CHAPTER THREE
The High Seeker remained motionless, like a hidden viper. After a long while he said, “If you were to ask the other Seekers in this place, I imagine that most of them would answer as Mr. Sobel did, that the greatest weight upon them is the fear that they have caused the death of innocent men and women.”
Elsdon, who always seemed to end up crammed as far as he could into the near corner of the cell, said, “That isn’t your greatest weight?”
“No. Mine is that I may have caused the release of guilty men and women.”
Elsdon gripped his hands together so tightly they hurt. After a time he said, “I suppose that could cause the death of innocents also. I mean, if the criminals are murderers, and they repeat their crimes.”
“That also, of course. But my immediate charge as a Seeker is to assist prisoners, and if I allow them to leave here trapped within the same darkness that brought them here, there is a chance they will never free themselves from that darkness. There are few places in the world that make as much effort to free prisoners from their dark chains as the Eternal Dungeon does.”
“I suppose,” Elsdon said in a soft voice, “that is true for the Seekers as well. So it must be especially hard for a Seeker to fail in breaking the chains of a prisoner, if his own chains were broken here.”
Mr. Smith seemed disinclined to speak for a while. His cool green gaze kept Elsdon pinned to the wall. Finally he said, “Mr. Taylor, it has been many years since I have searched a prisoner who is as difficult as you are.”
Elsdon felt confusion take hold of him. “Sir?”
“I ask you why you failed to leave your father’s household upon your coming of age, and you treat me to a discourse on your father’s dilemmas in finding someone to run his household. I ask you what work you were most skilled at in school, and you tell me about the problems your age-mates had in deciding where to take their skills after school-leaving. I ask you whether you got along well with your schoolmasters, and you outline – at great length – the health troubles each schoolmaster endures. And now, if I understand you correctly, you are seeking to comfort your torturer. Why?”
The final word came as a whiplash. Elsdon jerked back instinctively; his backbone ground into the corner. He said breathlessly, “I was just wondering if you knew . . . That is, if someone is chained in darkness as you say, how does he free himself from that?”
A long silence followed. The High Seeker’s gaze had turned away from Elsdon, as was his custom, and Elsdon was left alone with the small sounds of the prison: angry shouts coming faintly from another cell, and fainter still, the sound of fire behind the translucent wall. He could not hear the guards; he wondered whether Mr. Sobel was watching this conversation, and listening.
Finally Mr. Smith said, in as even a voice as he used at all other times, “When I was quite young, my mother taught me that, if you do mischief, the best way to keep yourself from doing mischief again in the future is to tell someone that you’ve done wrong – a parent, or some other figure of authority – and to ask their help in making whatever reparation you can for your misdeed.”
“And the reparation—” Elsdon was forced to swallow in an attempt to open his tight throat. “What sort of reparation—? That is, if I knew someone who had committed a crime, and he was sorry for it, would the fact that he was sorry count in his favor? Could his reparation be less?”
His green gaze now locked upon Elsdon, the High Seeker said, “It is difficult to discuss this matter in the abstract. But if, for example, someone had murdered a member of his own family, and had done so without provocation from the family member, then I must tell you that I think it’s likely any magistrate would place the death sentence upon him.”
Another silence followed. Elsdon, who had pushed himself as far into the corner as any human being could possibly go, felt sweat cover his skin as though Mr. Smith had been torturing him with a brand. After a long moment, the High Seeker said, “Shall we continue this discussion tomorrow, Mr. Taylor?”
Elsdon shook his head. “No,” he said in a low voice. “Now. I’m ready now to tell you what happened.”
He spoke the final words in a whisper. The High Seeker nodded and glanced toward the door. As though a signal knock had been given, the door opened, and Mr. Sobel walked in. He was carrying a memorandum book and a pencil.
When the door had closed again, and Mr. Sobel was poised with pencil to paper, the High Seeker turned his attention back to his prisoner. Elsdon swallowed, trying to wet his dry mouth, and said, “I don’t know where to begin.”
“I would suggest,” said the High Seeker, “that you begin with your father.”
o—o—o
He was four when his mother died. The death came with no warning other than raised voices, and those were hardly unusual in his family: his mother had a fiery temper and often quarrelled with his father, always racing from the house afterwards in a fury. So Elsdon was not startled out of his play with his baby sister until he heard a scream, followed by a series of loud thumps upon the stairs. When he ran to the foot of the stairway to look, he found his mother lying crumpled there, as his father stared down the stairs with disbelief.
After that, matters changed between himself and his father. He could not remember the first time it happened, but the pattern remained the same forever after: his father would come into his bedroom, speak in a friendly manner to him about his play or other activities of the day, and then, with no change of expression, his father would bind him and beat him.
At first Elsdon assumed that all boys were treated thus by their fathers. Not until he reached school age did he learn that, in the Queendom of Yclau, boys were normally beaten only by their schoolmasters, and then only for dreadful offenses.
Since his father was in all other respects a man who adhered strictly to custom, Elsdon could only conclude that there was something particularly awful about himself that caused his father to punish him. Gradually he came to connect the beatings with the raised voices he had heard on the day of his mother’s death, and with his father’s occasional gentle hints that he possessed too much of his mother in him.
He had been too ashamed of the beatings to speak of them to his age-mates; now his shame deepened. He was grateful that his father always beat him on the bottom, where he could hide the scars from others, and he acquired a body shyness so intense that even the neighborhood healer ceased urging him to disrobe himself of his drawers.
His father was usually careful not to beat him elsewhere on the body. On the few occasions that the belt slipped, his father promptly took Elsdon to the healer. Elsdon always found ways to explain how his injuries had arisen, and he was grateful that his father backed his falsehoods. It was one of many kindnesses his father showed him, for he was a man who demonstrated great patience toward the ill-made son he had begotten.
At first Elsdon hoped that the beatings would drive from him whatever his father feared, but matters only worsened as Elsdon grew older. At times, Elsdon was seized with a fury he could not contain, and once, for no reason that he could understand, he threw a vase at his father. The vase missed, but Elsdon was terrified at what he had done. He was not surprised that his father’s beatings became more frequent after that.
In the final year of his childhood, there was a change. Increasingly, Elsdon was finding that the hardest part of his punishments was not the beating but the binding. His father must have guessed that, for one day the punishment abruptly switched: instead of beating him, his father simply bound and blindfolded him, then left him tied to his bed overnight.
Now he not only had to endure the shame of knowing what he was, but also the shame of soiled bed-linens. He washed them himself, determined that the servants should not know the truth about him. When he began to find it harder and harder to keep from screaming during the bindings, he begged his father to gag him. His father complied.
Elsdon had tried to hide the truth from his sister as well, but she knew. She was utterly unlike her mother, wi
th no fire in her; instead, she had an innocent sweetness about her. She would come to his bedroom after the punishments and hold him while he cried. Once she even came into his room while he was tied and tried to free him. He begged her to leave him be, and she, uncertain as to the reason for the punishments, did as Elsdon wished.
It was a few months after his birthday of manhood that he finally rebelled against his father. His rebellion was not out of any lessening feeling that he deserved the punishments; it was simply that he considered himself too old to endure such punishments at his father’s hands. If punishment was needed, he told his father, then his father should give Elsdon over to the city’s patrol soldiers so that Elsdon could receive his punishment as a man does.
His father said nothing; he simply gave his son a look that sent Elsdon into his sister’s room, where he cried in her arms for several hours.
The next day Elsdon murdered her.
He could not remember afterwards what the cause of the quarrel was, though he was sure that it was nothing more than the type of argument brothers and sisters normally have. He had never had any other type of quarrel with his sister. Yet in the midst of it, the fury came suddenly upon him, and what followed was a dark tumbling of screams and pleas and his sister’s blood upon his hands.
And then it was over, and as Elsdon crouched down beside Sara, desperately searching for signs of life, he knew, finally, what it was that his father had feared about him.
o—o—o
“He knew what I was, you see,” Elsdon said in a broken voice. “Nobody else did. My schoolmasters thought I was bright-witted, and my friends thought I was kind and good. But he knew the truth. I remember once he told me it was a shame I’d inherited my mother’s face. I thought at first he meant only that he wished I wasn’t ugly, but it was more than that. He knew that the ugliness was in my essence. He saw how lack-witted I was, and how cowardly, and how vicious . . . Well, you know all this. I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you.”
The High Seeker did not speak for a time. He had remained motionless during the recitation, his gaze unwavering upon Elsdon’s face, with no change of expression in his eyes to reveal what he thought. Now he said softly, “You appear to have a high opinion of my ability to know you. I erred about you on your first day here, as you’ll recall.”
“No.” Elsdon shook his head vigorously. “You were right then. I didn’t deliberately lie to you, but I did lie. I hate my father – I hate him as much as I must have hated Sara. It’s a mercy he told the soldiers to arrest me, because I probably would have murdered him too, and anyone else who came my way.” He forced himself to raise his head so that his gaze was level with the High Seeker’s. “I’m sorry. I should have told you the truth the first day rather than force you to be patient with me, as my father was.”
Mr. Smith’s eyes were unblinking, like that of a serpent. “As it happens,” he said coolly, “you are right that I know what you are. I have known what you are since the first day. The question is whether you are willing to listen to me if I tell you.”
Elsdon’s hands had been gripping each other. Now he brought his fists up to his lips and bowed his head over them. He nodded, a single jerk of the head.
“Will you believe me?” persisted Mr. Smith.
“Yes,” whispered Elsdon. “You told me the truth about my execution.”
“But will you believe that I have the skill to have discerned your essence during our short time together?”
“You’ve talked to me for nearly half the clock-hours of each day since I arrived,” said Elsdon. “And even if you hadn’t—” He stopped abruptly, and looked over at the third man in the cell.
Mr. Sobel had been perusing the pages he had written while Elsdon was giving his confession. Every now and then he crossed something out and scribbled in a correction. Now he raised his gaze from the papers. His eyes met Elsdon’s; neither man spoke.
“Mr. Sobel,” said the High Seeker, “will you wait outside, please?”
The guard left the cell silently. When the door closed, Elsdon said, “That’s why you ordered Mr. Sobel to talk to me. To find out the truth about me.”
“Is that the observation of a lack-witted man?”
The remark, coming as it did without warning, stung Elsdon as much as his father’s beatings once had. He stared down at the ground, trying to blink away the moisture on the edges of his eyelids.
“You mistake me, Mr. Taylor.” The High Seeker’s voice remained as cool as before. “I am telling you that you should not have believed what your father told you about your lack-wittedness. I do not need to trust your schoolmasters’ reports on this matter; you have demonstrated your intelligence since the moment of your arrival here.”
“But my father knew me—”
“Knew that you were a coward? Mr. Taylor, I can assure you that, if there is any place in the world where cowardice reveals itself, it is in the Eternal Dungeon. You have shown a reasonable fear of what fate awaited you here, nothing more. As for your purported ugliness—”
The change came without warning: a deepening of the creases around the High Seeker’s eyes. The smile was in his voice also as he said, “I don’t think your looks are a matter which need cause you any distress, Mr. Taylor.”
“But I’m vicious,” Elsdon whispered. “Even if the rest of what you say is true, you know I’m a brutal man. I told you what I did to my sister.”
The smile disappeared from Mr. Smith’s eyes. “You are chained by darkness. I will not deny that. You have been in grave danger from your furies, and it is well that you recognize that. But there is more to you than viciousness, as you have demonstrated by giving your confession freely.”
Elsdon shook his head slowly. His hands were still clutching each other beneath his chin. “You would have broken me anyway, with Mr. Sobel’s help—”
“A breaking is about to occur,” Mr. Smith said, “but it is not my breaking. Mr. Taylor, do you know why I sent Mr. Sobel to talk with you?”
“In order to search me so that he could give you the information you needed to break me—”
“No. The Code forbids guards from searching prisoners, nor do I know what conversations passed between you and Mr. Sobel.”
The High Seeker reached out then and placed his palm against the wall, resting himself lightly against the grey stone. He said softly, “We have two basic methods of breaking, Mr. Taylor, and we use variations on these methods with all the prisoners. With prisoners who are uncooperative, we do our best to instill fear in them, making ourselves appear to be an enemy too fearsome to be held out against. Mr. Urman’s report of your attack on Mr. Sobel led me to believe initially that you were such a prisoner; hence my effort to frighten you on the first day.”
“And the cooperative prisoners?” Elsdon asked, his interest quickening despite his worries.
“We try to establish trust with them. We allow them to see that we are not their enemy, and though we cannot save most of the prisoners from the consequences of what they have done, we will endeavor to see that their fates are no worse than the law demands. That is why I sent Mr. Sobel to you, Mr. Taylor: so you would know that there is at least one person in this dungeon you can trust.”
“I trust you.”
Another change came into Mr. Smith’s expression, but this one Elsdon could not read, nor could he read the shift in the High Seeker’s body as Mr. Smith drew himself up rigid. He was as stiff now as he had been on the first day, and on most of the occasions since then.
“If you trust me,” the High Seeker said, his voice turning from coolness to coldness, “do you trust me to tell you the truth about you? For though Mr. Sobel did not report to me his conversations with you, he did give me one piece of information that I felt would be invaluable in your breaking.”
“What information?” Elsdon asked, his throat tightening. He pulled back once more, squeezing into the corner as though he might find refuge there.
“He said that you asked
no questions about your own welfare; you asked only about the welfare of those who were imprisoning you.” The High Seeker’s voice grew soft. “That is the essence of what you are, Mr. Taylor. Your father lied to you. And that is why you hate your father: because he lied to you and abused you most brutally.”
A dark wave, dashing itself upon a solid rock, shatters into a million teardrops and dissolves into the spray rising toward the sun. So it was with Elsdon; he felt his body racked over and over with the pain as he crouched down on the floor, sobbing. The bile was in his mouth again, but he barely noticed it. He was too busy feeling his bones shatter from the impact of the storm-wave.
He did not notice Mr. Smith move toward the door. But when he heard Mr. Sobel quietly speak his name, he leaned to the side with an old instinct for comfort, and in the next moment, Mr. Sobel’s arm hugged his shoulders.
The squeak of door-hinges made him look up finally. Through the spray of his tears, he could see a blurry image of the High Seeker, who was on the point of stepping into the corridor. Mr. Smith paused to look back at him, saying, “I need to visit the Record-keeper about some documentwork. I will see you tomorrow in the magistrates’ court, Mr. Taylor.”
And then he was gone, and Elsdon’s sobs began to batter him again with renewed force.
“Stupid,” he managed to choke out. “I’m so stupid. . . .”
“Don’t say that,” Mr. Sobel replied. “You were only a young child when the beatings began; you couldn’t have been expected to understand what was taking place.”
“Not that. The High Seeker. I made a fool of myself in front of him. You saw how he left as soon as he could. . . .”
“Hush, now.” Mr. Sobel handed Elsdon a handkerchief. “Don’t you think Mr. Smith has seen prisoners break themselves before? Why do you think we call these the breaking cells?” His hand rose up to wipe a tear from Elsdon’s cheek. “It will be all right now.”
“No, it won’t,” Elsdon said between sobs that threatened to choke him. “I killed my sister, and tomorrow I’ll die.”
He expected Mr. Sobel to reply. When the guard didn’t, Elsdon lifted his face toward him. Mr. Sobel’s expression was drawn into tight lines, as though he were straining against a great heaviness.
He said nothing, but continued to hold Elsdon until the dark wave lay shattered upon the rock, and Elsdon could cry no more.
The Eternal Dungeon: a Turn-of-the-Century Toughs omnibus Page 10