. Instead, I will try to give an account of the things that I saw around me in the throes of the fever. My mind has imbued them with a spurious significance, and this is my account.
I was playing chess. At the beginning I was back in the prison boat, facing across from Peter Drachmar, and everything was as I remembered it. I recall that the throb of the engine changed as we played, so that it became more and more like a heartbeat. Peter noticed nothing but I could see the metal walls of the room suddenly flushed rust-red with blood. They sucked in and bulged out with the rhythm of the cardiac engine, and I knew that if the boat felt us within it, it would vomit us out into the toxic river.
I faded out from this scene of game-playing many times, but always returned to it across the days of my fever. As the illness grew more intense, the room in which we sat changed in bizarre ways. The walls receded, leaving us stranded at the tiny table in a vast and vaulted hall, baroque with carvings, all of it worked from the rusted, rivet-pocked metal. The worse my condition became, the larger and more byzantine the room, until I was surrounded by an artificial forest, insanely detailed and intricate, where the gaps between figures opened onto further halls that were darker and more detailed still. Of all the things that I saw in my delirium, that cathedral-like place was not stolen from any memory of mine, and I cannot tell from where I might have drawn it.
My opponent changed too. From Peter, the shadows drew other faces. The fever tried on the shapes of fellow prisoners, but Lucian, Onager, even Shon were not credible behind a chessboard. Instead the sickness delved deep into my mind to find others, and those others brought their contexts with them. In my weakened state I was swept along by a tide of memories run mad. I played chess across from Jon de Baron, my old Academy friend, and then I was running through the streets of Shadrapar trying to save him, even as the crowd roared and the Angels loaded their weapons. Poor Jon: wit, socialite and wastrel who never deserved what happened to him. Then I was running, not towards, but away. The white sand of the desert was beneath my heels and I could feel the vast, deceptive footfalls of the Macathar as it bore down on me. Its shadow blotted out the sun as its house-sized body loomed above me.
Then the chessboard was back, and the fever tried to show me the face of my beloved Rosanna, but it was too painful and I refused to play until she was taken away. The fever took me away instead, back to the city, in the shadow of the Weapon, desperate to tell her something but never able to find her. There were others, some close, some that I had barely known, all sitting in sequence across that chessboard from me. Even the Lord President, Harweg, although I would barely recognise the man in waking hours. The game unfolded, and I felt that it was getting away from me. The pieces seemed to have their own agendas. I was losing control of the game.
