“He is a traitor,” the Emperor broke in. “If you back him – and I see you do – then you’re another.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Guards! Take this wretch – take both these wretches – to the dungeons!”
XVI
Hamnet Thyssen had always known the imperial palace had dungeons. He hadn’t expected to make their personal acquaintance. Wasn’t a big part of real life the difference between what you expected and what you got?
Fighting a dozen guards would have been suicidally stupid. Hamnet took a certain dour satisfaction in noting how astonished Kormak Bersi seemed when the guards laid hold of him. His only crime had been to tell the truth as he saw it. To Sigvat, that was perfidious enough all by itself.
The guards hustled Count Hamnet and Kormak out of the throne room. The last thing the Raumsdalian noble saw there was the courtier’s smirking face. “What’s going on here?” someone asked as the guards frog-marched the new prisoners through the corridors down which Hamnet had come on his own not long before.
“They made the Emperor angry,” one of the guards answered. He didn’t seem to think he needed to say anything more. By all appearances, he was right.
How many times had Hamnet walked past a stairway without wondering where it went? Now he found out with this one, and wished he hadn’t. Dungeons were supposed to be dark and gloomy, weren’t they? This one, built below ground level, lived up to – or down to – that specification. Mold clung to the massive stones of the wall. Only a few torches gave fitful light. The air was cold and damp, and smelled of sour smoke and stale straw.
“In you go,” the guards told Kormak Bersi. One of them opened a massive wooden door with a small iron grate at eye level. Kormak’s captors shoved him in, closed the door (the hinges didn’t squeal – they were rustproof bronze), and made sure it stayed closed with a heavy wooden bar.
“Now it’s your turn,” a guard said to Hamnet. He went into a cell some distance from Kormak’s. He supposed the guards didn’t want him plotting with the agent. That was a compliment of sorts, but only of sorts. No matter how much plotting he and Kormak did, he couldn’t see how it would help them get away.
His cell had stone walls, a stone floor and ceiling, a musty pallet and wool blanket that were bound to be verminous, and a stinking slop bucket. Maybe a wizard could have put that together and used it to escape, but Hamnet knew he couldn’t. The only light came through the grate.
After a bit, the door to the cell opened again. Three guards pointed bows at Hamnet while a fourth set a jug and a loaf on the floor and then hastily withdrew. When Count Hamnet sniffed the jug, he sighed. It held water. If he drank from it, it would probably give him a flux of the bowels. Of course, if he didn’t… The loaf wasn’t very big, and seemed almost as full of husks and chaff as his mattress. He ate about a quarter of it, and found it tasted as bad as it looked. Saving the rest for later – he had no idea how often they would feed him, but feared the worst – was no hardship. Eating more when he got hungry probably would be. Again, though, not eating was bound to be worse.
He paced off the cell. Six strides from the door to the back wall. Seven from one side to the other. With nothing else to do, he walked back and forth and around and around for a bit. That soon palled, as he’d known it would. He sat down on the miserable pallet. The blanket that went with it would be warm enough now. When the Breath of God started to blow? How many prisoners died of chest fever every winter?
As his eyes got used to the near-darkness all around, he saw more sharply than he had when the guards first shoved him in here. That might have been useful if there were anything much to see in the cell. Or so he thought at first.
After a while, he got up and went back to the far wall. No, his eyes hadn’t tricked him. Prisoners who’d been here before had used – well, who could say what? – to scratch their names and other things onto the stones there. Some proclaimed their innocence. Some named the women they’d loved. One had carefully shown a woman loving him. The man wasn’t a bad artist, and he must have had plenty of time to complete his work. Hamnet wondered how many other luckless souls in this cell had wandered over to the obscene drawing to remind themselves of what they were missing.
His mouth tightened. If he thought of Gudrid or Liv, he wouldn’t necessarily think of them doing that with him. He might be more likely to see them in his mind’s eye loving someone else.
And some of the prisoners cursed the people who’d caused them to end up here. Emperors’ names figured prominently there. Some of them went back hundreds of years. Viglund had been a great conqueror in the days when the Raumsdalian Empire was much younger than it was now. Someone he’d conquered hadn’t appreciated it.
Much good it did the poor bastard, Hamnet Thyssen thought. Much good anything does anybody.
With nothing better to do, he went back to the pallet and sat down again. He started reciting poetry, and wished he knew more of it. A bard might be able to entertain himself for a long time.
Or he might not. A guard’s head blocked the grate, killing almost all the light in the cell. “Shut up in there!” the man snarled. “No noise allowed!”
Hamnet Thyssen laughed in his face. “What will you do to me if I make noise? Throw me in the dungeon?”
When the guard laughed, too, it was not a pleasant sound – anything but. “You want to find out, smart boy? Keep mouthing off and you will, by God! There’s never been a bad place that couldn’t get worse.”
He spoke with great assurance. After a couple of heartbeats, Count Hamnet decided he was bound to be right. The guards could do whatever they wanted to a prisoner who annoyed them. “I was only trying to make time pass by,” Hamnet said.
“It’ll pass whether you do anything or not,” the guard said. “So shut up. That’s the rules.” He stomped off.
A kidney stone would pass, too. . eventually. And it would hurt all the time while it was passing. As for the rules, well, the people who enforced them always liked them better than those at whose expense they got enforced.
Swearing to himself, Hamnet – quietly – lay back on the miserable, lumpy pallet. When he and Kormak Bersi didn’t come back to the hostel, Trasamund and Ulric Skakki would realize something had gone wrong. No doubt they would have a good idea what, too. But what could they do about it? When the Emperor was angry, could they do anything at all?
They would probably come straight to the palace to try to find out what was going on. And what would happen then? Count Hamnet’s best guess was that they would end up here in the dungeons themselves in short order.
If Audun Gilli and Liv came along. . . Hamnet Thyssen ground his teeth. He didn’t suppose they would end up here, or Marcovefa, either. But the Emperor was bound to have some place where he could put wizards who caused him trouble – a place warded by other, stronger wizards, no doubt.
Did the Raumsdalian Empire have any wizards stronger than Marcovefa? Count Hamnet wasn’t so sure about that. She was liable to give Sigvat’s arrogant sorcerers a surprise of the sort they hadn’t had in many years, if ever. But was she stronger than all of them put together? Hamnet had trouble believing she was.
While he wondered about such things, time seemed to move at its normal rate. When his river of thought ran dry, though, it was as if everything stopped. He might have been in the cell for centuries, with another eternity or two to look forward to. He wasn’t too hungry. He didn’t need to ease himself. In the unending dim, damp twilight in there, those were his only clues that he hadn’t already spent a very long time indeed down below all the parts of the palace he’d ever visited before.
If I do stay here long enough, my nails will grow out into claws and my beard will reach down to my waist. He might measure months and years that way. Days and weeks? The gauge wasn’t fine enough. Sunrise? Sunset? He was even more cut off from them than he would have been in winter up beyond the Glacier. The sun might stay below the horizon for weeks up there, but you knew it would come back sooner or later. Down here, he had no guarantee of ever seeing another sunrise again.