“Halt, you!” cried their sergeant.
Penric tensed on his toes, but obeyed, blinking and smiling, free hand out empty and unthreatening. “Hello,” he tried in a friendly tone. “Can I help you?” Only then did he see Velka running behind them, pointing at him.
“That’s the spy! Arrest him!”
His first impulse, to try to talk himself out of this contretemps, died as he reflected that a more thorough search of his leather document case must surely find its hidden compartment, and the duke’s secret letters, and then no amount of talking would help. But his well-filled purse was hung hidden on a cord around his neck, his case strap slung over his opposite shoulder, unsnatchable.
As the sergeant pulled his short sword from his sheath and swung it upward, Pen thought, Des, speed us!
From his point of view, his would-be assailants slowed. Pen flung his valise at the sergeant, knocking him backward, and ducked another man’s leisurely sword thrust. His own movements always felt as though he were fighting through oil when he did this, but he drove force through his legs and turned, taking the first few steps of a sprint away. Where, he would have to work out later.
But now, he bounded directly into the other half of the squad who’d turned onto the street just above him, bearing down upon him with raised truncheons.
He evaded four languid blows as sinuously as any striking snake. Jerking successfully away from a fifth swing smashed the side of his head into a sixth, with a lot more power than even the man who wielded it had probably intended.
The world turned to stars and snow as he gasped and dropped, cracking his head on the stones again as his flailing hands missed catching himself. Nauseating black clouds bloomed in his vision as he did not, quite, pass out.
Passing out would have allowed him to evade the pain and misery that followed. Plenty of strong hands combined to hoist his long body up and hurry him back down the hill and through the gates of the shore fortress. Shadows flickered overhead, then stone. At first he thought he was swooning for certain as the world darkened, despite the continued drumming in his skull, but they were just going underground; an orange blur of torchlight wavered past him. The passage narrowed, widened, narrowed again. Widened again.
He was held down and efficiently stripped of case, boots, purse, belt and belt-knife, and his outer garments. Someone grabbed him by the hair and growled, “What is your real name?” Pen couldn’t even groan in reply, though he panted and then, suddenly, vomited on his interrogator. As defenses or even revenges went, it seemed weak, but at least the man leapt back, swearing.
“Bosko, you hit him too cursed hard. He can’t talk in that state.”
“Sorry, Sergeant! But it was his fault—he ducked into me!”
“Never mind,” said Velka’s voice. “I daresay this will answer all the questions anyone has.” Velka, yes, seemed to have taken loving possession of the leather case. A smile of satisfaction curled his lips. Pen grew sorry he hadn’t let Des cheat the man at dice after all, shipboard.
“I don’t suppose he can climb down the ladder on his own, now,” said a soldier.
“We could just drop him in.”
“Aye, if you want to break both his legs.”
“So is he going to be needed for anything, later? Aside from his execution?” asked the sergeant of, Pen guessed, Velka.
“Too soon to know. Best preserve him for the moment.”
A brief, professional debate among the soldiery resulted in Pen, dressed only in his shirt and trousers, being lowered into darkness by a rope wound painfully under his arms, shepherded by a soldier on a twisting rope ladder. His bare feet, then knees, then the rest of him found cold, raw rock as he collapsed. Rope, soldier and ladder all disappeared upward. The scrape of a heavy stone overhead cut off both the voices, and the last faint reflections of the torch. Utter silence. Utter darkness.
Utter aloneness.
Only… not for him.
“Des,” he groaned. “Are you still with me?”
A shaken pause. “They’d have had to spatter your brains all over the street for me to be anywhere else.”
Despite his current throbbing pain, his curiosity prompted him to ask, “Where would you have jumped?”
A sense of surly thought. “Velka.”
All else being equal, a demon forced to jump by the death of its rider usually went to the strongest other person in the vicinity. “Really?”
“He would not have lived long.” A pause. “And he would have died in all the lingering agony I could arrange.”
Pen wondered if that was how a chaos demon said I love you.
More or less, Des said in their silent speech, as his lips grew harder to move. Pen, pay attention. You mustn’t swoon. Your skull is cracked and you’re bleeding inside it. We can burn closed the blood vessel, but we have to open a hole to let out the clot before the pressure kills you.
You want me to trepan myself?
I’ll do it, but you have to stay conscious. I can’t work it if you… if you…
Understood.
Destructive medicine. Sometimes, it saved lives.
Sometimes it didn’t…
His head was in so much pain already, exploding open a hole the size of his fingertip hardly made a difference. The spurt of blood seemed small, but a little of the numbness left his lips. Yes, that’s right, and he wasn’t sure which of them said it.
Can I pass out now? Hurts…
No. Stay awake. We have to finish shifting the clot.
That, too, was right. Familiar. And a very unpleasant prospect. Was Des in as much pain as he was? Maybe not, but if his mind and body broke down, she would fragment, too. Can’t be fun for you either.
No.
After a little, he asked, Des, can you still light my eyes?
Yes…
In a moment, the blackness pulled back. With no light at all to work with the effect was peculiar, oddly colorless, but his sense of the space and the shapes around him grew secure. They seemed to be in a round chamber quarried out of the bedrock, about fourteen feet high and seven wide, its chiseled walls curving steadily inward to the small port at the top presently blocked by the heavy stone.
Penric studied the cruel angles, and meditated on the mountain-climbing experiences of his youth. No. I don’t think even I could scale this one. And certainly not in this condition. In his imagination, on the trip over, he’d confidently posited that no locked door could hold them. Is this place meant to be proof against sorcerers? Had Velka penetrated that secret, as well as his others?
It’s a standard Cedonian bottle dungeon. A place they put prisoners they want to forget, it’s said.
Ever been in one before? And, unsaid, Ever got out of one before? Except the hard way, he supposed, minus her rider.
No.
In a little while, he crawled to the wall and clawed up far enough to turn and brace his shoulders against it. They paused to tease out the last of the clot, and he felt gingerly at the spreading wetness behind his ear, soaking his walnut-dyed queue. It wasn’t going to add up to enough blood loss to kill him. At least, not on this side of his skull.
He sat up and concentrated on keeping breathing. As ambitions went, it seemed much reduced from this morning’s, but it was challenge enough for now.