He kicked rather helplessly, but whoever held him –a big man smelling of mutton and damp leather –had every advantage, and Will found himself shoved unceremoniously to his knees, his fingers numbed from a thin cord wrapping his wrists. Helpless as a jessed and hooded hawk, damn them all.
The carriage lurched and rattled on for a little while, and he was just as casually carried out of it and up a flight of stairs, and deposited on a mattress. Still blindfolded, Will heard another scuffle, but was able to do little about it with his wrists bound behind his waist and his vision baffled. He knew Kit’s voice when he heard it, however, and shouted, trying to shove himself to his feet and measuring his length instead on the rush‑covered stones.
The fall knocked the wind from him, a spasming pain that wouldn’t let him fill his lungs. He wheezed, worming forward on scraped knees and bruised chest, and then grunted once as someone dropped a knee between his shoulders and pinned him hard. “None of that, old man.”
The scuffle ended abruptly enough that he knew it was not Kit who’d won it. Oh, bloody hell,he thought. Damn‑fool Kit, when wilt learn to bring friends on these missions of mercy?Will did not hear Kit’s voice again, but he heard a man grunting with effort as if he lifted something unwieldy, and then the slamming of a heavy, strap‑hinged door. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it to Hell–
Act V, scene vii
This dungeon where they keep me is the sink
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls.
–Christopher Marlowe, Edward II,Act V, scene v
Kit woke in absolute blackness, with a ringing head, and tried to remember how he had gotten there and why he was lying on a dank, lumpy surface with the taste of earth on his lips. He summoned a witchlight first, wondering that the darkness was so complete that even he could not see through it, and when the hoped‑for blue glow failed to materialize around his fingers he swore softly and rolled onto his back.
He lay on earth, he decided, burrowing his fingers into it. Packed earth, and foul; it reeked of sweat and filth and the long tenancy of terrified men. He cast his right hand out, and his left, and found stone blocks on either side. The walls of his cell, if it was a cell. He snapped his fingers again, to spark light, and nothing answered his murmured incantation except a strange clatter and a heaviness, a constriction on his fingers. His head throbbed as if John Marley were on the inside, banging Kit’s skull with his tacking hammer, and Kit hunched forward between his knees and tried to take some inventory of the situation.
Feet, bare. His head swollen as a broken fist, and oozing blood from a welt on the left side. His cloak was missing, and his sword – he chuckled under his breath in recognition of what was gone. No external sound reached him–
–No. Not quite true. Somewhere far above, he heard… not so much the sound of footsteps as the echo of the sound. “I might as well be at the bottom of a well,” he said out loud, to hear something besides the half‑panicked rasp of his own hurried breaths. His voice echoed too, peculiarly: from above, rather than from any of the sides.
Carefully, wary of his head and his dizziness, Kit stood in the darkness and extended his arms. His palms lay flat against the walls on either side – masoned stone, he thought–and whatever rings encircled his fingers clanked on the blocks. A harsh, heavy clank, and not the ring of silver or the clink of gold.
He lowered his hands, feeling the moist earth under his feet – heels, ball, toes–and drew another deep breath. The stench of a place men have died in, aye.
And something else.
Thick and raw, the stench of the Thames.
“The Pit, ” he said, and sat down on the floor again, shaking his head. “I dreamed this.”
He knew where he was now, and he knew who had him. He was in the oubliette at the Tower of London, and he was in the power of Robert Poley. And by extension, of Richard Baines.
In absolute blackness, Kit paced the cramped circle afforded him. His right hand trailed on the damp stones of the wall. He had no fear of tripping; his feet knew the path, and the dank earth was where he slept when he grew too tired to walk. Wasting energy,he thought, but he could not sit still. “The sink wherein the filth of all the castle falls,” he mumbled, but it wasn’t, quite. More an old, almost‑dry well, lidded in iron as much to keep light out as the prisoner in, for the sides were twenty foot and steeply angled.
He had paced forever.
He would be pacing forevermore.
The iron rings–or so he thought them, groping in the darkness –on his hands wouldn’t come off. He’d tried, and all he’d gotten for his trouble was a clicking pain as if he were trying to yank each finger individually from its socket. Upon pulling harder, there had been the stretch of tearing flesh and a slow, hot trickle of blood, but the rings had not shifted.
A strange sort of irritation, first an itching and then a raw, hot pain, grew in patches on his torso and his thighs. To pass the time and to stave off whatever sorcery Baines might be working, so far out of reach above, he told himself stories. Bits of verse –Nashe’s plays, half memorized, Kyd’s Tragedy,Will’s Titus,and Kit’s own words. The Greeks and the Romans and the Celts. The Bible.
Anything to keep from thinking of his own predicament, and worse. To keep from remembering how he had failed Will. Because when the throbbing in his head had subsided, he’d remembered how he’d been surprised.
Coming to Will’s rescue.
Just as Baines would have known that he would, having seen it before. Stupid, Kit, to leave anyone alive who know what William means to thee–
He’d stepped from the Darkling Glass, his sword in his hand and witchcraft on his lips –and straight into a sorcerer’s trap.
He slept twice more. His belly cramped with fear more than hunger, and his dry throat turned his recitations into a mumble. He dragged his ringed fingers along the stone, and thought to dig through the floor with his fingers, but all he did was tear his nails and score his fingertips on buried rocks. He came to know his domain intimately, an oval four feet by five feet, with a slimy, echoing drain that stank even worse than the earth but at least ensured he wasn’t sleeping in his own piss.
The cramping belly reminded him of something, and he smiled. If Baines plans to use me for whatever blackness he had planned on the fifth–
–won’t he be surprised when Faerie kills me for my absence in a couple of days?
Kit closed both eyes. It made no difference: he walked, and turned, and walked, and turned in a blackness as deep as if his eyes had frozen into ice. He hadn’t seen real darkness since Hell; he barely remembered it, but whatever bound his magic bound his otherwisesight as well.
Mehiel’s brands burned on his chest and sides. “All very well,” Kit said to the angel, a whisper like a rasp dragged over his throat. “Couldst speak to me, thou knowest. Would help to pass the hours. And ‘tis not as if we’re unacquainted.” A cracked‑lip grin, blood paying for a pun. And not a good one at that.
The chafe of unoiled hinges served his warning of the shaft of light that seemed to boil his eyes from his head. Kit covered his face in his hands, swearing, and hated it that he knew who saw him cringe.
“Art yet hungry, puss?”
Sweet God in his heaven.Kit could never speak loud enough to be heard from the depths of the oubliette, with the fire in his throat. And damned if he would plead and whisper. He stood, looking up, and shaded his left eye with his hand. Nay,he thought, wishing he had the wherewithal to speak. But could use a drop of wine, hast it to spare–