Cleery took no chances. He had the guards shackle Ardan to Hanse, and their feet linked on short chains so they couldn't possibly run. Then, the Maître stepped forward and snapped his fingers. One of the young pages brought him a bag, from which he took two thick robes, like those worn by inhabitants of some desert worlds. They had deep hoods.
Once the captives had them on, neither could possibly have been recognized, unless an observer were to stand face to face with them and look directly into the shadowy recesses of the hoods. Cleery was definitely no fool, Ardan decided.
The Maître had, of course, ordered that both men be disarmed immediately. Cleery himself had run his hands down the arms, sides, and legs of his prisoners to make doubly sure. Then the guards led them down and down beneath the huge palace, into the dank corridor that led into Lucien's genuine, old Earth-type dungeons. Even the steps they descended had been artificially shaped to hint at millennia of wear.
The bottommost corridor ran crosswise. Rats scampered away from the handlight of the guards. Drips sounded, echoing hollowly through the maze of tunnels leading from the main artery. The smell was not pleasant, and it got worse as they moved deeper into the complex.
"Here we are," said Cleery, mock cheerful. "The Royal suite. Designed, no doubt, for Pretenders. Suitable enough. We'll even leave you together to grieve over the failure of your plot."
Ardan felt sure at this moment that Cleery was part of the conspiracy. How else could the false Hanse have gotten into the Palace and into the royal quarters so easily without being detected?
"Cleery, I never really knew you," said Hanse quietly. And now that I'm beginning to, it's certainly not a pleasure."
The Maître smiled, his fat lips stretched obscenely over his square white teeth. "I think that you will now have time to plan all sorts of vengeful schemes. And that is all you will have—Time. It can break the hardest will, I am told. It will be interesting to put the theory to the test"
Hanse did not reply. They watched the heavy door slam to. Bars were slid across from the outside. Locks snapped, the harsh echoes resounding crazily.
A torch had been left in the corridor, and its dim flickers gave only the barest illumination to the cell, the light making its way through some slits in the stone wall. Ardan examined those at once, but they were obviously for the purpose of placing food and water within reach of prisoners, without taking the chance of opening a door.
"No hope there," he said, testing the solidity of the stonework. "I think it must be cut out of the bedrock the house sits on."
"Damn Lucien!" said Hanse. "That's exactly what it is. I've read his journals. He was very proud of his authentic dungeons, from which no prisoner would ever escape." He shivered in the dank, chill air. "Cold in here, isn't it? At least we can be thankful for these havy robes."
Ardan nodded. With his mind racing frantically to think of some way out of an impossible situation, he hadn't even noticed the cold till now. He shivered, too, hoping the torch would hold out for a while. He didn't like to think about how it would be when they also were faced with total darkness. Ardan huddled against Hanse in a corner. Evidendy, no prisoner had ever been kept in the place, for there wasn't even straw to cushion the hardness of the stone floor.
At first, Ardan and Hanse had expected that their captors would kill them immediately. As long as they remained alive, the two of them were a grave threat to the plot to replace Hanse Davion with an imposter.
Instead, the days passed, empty, dark, cold, and interminable. Hanse and Ardan no longer knew whether it was night or day, though Ardan had pulled the wire from a pocket charm the guards had not removed, and he was using it to scratch out the passage of time in the stone wall. There wasn't much else to do, except think. But when the routine suddenly changed, Ardan would gladly have gone back to the torture of boredom.
One day, several guards came into the cell, seized Hanse roughly, and dragged him away protesting. "Hanse!" Ardan screamed, grasping the bars and pressing his face against them as the footsteps retreated down the corridor. When the silence descended once more, Ardan dropped to the floor, overcome by his sorrow and despair. He was sure Hanse had just gone to his death.
What seemed like hours later, Ardan again heard heavy footsteps approaching down the stone corridor. "My turn now," he thought grimly. But the guards merely opened the cell door, and threw Hanse bodily back into its gloom. Ardan crawled weakly over to his friend, and found him drugged senseless. It was a relief that Hanse was still alive, but what had they done to him?
He did his best to make Hanse comfortable, holding the Prince's head on his lap, and laying his own robe over him for extra warmth. The two of them sat that way for hours, Ardan with eyes closed, his back propped against the damp stone wall. When Hanse mumbled something finally, and stirred as though trying to get up, Ardan restrained him. "Hanse, no...you must rest now and stay warm..."
"Ardan...you..." Hanse murmured. "They took me..." he said with great effort. "Cleery was there...and some others...doctors maybe...Gave me something...an injection..."
"Not now, Hanse," Ardan said. "Later...you can tell me later."
But Hanse was never able to remember anything more than that The guards came back for him frequendy now, and when they returned him hours, even days later, Hanse was usually so drugged or his mind so numbed from exhaustion that he might as well have been. Whatever they did while Hanse was semiconscious, it would take him several days to break out of the mental fog and confusion. Then the guards would come for him once more, and the whole cycle would begin again.
Huddled like an animal in the cavelike damp of the cell, Ardan could never be sure whether Hanse would come back or not. Though Hanse could never remember anything afterward, Ardan was sure their captors were interrogating him, using mental taps and drugs. In spite of the nicks he etched into the wall, Ardan had no idea whether it was day or night or how much time had passed since they had been led down into this dungeon and the horror of their uncertain fate. It was small comfort, but he was beginning to understand what was going on, at least
When he and Hanse had confronted the false Prince, what baffled Ardan was how the imposter could have known so many details about the past...tilings no one but he or Hanse could have known. The betrothal to Melissa, for instance, or the long-ago day when Hanse had almost drowned or the gift he had given the child Ardan one birthday. Now it was starting to make sense. For one thing, the imposter had notknown about the starbird, which was a story that Melissa had told Ardan afterhe had been rescued from Liao hands. While he had lain delirious in that hospital on Stein's Folly, the Liao doctors must have been probing his brain with drugs and mental taps just as they were doing with Hanse now.
Ardan was sure that his captors were systematically probing Hanse Davion's mind for every last memory so that they could transfer it all to their puppet Hanse, and authenticate him beyond the shadow of a doubt. These men were as desperate as they were ambitious, and so Ardan was certain neither he nor Hanse would survive long once they had all they needed.
31
Sep found Jarlik alert but fuming at the delay in getting to the business at hand. "We have to know where Ardan is before we can spring him free or help him escape from Argyle," she said.