As the ground came up to meet him, Dennis thought, I’ve got to stop meeting people like this.
8. “Eurekaarrgh”
1
It was getting monotonous, this waking up not knowing where you were, feeling like something dragged in from a refuse heap.
He could tell without even opening his eyes that he was back in the dungeon again. Sharp bits of straw stabbed his naked back, thwarted only where bandages covered his worst cuts and bruises.
Still, someone in authority apparently had decided to keep him alive for the present. That was something.
Strangely, in spite of the greater severity of his welts—and they seemed really to have worked him over this time— Dennis felt better than he had on the other occasions when he had been beaten up here on Tatir This time, at least, he had gotten his own licks in. The brief memory of Baron Kremer tipping over like a fallen tree seemed to lessen the pain.
He shivered and sat up slowly, wincing, and gingerly examined himself until he was fairly certain nothing had been permanently damaged.
Yet, he reminded himself.
From somewhere down the dank hallway he heard a faint “thunking” sound… like someone chopping something with a sharp object. Perhaps the headsman was practicing his ax.
Time passed, measurable only by his sparse meals, by his thoughts, and by punctuated screams from some poor devil down the hall.
Dennis passed some of the time wondering at his bandages, which seemed never to need changing. They breathed easily, remained clean, and were comfortable to wear. Of course, he realized, they were probably well practiced. No doubt the baron gave his people free emergency care during peacetime so the medicinal supplies would be up to par when war came along. Here in the castle the dispensary would have dressings hundreds of years old.
It was a peculiar thought.
Bandages were among the things he would bring home to Earth if he ever got the chance—not gemstone tools, or works of art that would presumably only decay once they were released from the field of the Practice Effect, but things whose properties could be analyzed and then duplicated by the making wizards of Earth.
In the dark hours he made lists of things to take back. To help pass the time, he rehearsed the report he would give to the dubious folks back home.
He concluded that even if he ever did escape this place, and somehow managed to fix the zievatron and get home, he had better bring back some pretty convincing novelties. Otherwise nobody would ever believe him.
They fed him a thin gruel at infrequent intervals. Dennis lost all track of time. For a day or so the screams from down the hall ceased. Then some unfortunate new victim seemed to have been recruited to practice certain specialized tools.
Dennis tried to do anomaly calculations in his head. He brought up long-untended memories of home. He listened hard for anything to relieve the monotony.
Once he heard the jailers talking excitedly out in the corridor.
“… first here, then high in the tower, then out in the yard, and now down here again! And nobody knows what it is!”
“It’s a monster is what ’tis!” the other retorted. “It’s the spawn of that great demon who struck down the Baron four nights ago. I tell you it’s unlucky to keep wizards and L’Toff under a roof! I can’t wait ’til the Baron’s recovered and makes a judgment…”
The voices passed down the hallway.
Dennis got up to grab the bars in his door’s tiny window. “Guard!” he called. “Guard! Did you say Kremer lives?”
The jailers had answered none of his questions before, but this pair sounded different. Perhaps they had just been rotated down to the dungeon.
They looked at each other in the flickering light from a wall cresset. One of the jailers shrugged and gave Dennis a snaggle-toothed grin. “Yeah, Wizard. No thanks to that demon you conjured up to drop rocks on his Lordship. Baron Kremer should be up an’ aroun’ in a few days. Til then Lord Hern’s in charge.”
Dennis nodded. So. He had figured that these cavemen never even invented the sling. It was a miracle they had bows and arrows. Probably no one but Kremer himself knew exactly what Dennis had done.
Everyone else quite correctly blamed him for the Baron’s condition, but for the wrong reason, thinking he had managed it by metaphysical means. They wouldn’t do anything further to him until Kremer was ready to choose an appropriate fate himself.
Dennis didn’t doubt it would include a protracted visit to the technicians down the hall.
He scratched his stubble and asked the guards if he could have a razor in order to shave.
They grinned at each other as if they had read his mind. “Naw, Wizard,” the snaggle-toothed one said, grinning. “Even Lord Hern don’t forgive incomp’tents who let a prisoner take the easy way out.”
The other jailer smiled. ‘Tell ya’ what, though. We’ll letcha have some brandy"—he said the word with hushed reverence— “if you’ll promise to keep us safe from those devil-spawned critters you’ve let loose around here. I got a friend on the still detail, an’ he sneaks me some.” He held up a flask that sloshed.
Dennis shrugged as the man poured a cupful and passed it between the bars. He hadn’t the slightest idea what the fellow was talking about. Devil-spawned? Critters? It sounded like a load of superstitious nonsense.
He took a swallow of the wonderfully vile liquor. After the fire had settled warmly into his stomach, he asked the guards about Arth.
They told him the little thief had been placed in charge of the distillery. Dennis suspected Arth had actually bribed the guard to pass the entire flask on to him.
Another swallow of the horrible stuff made him cough. But he swore he’d make it up to Arth someday.
The jailers knew nothing of Linnora. Mention of the L’Toff Princess made them nervous. They made small warding motions with their hands and claimed pressing duties elsewhere.
Dennis sighed and returned to the straw pallet. At least the spot where he lay was getting slowly more comfortable. It had to.
He tried practicing a small stone into a chisel, to pry apart the stones of his cell. But he knew he was really only practicing the dungeon itself. The pebble wasn’t anywhere near as good at chiseling as the wall was at being a wall. No doubt it was an old story on this world. Unless he came up with something unusual, a prisoner was stalemated.
2
He awakened suddenly from a dream about monsters.
There was a feathery touch of vague horror to the images that clung to Dennis’s mind as he blinked in the darkness… scrabbling shapes and sharp, ominous claws. For a long time after waking, he felt filled with a heavy lethargy.
In the dark silence he thought he heard something. Then, for a time, he dismissed the faint scratching sound as a lingering remnant of his nightmare.
Then it changed and became a soft hissing.
Dennis shook his head to free it of mental cobwebs. He turned in the gloom and then blinked. A fiery spark had appeared at one corner of the door to his cell, a bright speck in the almost total blackness.
The spark climbed slowly, leaving a glowing line behind it, until it reached a height of about two feet. Then the hot glow jogged right. Faint light from the hallway shone through the charred trail the flame left behind.
Dennis backed away, suddenly remembering what the jailers had said about “devil-spawned critters” loose in the castle. They had blamed him, but Dennis knew he had nothing to do with demons. Something was cutting its way into the cell, and it was not of his liking!