Chapter 9
People came to Minna’s door and knocked in spite of her orders. They came to clean her room; she kept her door barred and stayed silent until they went away. They came to announce the midday meal, and then the evening meal. She made no sound. News of visitors came to her door, and of messages they had left when she did not answer.
Cadlius showed more ingenuity, persistence, and patience than the others. He pounded loudly enough to rattle her rest, and he kept banging in a rhythmic drumming that battered Minna’s patience. When he shouted he would not leave until he at least heard her voice, she shouted, “Damned you, Cad, leave me the hell alone!” He left, and silence returned.
Eventually, the light seeping through the balcony doors grew dim and vanished completely. Minna felt the rumblings of hunger, and thought about them, but they did not drive her to even lift her head off of the pillow. She thought about those inmates in her ward at the Earl’s dungeons who laid around wallowing in their own depressive self pit, and had scorned them for it.
The knock that came with the arrival of night was almost too faint to hear. Rolling over onto her back, she listened, until she was certain that it came from Cadlius’s door. With his persistence, the annoying little rap could continue for the rest of the night. She rolled to concentrate to find out which door it came from; it was the door to Cadlius’s room. She imagined that weak rapping going on for most of the night. “I told you to leave me alone,” she said in a voice just loud enough to carry through the wall.
“Cadlius is in the common room;” it was Jeffers’s voice. “I was sitting in my room watching the evening sky. What a wonderful night, I told myself, to sit out in the mountain air with a good friend and to talk—to talk about import things—about life.”
The smile that Minna found surprised her. There were many starry nights on the trail hunting Zin that they had wandered off, away from the tracker’s ears. Jeffers cared nothing for small talk; when conversations started focusing on the annoying traits of friends and neighbors, or their peculiar habits, or the weather, Jeffers went for his books. Only when the conversation focused on some deep issue either for society as a whole or for an individual person would he think it worth his time. On the trail, he had been filled with questions about her work in the dungeon, about the attack, about how it felt to go back. But he never remained long in the past; always he guided the conversation carefully to questions about the future; about dreams and plans for making them come true.
Those memories gave Minna the strength to slide off of the bed and walk to the door. Jeffers had seen her on her worst days, so she passed the mirror without a thought to how she might look to him. Then she opened the door and saw him in his white robe with its gold trim—the traditional vestments of a cleric of Sif
“The Matron gave this to me,” he explained. “She has reconsidered her decision not to let me speak to the Temple’s congregation. Next Merchanday morning I have the alter.”
“Merchanday morning? That’s hardly a good time to draw a crowd to the Temple. They will all be out among the merchants’ stalls; the early shopper gets the best buys.”
“Do you really think so?” Jeffers answered with an exaggerated sigh of relief. He stepped into the room and Minna closed the door behind him. “Crowded rooms are not my favorite environment, especially with everybody in the crowd looking at me. To be honest, I wasn’t much disappointed when the Matron first said I would not be invited to speak.”
“But you spoke in front of the Earl in her court. While everybody was looking at you, you said some of the most unpopular things uttered in the history of the Empire.”
“I did not say I would not speak,” Jeffers said as he walked to the balcony door. “I only said that I don’t want to speak. Remember the scales you used for demonstrating indecision? Put a ton of gold on one side of the scales, and a ton and a half on the other, and the ton and a half will clearly win. But the ton it is put up against doesn’t simply vanish, and the scales will suffer from the strain, as do I.”
He opened the balcony doors and let in the faint glow of starlight, then stepped onto the balcony with Minna a pace behind. Side by side they leaned over the railing and looked down on the lower half of the town. To their right somebody shouted orders to workers closing off the channels and locking up the water wheels. They would allow the reservoir to refill over night, storing power for the next day’s labor.
“I only have one request,” Jeffers said softly. “I want Cadlius to be right behind me when I speak, and I want his hands free so that he can catch me when I faint.”
Minna smirked, nudged him with her shoulder, and said, “You’ll be all right.”
“And you?” he asked.
She thought for a long time before she answered. “They frightened me, Jeffers. They wanted to frighten me; that was the whole reason they took me there, and they succeeded beyond their wildest ambitions. I went running out of there like a pampered princess who just saw her first bug.”
“I heard.”
“What did you hear?” Minna asked. She had thought that things could not get any worse; to have stories about her flying around town would prove her wrong.
“Terrence told me. When you locked yourself in your room I made her tell me—as your confessor—everything that happened. She gave you a tour of their dungeon. During the tour there was a disturbance among the prisoners, and you insisted on coming out. I didn’t need to hear much; I didn’t even want to hear it from her. I would rather hear it from you.”
The memories drove a hard shudder through the Varlet. “She meant to scare me by showing me what would happen to me if I didn’t cooperate, like some brigand holding a knife under your nose and letting you imagine what you will suffer if you don’t hand over your money.”
“And . . . “
She turned away from Jeffers to face the town lying below the far end of the balcony. She found it easier to talk when she could not see his reaction. Floating before her eyes she could see her memories of the she-male’s harsh glare, Aubon’s smile, the weapons, the fight, men waiting for nothing but a chance to hurt others. They would hurt her, given a chance. The longer she thought about it the more horrible the possibilities she imagined, attacks worse than the one she suffered through in Malikii’s dungeon. She remembered that attack; remembered looking down and seeing intestines and blood leaking through a long cut.
She jumped when something touched her shoulder. Spinning, she saw Jeffers still flinching away and fell into his arms. His arms, with sleeves that extended nearly to the floor, surrounded her.
“Sif, help me,” she sobbed.
“It doesn’t work that way, and you know that,” Jeffers answered. “I can call upon Sif’s power to do a great many things, but she can do nothing for you here. It is a temple of Sif that you stand against, remember?”
Her knees grew weak, and she wondered for a moment if Jeffers would ease her to the floor gently if she were to collapse where she stood.
Jeffers, instead, pushed her away and held her until he was sure her feet would support her, staring into her eyes. “But, you don’t need to go into the dungeons. All you need to do is tell the Council what they want to hear, that Zin choose to do what he did. That much of it is true, on one sense at least.”
She found the strength to back away from him. It took time to fight words out through the surprise that filled her. “What? You sound like one of them. What did they do to you?”
“Nothing,” Jeffers answered, showing no sign that he was at all disturbed at her reaction. “I simply know the fear you feel inside. I know what it will cost you to spend time in the dungeons, and for your sake I think you have cause to give the council what it wants—regrettably.”
“You only know half of it,” Minna said, taking another step back and turning away. “Yes, I’m afraid of what the other prisoners might do to me. But I know how to stop them. I know how I must act to keep myself safe.”
She paused, running her fingers through her long hair and twisting the ends into a thick knot. “Jeffers, have you ever wondered what type of person you would have to be to . . . to flourish in that kind of environment? There is no place in K’non’s dungeon for kindness, compassion, or trust. An act of kindness only invites others to take advantage of you, just as they view your trust a tool to use against you. I will be able to survive in there best if I acted like them; cold, harsh, and not only willing but eager to hurt others. At first it would be an act, but if you play a roll long enough then you become that character. That’s one of the tools we use to alter people’s behavior in the Earl’s dungeons; we force them to act kind even if they do it for selfish reasons, and eventually some of them start acting kind out of habit. The habits they teach here are not those of kindness. I don’t want to be the type of person who can survive in K’non’s dungeons. I don’t want to learn what I will need to learn to survive down there.”
Her words raced on. “It’s so crazy, Jeffers, to put people who you will eventually have to share your community with—once they come out—in that type of place. They’ll come out acting just the way they needed to act inside. They’ll treat us the same way they had to learn to treat their fellow inmates. They go in condemned for life, for what they learn—what we set things up for them to learn—makes them unfit ever to step outside again. They set up a system where people have to be harsh and cruel, and then blame them for their harshness and cruelty, insisting on even more punishment. It’s madness, Jeffers. These people must be mad.”
“Perhaps not as bad as all of that,” Jeffers answered.
Minna gave him a sharp glare.
“Maybe you’re right,” Jeffers added quickly. “It’s a theory; one that people, perhaps, should investigate. I’ve learned long ago not to make judgments about things I have not studied.”
“I know my business, Jeffers. Treating criminals, changing their behavior, is my business.”
“I will trust your expertise,” Jeffers said with a formal nod.
She could have hit him. She wanted to. Her hand flinched as the muscles in her arm and shoulder tightened. In frustration she swung, but she diverted her blow into empty air. Things were not going nearly as she as expected. She had allowed Jeffers to come in because she had wanted to talk to him, to relieve herself of some of the mental weight she carried. But he kept acting so . . . mean. The strain showed on Jeffers’s face as well; he had not come here to make her mad.
“Options?” asked Jeffers.
“Same as before,” Minna answered. “In two weeks I go before the council and I either give them good reason to believe that Zin had the ability to draw on Will’s Power, which is a lie. Or I tell them that their questions contain false assumptions that prohibit any answer from being true except to say that their questions have false assumptions. If they aren’t willing to accept that, I’ll be sent to the dungeons for thwarting Justice.”
“They can’t accept it, even as a possibility,” Jeffers said, turning to lean on the balcony rail. “Granted, the council can not allow complex questions to go unchallenged. But you will be arguing that every question aimed at showing that a defendant had the capacity to draw upon Will’s Power, and every statement grounded on that assumption, is a complex question. To allow you to get away with that will set a precedent that will forever destroy the Council’s ability to serve retribution on people in the name of Justice.”
“Maybe they won’t realize what they’re doing until its too late.”
Jeffers’s look was enough to tell how low he thought the probability of that was.
With a sigh and a shrug, Minna said, “My third option is not to show up at the hearing at all. And that still remains one of the best ways to save Zin’s life. How are Cadlius’s escape plans developing?”
“You’ll have to ask him. I’ve spent all day in my room doing research; I assume he spent his day doing research as well.”
“And what did your research turn up?”
Jeffers smiled.
“You found something!”
Suddenly Jeffers looked shocked. “No, that’s not it. I didn’t find anything; more of the same, really. There’s precedent for forcing outsiders to testify. The exception that you want to argue for, when the outsider is nobility on a mission for the Earl, has just never come up before.”
Minna felt her frustration growing again. “Then why the smile?”
“It was nice to see you active again, doing something, rather than just laying around in your room feeling sorry for yourself.”
His words were sharp, but since Minna knew they were also true she could say nothing to protest. “I still see nothing that I can do. Our escape must be left in Cadlius’s hands; I don’t want to even know what he is up to, since I might tip off the guards. I don’t understand why you are now so interested in my doing something when, yesterday, you were saying that we had no hope of accomplishing anything.”
Jeffers shook his head. “It’s futile to expect the type of revolution that will have the Council abandoning Justice within two weeks. It’s not futile to nudge society a little closer to that end. I think of a society as a ball flying through a vacuum. Even the slightest force acting in any direction will push the ball further in that direction than it would have flown otherwise.”
With a playful smile, Minna counted off, “First, there’s no such thing as a vacuum. It boggles the mind to think of a section of space completely vacant. Second, things naturally travel in a curved line; every physicist and philosopher knows that. That is why things fall back to the earth when you throw them and why water forms meandering rivulettes even when flowing down a sheer pane of glass. Third, a push in any direction might just cause an even larger push in the opposite direction as people react to what you are trying to do.”
Jeffers answered with a shrug, “If the counter-revolution defeats everything the revolution aimed at and more, then I only hope that the revolutionaries turned out to be not so closely connected to truth as they thought; in which case, we still have progress.”
“If,” said Minna, her smile fading. “What are your plans for pushing this society through the vacuum while we wait around to escape.”
“First, we eat. Second, we sit down over a nice cool glass of iced water and discuss those options.” With a gesture to the door Jeffers said, “Shall we?”
Worry still nagged at her, but so did hunger, which had started to insist on her doing something to meet its demands. She took a moment straighten her hair and her clothes while Jeffers removed the clerical robes that covered his normal apparel. Then she and Jeffers descended into the common room.
Other than Cadlius, who sat alone at one table, there were two groups having dinner; the first customers Minna had seen at the Inn. Cadlius looked up at her, smiled, and seemed to sigh in relief. Though the Guardsman assigned to watch over her that evening had followed her down the steps, he remained far enough away to allow Minna to speak privately with Cadlius and Jeffers.
“So, how did your day go, Cadlius?” she asked as she took her seat.
His smile vanished and he looked down to stare at his plate. “I’m sorry, m’lady, but there’s a puzzle I don’t fully know how to handle. Two, really. First, we need to get rid of the Guardsman that watches over you, and we must do so without harming him. I don’t think Jeffers has any magic that can disable him for more than a few seconds, and clubbing him on the back of the head has a chance of doing far more harm than we intend. Overpowering him, tying him up, and leaving him where he’ll be discovered is the best option. But how do we do that quickly enough to deny him a chance of sounding an alarm?”
Jeffers turned his chair sideways and watched the other customers.
“Next problem,” Minna said.
“The best way out of town is over the wall at night. But we can’t take our horses over the wall.”
“Jeffers has permission to leave. He can be outside waiting.”
“Jeffers can leave, yes, but with only one horse. Three of us can not ride one horse, and he will have no good reason to take two. I have permission to leave too, but if I go that leaves you to subdue the guard and get over the wall on your own.”
“Don’t worry about transportation,” Jeffers said, waiving his hand dismissively. “I’ll be the one to leave, just after I give my sermon next Merchanday.”
“What do you have planned?”
“Magic,” Jeffers said with a sly smile and a flashy flick of the wrist. “Trust me, I’ll have mounts waiting for both of you.”
Cadlius gave Jeffers a hard stare that he ignored.
“That still leaves the Guardsman,” Cadlius said with a glance past Minna. “There’s too much chance of doing permanent harm in something like this. And if he manages to get a weapon out, or if anybody else recognizes us and comes for us with swords or bows drawn . . .” Cadlius left the rest unsaid. He slid his plate away, no longer hungry.
Finishing what Claudius was saying in her own mind made Minna pause. Cadlius had permission to leave. For him to stay behind and aid in her escape gained him nothing and could cost him quite a bit. Few would argue that his duties to protect her included helping her escape from the Cult of Justice. “Not that I want to make your job any more difficult, Cadlius, but you’re going to have to discover a way for me to take care of the Guardsman myself. You’ll be leaving here with Jeffers.”
“What?”
“I’ll not have everything I’ve accomplished with you over the past two years undone with a sentence to K’non’s dungeons. I worry enough about what it will do to me, I’ll not having you relearn habits I worked so long getting you to unlearn.”
“How are you going to take out a Guardsman by yourself?” Cadlius asked, straining to keep his voice to a whisper.
“That’s what I want you to tell me before you leave,” Minna answered. She then leaned back and said in a voice loud enough for any in the bar who cared to listen to hear. “I don’t trust Fint to carry my message to the Earl with the urgency it deserves, and there’s a chance he could fail to deliver it entirely. If the council releases me, I’ll send word to the Earl and have the Matron arrange my escort out of here. If not, I want the comfort of knowing that my release is being arranged. You will go to Malikii”
“As you wish, m’lady.” Cadlius grumbled. Jeffers smiled and said nothing.