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few, and they spoke to the Prison in those days as they spoke to each other."
Now he did sound awed.
They crowded around and saw that the book was smaller than the others and the text truly handwritten, with some scratchy pen. Gildas tapped the page. "The girl was right. They set the Prison up as a place to dump all their problems, but there was a definite hope of creating a perfect society. According to this we should have all been serene philosophers long ago. Look here."
He read aloud, in his rasping voice.
"Everything was prepared for, every eventuality covered. We have nutritious food, free education, medical care better than Outside, now that the Protocol rules there. We have the discipline of the Prison, that invisible being that watches and punishes and rules.
"And yet.
"Things decay. Dissident groups are forming; territory is disputed. Marriages and feuds develop. Already two Sapienti have led their followers away to live in isolation, claiming they fear the murderers and thieves will never change, that a man has been killed, a child attacked. Last week two men came to blows over a woman. The Prison intervened. Since then neither of them has been seen.
"I believe they are dead and that Incarceron has integrated them into its systems. There was no provision for the death penalty, but the Prison is in charge now. It is thinking for itself"
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In the silence Keiro said, "Did they really think it would work?"
After a moment Gildas turned the page. The whisper was loud in the stillness. "It seems so. He is not clear about what went wrong. Perhaps some unplanned element entered and tipped the balance, by just a remark, a small act, so that the flaw in their perfect ecosystem gradually grew and destroyed it. Perhaps Incarceron itself malfunctioned, became a tyrant-- that certainly happened, but was it cause or effect? And then there's this."
He pointed out the words as he read them, and Finn, leaning forward, saw that they were underlined, the page grubby, as if someone else had fingered them over and over.
"... or is it that man contains within himself the seeds of evil? That even if he is placed in a paradise perfectly formed for him he will poison it, slowly, with his own jealousies and desires? I fear it may be that we blame the Prison for our own corruption. And I do not except myself, for I too am one who has killed and looked only to my own gain."
In the vast silent room only motes of dust fell through the slant of light from the roof.
Gildas closed the book. He looked up at Finn and his face was gray. "We shouldn't stay here," he said heavily. "This is a place where dust gathers and doubt enters the heart. We should go, Finn. This is not a refuge. It's a trap."
A footstep in dust made them look up. Blaize stood on
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the gallery that circled the skylight, gazing down at them, his hands tight on the rail.
"You need rest," he said calmly. "Besides, there is no way down from here. Until I decide to take you."
***
CLAUDIA HAD been meticulous; scanners pre-placed in all the cellars, holo-images of herself and Jared sleeping peacefully in their beds, a hefty bribe to the under-steward to learn the duration of the debate, the number of clauses in the marriage treaty, the time it would all take.
Finally she had seen Evian and told him to argue about anything. As long as her father remained in the Great Chamber until well past midnight.
Slipping between the casks and barrels in her dark clothes, she felt like a shadow released from the endless banquet upstairs, the polite banter, the Queen's red-lipped cloying intimacies, the way she clutched at Claudia's hand and held it so tightly, thrilling herself with how they would be so happy, the palaces they would build, the hunts, the dances, the dresses. Caspar had glowered at her, drinking too much wine and escaping as soon as he could to meet some serving girl. And her father, grave and poised in his black frockcoat and gleaming boots, had caught her eye once down the long table, a swift glance between the candles and flowers.
Did he guess she had some plan?
There was no time to fret now. As she ducked under a snag
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of cobweb she straightened up into a tall figure and nearly screamed with shock.
He grabbed her. "Sorry, Claudia."
Jared wore dark clothes too. She glared at him. "God, you gave me a fright! Have you got everything?"
"Yes." He was pale, his eyes dark-shadowed.
"Your medication?"
"Everything." He forced a wan smile. "Anyone would think I was the pupil here."
She smiled back, wanting to cheer him. "It will be all right. We have to look, Master. We have to see Inside."
He nodded. "Hurry then."
She led him through the vaulted halls. Tonight the bricks seemed damper than before, the exhalations of the salted walls a fetid air that clouded their breathing.
The gate seemed higher, and as she came near to it, Claudia saw that the chains were back across, each metal link thicker than her arm. But it was the snails that made her shiver: fat, large creatures, their silvery trails crisscrossing the condensation on the metal as if they had bred down here for centuries.
"Yuck." She pulled one off; it came away with a soft plop and she threw it down. "This is it. He put a combination into the lock."
The Havaarna eagle spread wide wings. In the globe it held were seven small circular hollows; she was about to touch them when Jared caught her fingers.
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"No! If the wrong combination goes in, alarms will go off. Or worse, we may be trapped. This must be done carefully, Claudia"
He pulled out the small scanner and began, very gently, to take readings and adjust them, crouching among the rusted chains.
Impatient, she went back, checked the cellars, returned.
"Hurry, Master."
'T can't hurry this." He was absorbed, his fingers moving gently.
After long minutes she was almost sick with impatience. She took the Key out, looked at it behind his back. "Do you think ...?"
"Wait, Claudia, lm almost certain of the first number."
It could take hours. There was a disc on the door; it gleamed greenish bronze, slightly brighter than the surrounding metal. Over his head, she reached out and slid it aside.
A keyhole.
Shaped like the crystal, hexagonal.
She reached out and fitted the Key into it.
Instantly it leaped out of her fingers.
With a great crack that made her screech and made Jared jump back in terror, the Key turned by itself. Chains crashed. Rust fell. The gate shuddered ajar.
Scrambling up, Jared was frantically checking all the alarms; he gasped, "Claudia, that was so stupid!" but she didn't care,
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she was laughing because it was open, the gate, the Prison. She had unlocked Incarceron.
The last chain slid.
The cellars rang with echoes.
Jared waited until every last whisper of noise was stilled.
"Well?" she said.
"No one coming. Everything up there is normal." He wiped sweat from his forehead with one hand. "We must be too far down for them to hear. More than we deserve, Claudia."
She shrugged. "I deserve to find Finn. And he deserves to be free."
They stared at the dark slit, waiting. She half expected a crowd of Prisoners to burst through.
But nothing happened, so she stepped forward and opened the gate.
And looked Inside.
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25
***
I remember a story of a girl in Paradise who ate an apple once Some wise Sapient
gave it to her. Because of it she saw things differently. What had seemed gold coins were dead leaves. Rich clothes were rags of cobweb. And she saw there was a wall around the world, with a locked gate.
I am growing weak. The others are all dead. I have finished the key but no longer
dare to use it.
--Lord
Calliston's Diary
***
It was impossible. She stood frozen, felt hope shatter inside her. She had expected dark corridors, a maze of cells, stone passageways running with rats and damp. Not this.
Behind its oddly tilted entrance the white room was a perfect copy of her father's study. Its machines hummed efficiently, its single desk and chair stood uncluttered in the strip of light from the ceiling.
She let out a breath of despair. "It's exactly the same!"
Jared was scanning carefully. "The Warden is a man of
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meticulous tastes." He lowered the device and she saw from his face he was as stunned as she was. "Claudia, now the gate is open, I can tell you that there is no Prison below us, no underground labyrinth. This room is all there is."
Appalled, she shook her head. Then she stepped in.
Immediately she felt the same effect as before; that peculiar blurring and clicking, the floor seeming to even out under her feet, the walls to grow straighten Even the air seemed different in the room, cooler and drier, not the damp exhalations of the cellars.
Turning back she watched Jared.
"Now that was very strange," he said. "That was a spatial shift. As I said before, as if the room and the cellar are not quite ... adjacent."
He stepped in after her, and she saw how his dark eyes widened. But she was almost too sick with disappointment to care.
"Why make a copy of his study here?" She stalked over and kicked the desk angrily. "It looks no more used than the other one!
Jared stared around, fascinated. "Is it exactly the same?"
"In every single detail." She leaned on the desk and said the password Incarceron and the drawer rolled open. Inside, as she'd expected, was a crystal Key the image of their own. "He keeps a Key at home and one here. But the Prison is somewhere else."
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The bitterness in her voice made Jared give her a worried glance and then come to her side. Quietly he said, "Don't torment yourself..."
"I told Finn I'd found the way in!" Disgusted, she turned and hugged her arms around herself. "And what do we do now? Tomorrow I'll be married to Caspar or executed for treason."
"Or you'll be Queen," he said.
She stared at him. "Or Queen. After a bloodbath that will haunt me forever."
She walked away and glared at the humming silver machines. Behind her, she heard Jared say, "Well, at least..."
He stopped.
When he didn't finish the sentence she turned, saw him bent over the open drawer with the Key inside. Slowly he straightened and glanced at her sideways. When he spoke his voice was hoarse with excitement.
"It isn't a copy. It's the same room."
She stared.
"Look, Claudia. Come and look."
The Key. It lay in the black velvet and he reached out and touched it, and to her utter shock she saw how his fingers passed through the image onto the soft nap below. It was a holo-image.
The holo-image she had put there.
She stepped back, looked around. Then quickly she dived and scrabbled around the legs of the chair. "If it's the same,
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there was a ..." She gasped, then jumped up with a mutter of bafflement. She held a very tiny scrap of metal. "This was lying just there before! But how? How can it be the same room? That was at home. Miles away." She stared at the open door, the dim cellars of the Palace beyond.
Jared seemed to have forgotten his fear. His narrow face was lit; he took the metal scrap and looked at it closely, then slipped a small bag from his pocket and sealed the object inside. He aimed the scanner at the chair. "There's something strange just here. The spatial rift seems stronger." He frowned in frustration. "Ah, if only we had better instruments, Claudia! If only the Sapienti had not been so hampered by Protocol all these years!
"Have you noticed," she said, "how the chair is fixed to the floor?"
She hadn't seen it before, but there were metal clasps to keep it in position. She walked around it. "And why here? It's too far from the desk. There's just that light above."
They stared up at it. A narrow, faintly blue light, falling on the chair and nothing else. Barely bright enough to read by.
A cold thought chilled her. "Master ... this is not a place of torture, is it?"
He didn't answer at first, then she was grateful for his measured tone. "I doubt it. There are no restraints, no signs of violence. Do you think your father would need to use such devices?"
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She didn't want to answer that. Instead she said, "We've seen all we can. Let's get out." It was past midnight. Her whole body was listening for footsteps.
He nodded, reluctant. "And yet this room holds secrets, Claudia, that I would give worlds to discover. Maybe it is a gateway. Maybe we are not seeing what is here."
"Jared. That's enough."
She crossed to the gate and stepped through. The cellars were still and gloomy. All the alarms were safely in place. And yet she was suddenly shaken by terrors; that dark figures were watching, that Fax was there, that her father stood in the shadows where she had stood, that the bronze gate would slam suddenly and trap Jared inside. She dragged him out so quickly, he almost fell.
Taking the Key, she tugged it out of the keyhole, watched how instantly the gate folded back with barely a clang, the chains linking themselves into place, the snails continuing their relentless slimy progress over the worn wings of the eagle.
She was silent as she followed the Sapient's dark figure through the stacked barrels, silenced by disappointment and bitter failure. What would Finn think of her now?
How Keiro would laugh in scorn and that girl would smirk. And for herself, a day of freedom left.
At the top of the stairs she stopped Jared with a tug of his sleeve. "We should go back separately, Master. We shouldn't be seen together."
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He nodded, and in the dark she thought he flushed a little. "You go first. Take care."
She didn't move, her voice bleak. "It's all over, isn't it? Everything's finished. Finn will rot in that place forever."
Jared leaned back on the pillar and took a deep breath. "Don't despair, Claudia. Incarceron is near. I'm sure of that." He took something out of his pocket, and to her surprise she saw it was the tiny flake of metal from the floor in its plastic wrapping.
"What is that?"
"I have no idea. I'll use the Sapients' tower here and try a few investigations tomorrow."
"Lucky you." She turned sourly. "AH I have to try is my wedding dress."
She was gone before he could answer, slipping up the stairs into the candlelit corridors, the midnight silences and whispers of the Palace.
Jared turned the tiny scrap between his fingertips.
He pushed back his damp hair and breathed out slowly.
For a moment the strangeness of the room had made him forget the pain. Now it came back, worse, as if to punish him.
***
FOR HOURS they saw nothing of Blaize. He seemed to vanish, but Finn had no idea where.
"There's a part of this tower we haven't found yet," Keiro muttered, "and that's the way out." He sprawled on the bed
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looking up at the white ceiling. "And that guff about the books---I don't believe a word of it."
Blaize had laughed off their questions about the Prison records. "This tower was empty and possibly made only for these books to be stored here," he had said, passing bread across the table that evening. "I found the place and liked it, so I moved in. I assure you I have no idea how the images come to be stored here, and neither the time nor inclination to look at them."
"But you feel safe here," Gildas muttered.
"I am safe. No one can reach me. I removed all the Eyes, and the Beetles can't get in. Of course, Incarceron has many-ways of watching and I'm certainly under observation, as my images appear in the book like everyone else's. But not at the moment, though, because of the strange power of your Key.
At the moment we are all invisible." He had smiled then, rubbing the scabs on his chin. "Now, if I had a device like that, I could learn much from it. I suppose you wouldn't consider parting with it?"
"He wants it." Keiro sat up now, quickly. "You saw how he looked, when Gildas laughed at him? There was a coldness in his face then, a flicker of something. He wants the Key."
Finn sat on the floor, knees up. "He'll never get it."
"Where is it?"
"Safe, brother." He tapped his coat.
"Good." Keiro lounged back. "And keep your sword with you. This scabby Sapient makes me uneasy. I don't like him."
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"Attia says we're his prisoners."
"That little bitch." But Keiro's remark was preoccupied; as Finn watched, he rolled off the bed and stood, snatching a quick look at himself in the faceted window glass. "But don't fret, brother. Keiro has a plan."
He tugged his coat on and went out, peering cautiously around the door.
Alone, Finn pulled the Key out and looked at it. Attia was asleep and Gildas was restlessly searching the books, as he seemed to have been doing since they came here. Quietly Finn closed the door and put his back against it. Then he activated the Key.
It lit quickly.
He saw a chamber strewn with clothes, and there was light there that made his eyes sting ; sunlight through a window. Beyond the circle of the Key was a large, heavy wooden bed, hangings, a wall of carved panels. Then, breathless, Claudia.
"You have to give me more warning! They could have seen you!
"Who?" he asked.
"The maids, the seamstress. For God's sake, Finn!"
She was red-faced, her hair tousled. He realized she was wearing a white dress, the bodice elaborate with pearls and lace. A wedding dress.
For a moment he had no idea what to say. Then she sat next to him, crouched on the rush-strewn floor. "We failed.
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We opened the gate, but it didn't lead to Incarceron, Finn. It was all a stupid mistake. All I found was my father's study." She sounded disgusted with herself.
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