The Ruined City (5 page)

The supply of immediately available blades was exhausted, but there were other weapons to be had. The Plaza of Proclamation was kept indifferently clean, these days. Refuse and rubble lay strewn everywhere. Stones, brickbats, and broken bottles came readily to hand. In an instant, these missiles were pelting the Sishmindris.

The flying rocks did their work, and the doleful outcry subsided to a feeble croaking, inaudible above the fierce shouts of the citizens. The uproar drew the attention of the guards stationed at the nearest Cityheart entrance, and a pair of them approached to investigate. Thrusting their way to the center of the human clump, they caught the gang of Faerlonnish nationals
vandalizing the governor’s property, and drew their swords at once.

“Clear off, you lot,” one of the Taerleezis bellowed, making himself audible above the din. “Out of here, or face charges.”

Vociferous protest followed, but the overlapping, sometimes incoherent attempts at justification fell on deaf ears. The Taerleezi guards saw only a pair of valuable Sishmindris, clothed in the livery of the governor’s household, fallen victim to senseless Faerlonnish violence. The wretched creatures—glistening with blue-green fluid, cut, bruised, swollen, and maimed almost beyond recognition—still stirred feebly, but appeared unsalvageable. Even as the disgusted guards looked on, a rock flew from the crowd to strike a greenish head. The Sishmindri quivered and went still.

It was outright mutiny, and it had to be quelled. Turning to the nearest citizen, a stout and threadbare laborer, one of the guards dealt a sweeping backhanded blow to the face with the flat of his sword. The victim dropped to the pavement. He had not flung the most recent rock, but he was identifiable by his manifest poverty as Faerlonnish, and for the moment that was enough.

Protest roared; stones and bottles flew at Sishmindris and Taerleezis alike. One of the soldiers went down, bleeding from a head wound, at sight of which his companion thrust steel through the nearest set of Faerlonnish vitals, whose owner was young and female. At that instant the gathering of outraged citizens coalesced into a mob. A dark roar thundered through the Plaza of Proclamation, and set the Cityheart windows to rattling. A boiling human tide overwhelmed the two Taerleezi guards, and the pent rage of decades found murderous release. Moments later the guards at the Cityheart entrance were likewise annihilated. Still seething, the tide flung itself against the heavy door, which was locked and barred.

For some minutes longer they remained there, some screaming threats and imprecations at the Taerleezi governor immured within, some flinging rocks and refuse. It ended
when a sizable squadron of helmeted Taerleezi soldiers rounded the edge of the Cityheart and marched into the Plaza of Proclamation. The wiser among the Faerlonnish rioters immediately retired. The foolishly heroic stood their ground.

The Taerleezis issued neither warning nor command to disperse. Advancing smartly in close formation, they cut down all in their path. Attempted resistance was inexpert and ineffectual. Within moments, some ten or twelve Faerlonnish lay dead on the pavement. The rest fled for their lives.

It was not to be supposed that so flagrant an affront to Taerleezi authority would go unpunished. Two hours later Taerleezi troops in full battle regalia descended upon Rookery Grove, a neighborhood of modest homes and shops adjacent to the Plaza of Proclamation. Taken by surprise, the residents offered little opposition as the invaders burst in, taking tenement after tenement by storm, and herding male Faerlonnish above the age of ten out into the street, where all were systematically butchered and decapitated. Some two hundred bodies were left in the street for the locals to dispose of as they saw fit. The heads were mounted on poles and arrayed in neat rows at the southern end of the Plaza of Proclamation, to serve as a reminder to all.

The term “solitary confinement” was a misnomer, perhaps applied ironically. There was nothing in the least solitary about Vinz Corvestri’s confinement. He shared his tiny space with a host of companions: some four-legged, some six-legged, some indeterminate of appendages, all of them unwelcome. He could hear them rustling and clicking, too near at hand. Sometimes their movement stirred the damp straw on which he lay, and sometimes they scampered or scuttled across his body, the tickling contact always causing him to jerk, no matter how often he felt it. Sometimes they stung, and then he hit at them. Usually they escaped, but when they didn’t, and the small creatures exploded juicily against his skin, the sensation was worse than a sting.

He never saw them, however. He never saw much of anything, for the darkness was intense. Once upon a time, not so very long ago—or perhaps it had been long ago, it was impossible to judge the passage of time while buried alive—he had possessed the ability to draw upon the vast potential power of the epiatmosphere as a source of light, whenever he wanted. Or, when he preferred, he had been able to achieve a temporary capacity to see clearly without benefit of illumination. He could not do these things now, however. For uncountable days and nights he had been denied use of the powders, draughts, lozenges, and assorted inhalations upon whose properties he customarily relied for mental enhancement. And even had he enjoyed access to such substances, he could never have achieved the inner clarity and focus so essential to the practice of the arcane art; not here in this black hole of a dungeon, with its rats and its crawling things, its reeking atmosphere
faintly tinged with smoke, its puddles, weeping walls, and its deep chill. Not here, where he was perpetually hungry and cold, often sleepless, and always afraid. In this place he was helpless as any ordinary prisoner.

He was not ordinary, however. He was a magnifico of Faerlonne, head of one of the Six Houses, and as such a personage of some consequence, even to his loutish Taerleezi captors. Or so he often told himself; and not without some reason, for what else could explain the clearly preferential treatment he had received? Despite his extreme wretchedness, he was fortunate by comparison with most others, for—unlike those anonymous fellow captives—he had not been tortured; at least, not technically. He had been subjected to countless miseries and humiliations. He had suffered through hours of threatening, abusive interrogation. He had been bullied, screamed at, reviled and mocked, deprived of sleep, slapped, shoved, spat upon and urinated upon—but he had never been whipped, beaten, or maimed. He was achingly hungry, but not literally starving; chilled to the bone, but not literally freezing. He had once been conducted to the prison’s deepest levels, there to behold the instruments of torture—but those instruments had never touched his flesh. Bad as it was, it might have been far worse.

He wondered whether anyone had dared to intercede on his behalf; his family, perhaps. During the term of his incarceration he had received neither visitors nor messages from the outside world, and had expected none such to be permitted. Sitting there alone in the dark silence of his living tomb, however, he could not help but wonder whether he had not already been forgotten by all who once knew him. Perhaps he had received no greeting or word of encouragement because none had been sent. His wife, Sonnetia—would she spare so much as a moment’s thought for him? Or had she quite dismissed him from her mind? Well, perhaps she had, but one thing was certain—young Vinzille would not. His son’s affection was deep and true. On this point, if few others, Vinz was genuinely secure.

For a while he sat very still, head filled with recollections of the happy times he had shared with Vinzille in the workroom. But the miseries and terrors
would
worm their way back into his thoughts, despite all his efforts to bar them. His teeth would chatter, his hands shake, no matter how he tried to still them. And then all of it flew from his mind as the cell door opened and the light from the corridor burst in upon him.

The onslaught took him by surprise. He had heard no tap of approaching footsteps. The stone walls and heavy cell door muffled nearly all external sound, thus intensifying the prisoner’s sense of utter isolation; by design, no doubt. The lantern light was moderate, but dazzling to Vinz’s unaccustomed vision. He shut his eyes and turned his face away.

A thud of boots on the floor, and then their hands were on him, hauling him to his feet. He offered no resistance. Nor did he ask them where they were taking him. He already knew.

Out of the cell, along the damp corridor, and up a narrow flight of stairs they steered him, Vinz still blinking against the light, mute and passive in the hands of the two guards, the iron fetters that confined his ankles clanking with every short step. Another few feet, then they thrust him through a familiar door into a small, grim room.

The place was bare as always save for a table laden with notebooks, ledgers, and writing materials. At the table sat three men. Their names and titles were unknown to Vinz, but he recognized their faces, having confronted them often enough. The one on the left, with his long visage, long upper lip, and drooping eyelids, looked like a sleepy horse, but that appearance was misleading; he was very much awake. The one on the right—chubby, elderly, silver-haired, and pink-cheeked—might have been taken for a benevolent grandfather, but for his palely depthless, blind-looking stare. And the one in the middle—burly, black-thatched, and red-faced—glowered like some hard-drinking village bully. All three of them wore the shoulder sashes and brass insignia of minor Taerleezi officials.

Vinz knew what to expect, and the meeting held no surprises.
The interrogation began, consisting of the same questions that he had heard and deflected so many times: Who were his accomplices among the criminals of the Faerlonnish resistance—what names could he supply? Who were the leaders—what names? What were the plans? What were the targets? Had the Magnifico Corvestri taken part in the attack upon the Palace Bonevvi, as the evidence clearly suggested? Could he identify his fellow culprits, thereby diminishing his own guilt? What about the attack upon the Oats Street Armory? The magnifico had been there, along with—who else? What names? What
NAMES
?

The voices hammered.

In earlier interviews he had striven to defend himself, answering all questions put to him at earnest length. He had been stalwart in his denials, composed and lucid in his explanations. He had even ventured to hope that his eloquence might favorably impress the interrogators.

Such hopes were vain. They had not troubled to contradict or refute him. Indeed, he might have thought them deaf, had not the horse-faced individual periodically shifted his somnolent gaze from the prisoner’s face to the notebook on the table before him, wherein he scribbled the occasional observation. They had always permitted Vinz to speak uninterrupted. Then, when he was done, they had simply repeated their questions.

He had attempted to parry with questions of his own concerning the nature of the charges and evidence against him, but these drew no response. Thereafter he had lapsed into silence and apparent vacancy.

His silence in no wise discouraged the Taerleezis. Their queries and accusations flew like arrows, but presently a new string of syllables added itself to the bombardment:
Your silence, denying nothing, equates to a confession of guilt
.

In better times, the arrant injustice would have infuriated him. Now it hardly seemed to matter. He said nothing, and the threats proliferated along with the indignities, yet his skin
remained whole, for the most part. The voices were beating at his ears, and he performed an internal operation that he had lately developed—mental removal. The discipline of a lifetime was not wholly lost, even here, and he achieved success with relative ease. The grim chamber and its noisy tenants faded from his consciousness, and he walked green meadows in the company of his son.

A sharp slap across the face recalled Vinz to confused reality. The hands of the guards were on him again, and they were not exactly hurting him, but they were busy, and it took him a moment to understand what they were doing. The sudden chill of the atmosphere upon his exposed flesh cleared his mind. They were tearing his garments away, using the points of their daggers where the fabric refused to yield. Within seconds they stripped him bare of all save iron fetters, and one of the interrogators was intoning piously:
Decency is a privilege that you have failed to earn
. Then someone threw a bucket of cold water over him, and the guards were guffawing.

This latest humiliation was indifferently effective. Vinz was conscious of physical discomfort underscoring dull misery. He seemed to have lost the capacity to feel much else. Apparently the Taerleezis recognized his present imperviousness, for the interview concluded abruptly, and the guards removed him.

Down again to the lower level of the prison known as the Witch. Back into his tomb of a cell. The door clanged shut, and the darkness swallowed him.

He sat very still, eyes wide in the dark. Soon he started to shiver. That, in addition to the chattering of his teeth, recalled him to a sense of his own damp nudity. He was very cold, but unhurt, and once again he wondered at the comparative restraint of his captors. But then, he reminded himself, they had no real need of a confession to justify his conviction and execution. That packet of letters they had discovered in his home on the evening of his arrest furnished all the proof the law required.