‘I’ve sworn that while a man or woman wears the iron collar in Nevèrÿon, I shall not take the one I wear from my neck.’
They turned a corner.
‘The opposition says that the only reason I exist is because the reign of the Child Empress is itself lenient and liberating,’ he went on. ‘But though the slave population in urban centers has always been low — and is getting lower — there are still road-, mine-, and agricultural slaves by the gangload, as well as a whole host of house workers and estate slaves, owned largely by hereditary royalty. Do you see that old tavern building three streets down?’ He stopped to point. ‘In the basement of that inn are the real headquarters of Gorgik the Liberator.’
When Pryn glanced up, the giant again wore his scarred smile. ‘But, like all things concerning the Liberator, one approaches it by a somewhat devious route. Come along here.’
The alley he led her down certainly didn’t go toward the indicated inn but in a completely oblique direction. The sense of adventure that had dissolved into a kind of quivering anomie when the riders had left her on the street was now rewritten across the field of its own dissolution without really reforming it. She felt excitement; she also felt discomfort. Earlier, she definitely hadn’t wanted an adventure — but would have accepted it. Now, dragons notwithstanding, she was unsure if she wanted an adventure at all and was equally unsure what accepting one might mean.
‘This way, girl.’
Off the alley was another yard. In it stood another cistern. The stone wall came up to Pryn’s waist. The man walked to it, grabbed one of the split birch logs lying across it, and swung it back. Frayed bits of rope were tied to it, as though a canvas had once been lashed there.
The man picked up a bit of white mortar from the wall’s top and tossed it in.
Moments later, its clatter on the rock floor echoed up. ‘You see?’ He grinned. ‘No water.’ Turning to sit his naked buttock on the wall, he swung one leg over, then the other. ‘Follow me down.’ He grasped some handhold within, moved to stand on it, and dropped, by stages. His head vanished; his hand disappeared from the ledge.
Had Pryn read, or even heard of, those tales we have mentioned, she would doubtless have used this opportunity to flee — as indeed I would advise any of my readers to do who might find themselves in a similar situation. But this was a long time ago. She could not have heard such stories. More to the point, the great slave who was not a slave could not have heard them either. And bridling, positioning, and urging her dragon from its ledge had been unpleasant, angering, and frustrating.
Feeling unpleasant, angry, and frustrated, Pryn climbed over the wall at the same spot as the man, to find, inside, immense, rusty staples set in the inner stone, making a kind of ladder. As she climbed down by lichen-flecked rock, as shadow slid up over her eyes like water, Pryn wondered briefly, as well might you, what if this man were not who he implied he was, but rather some strange and distressing creature who would hack her to pieces once she set foot on the bottom. (Though most of those tales had not been told, a few, of course, had.) She stumbled — the last rung was missing — to be grasped at her shoulder by his great hand. ‘Watch yourself. This way.’
If the water was gone from the cistern, the bottom was still pitted and puddled. In sunlit bands falling between the overhead logs, she saw half a dozen broken pots on the wet flooring, a few pieces of wood, some bricks, and a number of small, round things too smooth to be stones. At one place the wall had fallen away to form a…cave?
‘In here.’ He had to bend nearly double to enter it — head and knees first, huge hand lingering in a slant of sunlight on the stone jamb, an elbow jutting in shadow. Then elbows and buttocks were gone; then the hand. Pryn followed them into the dark, feeling the moist walls beside her with her palms, vaguely able to see him ahead; feeling along beside herself; then unable to see at all. (Well, she thought, if he does turn around and try to cut me to pieces, I’ll be able to get out faster than he will.) She could hear her own breath; she could hear his breath too; a pebble clicked against a pebble on the ground. After a long while she heard him stumble, grunt, and call back: ‘Step down.’
Five steps later, Pryn stumbled. And stepped down. She moved her toes to the next ledge, and down, still going along the wall with her fingers. Exactly when she noticed the orange flicker on the damp wall, she wasn’t sure. But soon she was walking on level dirt and blinking a lot — and she could make out his dark shape, walking upright.
Here the ceiling was very high between the close-set stones. At first Pryn thought the great pile of darkness before them was dirt; but when she stepped around it, it turned out to be sacks with rope-lashed corners. The wall to the left had, by now, fallen back.
The man paused below a torch burning in a niche high in the rock. Pryn came up beside him. The flickering banked at his scar, pulsing and failing and threatening to overspill onto his cheek. He smiled at her — turning his face, with its broken tooth, into a mask a mummer might wreck terror with. There was a flat glow on his shoulder. Despite the demon look, Pryn breathed easier for the first time since they’d entered the alley.
He started ahead through a vaulted arch into a room with half a dozen torches about, shadowing and brightening the dirty mosaic floor. As she followed him in, a man and a woman carrying a split log bench between them came in by another wide entrance, glanced at them (the woman smiled), set the bench on a pile of benches by the wall, and nodded to Pryn’s companion. The smile and the nod, if not simply the couple’s presence, somehow abolished the momentary demonic image and moved friendship from a possibility to be gambled on to a probable fact. Then they went.
Pryn followed the giant into the next room with even more torches on the walls — these in iron cages. Perhaps twenty-five men were there; and half a dozen women. Some who had been sitting on benches now stood. All looked. Most standing stepped back. One man called: ‘So, our Liberator has returned from his survey of the city! How did you find it, Gorgik?’
The big man did not answer, but only raised a hand, smiling.
One woman turned to another near her and said something like: ‘…vabemesh har’norko nivu shar…’
Gorgik’s response was an outright laugh. ‘Ah — ! Which reminds me,’ he called to her. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now —’
Another man interrupted. ‘The others are waiting for you, down in the receiving hall, Gorgik.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Gorgik nodded and walked.
As the others moved after him, Pryn wondered if she should fall back among them; but one man stood back to let her go forward just as, a few feet ahead, Gorgik looked at her and beckoned her to him.
She hurried up. This time his hand fell on her shoulder, reminding her for all the world of the portly gentleman in the toga and the naked barbarian boy she’d seen on the bridge — quite ludicrously, though she could not have written why unless she invented new signs.
This archway was hung with heavy drapes. A man before them pushed the hangings aside, and she and Gorgik went through, to start down wide steps.
Pryn blinked.
So many more flares and torches along the walls of this hall, yet it seemed so much darker — it was dozens of times as big! Distantly she heard free water. Because she associated the sound with outside vastness, this inside seemed even larger.
All the hall’s center, a metal brazier, wider across than Gorgik was tall, flickered over its coals with low flame. As they descended, Pryn looked up to see half a dozen balconies at different heights about the walls. One corner of the hall looked as if it were still being dug out. Earth and large stones were still heaped there. On another wall she saw a carved dragon, three times a man’s height — though from the rubble piled low against it, it, too, had only recently been dug free. Overhead, large beams jutted beneath the ceiling, from which, here and there, hung tangles of rope.