The Eternal Dungeon: a Turn-of-the-Century Toughs omnibus

by Dusk Peterson

CHAPTER TWO

  If you’re expecting me to describe what the youth said after my punishment, that’s a sign you’ve never received a hard beating. I was barely conscious when the burly guard finished his work, and it was two weeks before I was able to do more than lie on my stomach and moan.

  I had a couple of visitors during that time. One was a man claiming to be the prison’s healer; if he was, he didn’t know his work, because I got better during the time he treated me. He would have been dismissed as an incompetent at Alleyway Prison, where the healer might as well have held the title of head torturer.

  Of course the other visitor was the youth. He didn’t make any flowery speeches this time about regretful incidents; I guessed he knew that his illusion of soppishness had been penetrated. He spent a lot of time examining my wounds. I wondered whether he was the type of top who gets off on the sight of blood, and I had visions of what that could lead to. He must have been too busy hero-worshipping the green-eyed Seeker, though, because the youth made no attempts at what remained of my virtue – or perhaps I just wasn’t his type. He certainly wasn’t mine.

  I spent the first few days imagining putting my old dagger into his chest, but that sort of dreaming gets wearisome after a while. Instead, I tried to assess my situation. The only plan I’d held for escaping from this place hadn’t worked, and I’d received evidence enough that the scare-tales about the Eternal Dungeon were true. Mind you, the youth had implied that the soppish guard’s tales were true also, but who knew whether to believe the youth’s words. It was quite possible that every word he’d spoken to me was a lie.

  So I watched him, and tried to judge from the tone of his voice how soon he’d stretch me on the rack, and felt myself grow more and more chill as I realized what I was facing. I didn’t think of suicide – if I wanted to die, all I need do was confess to my crime – but I came to understand, as I never had before, some of the reasons why bottoms kill themselves rather than tops.

  I spent a lot of time wishing I had access to silver pot-herb. I told you about those sops who go on and on about joy and beautiful light; well, I’d never believed any bottom who claimed this had happened to him. A mild glow when I was with my mates, exchanging stories about the horrors of the tops, was the most pleasure I’d ever received by natural means. My theory was that the sops had been ingesting silver pot-herb, because, as everyone knows, silver can give you that feeling of floating on air and being surrounded by piercingly beautiful images. I’d only taken it a few times in my life, because it has the nasty side-effect of removing inhibitions. I’d been on silver the night I killed Mendel. Not that I regretted killing him, but if I’d been sober I would have taken greater care to keep from being seen when I left his area of the Parkside district. Now, faced with a Seeker who planned to torture me till I confessed to the real reason I’d been walking around a top district that night, I wished I had some more silver to put me into a haze that would dull at least a bit of the pain. I was beginning to have sweating spells every time the youth entered my cell.

  Then he brought me a xylophone.

  It was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, all etched with gold in the manner of top instruments. And it wasn’t just lovely to the eye: its staves were silver-toned, the notes keyed just right and given the ability to echo each other. I’d heard of xylophones like that but of course had never had my hands on one.

  The youth brought this treasure into my cell and placed it at the head of my bed-shelf, where I was still lying on my stomach. “Your school records said that you used to play this,” he said. “I thought it would help you to pass the time.” And then he left, not waiting for me to respond.

  I spent an hour after that, staring at the thing, trying to figure out what form of torture this was. The best I could figure was that the youth would wait till I was attached to the jewel and then take it away from me. Well, if that was his plan, it wouldn’t work. I’d never let myself get attached to anything but my mates, knowing as I did that the tops were likely to get rid of my belongings at any time. They got rid of my mates too, but I wasn’t prepared to stop caring about my mates for that reason. If I did, I’d end up like one of those business-obsessed tops.

  The xylophone stayed, and after that the youth’s visits changed; he went back to asking about my childhood and my mates and my work. I’d reached the point where I could stand again, and I would watch him from a corner, trying to make sense of him. I’d met worldly, hard men. I’d also met unworldly, soft sops. But believe me or not as you will, this youth was both. I’m not making mock. He was as sincere about giving out xylophones as he was about giving out whiplashes. I didn’t know what to make of him.

  I suppose it was the xylophone that caused me to take a chance. We’d reached the second month now of my imprisonment, and we weren’t getting anywhere; he was still asking me questions about the hell-pit where I’d worked, and I was still refusing to volunteer information about the night of Mendel’s murder. The youth didn’t look as though he was in any hurry to put me on the rack, though I was dead certain he’d yank me into the rack room if I told him the slightest lie. It appeared that his preferred method of breaking prisoners was to stay them out, waiting for the moment when the delay became too much for the prisoners and they began to babble.

  Well, he could wait till he reached retirement age if that was his plan. I wasn’t anywhere near to being broken, but I was certainly getting bored. The youth was spending most of each night with me – he kept strange hours – and we were beginning to cover the same ground over and over. In the remainder of my waking hours I’d play with the little xylophone and dream of the days when my mates and I used to make music together. There are certain songs that bottoms sing . . . Well, tops will never understand the appeal of those songs.

  So I decided to break the stalemate finally. I told the youth, “I can ask you questions, can’t I? You said I had that right when I first arrived.”

  “Certainly,” he said. If he’d become bored by my endless tales of life in the quarry, he wasn’t showing any sign of it. He reminded me of a mate I had who could listen to the same joke twenty times and roar with laughter each time.

  “So where did you go to school? Was it in the Parkside district?”

  Of course it was. He answered my questions readily. As I’d guessed, he’d lived a spoiled childhood; his father owned the city tannery, with hundreds of workers. The youth didn’t seem to want to talk about his family much – he was hiding some sort of secret – but he talked easily about his school and the mate-bonds he’d made there. That surprised me, I’ll admit. I’d known in theory that tops have mates, but since the tops’ minds are on business most of the time, they don’t talk much about their mates. This youth talked quite a lot about his mates, saying he missed them; I gathered his work kept him too busy to go back and visit them. Well, that was more like what I’d expect from a top, but he sure had a lot to say about the boys he’d spent time with and the games they’d played. It made me wonder whether the green-eyed Seeker had paid him any mind, or whether the youth was spending his days lonely now. It would sure explain why he spent so much time talking to me.

  o—o—o

  Looking back on this, I can see that the youth’s candidness was all just his devious way of trying to break me, but I didn’t recognize it at the time; he was good at his work. There came the day – he must have been waiting for this day like a spider waits for its victim – when I took a deep breath and said, “I have another question.”

  He nodded silently. We were standing in our usual spots, me at the far end of the cell and him near the door. I hadn’t liked to come too close to him since that incident with the hard beating. Sop he might be, but he’d given the orders for my lashing in a no-nonsense manner, and I still wondered how long it would be before he made use of the rack.

  I took another deep breath and said, “It’s about a mate of mine who got arrested a few years back. He was searched at a local prison – we heard about it later from
one of his fellow prisoners. It seems my mate tried at first to lie to the men questioning him. That didn’t work; they saw through him. But he knew that if he confessed to the deed, he’d be sent straight off to the hangman – unless maybe he said he was sorry, which he wasn’t. A bunch of us at the quarry had a debate about what he should have done. It didn’t occur to us to ask anyone who’d worked at a prison. What do you think my mate should have done?”

  It took him a while to answer, and I can tell you, the sweat was pouring down my back during the delay. Waiting for the hangman is easy by comparison to waiting for your torturer to decide whether to fit you for the rack strappings.

  Finally he said, “My advice to your friend would have been that he should be honest about his dilemma to the men who were questioning him – that would have been a start. Would you like to sit down, Mr. Little?”

  I narrowed my eyes, trying to read his face; that bloody hood still made it difficult for me to tell what he was thinking. “I thought you had a rule against that.”

  “Not if you permit me to sit down as well.” And he seated himself on my bed-shelf, cool as can be.

  It was a relief, I’ll admit. I suppose they make prisoners in the Eternal Dungeon stand for eight-hour stretches in the hopes of breaking them that way. I’d done sixteen-hour shifts since I was a youth, so that tactic didn’t work on me. Still, sitting down made the conversation a little less stiff. The first thing the youth said that was important – he tended to rattle on about stuff that didn’t matter – was, “Death isn’t the worst thing, you know.”

  Easy for a top to say. I bet he’d never seen a mate die a violent death. But I lost that bet in the next moment when he said, “A friend of mine died when we were at school together. Up till that time, he’d lived a wasted life: he hadn’t put any effort into schoolwork or into any side interests, and it looked as though he was going to spend the rest of his life in idle and useless pursuits. Then one day he saw a little girl in the street who was on the point of being trampled by a passing horse, and he charged in and saved the girl’s life. He was trampled himself. This happened just outside the schoolyard, and a group of us came running and knelt beside him while the healer was being fetched. My friend didn’t live long enough to be treated by the healer, but I remember what he said when he was dying. He said, ‘This is like having a child of my own loins. Even after I die, my good deed will remain alive so that others can remember me.’”

  Pretty fancy speech for a dying boy. I wondered whether the youth had made this tale up. It was all well and good for him to talk about men being remembered for their good deeds – he was a top. I don’t suppose he noticed, when he was in school, that the history books spoke about nothing except the deeds of tops. But I’d noticed; I knew that, when I died, nothing I’d done would be remembered. I wasn’t in any hurry to throw myself under the hooves of horses or let myself be led off to the hangman.

  It was a clever ploy by him, though. He knew my weakness for stories about mate-bonds; he was prepared to use that as a weapon to break me. I didn’t see anything I could do about that except try to be on the alert for his next trap.

  Traps tend to be well hidden in the Eternal Dungeon. The youth had just finished telling the tale about his heroic mate when there was a knock on the cell door, and a guard entered – not one of my guards, but a strange one.

  “The High Seeker sends his apologies for interrupting you, sir,” the guard said to the youth. “He was wondering whether you could join him in his office when you were at a pausing point.”

  The youth offered his thanks for the message – I’d never met a top so infested with politeness – then turned to me and said, “Would you mind if we took a break? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  As though a prisoner ever minds having a break from his torturer. Sometimes I wondered whether the youth really knew what he was doing, or whether he was living with the illusion that he and I were taking part in a pleasant get-together.

  He was gone for a while after that, and I played with the xylophone and thought about the youth’s dead mate. It must be nice to be a top and have people talking about you after you’re dead. Mind you, I was sure that my own mates – who must think I was dead by now – were still talking about me, but that was as far as the matter would go. When they took me off to the hangman, nobody would put up plaques in the Eternal Dungeon saying, “A good man dwelt in this place.” No top would remember that I’d lived.

  The door finally opened again. The youth re-entered, and behind him followed the green-eyed Seeker.

  I knew who the green-eyed Seeker was by now, of course, and this wasn’t a pleasant turn of events. Even that soppish guard at Alleyway Prison had believed every scare-tale told about this man. I suppose my apprehension must have showed on my face, because the green-eyed Seeker said, in a surprisingly soft voice, “Forgive me for interrupting your time with Mr. Taylor, sir. I was wondering whether I might have your permission to stay in the corner here and do some work.”

  He was holding in his right hand a thin board with pieces of paper pinned to it; his left hand held a pen and a sealed inkwell. I gazed narrow-eyed at him, trying to figure out whether this was an elaborate prank, but he didn’t say anything. So after a while I shrugged and said, “It’s your dungeon.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Little.” And with that, the green-eyed Seeker sat down cross-legged in the corner and began to scribble on the paper, for all the world as though he were a lowly record-keeper.

  I tell you, that was the moment at which I began to wonder whether the burly guard had actually bashed me over the head upon our first meeting, and everything since then had been a weird dream. Either that, or I was in the hands of a bunch of madmen. I didn’t much care for the thought of that: something about the way the green-eyed Seeker spoke made me think of racks. A madman who is in charge of a rack . . .

  “Don’t worry,” said the youth quietly. “When he gets absorbed in documentwork, he’s oblivious to everything occurring around him. He won’t listen in on our conversation, provided that we keep our voices low.”

  As though it mattered to me which tops listened to us talking. I’d already figured that the guards were listening from behind the door, waiting for the inevitable moment when they’d be called upon to secretly record my confession. I shrugged, and the youth went back to talking about the glories of death.

  The next few days were just the same. Every day now, the green-eyed Seeker accompanied the youth to the cell, apologized for his intrusion, and sat cross-legged in the corner, spending eight hours doing documentwork. Of course everyone knows that even the highest tops have documentwork to do, but this began to feel a bit creepy to me. Surely a man of his sort had more important things to do with his time?

  My curiosity got the better of me finally, and I asked the youth. He glanced back at the green-eyed Seeker to see whether he was still absorbed with his writing, then said, “The High Seeker and I are working together these days. There’s a rule in our code-book, though, that says a Seeker may not participate in the searching of a prisoner unless he’s there for the start of the search. The High Seeker doesn’t want to waste the three months you and I have had together by making us go back to the start, so he’s waiting for your case to be finished before he and I take up our work.”

  It still sounded odd to me. Why should the green-eyed Seeker do his waiting here rather than somewhere else? Because it was becoming obvious that the top didn’t like this place as a workshop. Every now and then his eyes would glaze over, as though he’d taken silver pot-herb, and when he finally shook himself out of this dreaming spell, he’d look angry, as though he hadn’t intended for it to happen, and he’d scribble furiously on the paper. These glaze-eyed spells were beginning to grow longer and longer, and his fury was correspondingly increasing. I didn’t like the looks of all this. I’d known one top who went completely off his head and started throwing rocks at the quarry workers. If a man like this went off his head, I could just
imagine what he’d do.

  Of course, when I was alone I’d tell myself that I was being silly. The green-eyed Seeker was simply as bored as I was with the cell and was impatient for me to confess my deed so that he could get on with his racking. When I said something like this to the youth, he agreed with me, saying, “Searching prisoners means a lot to the High Seeker. I was with him during a period recently when he was on leave from searching, and it was nerve-racking for him, having to confine his duties to documentwork. He managed to get through that period all right, but this time round . . .”

  My interest pricked up. There haven’t been many times over the years when I’ve empathized with tops, but this was something I was familiar with. There’d been a year after school when I was unable to find work, and that had been the worst time of my life. Having my fiancée break off with me hadn’t helped either. I said, taking a stab, “He’s got personal problems? That’s adding to the pressure?”

  The youth’s gaze had drifted past me to the green-eyed Seeker, who was having one of his glaze-eyed spells. Usually the youth was totally centered upon whatever conversation he and I were holding, but occasionally, since the green-eyed Seeker’s arrival at my cell, I’d sensed that the youth’s mind wasn’t entirely on me. Now he said, rather stiffly, “We shouldn’t be talking about the High Seeker. We were discussing your friend’s problem.”

  I shrugged. If he didn’t want to talk about the green-eyed Seeker, that was fine with me. Truth to tell, that made me admire him a bit. I’d never known a top who was above back-slashing gossip that would cripple a man.

  But I’d already guessed that this top was different from the others.