by Alexey Pehov
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that in the final few seconds before death a man’s entire past life flashes in front of his eyes like a galloping herd of Doralissian horses.
It’s a lie. A deliberate, barefaced, godless lie.
I didn’t notice any visions passing through my mind in those few seconds. Who can pay attention to visions when his knees are knocking in sheer terror? The hideous old man had decided to do away with me, there could be no doubt about it.
Either the god of all thieves heard my prayer, or the smell, which I had almost managed to get used to, offended the jailer’s sensitive nose, but either way, he stopped three steps outside the doorway of my refuge. The old man was looking straight at me, and the light cast by his lantern ended just five yards away from my feet. If the monstrous freak had taken just a few more steps forward, the light would have reached me.
I cursed my own careless curiosity. If I’d used my head, I would have pressed myself back against the wall and not just stood there like a statue in the middle of the cell, facing the doorway and hoping that the darkness would protect me from the old man’s eyes.
Those black eyes gazed in my direction without blinking, and my heart pounded thunderously in my chest, louder than a blacksmith’s hammer. I was amazed that the old man couldn’t hear it. He stared for a long time. For a very long time, at least a minute, which felt to me like a year, during which I aged an entire century.
“Damned rats,” the old man wheezed eventually. “Still breeding, the lousy creatures. What do they eat down here, anyway?”
He stuck his spear-bone away somewhere under his rags, shifted the lantern from his left hand to his right, and shuffled off down the corridor toward the stairway. Once he was gone, all I could see was a small piece of the corridor and the door of the cell in which the two female prisoners were languishing. The farther away the old man moved, the dimmer the light in the corridor became.
I didn’t do anything insanely stupid like trying to creep along behind the jailer. Any desire to leave my stinking cell had evaporated the moment I saw his eyes. It would be better to wait and then make my way slowly and quietly to the stairs, even if they did lead into pitch-darkness.
So I stayed where I was.
What if, instead of going up the nearest stairway, I walked to the one that had led me into this corridor and then staggered back to the place where I had come round, and looked for a different way out? I didn’t feel too lazy to cover the immense distance back anymore. I was prepared to do anything at all, up to and including flattening the Mountains of the Dwarves, just as long as I didn’t meet that old man again. The sound of shuffling feet faded away and a deafening silence filled the corridor. But there was still light! The light of the lantern hadn’t completely disappeared. There was a thick, deep twilight in the corridor.…
The old man had stopped before he got to the stairway. But why, darkness devour him?
Keeping my eyes fixed on the doorway, I took a careful step to the left, then another, and another, and another.
And then I almost had a heart attack! On my word of honor, no one had ever managed to frighten me so badly twice in such a short time before.
The monster hadn’t gone away at all. He’d stretched his withered body out on the floor and he was looking into the cell. If I’d stayed in the same spot where I’d been standing only a few seconds earlier, I wouldn’t have noticed him. And if I’d done something even more stupid and moved toward the doorway instead of stepping to the left, I would have come face-to-face with him. And now this monster in human form was staring intently at the very spot where I had just been.
What a cunning devil! How furtively and silently he had come back! He had even duped me. May the darkness drink my blood—it had all been a pretense.
As the old man got up off the floor, his hand dived under his doublet and whipped out his weapon. My back was instantly soaked in cold sweat.
In only two heartbeats the old man leapt into the center of the corridor, stood facing the doorway, and with a movement almost too quick to see, flung the bone at the spot where he thought I was standing. The bone whined as if it were alive as it flew through the air and shot right across the cell, crashing into the far wall with a dull thud and falling to the floor.
My would-be killer grunted in surprise and scratched the back of his head thoughtfully.
“It really is rats,” he said in a rather disappointed voice. “Oh, what a bone I’ve wasted! I’m not sticking my nose into this dump until that smell’s gone.”
Muttering and swearing, he set off in the direction of his lantern. The sound of shuffling feet receded, the corridor turned darker, and soon the impenetrable darkness returned.
I tried to calm the insane pounding of my heart, which was all set to jump right out of my ribcage. I’d been lucky. If I hadn’t moved from my old spot that bone would have been stuck in my chest. The old man had thrown it so quickly that I couldn’t possibly have dodged it; I wouldn’t even have realized what had happened.
I had been saved by good luck, the help of Sagot, and the caprice of fate. My heartfelt thanks went to all of them for allowing me to keep my life.
The old man’s footsteps faded away. My eyes had become so used to the darkness now that I could make out the contours of the doorway. It was very, very quiet all around me, but my fear was still as strong as ever. I was quite simply afraid to move a muscle. What if this was just another cunning trick? I’d already seen how silently he could move. He could easily have pretended to be leaving, taken the lantern away, and could be waiting for me now in the darkness of the corridor!
Waiting … in the darkness of the corridor.…
A cold shudder ran between my shoulder blades and down my back. I distinctly felt the hair on my head move. That cursed old man with his cursed black eyes was as tricky as a dozen orcs and he could quite easily be waiting in ambush, ready to send me on my final walk into the light.
“Stop, Harold, stop! Stop thinking about it, otherwise the fear will seep into your very bones! A few more thoughts like that, and you’ll start to panic. You’re a thief. The calm, calculating master thief known as Shadow Harold. A menace to every rich man’s treasure chest. The Harold that little green goblins with sharp tongues call the Dancer in the Shadows. You’ve never given way to panic while you were working, so don’t give way to it now! Keep calm.… Keep calm.… Calm your breathing now, that’s it.… Breathe in, breathe out.… Well done! Now get out of here, before things get even worse.”
I don’t know if I muttered these words myself or if someone invisible whispered them in my ear, but, with an angry snarl and clatter of teeth, the fear retreated.
Wandering about unarmed in the dark is an absolutely crazy idea, so I held my breath and walked to the back wall of the cell, where the bone had fallen to the floor. I felt around blindly with my feet for a long time, trying to find it. My eyes were watering from the stench and my nose felt as if someone had emptied a wagonload of Garrakian pepper into it, but eventually I found the bone and picked it up.
It was heavy! As I weighed the weapon in my hand, I immediately felt safer. If, Sagot forbid, something went wrong, at least I would have a weapon. I stuck it under my belt and cautiously peeped out of the cell into the corridor.
Nothing and nobody. Black darkness.
I couldn’t see the light of the lantern; the old man must have already reached the stairway. After the stupefying stench of the cell, the stale, musty air of the corridor seemed like refreshing nectar of the gods to me.
I couldn’t get those cursed black eyes out of my mind—I knew they would haunt my nightmares forever. Ah, if only Eel was with me.…
Eel! How could I have forgotten about him!
The veil of forgetfulness fell away and all the previous events of the day flashed through my mind. I remembered what had happened that morning.
First the walk to the mansion and estate of the unknown servant of the Master, then the attack by supporter
s of the Nameless One, our escape on that absurd wagon, and the crash into the wall before we were taken prisoner and I lost consciousness. And then I had come to in the corridors of this underground prison.
But if I was here, then what had they done with the Garrakian? And why had they left me on the floor of the corridor and not put me in a cell, like the other prisoners? And there was another strange thing—I didn’t feel as if I’d gone flying into the wall of that house at full speed.… My arms and legs were all sound, my side wasn’t smarting. I felt as if I could easily sprint a hundred yards with the guards chasing me.
Was I asleep? It didn’t really feel like it. So I had to find Eel and set him free. He had to be somewhere around here. Poking my nose into every cell was pointless—there were too many of them. And I could easily run into serious trouble if I opened the wrong one. I couldn’t tell who might be waiting for me inside. The best idea was to steal into the watch house and take a look at the register of prisoners—there had to be one of those in a prison, even if the warders here were old men with black voids where their eyes ought to be.
I set off along the corridor in the direction of the stairway, but stopped before I had taken ten steps. The women prisoners! How could I have forgotten about them? The women must know what prison this was. And there was no way I could just leave them to the mercy of that cursed old man. Maybe I ought to try to let them out, since the Nameless One’s supporters hadn’t touched the lock picks in my pocket.
A blizzard of contradictory thoughts immediately started swirling around in my head.
“Harold, you’re not a knight on a white horse from some sickly sweet children’s fairy tale,” whispered a voice with a slightly cynical tone. “Take your arms and your legs and scram, get as far away from there as possible! You won’t save the women anyway.”
“Oh, yes I will!” retorted a different voice. “Could you just leave someone to rot in the dark if you had even the ghost of a chance of saving them?”
Oho! So I had not just one, but two inner voices! Plus my own voice, and Valder’s as well! Four in all! It was time to book a room with padded walls in the Hospital of the Ten Martyrs.
“Yes, I could,” the first voice replied. “Wandering around in the dark with two women who are half dead from starvation is sheer lunacy. We’d never make it.”
“Say what you like, but I’m at least going to try to save them.”
“All right,” the first voice said to the second after a pause. “But afterwards don’t say I didn’t warn you. But then … What if we can grab ourselves the ten thousand gold pieces that woman offered the old man? Ten here and fifty from the king when we deliver on the Commission…”
I went back to the cell where the female prisoners were languishing.
Very carefully, so that I wouldn’t make the slightest sound, I put the lock pick with the triangular notch into the keyhole and tried to turn it. It didn’t work. Hmm, let’s try the one with four prongs and the size zero-one-eight groove. Right, now … that was it! Or at least, something in the lock had given a quiet click.
This wasn’t a simple lock, though. It had at least nine springs and two secret ones. Catch one of those by accident and you had to start the job all over again. It must have been made by dwarves. The short folk had done their usual good job, and now it would cost me no end of effort to get the door open. I would have to work on a lock like that for anything from two to fifteen minutes.
“Don’t be in such a hurry. Think. These women weren’t afraid of the old man,” I suddenly heard a voice say inside my head.
I shuddered. It wasn’t one of my own “inner voices,” the sides of a stupid quarrel with myself, it was the voice of Valder, the archmagician who had died several centuries earlier and had now found a refuge inside my hospitable head, which welcomes anyone at all who wants to come in.
“Do you think so?” I thought in fright.
“Yes. Did that old man frighten you?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
“Me, too, although I saw it all with an entirely different vision, but while they were talking the women’s voices didn’t even tremble. So should we really…” Valder’s whisper inside my head stopped for a moment. “Should you really go barging into the spiders’ den?”
“What is this place where I’ve … where we’ve ended up?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.” It was the first time I could recall the magician not knowing something. “Suddenly we were here, that’s all.… As if someone had just dropped us here.…”
“Suddenly we were here? That is, some kind individual just snaps his fingers and bang!—here I am in prison?”
In my mind I wished away the zealous clicker’s fingers, together with the rest of his hand. That would teach him to go sending decent people off to Sagot only knew where!
“What should I do?” I asked Valder, just to be on the safe side.
“It’s your head,” the answer came back. “You decide what you should do.”
“Oh no, I beg your pardon! Thanks to you, it isn’t just my head anymore!” I snapped back at the archmagician. “You climbed into it without asking permission, and now, if you would be so kind, since you have no intention of disappearing from it, advise me. What should I do?”
This time the answer was silence. The damned archmagician had disappeared, just as he had done before. It was as if he didn’t even exist. But I wasn’t going to be fooled like that. Valder only pretended to be dumb until some genuine magical danger threatened my skin. He had already got me out of several really tight corners, and I had no doubt that he would do the same again.
Some people might say that the archmagician and I had a mutually advantageous collaboration going, with Valder saving me from dangerous situations and me offering his soul rest and temporary forgetfulness in a corner of my mind. Well, now, everyone who thinks that’s great can just shut his mouth and keep it shut! They just don’t know what it’s like sharing your own head with another person, even if he did die a long, long time ago and he doesn’t interfere in my business until things are looking really desperate.
It’s a very unpleasant feeling, being able to sense someone else inside yourself and remembering things that never happened in your life. Although I can’t deny that if the archmagician hadn’t been with me, my eyes would have been eaten away by death-worms long ago.
“All right, the darkness take you. You can keep your damn mouth shut until you turn blue!” I swore under my breath.
I had no time to make any decision about what to do, though. I suddenly heard the sound of footsteps approaching from the direction of the stairway. Whoever the newcomer was, he was walking with a firm, confident stride, and walking in my direction. I thought how strange it was that all the jailers were in the mood for wandering the corridors today. For had always taught me to be afraid of people who strolled blithely through places where you ought to tiptoe and avoid attracting any unnecessary attention. If he was so noisy, it meant he wasn’t afraid. If he wasn’t afraid, it meant he could be dangerous. If he could be dangerous, he was someone I ought to avoid if I possibly could.
I had always tried to follow my old teacher’s wise advice, which was why I was still alive and well. I had no intention of doing anything different this time around.
I ducked into the cell with the open doorway. It already felt like home—the stench crept up into my nose, but this time I was able to adjust to it much more quickly than before. I stood where I could see the door of the female prisoners’ cell, and listened to the approaching steps.
The footfalls were only about five yards away from my sanctuary. Three … two …
The newcomer had a dark-lantern and although I could see an orange crescent in the dark, I couldn’t make out anything else around it. There was just the outline of a shadow in the darkness that had scarcely paled at all.
The newcomer stopped and the door gave a pitiful creak. I stared as hard as I could, but it was impossible to see anyth
ing in the pitch-black darkness. All I could do was keep my ears open.
The newcomer walked into the cell and I heard a chain jangle again.
“Hello.”
This time it was the second woman who spoke first.
“The most important thing is always to be polite, is that right, Lafresa?” the unexpected visitor asked in a mocking tone. The moment I heard that voice, I wished I was a thousand leagues away!
Darkness! A h’san’kor and a thousand demons! May they roast the soles of my feet on a frying pan! May I be caught red-handed every time for the rest of my life! Now I was really in trouble.
I recognized him. I had only heard his voice twice before, but both times I really wished I wasn’t there. It was the Master’s faithful servant, the one they called the Messenger.
“And what else do I have, apart from politeness?” The woman’s voice sounded bitter. “Or did you expect me to start begging you to spare my life?”
“Only the Master can spare your life,” the creature replied bleakly. “I am merely the Messenger who carries out his will. And as for not begging me … you will. If I want you to. You certainly will, Lafresa.”
The woman didn’t answer.
“Well, now,” the Messenger chuckled, without waiting for an answer. He sounded quite human now. “I see Blag is keeping you on nothing but water.”
“I’ll rip his heart out!” Leta hissed furiously.
“I don’t think that would do him any harm,” the Messenger chuckled. “You ought to know how to deal with Soulless Ones. It’s simpler to cut Blag’s head off than try to tear out a useless organ.… Although I can offer you some hope—you may soon be able to carry out your threat, my dear Leta. I’ve been thinking more and more often about making you into the same kind of Soulless One as old Blag. Our mutual friend needs an assistant … for various kinds of … pleasures.”