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

by Dusk Peterson

CHAPTER SIX

  Thatcher had been having a bad month. It ought to have been a good month: a month’s reprieve from being searched by the mad High Seeker, a month to savor his triumph. Instead, he had been plagued every night by dreams of the Vovimian girl, only now they were mixed in with dreams of the High Seeker, lying motionless on the rack. What connection there was between those two images, Thatcher could not imagine, other than that both were defeated enemies.

  His only comfort, standing once more in the presence of his Seeker, was that the High Seeker looked as though his month had been worse. He did a good job of hiding it, but Thatcher had seen the man’s hand grip the door tight as he entered, clearly using it for support, and his guard was closer to him than before, as though he feared that his Seeker would collapse. The High Seeker was making his best effort to appear as tranquil as on the first day, but tremors ran through his body every minute or so.

  Thatcher waited for him to speak, but the High Seeker remained silent, and after a while, Thatcher realized the man had nothing to say. What could he say? Thatcher decided to say it for him.

  “You lost,” he stated with a smile.

  The High Seeker did not bother to deny the fact. He simply stood trembling, like a ghost visiting his former life.

  “You’re a fool too.” Thatcher could not resist tightening the rack another notch. “You thought you could make me feel sorry for you – you, the man spawned from the race that has attacked our queendom all these years. You, trying to break the soldier who has been fighting against your kind. And you actually thought I might pity you.” Thatcher laughed.

  He saw the guard’s hands tighten into fists, and then quickly relax. The High Seeker remained dumb.

  “You were a fool on the rack too,” Thatcher taunted. “You were so close to winning there – you know that, don’t you? I would have conceded you the battle if you’d told me that your body would break when I raised you to ten. But you didn’t, you idiot. You went through nine hours of intense pain for nothing. Nothing at all. Fire in your flesh, break-lines in your bones, and it all went to waste because you were too much of a fool to lie to me. You told me the truth—”

  He stopped. The tremors continued upon the High Seeker’s motionless body, like waves dashing themselves fruitlessly against a solid rock. The guard’s gaze remained fixed on his Seeker. He had not yet realized that something had happened.

  It took Thatcher some time to find his voice again. Then he asked hoarsely, “What do you want from me?”

  “Only what you demand of others, Mr. Owen,” the High Seeker replied, as quiet as a hidden viper. “The truth. Can you truly say, in complete honesty, that it was necessary for you to kill those children?”

  The corpse on the ground stirred and raised its head. Before Thatcher could react, it had pinned him to the ground in a death-grip.

  o—o—o

  Seward knew that it could only be his imagination, but he was certain he could hear, from the other end of the dungeon, the soft singing of the guard appointed to the twelve-hour watch in the crematorium.

  Seward turned his attention to the bare back before him. Reaching down, he ran his thumbs firmly along the two sides of the spine, eliciting something close to a sigh from the High Seeker.

  Layle Smith, sitting in his usual chair and bent over his office desk, said for the third time, “This is not part of your duties, Mr. Sobel.”

  “I’d just like to see whether I’ve lost the knack.” This was less than truthful. He had gone to the healer that morning and begged him for information on how he might aid the High Seeker’s recovery.

  Layle Smith no doubt knew this. He knew everything that took place in his dungeon. He remained silent, though. Seward wondered whether he too was thinking of the prayers taking place at the other end of the dungeon.

  After a while, Seward said, “You fooled me as well. Up until the last moment, I was sure that you had undergone torture in an attempt to stir compassion in your prisoner.”

  “It would take greater skill than mine to do that.” The High Seeker’s voice was muffled. His head was hidden in his arms as he bent over the desk; yet even so his hood remained over his face.

  The High Seeker added, “If Mr. Owen had any potential for compassion in him, then surely it would have occurred to him over these long years that his grandmother, in using treacherous methods to try to keep him to her path, had succeeded only in losing that which she valued most. No, Mr. Owen wasn’t seeking to learn compassion. He wanted honesty – he wanted high proof that at least one person in the world was willing to be completely truthful to him.”

  They were silent a while more. The only sound in the office was the faint murmur of guards in the entry hall outside and the flicker of flame in the single oil lamp that was lit. And the singing that filled Seward’s ears.

  “Of course he was right.”

  Seward craned his neck to look to the side of Layle Smith’s head, though this was a useless gesture, since all that could be seen was the black cloth of the hood. “Sir?”

  A light knock rattled the door. The High Seeker straightened up with what sounded like a suppressed moan. Wordlessly, Seward handed him his shirt. Not until the shirt was completely buttoned and tucked into his trousers did the High Seeker say, “Enter.”

  The door opened a space, but nothing entered except a head, which poked inside the office. “I don’t mean to disturb you, sir,” said the visitor, looking between the High Seeker and Seward with faint curiosity.

  “There is no need to apologize, Mr. Urman,” replied the High Seeker in a cool voice. “How are you feeling?”

  Mr. Urman gave a grimace as he opened the door wide enough to slide inside. Leaving the door ajar, he said, “Well, sir, my pain has subsided to daily headaches – the healer says I’m likely to have them for the rest of my life. I told him, if that was the worst legacy I took from a career in the Eternal Dungeon, then I was better off than most of the people who pass through this place.”

  Seward winced. Mr. Urman, he guessed, was not being intentionally cruel. It was unlikely that he yet knew of the aftermath of the attack.

  The High Seeker’s voice remained as level as before. “Then you are ready to return to your duties?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s all I came to tell you. I’ll leave now.” The guard hesitated, but if the High Seeker had any praise for the young man who had come close to sacrificing his life for the Eternal Dungeon, the praise remained unspoken.

  Seward sighed inwardly as the door shut. Out of the many gifts that Layle Smith had been born with, an ability to speak warmly to his fellow humans was not one of them. The High Seeker had undergone torture for a prisoner and would no doubt have risked his life for Mr. Urman. But Mr. Urman did not know this, and so the only impression the guard would carry away from this encounter was that Layle Smith did not value his service. No doubt this would add to the High Seeker’s dark reputation in the dungeon.

  This thought brought others. Seward was still standing in reverie when the High Seeker said, “What is on your mind, Mr. Sobel?”

  Seward jumped in place and felt himself wince again, this time inwardly. It was dangerous to allow the pain he felt sometimes in the High Seeker’s presence to occupy his mind for more than a minute. The High Seeker was too well trained at sensing inner turmoil. “Nothing pertaining to my duties, sir,” he said quickly. This response had always stopped such conversations in the past.

  Once again, it succeeded. The High Seeker turned away and began gathering papers on his desk, saying, “That is how Mr. Owen was right.”

  “Sir?” It took Seward a moment to connect the High Seeker’s remark with what Layle Smith had said before.

  “Mr. Owen was right that I was lying to him. I let him think that Mr. Urman was dead, in order to increase the chance that Mr. Owen would confess to his war crimes. I let Mr. Owen think that my aim was to raise compassion in him, when in fact my aim was to reach that moment when he asked me whether my body would break on
the rack. I knew exactly what path Mr. Owen would follow, and I led him up it with as much deviousness as his grandmother had shown. Our relationship was based on lies.”

  Seward did not know what to say for a moment. No doubt Elsdon Taylor was privileged to hear of Layle Smith’s self-doubts following a searching. Seward himself had never before heard such words from the High Seeker. Had the madness changed him? Or had something about this particular prisoner prised open a door long kept locked?

  At last Seward borrowed words from the Code: “‘Under no circumstances may a Seeker lie to a prisoner. He may, however, mislead the prisoner if to do so would be in the prisoner’s best interests.’”

  “A rule that is open to the worst abuses,” said the High Seeker, not looking up to where Seward stood beside him. “No doubt Mr. Owen’s grandmother also thought she was following her grandson’s best interests by keeping him out of the army. What makes me any different from the grandmother Mr. Owen despised?”

  The difference, Seward thought, was that he considered it unlikely that anyone would be prepared to sacrifice their life for Mr. Owen’s grandmother. But these were not words he could speak aloud to the High Seeker. He felt again the pain that came to him at moments like this.

  “Mr. Sobel.” The High Seeker’s voice was very soft in a familiar way that made Seward’s body tense. “My junior night guard has undergone permanent injury while serving in my dungeon; my body aches as though the High Master of hell has torn it to pieces; my ears are ringing from the sound of the Vovimian ambassador’s curses when I suggested during the trial that a confessed child-murderer be granted the mercy of a prison term; and a prisoner of mine lies in the crematorium, in the form of ashes. In short, I am not in a good temper. Either voice what your thought is, or take a break from duty until you can return your mind to your work.”

  The pain increased. Never, in his years with the High Seeker, had Seward received a reprimand like this. Indeed, he could not remember any time that he had received a reprimand at all – merely mild suggestions on how to improve his performance. He felt his breath heavy within him, as though he stood before the bowl that would hold Mr. Owen’s ashes until the twelve hours were over and he was buried in the communal pit.

  “Mr. Sobel!” The High Seeker’s voice was a whiplash this time.

  Seward resisted the urge to flee from the room; it was too late for that. He said truthfully, “I was wondering what your face looked like, sir.”

  Layle Smith slowly turned his head toward Seward. His eyes were too dim in the lamplight to read. “I was unhooded when I first arrived at the Eternal Dungeon.”

  “That was many years ago, sir.” He thought it best not to add that he had done his best to forget those first, terrifying days of his acquaintance with Layle Smith.

  “You saw my face in the rack room. And also, if I have understood Mr. Taylor’s account correctly, on the day I entered fully into madness.”

  “No, sir. I turned away my gaze both times.”

  The hooded man sitting near him continued to look upon him in the dark light. Seward felt again the desire to flee. Then, to his amazement, he heard a soft chuckle emerge from the hood.

  “Mr. Owen is hardly the first person to ask why I took up this work,” Layle Smith said. “Other than the obvious reasons, I remain a Seeker because I so often learn valuable lessons from my prisoners.” His hand rose to the edge of his face-cloth.

  Seward turned his head swiftly away. His heart was running full pace now. “No, sir,” he said. “That isn’t what I was seeking.”

  “No?” The High Seeker’s voice held mild curiosity. “I seem to recall that, a number of years ago, you offered me the honor of your friendship and were rewarded by a brusque refusal on my part.”

  Seward ventured to turn his head back. The High Seeker was where he had been before, sitting behind his desk with his fingers touching his face-cloth, waiting.

  “That’s so,” Seward said, accepting both the statement and the implicit apology. “But that was before Mr. Taylor entered this dungeon, sir. Having witnessed the two of you together, and having seen the struggles you both undergo to keep your private relationship from interfering with your public duties . . . Well, sir, I reached the conclusion a couple of years ago that I’m better off simply as your guard. It’s easier on both of us that way.”

  After a moment, Layle Smith’s fingers slipped away from the hood. “I see,” he said. “Then I confess I’m confused. I sense that something about our present relations with one another disturbs you. If it is not our lack of friendship, then what is it? What is your goal with me?”

  The words echoed oddly in Seward’s head, as though he had heard them in the far past. He wondered wildly how he had allowed matters to reach this point, beyond anything that the sensible part of him had ever wanted.

  Layle Smith waited. Finally Seward said in a low voice, “I was just wondering, sir . . . whether it mattered. My service to you.”

  The High Seeker’s eyes were black holes in his hood. His body had lost its usual rigidity, as it always did when he was breaking prisoners. After a while he said in a flat voice, “You are wondering this because I did not ask you to assist me during the time I was entering into madness, nor during the time of my healing.”

  Seward said nothing; he could feel that his face must be flush-red by now. It was the act of a child to tug on an elder’s shirt and say, “Do you like me? Do you want me to be here? Would you miss me if I left?” The High Seeker had no doubt thought better of him than that. Seward felt the pain renew in him as he wondered whether this momentary lapse on his part would destroy what trust remained between himself and his workmaster.

  The High Seeker indicated a chair. After a moment, Seward stiffly sat down across from Layle Smith, feeling as though he had come to this office solely for the purpose of receiving a reprimand, rather than to seek Layle Smith’s signature on Seward’s latest report. The High Seeker leaned back slightly in his chair, playing with his pen as though it were a dagger. Finally Layle Smith said, “Do you recall the period when you were first appointed to me?”

  “Of course, sir.” The walls of Seward’s throat seemed to be sticking together; he could barely breathe now.

  “The Codifier asked me whether I wanted you, or whether he should assign another guard to me. He knew that it would not be easy for me, having a shadow – being shadowed day and night, back in those days. . . . I asked him whether he had told you of my past – of as much of my past as anyone in this dungeon knew in those days. He said that he had not considered it necessary.”

  The High Seeker leaned forward. His eyes flamed into light under the lamp, green like a cat’s. “He advised me to read through your records. I did so, and discovered that you had led as pure a life as any man can hope to live. No crimes. No marks for misbehavior in school. Diamond-bright recommendations from every person who had known you for any length of time. You seemed to have lived a life as stainless as Mercy herself. The question arose in my mind – as the Codifier had intended it to arise – of why a man of unblemished character would seek to work in a dungeon filled with the filthiest criminals of Yclau. And why he would volunteer to work with me.”

  There was a pause. After a while, Seward realized that he was expected to answer the question. Feeling, as he rarely did, the chill of the dungeon, he said, “I suppose it was because of the diviner, sir.”

  Through the holes of his hood, Layle Smith raised his eyebrows.

  Seward told the story then, stumbling upon the words, for he had never spoken of this to anyone but his wife. By the time he finished, Layle Smith was staring at the wall beyond him. Without shifting his gaze, the High Seeker said, “Do you believe that the diviner told you the truth?”

  “I’m sure she didn’t, sir.” Then, as Layle Smith’s gaze snapped over to him, Seward added, “Oh, she may have had powers beyond that of ordinary humans. I wouldn’t know. But if she did, I don’t think she used them on me. Her fate-telling was too
general – her words could have applied to anyone who walked into her dwelling. She didn’t waste her powers on someone who had entered her tent in order to mock her. She told me what she thought I wanted to hear, in hopes that I would reward her.”

  “Indeed.” The High Seeker’s voice was unsurprised. No doubt he had already deduced this from Seward’s tale. “You seem to have encountered corruption at an early age, like Mr. Owen – and you could not even tell yourself, as Mr. Owen could have if he had thought the matter through, that you were as capable of such evil as the person who betrayed you.”

  “That’s just it, Mr. Smith.” Seward leaned forward, his voice now earnest. “That was what hurt the most. Until that time I’d thought of myself as you described me before: pure, unblemished in character. I was proud of myself for that. But when I asked myself why it was that my fellow guards mocked the diviner and I did not – why it was that I led a life of straightness while the diviner wound her way down a crooked path – I realized that the answer was the same in both cases. I was lucky. I was born into good circumstances, with good parents who gently taught me right from wrong, and thanks to some inborn gift, I was not drawn into strong temptation to do evil as most other men are. Nothing I had done in my life made me worthy of the praise I had received. I was good, not because I had tried hard to be good, but simply because I found it easy to be good.”

  The High Seeker said nothing. His eyes were now fixed upon Seward, unwavering but for the light that danced over them.

  “I began to look at the people around me,” Seward said, “the people I had thought to be my inferiors because they did evil. I began to realize that they might have spent a far greater portion of their lives fighting against temptation than I had. I was no better than the prisoners I had despised. And I began to realize that the men who were strongly drawn to evil, and who kept themselves from doing evil, were much better than I, who had never been strongly drawn to evil.”

  His voice was hoarse by the end of his speech; he felt drained, as though he had emptied himself of all his blood. He waited.

  The High Seeker’s gaze drifted down to the table, and to the pen before him. He touched it lightly, and then said, without looking up, “I wanted to attack Mr. Owen when I was searching him. You know that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know what I would have done to him if I had attacked him?”

  “I can guess, sir.” He could indeed; he had heard the High Seeker frighten prisoners for two decades, and he could guess how close a link those imaginary threats had with the High Seeker’s own dreamings.

  In the long silence that followed, the sound of singing swelled strong in Seward’s ears. Finally the High Seeker tossed aside the pen and looked up. “I did not ask you to assist me during my illness – though I very much desired your presence – because I feared that I would lose you if you saw the full depths of what I am. That was faithless of me. I ought to have known better, from the clue to your character that your records gave me twenty-one years ago. . . . Mr. Sobel, you do not know of my past.”

  Seward hesitated, unsure of how to contradict the High Seeker’s apparent lapse in memory. “Sir, you revealed three years ago that you once worked in Vovim’s Hidden Dungeon. I know that you would have been trained there to abuse prisoners—”

  “Mr. Sobel,” the High Seeker said softly, “you do not know of my past. You only know the part I made public. Only a few people in this dungeon know the full story of my past: the Codifier, the healer, Mr. Chapman whom I count as friend, and of course Mr. Taylor. Would you like to know what I have not told the rest of the dungeon?”

  Seward felt his throat tighten once more, but he nodded, and for the next hour sat appalled, listening to what the world did not know about Layle Smith. The darkness that everyone thought lay within the High Seeker . . . that dim dreadfulness was only a pale shadow to what the High Seeker truly was. It was as though all the darkness of the world had gathered itself into one place, and had chosen to reside in Layle Smith.

  After it was all over, and Seward was sitting in a small pool of his own sweat, the High Seeker waited. Seward could not read from his eyes whether he was worried or whether, this time, he held faith in his guard. Seward cleared his throat and said, “Sir, could you teach me the technique you used to keep yourself from attacking Mr. Owen? It might be of help to me, the next time I’m tempted to lose my temper with my wife.”

  A smile travelled onto Layle Smith’s face then. Seward could see it through the change in the High Seeker’s eyes. He had watched the High Seeker’s eyes smile many times over the years, but in the past, the smile had only appeared when he racked prisoners.

  “Of course, Mr. Sobel,” Layle Smith said. “And perhaps you can offer suggestions on how I might improve my technique. I imagine that maintaining a peaceful domestic life has taught you valuable lessons.”

  And so they talked on, and in the brightly lit crematorium, Mr. Boyd reached the end of his song of praise for the executed prisoner. He scattered Thatcher Owen’s ashes to start him on his journey into new life, and then returned to the darkness of the Eternal Dungeon.

  o—o—o

  o—o—o

  . . . The danger seemed particularly strong, given the crime the prisoner had committed, yet there is no evidence that Layle Smith allowed his Vovimian heritage to prejudice him against the prisoner who had committed war crimes against his native people.

  Indeed, if it were not for the records which tell us that Layle Smith was born and raised in Yclau’s neighboring kingdom of Vovim, and that he was trained in Vovim’s infamous Hidden Dungeon, it would be hard to know this from the early records of the High Seeker’s career in the Eternal Dungeon. Despite the efforts of historians to prove otherwise, it appears that Layle Smith’s skills as a Seeker derived, not from his Vovimian training, but from his innate talent.

  Yet it was in this very year that Layle Smith’s heritage would play a small but crucial role in what must at first have appeared to be nothing more than the usual disputes between dungeon workers, but which ultimately would lead to the greatest crisis the Eternal Dungeon had ever faced.

  It is therefore important that, before we witness Layle Smith in the role he played in that crisis, we pause a moment to recall what Layle Smith was on the eve of the crisis: a man of such commitment to help prisoners that he would allow himself to undergo great suffering on their behalf.

  —Psychologists with Whips: A History of the Eternal Dungeon.

  The Balance 2

  BARBARIANS

  The year 359, the sixth month. (The year 1881 Clover by the Old Calendar.)

  Countless books, paintings, and films have been produced about Vovim’s torture-god. Hell, it seems, provides endless fascination, even for a generation that doubts the god’s existence.

  As a result of this current cult, historians often forget that Vovim never possessed a monotheistic religion. Its religion was polytheistic – or, to be more precise, duotheistic, with a host of lesser gods. Hell certainly played a central role in Vovim’s religion in the fourth century, but so did Mercy.

  The torture-god is so strongly identified in the popular mind with Vovim’s old dungeon of torture that one historian has gone as far to say that Vovim’s Hidden Dungeon was devoted to the service of Hell, while the Eternal Dungeon in neighboring Yclau was devoted to the service of Mercy . . .

  —Psychologists with Whips: A History of the Eternal Dungeon.