Incarceron

by Catherine Fisher

  "It proves nothing!" Attia turned so suddenly, Claudia jerked back. The girl's fists were clenched, her bruised face white. "Stop tormenting him! If you loved him you'd stop! Can't you see it hurts him and he can't remember? You don't really care if it's him, if he's Giles. All you want is not to marry this Caspar!"

  In the shocked silence Finn breathed hard. Keiro pushed

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  him onto the bench; his knees gave way and he sat quickly.

  Claudia was pale. She took a step back, but her eyes never left Attia. Then she said, "Actually that's not true. I want the real King. The true Heir, even if he is of the Havaarna. And I want to get you out of that place. All of you."

  Jared came close and crouched. "Are you all right?"

  Finn nodded. His mind was fogged; he rubbed his face with his hands.

  "He gets like this," Keiro said. "And worse."

  "It may be the treatment they gave him." The Sapient's dark eyes met Gildas's. "They must have given him drugs to make him forget. Have you tried any antidotes. Master, any therapies?

  "Our medicines are limited," Gildas growled. "I use powdered tumentine and a decoction of poppy. And once harestooth, but it made him sick."

  Jared looked politely appalled. Claudia knew by his face that such things were so primitive the Sapienti here had all but forgotten them. All at once she felt furious with frustration; she wanted to reach in and drag Finn out, to break down the invisible barrier. But that was no use, so she made herself say calmly, "I've decided what to do. I'm coming in. Through the gate."

  "How does that help us?" Keiro asked, watching Finn.

  It was Jared who answered. "I've made a careful study of the Key. From what I can see, our ability to contact each other is changing. The image is becoming clearer and more focused.

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  This may be because Claudia and I have come to Court; we're nearer to you, and the Key may register this. It may help you navigate toward the gate."

  "I thought there were maps." Keiro eyed Claudia. "The Princess here said so."

  Claudia sighed, impatient. "I lied."

  She looked straight at him; his blue eyes were sharp as ice.

  "But," Jared went on hastily, "there are problems. There is a strange ... discontinuity that puzzles me. The Key takes too long to show us each other; each time it seems to be adjusting some physical or temporal parameter ... as if our worlds are somehow misaligned ..."

  Keiro looked scornful; Finn knew he thought all this was a waste of time. From the bench he lifted his head and said quietly, "But you don't think, Master, do you, that Incarceron is another world? That it floats free in space, far from Earth."

  Jared stared. Then he said gently, "No, I don't. A fascinating theory."

  "Who told you that?" Claudia snapped.

  "It doesn't matter." Unsteadily, Finn stood. He looked at Claudia. "In this Court of yours, there's a lake, isn't there? Where we floated lanterns with candles inside?"

  The poppies around her were red tissue in the sun. "Yes," she said.

  "And on my birthday cake, tiny silver balls." Claudia was so still, she could hardly breathe.

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  And then as he stared at her in unbearable tension her eyes went wide; she turned, yelled, "Jared! Turn it off! Turn it off!"

  And in the dark room of spheres instantly there was only darkness, and a strange tilted giddiness, and a scent of roses.

  Keiro reached his right hand carefully into the empty space where the holo-image had been. Sparks spat; he jerked back, swearing.

  "Something scared them," Attia breathed. Gildas frowned. "Not something. Someone."

  SHE HAD smelled him. A sweet, unmistakable perfume that she realized now had been there for a long time, that she had known but ignored, caught up in the tension of the moment. Now, as she faced the blazing border of lavender and delphiniums and roses, she felt Jared behind her rise slowly to his feet, heard his small breath of dismay as he registered it too. "Come out," she said icily.

  He was behind the rose arch. He stepped from it reluctantly, the peach silk of his suit soft as petals.

  For a moment none of them spoke.

  Then Evian smiled an embarrassed smile.

  "How much did you hear?" Claudia demanded, hands on hips.

  He took out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his face. "Quite too much, I'm afraid, my dear."

  "Stop the act." She was furious.

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  He glanced at Jared and then, curiously at the Key. "That is an amazing device. If we had had any idea it existed, we would have moved heaven and earth to find it."

  She hissed out a breath of anger and turned away. To her back he said shrewdly, "You know what it means, if that boy is really Giles."

  She didn't answer.

  "It means that we have a figurehead for our coup. More than that, a righteous cause. As you so thrillingly said, the true Heir. I gather this was the information you promised me?"

  "Yes." She turned and saw his fascinated gaze, and it chilled her as it had before. "But listen, Evian. We're doing this my way. First of all I'm going through that gate."

  "Not alone."

  "No," Jared said swiftly. "With me."

  She shot him a startled look. "Master ..."

  "Together, Claudia. Or not at all."

  A trumpet rang out in the Palace. She glanced toward the building in annoyance. "All right. But there's no need for assassinations, don't you see? If the people understand that Giles is alive, if we show him to them, surely the Queen will never be able to deny it..."

  Her voice trailed off as she looked at them. Jared was playing unhappily with a small white flower from the grass; rubbing its perfume between his fingers. He wouldn't look at her. Evian did, but his small eyes were almost pitying. "Claudia,"

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  he said, "are you such an innocent still?" He came over to her, no taller than she was, sweating in the warm sun. "The people will never see Giles. She would not let that happen. You and he would be killed mercilessly, like the old man I spoke of. Jared too, and anyone else they thought knew about the plot."

  She folded her arms, feeling her face go hot. She felt humiliated, like a small child being told off kindly, to make it worse. Because, of course, he was right.

  "They are the ones who must be killed." Evian's voice was low and hard. "They must be removed. We are decided on that. And we are ready to act."

  She stared up at him. "No."

  "Yes. Very soon now."

  Jared dropped the flower and turned his head. He looked very pale. "You must at least wait until after the wedding."

  "The wedding is in two days. As soon as it's over we will move. It's best if neither of you know any details ..." He raised a hand to forestall her. "Please, Claudia, don't even ask me. If it should go wrong, if you are questioned, this way you can give nothing away. You won't know the time, or the place, or the method. You have no idea who the Steel Wolves are. You cannot be blamed."

  By no one but herself, she thought bitterly. Caspar was a greedy little tyrant and would grow worse. The Queen a silky murderess. They would always enforce Protocol.

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  They would never change. And yet she didn't want their blood on her hands.

  The trumpet rang out again, urgent. "I have to go," she said. "The Queen is hunting and I have to be there."

  Evian nodded and turned away, but before he had taken two steps she forced the words out. "Wait. One thing."

  The peach silk shimmered. A butterfly fluttered at his shoulder, curious.

  "My father. What about my father?"

  In the beautiful blue sky a flutter of pigeons rose from one of the Palace's thousand towers. Evian did not turn and his voice was so quiet she barely heard it. "He is dangerous. He is implicated."

  "Don't hurt him."

  "Claudia ..."

  "Don't." She clenched her fists. "He is not to be killed. Promise me now. Swear. Or I go to the Queen this minute and tell her everyth
ing."

  That made him turn, startled. "You wouldn't..."

  "You don't know me."

  Iron-cold she faced him. Only her stubbornness would keep a knife out of her father's heart. She knew he was her enemy, her subtle foe, her cold opponent over the chessboard. But he was still her father.

  Evian flashed a glance at Jared, then breathed out, a long uneasy breath. "Very well."

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  "Swear." She put her hand out and grabbed his and held it tight; it was hot and clammy. "With Jared as witness."

  Reluctant, he let her raise their clasped fingers. Jared put his delicate hand on top.

  "I swear. As I am a lord of the Realm and a devotee of the Nine-Fingered One." Lord Evian's small gray eyes were pale in the sunlight. "The Warden of Incarceron will not be killed."

  She nodded. "Thank you."

  They watched him detach his hand and walk away, wiping his fingers fastidiously with a silk handkerchief, disappearing down the greenness of the lime walk.

  As soon as he was gone, Claudia sat on the grass and clutched her knees under the blue dress. "Oh, Master. What a mess."

  Jared seemed barely to be listening. He shifted restlessly about, as if he was stiff. Then he stopped so abruptly, she thought a bee had stung him. "Who's the Nine-Fingered One?"

  "What?"

  "That was what Evian said." He turned, and there was a tension in his dark eyes she knew well, like the burning obsessions that sometimes kept him at his experiments for days and nights. "Have you ever heard of such a cult before?"

  Brutally, she shrugged. "No. And I don't have time to care. Listen. Tonight, after the banquet, the Queen holds a meeting of her Council, a great Synod, to prepare the deeds of the wedding and the succession. They'll be there, Caspar and the

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  Warden and his secretary and anyone of importance. And they won't be able to leave."

  "Not you?"

  She shrugged. "Who am I, Master? A pawn on the board." She laughed, the laugh she knew he hated, hard and bitter. "So that's when we go into Incarceron. And this time we take no chances."

  Jared nodded mildly. His face had fallen, but the edge of excitement still lingered.

  "I'm glad you said we, Claudia," he murmured.

  She looked up. "I'm afraid for you," she said simply. "Whatever happens."

  He nodded. "That makes two of us." They were silent a moment. "The Queen will be waiting."

  But she made no move to go, and when he looked at her, her face was taut and distant. "That girl Attia. She was jealous. She was jealous of me."

  "Yes. They may be close, Finn and his friends."

  Claudia shrugged. She stood and brushed pollen from her dress. "Well. We'll soon find out."

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  24

  ***

  Do you seek the key to Incarceron?

  Look inside yourself. It has always been hidden there.

  -- The Mirror of Dreams to Sapphique

  ***

  The Sapient's tower was odd, Finn thought. He and Keiro and Attia had taken the man at his word, and spent the day exploring all over it, and there were things about it that puzzled them.

  "The food, for instance." Keiro picked a small green fruit from the bowl and sniffed it cautiously. "This is grown, but where? We re miles in the sky and there's no way down. Don't tell me he takes his silver ship to market."

  They knew there was no way down because the basement rooms where the beds were had been built on the bare rock. Small stalagmites rose up between the furniture, icicles of calcium hung from the ceiling, sediments laid down over the century and a half of the Prison's life, though Finn had thought it took longer, millennia even, for such things to form.

  As he wandered behind Attia from kitchen to storeroom to observatory he let himself slip for a moment into a daydream of fascinating horror; that Incarceron was indeed a world, ancient

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  and alive, that he was a microscopic creature inside it, tiny as a bacterium, and that Claudia too was here, that even Sapphique was a dream dreamed by Prisoners who could not face the dread of there being no Escape.

  "And then the books!" Keiro thrust the door to the library open and gazed at them all in disgust. "Who needs so many books? Who could ever be bothered to read them?"

  Finn moved past him. Keiro could hardly read his own name, and was proud of it. He had once gotten into a fight about some supposed insult about him scribbled on a wall by one of Jormanric's bullies; Keiro had come out of the fight alive but badly beaten. Finn remembered being unable to tell him that the graffiti was harmless, even grudgingly admiring.

  Finn could read. He had no idea who taught him, but he could read even better than Gildas, who muttered the words half aloud and had only seen about a dozen books in his life. The Sapient was here now, sitting at the desk in the library's heart, his knobbly hands turning the pages of a great codex bound in leather, his eyes close to the handwritten text.

  Around him, on shelves that reached to the shadowy ceiling, Blaize's library was immense, towers of heavy volumes all numbered in gold and bound in green and maroon.

  Gildas raised his head. They had expected him to be in awe, but his voice was acid. "Books? There are no books here, boy."

  Keiro snorted. "Your eyes are worse than you think."

  Impatiently, the old man shook his head. "These are useless.

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  Look at them. Names, numbers. They tell us nothing."

  Attia took a book from the nearest shelf and opened it, and Finn looked over her shoulder. It was thick with dust, and the edges of the pages were eaten away, so dry they fell into flakes. On the page was a list of names:

  MARCION

  MASCUS

  MASCUS ATTOR

  MATTHEUS PRIME

  MATTHEUS UMRA

  each followed by a number. A long, eight-digit number. "Prisoners?" Finn said.

  "Apparently. Lists of names. Volumes of them. For every Wing, every Level, going back centuries."

  Beside each name was a small square image of a face. Attia touched one and almost dropped the book. Finn gave a gasp, which brought Keiro over to the table, kneeling up behind them.

  "Well, well," he said.

  For each name a series of images blinked rapidly over the page, appearing and disappearing in quick succession, until Attia touched one with her small fingertip and it froze, opening into a full-length picture of a hunchbacked man in a yellow coat that filled the page. When she let go, the pictures rippled again, hundreds of images of the same man, in a street, traveling, talking by a fire, asleep, his whole life catalogued there, his

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  body growing gradually older before their eyes, bending, on a stick now, begging, leprous with some terrible sickness. And then nothing.

  Finn said quietly, "The Eyes. They must record as well as watch."

  "So how has this Blaize got all this?" Keiro raised his head in sudden shock. "Do you think I'm in here?" Without waiting for an answer he crossed to the shelf marked found a long ladder, and set it against the books, climbing easily up. He began to take the books out and shove them back, impatient.

  Attia had crossed to the A section and Gildas was busy reading, so Finn found the letter F and looked for himself.

  FIMENON

  FIMMA

  FIMMIA

  FIMOS NEPOS

  FINARA

  His fingers shook as he turned the page, tracing down until he found it. FINN

  He stared at it. There were sixteen Finns, but his was the last. The number was there, in all its black familiarity, the number that had been on his overalls in the cell, that he had learned by heart. Next to it was a small image, two triangles superimposed, one of them inverted. A star. Feeling almost sick with anxiety, he touched it.

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  Images rippled. Himself crawling in the white tunnel. He stopped it instantly.

  There he was, looking younger, cleaner, his face a mask of fear and tearful determination. It
hurt him to look at it. He tried to turn back, but this was the first image; there was nothing before.

  Nothing.

  His heart thudded. He scrolled on slowly.

  He and Keiro. Images of the Comitatus. Himself fighting, eating, sleeping. Once, laughing. Growing, changing. Losing something. He almost thought he could see it going, the ever-changing images showing himself becoming someone harder, watchful, scowling, always there in the background of Keiro's quarrels and schemes. One image showed him in a fit, and he gazed in horrified disgust at his curled, convulsed body, his contorted face. Quickly he let the pictures run on, almost too fast to see, until he jabbed down and held them still.

  The ambush.

  He saw himself frozen, half out of the chains, grabbing the Maestra's arm. She must have just realized what a trap she was in; her face was caught in a strange, hurt, almost bruised look, her smile already stiffening.

  If there was more he didn't want to see it.

  He slapped the book shut, the sound loud in the silent room, making Gildas grunt and Attia look over.

  "Find anything?" she said.

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  He shrugged. "Nothing I didn't know. What about you?" He noticed she had left the A section and was up among the C's. "Why there?"

  "What Blaize said about no Outside. I thought I'd look up Claudia."

  He went cold. "And?"

  She was holding the book, a big green volume. She closed it quickly and turned, shoving it back into the shelf. "Nothing. He's wrong. She's not in Incarceron."

  There was something subdued about her voice, but before he could think about it Keiro's hiss of wrath jerked him around.

  "He's got everything about me in here! Everything!"

  Finn knew that Keiro had been orphaned as a baby and had grown up in the gang of filthy urchins that always seemed to be hanging around the Comitatus; warriors' by-blows, children of women they'd killed, kids who nobody knew. It would have been a tooth-and-nail struggle to eat and survive and keep a face as unmarked as Keiro's in that ferocious rabble. Maybe that was why his oathbrother looked so alarmed. He too closed the book with a clap.

  "Forget your petty histories." Gildas looked up, his sharp face lit. "Come and read a real book. This is the journal of one Lord Calliston, the one they called the Steel Wolf. He is said to have been the first Prisoner." He turned a page. "It's all here, the Coming of the Sapienti, the first convicts, the establishment of the New Order. They seem to have been relatively