Chapter 8
Varlet Minna had found herself strangely pleased that Jeffers had riled the Matron. Her own summons gave her little time to hear much more. She trusted that the Guardsmen had found Cadlius and delivered him in the temple, though Jeffers did not see him waiting. Since Jeffers had told the truth and been given permission to leave, and since Cadlius lacked Jeffers’s tendency to engage in verbal sparring, Minna expected his interview to go at least as well. She was just as certain hers would be much worse.
As she entered the temple, she expected to see the walled off section in the corner that Jeffers had described. She did not expect to see Terrence standing with two Temple Guardsmen.
“Greetings, Varlet Minna,” Terrence said with a bow. The two Guardsmen also acknowledged her with a salute.
“Good morning,” Minna answered. “I hope that your business is going well.”
The soldiers closed ranks behind Minna, to block her retreat.
“I hope you slept well and the service was to your liking,” Terrence said.
“I slept well, but not long.” Minna answered. She gestured to the Matron’s station inside and added, “If you’ll excuse me, the Matron has summoned me.”
“Yes, but not to see her,” said Terrence. “This is the morning the Matron devotes to the males.”
Minna had the scroll in her hand and read it; Terrence stood over her shoulder. “See,” Terrence said, “you are summoned to the Temple, not to the Matron.”
“What for?”
Terrence laid a hand casually on Minna’s shoulder and guided towards the doorway behind the statue. The Guardsmen followed. “We figured that, as somebody who works in the dungeons of Malikii, you should see our dungeon. I’m here to give you a tour. Perhaps we can give you a few ideas worth taking home with you when you leave.”
A knot tied Minna’s stomach and choked her ability to answer. She stopped, and found her hand sitting on her side, where the prisoner’s knife had cut her. That was the first of her wounds. She remembered seeing her intestines push themselves out of the opening he had made. There were other cuts; on her face, her arms as she tried to parry his blows, her breast, and a stab that penetrated deep into the small of her back. Still, it was the first cut, the one that had split open her belly, that she remembered most vividly.
The gods had not been kind to her. They left her conscious.
“Read that scroll again, Varlet. This was not a request, it was a summons. Come.”
She knew the rules, but could not move at first. Telling herself that the two Guardsmen were competent, and that Terrence herself would not enter if it the dungeons were not safe made it only slightly easier to walk. Once she took the first step she forced another—a steady rhythm that she dared not break.
Terrence’s words were little more than background noise as they walked. She heard them, and filed them away for consideration when her mind was less occupied.
“We have a program here that I am particularly pleased with; it was my doing. We take boys who seem to be heading towards a troubled future and we give them a tour of this place. We want them to know the future they are choosing for themselves. There are a few who told me later that this had a dramatic impact on them seeing the need to serve Justice,; I know we’ve had more peace in K’non because of it. You might benefit from doing this in Malikii, Varlet. Though we like to think we are encouraging these boys to draw upon Will’s Power to make a cleaner life for themselves, you might want to think of it as causing changes in a malformed mind. Except, it does require — threatening them, I believe that is the term you used — with something any reasonable person would want to avoid.”
Though no Lady of the Temple escorted them down the steps, something still forced the darkness a pace or two away. No shadows or points of brightness betrayed where the light came from.
The fact that she had been down these halls before helped Minna to walk the first part of the route. A turn down an unfamiliar hallway sparked anxiety, but the fresco-adorned walls had enough familiarity to set her at ease. When a flight of steps dropped them to a level below the Matron’s level, where only dampness decorated the walls, Minna fought for breath. Only knowing that turning back would accomplish nothing kept her moving.
The community’s stores were kept here; grains and other foods received in exchange for wood in Krakori and Malikii. Within a few months, before the freeze closes the roads and stopped the flow of water over the wheels, these rooms would have to hold enough to feed K’non’s population through winter.
The quarters for the Church Guardsmen were next to the grain stores. Practice rooms, sleeping chambers, game rooms, an armory, a kitchen, and materials for smithing weapons and armor lay on both sides of the hallway.
Nothing on this level, or the level above for that matter, was carved from rock. They were built on open ground, then the space around them filled with dirt and stone that became the pyramid supporting the idol room. It was an impressive effort for a wilderness town.
A long hallway leading from the Guardsmen’s quarters ended in a single door. Two Guardsmen standing there started removing locks and bars as soon as Terrence stepped into view. Pressure from the two Guardsmen marching in step behind her kept Minna moving forward. The Guardsmen opened the door and stepped rigidly aside as the Varlet neared. No spoken word disturbed the march.
Beyond, another flight of stairs descended. There was no sign indicating when they passed below man-made hill into natural ground, but Minna thought she could sense the shift. The sound of the door closing behind them raced past; making the stairway seem a lot narrower and the ceiling a lot lower. She stared at her surroundings to force herself to recognize that they did not move; that the feeling of being squeezed came only from her imagination.
“The Guardsmen here work in four shifts,” Terrence said, echoes amplifying her words. “Five work in the dungeon, five work in the temple, five are at rest, and five are at sleep. The other three stationed to guard the prisoners are ahead.
From somewhere came a distant clattering of tools on rock and a low rumbling.
“We hope to be able to move the entire town down here during the freeze or in case we are besieged,” Terrence said. “It needs no heat; the coldest surface night has no effect on the temperature down here. It is easy to defend. Town walls are always vulnerable to flying creatures and some of the more powerful magics, and are too long to easily defend. Down here, we can restrict entrance to a few hallways where a single squad could keep an army at bay.
“Part of our plan is to build a channel from the reservoir through here. That will give us power up until the reservoir freezes solid. If we can find an adequate flow of underground water we can remain powered all winter. The only thing we can’t do down here is grow food, but we can make things to trade for food.”
The rumbling and clanking of distant workers grew suddenly louder. Two young men, well muscled, wearing no shirt and sweating in spite of the cool air, rounded a corner ahead of them.
“These are not prisoners,” Terrence said. “Prisoners are not allowed this much freedom. These young men are paying their tithing to the Temple through labor. They take the rubble to the surface where we are using it in the construction of the city’s new stone walls. We employ almost as many free laborers down here as we do prisoners.”
Minna stared at the muscles that the work had built on the young men. She imagined the damage either could do with a knife, a length of chain, or even a rock, and she shuddered.
“Of course, this is not a part of the consecrated heart of the temple,” Terrence added. “It can’t be, not if we expect males to live here too. Males can get in without going through the heart by using an entrance off to the west.”
Around the corner Minna saw a single doorway down a long, dimly lit corridor. This one had a single Guard standing near it. He opened the door before Terrence and her company got up to him, releasing a barrage of sounds from the room beyond.
“This will eventually be where we hold our reserve supply of water,” Terrence said. She gestured to a circular pit off to the side. In the darkness, the liquid inside looked more like ink than water. The floor showed an array of similar pits; some completed, others being built.
Minna’s attention drifted to the workers in the back of the room. Some dug new pits in the cavern floor, while their fellows hauled the rubble out in buckets and poured it into the wagons. Others chipped away at the rough back wall, enlarging the room.
It was easy to figure out which were the prisoners and which were the free laborers. The prisoners worked in the best lit corner of the room, closely watched not only by the remaining two Guardsmen but also five Watchmen. The prisoners worked in groups, chained together with leg irons connected to a piton. Near the piton sat a clay chamber pot. A dozen elves of both genders and three human women worked in groups separated from the men, though the men watched the women and elves intently. That is, until Minna stepped into their light. Then they looked at her.
One of the men leered, elbowed another, and whispered. Another strutted up to the chamber pot and, while fully facing the Varlet, pulled his pants down and said loudly, “Excuse me, boys, but I got to take a piss.”
A whip snapped across his face and a Guardsman shouted, “Hold it in, Bain.” He backed off.
The Guardsman snapped the whip again and shouted, “Back to work.” The prisoners obeyed slowly; the Guardsman did not push them.
“Walking up to the elves and women, Terrence said, “They’ll probably put you over here.”
One of the nearer men shouted, “Hey, she’s not a tourist. She’s a customer.”
Another shouted, “We’ve got ourselves another she-male.” Minna knew the slang. Since most prisoners were male, females who broke the law were commonly thought of as women with too much manliness.
She looked at the two human women; the claim seemed to be true of one of them. Tall and muscular, she stared at the Matron menacingly. The elves in her group kept as much distance between themselves and her as the chains allowed. The other woman looked only slightly larger than the elves; her labor had done little to add to her bulk. She worked, even as the others stopped to stare at the visitor, her mind elsewhere.
The distant stare brought the Varlet memories of one of her prisoners. “You can chain my body, but you can not chain my mind,” he had said. He was a vampire, the unrepentant kind who felt nothing wrong with sucking the life-blood from another so long as the other was willing and he left enough blood so as the victim did not feel any effects. He called himself a poet, and continued to work on his art even as he was confined to the dungeons, flying free in a fantasy world while his body remained chained to the dungeon walls.
Only, this woman’s eyes did not appear filled with a mental life far away. Her eyes were vacant, her movements like those of a golem.
The memory of the vampire drew Minna’s attention to two prisoners, each chained individually well away from the others. She wondered if either of them might suffer from the blood-thirst. Most prisoners, though they had failed to learn society’s aversion to violence, picked up society’s aversion to all things vampiric and declared vampires were fair game for fulfilling their own sadistic lusts. Many guards liked to turn a blind eye to such things; sometimes they were forced to recognize the need to separate vampires from other prisoners.
Terrence still spoke. “Most of these elves are the ones we told you about yesterday, the ones who tried to offer sanctuary to some hobgoblin leaders during the troll wars.” He ruffled the hair of one elf as it were a child. “This one decided he needed some sunshine. I know their skin differs from ours, but standards of decency need to be upheld. Asjeia over there tried selling a dagger to a blacksmith; only the blacksmith recognized the blade as belonging to a friend of his who had reported it stolen earlier that morning. And that one tried to pick a merchant’s pocket on a dark night. When he failed, he decided to try and cut the man’s throat instead. That merchant was skilled with a blade himself, fortunately for this elf, or the elf would have been on the gallows.”
All of the elves wore just enough clothes to hide their genitals. Minna noticed that their skin was lighter than she was used to seeing even on an elf. At first she thought it was an illusion generated by their pale skin in an otherwise darkened room, but when a couple of elves moved next to the vacant-eyed woman the difference was plain.
“These elves need to spend more time in the sun,” Minna said, interrupting Terrence’s lecture in mid-sentence.
“Sunshine? They are prisoners. They’ll see sunshine once they have paid for their crimes. I don’t think even Malikii allows elves to walk around the streets naked. They still ban elves from the capital district, don’t they?”
“We don’t keep elven prisoners entombed either. They are a different type of creature from us. Their skin needs exposure to sunshine; it’s not healthy to keep them down here all the time.”
Terrence responded with a smile. “Maybe we should take them up and let them sprawl out naked on the temple steps for a while. Finnan there would like that. We gave him two warnings about public exposure before we decided on a few months down here to teach him a lesson.
“They have different needs from us.”
“Their so-called ‘needs’ are disgusting and a violation of the standards of decent behavior that society has a right to expect from its citizens. They are going to have to learn that their ‘needs’ do not give them a right to engage in behavior that society finds offensive. Wince, over there by himself, has certain ‘needs’ too and charmed a woman into letting him have a mouth full of her blood once a week.” Terrence was gesturing to the taller of the two isolated prisoners, who looked up when he heard his name. “And there’s Stad over here, who ‘needs’ to rape and cut women. Where do you draw the line, Varlet? Or do you favor the anarchy of the Laurellans?”
Terrence moved on as if she knew how Minna would answer — how Minna should answer. If not for the nights Minna had spent with Jeffers and, before him, Thane Tiempko himself, she would have thought Terrence’s expected answer as obvious. Looking at the elves, she could say that society’s being offended at the sight of a naked elf was not a good enough reason to prohibit them from exposing their skin to the sun’s light. And, if Jeffers was right, the Designer made elves so that wearing clothes was uncomfortable as a way of making sure they got the sunshine they needed. And that trait passed on to half-elves; many of whom had the elven dislike for clothes without the need for sunshine. Was there good reason for their suffering? But the Designer also gave vampires a taste for blood. If the Designer had also given a race a need to taste human flesh, as trolls seemed to have.
She shook away the questions. She had no time for them here, and resolved she would not mention the condition of the elves or the existence of the vampire to Jeffers. He was as powerless to do anything to help them as she, and yet he would very much want to try.
“I think you should hear what some of these people have to say,” Terrence said as she started to walk into a dark, private corner of the room. “Let them tell you something about what it’s like down here.” She gave a signal to a Guardsman as she lead Minna to a couple of chairs and a piton for holding the prisoners’ chains.
Guards brought the prisoner, with his hands shackled behind his back and a choker collar around his neck. He was short for a man, only a little taller than Minna herself, and could not weigh more than she did. His beard was sparse, like a wispy attempt of a teenager, However, his face around the eyes and his thinning hair gave the impression that he had left childhood a few years behind. A white scar stretched from above his left ear and ended just short of his left eye.
The guards sat him in the chair and hammered the end of his chain into the stone.
“How long have you been here, Aubon?” Terrence asked.
The prisoner looked at Terrence, then looked back at the other prisoners. A couple of them watched him as well. Then he looked back at Terrence and said, “Since midfreeze.”
“Why are you here, Aubon?”
“Burglary.”
“Tell Varlet Minna your story.”
The sound of the noble title startled the prisoner. He stared wide eyed at Minna for a moment then asked Terrence, “Why does a Varlet want to hear my story?”
“The Varlet here is considering doing something that will give us no choice but to bring her to live with you for a while.”
A sudden look of worry grew on the prisoner’s face. “Oh, no, Varlet. You don’t want to do nothing like that.”
“I have no choice,” Minna answered.
Aubon turned back to Terrence for an explanation, but none came. “Tell him what you did to end up here?” she said.
He wiped sweat from his head and scratched at his beard a moment. “I stole. I worked the fields outside the gate, next to the road. Every day I saw merchants come into town with wagons full, and the next evening they would leave with their pockets heavy. Fine clothes, good food, and all they had to do was sit by their wagons all day and visit with people. It wasn’t fair, you know, with the prices they charged and all. I figured I wasn’t really robbing them. They were robbing us, and I was getting back what they stole. It’s not like I was trying to hurt anybody.”
“Did you hurt anybody?”
“Never. They kept their wagons in one of the warehouses at night, and I found a way in. I never hurt nobody. I just took some of the money they hid away.”
“He got greedy,” Terrence said. “He went in once, and if that had been the end of it we never would have caught him. But he went back, only this time we were watching.”
Minna listened to the prisoner’s rationalizations, thinking of how she would handle such a prisoner in Malikii. She started all of them off with intense lessons in the rules of logic. Then, when she would go into concepts like “steal” and “rob” and the like and start changing the paths her prisoners’ thinking followed.
“Tell her how you got that scar, Aubon.”
The prisoner’s eyes flickered, as if he was trying to look at it. “I told you. I fell.”
“Come, Aubon, I know better. But you won’t talk, will you? You know what will happen if you talk.”
Both Terrence and Aubon made a quick glance at the other prisoners. Minna’s attention followed theirs. One prisoner leaned against the wall and stared back.
Terrence pulled a sack from the shadows. From inside he pulled a long, slender piece of metal, one side filed into a sharp edge. Minna closed her eyes at the visions of a prisoner using just such a weapon against her flooded into her mind. She struggled to appear calm, while panic filled every muscle.
Terrence continued speaking. “There’s nothing we can do to keep these things out of their hands. There are some we keep locked up because we don’t trust them even to handle tools. We count everything we put in their hands and make sure we get it back. One mistake, and one of them has something like this to file it down on the stone walls and keep around until it comes in handy. Not that I’m encouraging you to try something like this, Varlet. I just want you to know what happens.”
Terrence dropped the weapon onto the ground between Minna and Aubon, then upturned the sack. More sharpened pieces of metal fell among sharpened sticks, a crude miniature mace, and a length of chain. Minna immediately noticed a short wooden stick with a long triangular piece of metal tied into a slit on one end like a spear head.
She jumped back from the weapon as if it was a snake, tipping over her chair. Everywhere, guards reached for weapons.
Aubon smiled.
There was a clattering of rocks in the direction of the prisoners. One, picking himself up from the ground plowed into another. Guards rushed in, trying to force all of the prisoners to lie face down. One Guardsman used the choker collar to pull Aubon down onto the rocks; the prisoner could do nothing to break his fall with his arms shackled.
The noise and confusion crashed into Minna’s senses, overriding all thought but that of getting away. The exit stood open; two laborers were pushing a cart of rocks and debris through. Though Guardsmen shouted for them to clear the doorway and close the door, the cart did not move easily. Minna ran for the opening. The two workers pulled, and the door started to close. When Minna reached it, the door was nearly closed and the cart blocked her way. She leaped onto the cart, slipping on rocks that shifted under her weight, and rammed her arm through the opening to keep the doorway open. The Guardsman on the other side kept her from pushing her way through. The cartmen kept pulling on the cart; clearing the doorway so that it closed against Minna’s arm. The Guardsman on the outside relaxed his efforts for a moment, then slammed into the door with a force that made Minna worry that the door might cut off her arm. When the Guardsman relaxed again, she pulled her arm back. The door slammed shut.
She spun, putting her back against the door, listening as bars and bolts slid into place behind her. The cartmen had done their duty and hurried back to the other laborers, who formed a knot in the corner furthest from the prisoners. Guardsmen had subdued all of the prisoners but the two that fought. Heavy blows sent the two combatants to the ground. After a moment of peace, Guardsmen and Watchmen took a collective deep breath. Terrence called her escort and stepped up to Minna. The Varlet rubbed her bruised arm and pressed her back against the wood door hard enough to feel splinters in her back. She waited until Terrence was just about to speak, then cut her off. “I’ve seen enough. You are taking me to the surface now.”
After studying the Varlet for a moment, Terrence gave a smile of satisfaction and answered, “Yes, I think you have.” She gave the door three solid knocks with her cane, then shouted for the Guardsman to open the door. A small hole in the door opened first and the Guardsman took a careful look inside, then the bolts and bars on the door started clamoring off.
Minna dictated a rapid pace to the surface; she did not pause until she stood on the Temple steps under the full light of the sun. She stopped, closed her eyes, and let the sun warm her face while she filled her lungs with free air. It didn’t help; memories and the knowledge that she could easily be back in the dungeons with no way out kept her tense.
Finally catching up to the Varlet, Terrence asked, “What do you think?”
“What do I think?” Minna’s breath came in short pants. “I think you have learned some effective ways of enforcing your laws.”
Terrence smiled.
The Varlet continued, “However, the better you do that job, the greater your obligation to see to it that your laws are worth enforcing. You’ve made it clear how little you care about that obligation, where you feel free to compel me to participate in this ceremony of religious sacrifice the same day you refuse to allow Jeffers to speak against this monstrous institution of yours.
Before Terrence could answer, Minna started down the steps. A single Guardsman followed her.
At the Inn, Minna grabbed the arm of the first employee she saw and pulled him aside. “I’m going to my room. I want no interruptions. I want to see nobody. If the Emperor herself comes through that door and wants and audience with me, I am not available. Do you understand?” She slapped a silver coin on the bar; the boy saw it and nodded.
The Varlet ran up both flights of stairs. Her climb out of the dungeon and a face-paced quarter-mile march from the temple left her winded, and she welcomed it. She went straight into her room, closed the door, and barred it shut; she also barred the doors to Cadlius’s room and the balcony. Sealed in the dark, she leaned against the wall. Above the wheeze of her gasps she heard the Guardsman take his position. But he was outside, and she was alone. She pushed the scrolls from her bed and curled herself around a blanket. It took her a good half bell to stop trembling.