A snort, and the—pair?—of sandaled feet shuffled away.
A few minutes later, the hose bulged, coughed, and began to disgorge a steady stream of what Pen hoped was water. He tested it by thrusting a hand in the flow. Yes, seawater, not, say, rainwater or sewage. Odd…
“Are they giving our little home a washing and flushing? It certainly needs one.”
His throat constricted strangely as Des replied, “No. That’s not it.”
The water was coming in faster than the drain was leaking it away. Had they blocked the far end of the borehole? Pen splashed his bare feet uncertainly in the growing puddle.
Des continued, “They mean to drown us in our cell. Like a mouse trapped in a bucket. A means of disposing of a prisoner without leaving a mark on his body.”
Why should they care about that? And… “Don’t they know we can swim?”
“For how long?”
“Hours? Days?”
“They have days.”
“If they have days, they could just stop feeding us, and wait.” This suggested… what? Something has changed, out there.
After a few minutes, when the water topped his ankles, Pen said in aggravation, “They never even questioned me.” That had remained his primary hope of escape—let him only be lifted out of this stone bottle, and whatever bindings or tortures or hulking guards were offered, he’d have been through them and gone from this fortress like an egg through a hen. Although he’d planned to endure through the first few questions, to gain some idea of the shape of his situation. “It’s going to take a lot of water to fill this cell.”
“They have the whole sea as a reservoir.”
The fortress was above sea level, although only just, and so was the cell, or high tide would have come up twice a day to flush his wastepipe. The hose-water flowed steadily, not in spurts like a ship’s bilge pump. It was draining from some prefilled tank, perhaps, not being lifted on the spot by men with muscles, or animal power. His mind darted down a tangent, calculating by his hard-won geometry the volume of the cell and the probable rate of flow from above. Thank you, Learned Lurenz, and he never thought he’d remember the sharp tap of that rod on his woolgathering young head with gratitude. “Six hours, maybe? Eight?”
“They won’t fill it to the top, just to over your head. Pen, attend! Should I burst the hose?”
That would certainly delay things, although one of those things seemed to be ‘the inevitable.’ About to assent, he paused.
It was only parlor-magic. When he’d first moved over the mountains a year ago—along with six mule-loads of books and two of clothing—to take up his duties with a new archdivine, he’d found the heat of Adria's humid coastal plains oppressive. Lighting fires with a muted spark was the first destructive magic he’d ever learned, and the easiest. Running the process backward was a much subtler challenge. But with practice, and some thinning out of the vermin in the archdivine’s palace in Lodi, he’d devised a trick for pulling water out of the air into a large hailstone, to drop in his tepid drinks. Prudently, he’d not shown off his novel skill, not wanting to be pressed into work as a magical ice machine for the pleasure of his superior’s many highborn guests.
It hadn’t kept the archdivine’s cousin the duke from purloining him anyway, when he’d wanted a secret envoy with a reputation for cleverness and a native’s command of the Cedonian language to effect… a disaster, it seemed.
Don’t think about that now. You haven’t time.
Had that been Des, or himself? In any case, yes, he did have time. Several hours of it, he guessed.
“How soon do you think they’ll be back to check the cell for drowned mice?”
“No idea.”
If they expected him to flounder in immediate panic, maybe not that long? No controlling that. He leaned his shoulders against the cell’s curving wall and composed himself in patience, forming his plan.
Your plan is to freeze us to death before we can drown? Des asked plaintively.
His lips curled up for the first time in days. “Have you never watched the mountain raftmen in the spring, breaking the winter-cut logs loose from the river ice for their journey downstream?” Both Ruchia, his demon’s immediate prior rider, and Helvia before her had been cantons-born just like Penric. “It’s like a dance.”
“A dance with death! …Have you ever done that?”
“A few springs, in my youth, I helped the local men in the valley of the Greenwell.” Pen reflected on the memory. “Didn’t tell my mother, though.”
Hah. She added grimly after a while, as the water lapped his knees, “This is going to be costly.”
“Yes. But consider the alternative.”
As the seawater reached his thighs, he wondered aloud, “Do you suppose they know I am a sorcerer?”
Des hesitated. “It’s not sure proof, but I’d think if they did, there would be a goat or a sheep or some such tethered at the top.”
His head cocked back in momentary mystification, but then the answer slotted in. Oh. “To contain you safely after you jumped, till they could decide how to dispose of you?”
“It’s an old trick when executing a sorcerer, yes.”
“You wouldn’t like that.”
“No. So kindly stay alive, Penric.”
When the water reached his shoulders, he commenced, starting a thin sheet of ice in the center of the cell. Hand to the wall and pushing, he walked slowly around the perimeter, to keep the water moving and his tiny ice floe centered. His body grew warm with the working of his magic, welcome this time since the Cedonian seawater, while tolerable by Penric’s standards, was still much cooler than a man’s blood, and had been leaching his strength away in increments. Hunger and thirst, too, would start to sap him if he let this drag out.
And Desdemona was growing… he was never sure what to name it. More excitable, perhaps, in these early stages. They were still a long way from the uncontrollable mania that overtook her when they tried to work too much uphill magic too fast, but it seemed discourteous to stress her beyond need.
Also dangerous.
Des muttered an obscene agreement, sign of sorts. “But you realize,” she said in sudden cheer, as he plowed through water past his chest, “with this skill, you need never die of thirst in a desert.”
Pen coughed a seawater-laced laugh. “Not my most pressing concern, here, Des…”
His ice disk grew thicker, descending downward in the middle; he tried to keep the top surface relatively flat. He needed to generate rather more than his own body weight, he guessed. As the water reached his chin, he clambered aboard.
And up…
The hose end was just beyond his reaching fingers. His bare feet on his floe were chilling, and, worse, melting potholes. He attempted a jump, missed, slipped, and ended up splashing into the water, barking his elbow painfully on the wall and being pinched against it by the pitching ice-brick. Brine in his eyes and nose stung, the taste bitter and metallic in his mouth. He came up spitting and heaved himself atop his float once more.
This time, he waited a little, letting the floe and himself settle as much as they could under the ongoing spout of water from above. Tested his balance more carefully. Gauged. Stretched. Coiled. And UP…
One hand closed around the slippery leather, then the next. The jet of water in his face cut off as his hanging weight pulled the hose closed over the edge of the port. One hand over the other, don’t let go, don’t fall back… He flopped an arm over the keystone circle. Then he was out altogether, collapsing across the dungeon’s paved floor. He lay gasping for a moment.