An unmeasurable time later he began to wonder how he had betrayed himself to Velka, how he had failed in discretion or simply in acting, not that he’d cast a hard role for himself. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember. Velka hadn’t been another sorcerer. Nor a shaman. Nor, certainly, a saint. He’d not used any uncanny means to flush out Pen’s secrets.
For that matter, who was Velka really? The patriotic Cedonian merchant he seemed? Or an agent of another kind?
For what it’s worth, said Des, I can’t see our mistake either.
It was kind of her to try to make him feel less stupid, Pen thought. This, his first confidential diplomatic mission, had been supposed to be a simple one, and, if he brought it off ably, bore the promise from both duke and archdivine of more such opportunities for travels to new places. A bottle dungeon hadn’t been on his imagined itinerary.
Some period after that, he began to wonder if he would die; then, as time ground formlessly on, just how he would die. Executed in some frightful manner? Or simply forgotten to death in the dark? Which wasn’t the dark for him. Nor would he die alone; Des was a friend he couldn’t outlive. He could grow reconciled to that, he guessed.
I should have liked to see that sky again, though.
It was a shamefully long time after that when he finally thought, What will happen to the man I was supposed to meet? The full cost of his failure began to sketch itself to his vivid and well-stocked imagination, and he cursed some dozens of histories he’d read that suggested exactly how, in gruesome detail. Five gods. What will happen to General Arisaydia? It wasn’t just Pen who might pay for this fiasco with his life.
But not Des. That, at least.
And another small blessing: “No sun blisters, anyway!” He giggled. But his mouth was too dry, and then he choked.
Pen, said Des uneasily. You’re starting to fray, down here. If you can’t hold yourself together, you won’t be able to hold me. Hold!
How? He laid his aching head upon his knees, reminded of why people trapped in unbearable pain sought death at their own hands.
Des said reluctantly at last, Pray to your god. He’s the only other one in here besides us.
Pen considered this. For a long time. Then whispered, “Lord Bastard, Fifth and White,” and faltered. He held up his hands in the black, fingers spread wide in supplication. “Master of all disasters out of season.” Indeed. “I lay this day as an offering upon your altar. If it please you, take it from me.”
That wasn’t any of the prayers he’d been taught in seminary, almost a decade ago, but it felt right. And perhaps it was heard, for at length he slept.
A long time, it seemed to Penric, after he had been dropped into this hole, the stone scraped back, orange light flickered, and a covered pail was lowered on a hook. At the guard’s shouted instructions, he rolled over and freed the hook, which rose upward as he could not. The cover was a crude round tray holding a small loaf of bread, only a day stale, a sticky block of dried fruit, mostly figs, and a pale square that Des assured him was pressed dried fish. He lifted the tray to reveal not a slops bucket, but a generous couple of gallons of fresh water and a wooden cup.
Pen drank greedily, then slowed, wondered how long it would need to last.
“I’d guess this to be a daily ration,” Des opined. “Drink up anyway. You need it to heal.”
He managed part of the bread and some shreds of the fruit, but after one bite couldn’t face the fish, for all that Des urged it on him with the concern of an anxious mother, insisting it was common food, and strengthening. It smelled. And had bones in it, albeit as fine as stiff hairs. And, and bits.
So he was fed, watered, and left alone which, for the first three days, was all he wanted. The cell’s diameter gave him room to stretch out fully on the floor, even as it made impossible the old mountaineer’s trick for shinnying up a crevice by bracing one’s back and feet against opposite sides.
On the fourth day, he sat up and began to tend to his own wounds in more detail. Des could speed the healing of his abused skull and counteract infection, but it was definitely uphill magic, and she needed somewhere to dump the disorder. Normally there were enough minor vermin around to make this a trivial task, but once she’d eliminated the spiders and a few other shadowy things with far too many legs that rippled across the walls, others were slow to arrive. On the fifth day, they enjoyed a boon when a rat came up the central floor drain that doubled as Pen’s slops bucket. Des fairly pounced on it. Pen was afraid he would then be trapped in this bottle with rotting rat reek, but Des, compelled to unusual frugality by their circumstances, not only creamed off the death but reduced the corpse to dust within an hour, and he used the dregs of his daily water to rinse it back down the drain.
For lack of other pastimes, he found himself crouching at this sink hoping for more rats like a winter fisherman back home beside his hole sawn in the lake ice. He missed a flask of warming spirits to keep him company, or friends to trade lies with, but at least there was Des. He studied the drain, which was no wider than his palm, drilled down through solid stone. Maybe he was not that desperate yet…
“Not ever,” snorted Des. “Even you are not skinny enough to fit down that pipe. And it only goes to a borehole scarcely bigger.”
“Empties into the sea, I expect.” The smells and occasional drafts that came from it were more estuarial than cloacal. But no, probably not the drain. Widening a passageway through it by chaos magic could be a month’s tedious labor, as lengthy and tiring a process as tunneling with the spoon that he did not have. Up was another unfavorable option. He could work apart the arch around the port, at some risk of dropping large stones on his head and making guard-attracting noises, but levitating up there would still be impossible. Waiting to be hauled up out of the dungeon for interrogation by his captors still seemed his best and easiest chance at escape, certainly until his fractures mended. He was perilously hot with their healing, masking the chill of any incipient prison fever.
He shouted questions upward during the daily visit from his keepers to swap out his rations pail, but they were never answered.
Three rats later, his skull, though still tender, had stopped aching in a way that made him want to cut his own head off. He dutifully managed to choke down the disgusting fish and not gag it up after. Des beguiled some time by telling him stories from her many past lives with her former riders, all women, or rather, ten women, a lioness, and a wild mare. The mare had been the point at which the demon first escaped into the world from the Bastard’s hell, or repository of chaos, or whatever it was. There had been many theological arguments back at seminary as to the exact nature of the place, which Pen thought Des should be able to settle as she was the only one who’d been there, but she’d claimed to have no memory of it because its very disorder did not allow memory to form. All her personality—personalities—was, or were, something she had acquired afterward, imprinted on her by the endurance of matter.
Her tales were good, but in this lightless, soundless place, began to take on a hallucinatory quality. He’d usually experienced them as words, if inside his own head, and an impression of animated gestures like a storyteller in a marketplace. Now he began to see flickering pictures. It was much like those disturbing nights when he dreamed not his own dreams, but hers.
The more disturbing as it became harder and harder to tell day from night in here, or dreams from waking.