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

by Dusk Peterson

CHAPTER TWO

  Now, having been forced to spend a full week gaining the confidence of his fellow stokers before he began asking the necessary questions, he felt time slipping away from him. He should proceed rapidly, he knew. Having established that Elsdon Taylor welcomed his arrival, Yeslin should provide a brief, unemotional explanation of his presence in the dungeon and proceed with his mission.

  He knew what he should do. What he was actually doing was clinging to Elsdon as though his older brother were a life-raft.

  “Did I scare you?” asked Elsdon, speaking softly to Yeslin, who had buried his head upon the Seeker’s shoulder. “I’m sorry; I forget sometimes the effect that my uniform has upon people. I was just so startled and pleased to see you again— Yeslin, are you crying?” The Seeker pulled back, holding Yeslin at arm’s length.

  Yeslin shook his head, though he could not deny the evidence of the moisture running from his eyes. He could feel himself shaking. He should have expected this, he knew. How could he hope to accomplish his goals if he didn’t anticipate his weaknesses?

  “Yeslin?” said Elsdon. He sounded very young and uncertain, yet at the same time his inquiry had an underlying tone of authority. That was the paradox of Yeslin’s brother: a man shaped by brutal misuse in his childhood years, who had somehow come to terms with that misuse, though in a manner that Yeslin himself would not have chosen.

  Yeslin wiped the moisture from his face. “Belle died,” he said, as though this would explain everything.

  It took Elsdon only a moment to recognize the name and react with sympathy. “Your youngest sister?”

  He nodded. Belle was his birth-sister, born of a family he had fled from five years ago, but still . . . she had been his favorite.

  “Your parents . . .” Elsdon paused delicately.

  “The verdict was death from neglect.” Yeslin’s voice finally turned as unemotional as he had planned it to be, upon this meeting. “They both received brief prison terms. They’ll be released in a year or two. But my other sisters and brothers . . . Scattered, sent to elite households that were willing to take them in as apprentice servants. I tried to find out where they’d been delivered, but the court clerk wouldn’t tell me. He did say that my youngest brother, who was only a babe, was adopted by an elite family who took a liking to him.” He shrugged. “The clerk could have been lying to me, to make me go away.”

  “Oh, Yeslin.” Elsdon’s voice had turned soft again. “All this, on top of our father’s death. And I . . .”

  He nodded, glad that he didn’t have to explain. His birth-parents imprisoned, his birth-siblings sent away, his new father dead from a lingering illness . . . The only family that had been left to him had been Elsdon Taylor. And Elsdon, for a time, had seemed as inaccessible as the rest.

  “Did you manage to persuade the Codifier to change his mind?” asked Elsdon, reaching over to turn up the light on an oil lamp bracketed to the wall. Paradoxically, given that he would spend the rest of his life in a dungeon, Elsdon had poor night vision.

  Yeslin shook his head. The Codifier, the dungeon official who determined how the Code of Seeking should be interpreted, had decided two years ago that the Code’s clause permitting Seekers to be visited by close family members applied only to blood relatives. “No,” he said, “I took the more direct route of entrance.” He stepped back and swept his hand across his body, indicating his uniform.

  Elsdon stared and then laughed. “Oh, Yeslin – a stoker? What a step down for you!”

  His mouth quirked in a humorless manner. “Not really.”

  “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to demean your commoner origins.” Elsdon, as always, was quick to apologize for offense. “But for you to work as a stoker these days . . . Yeslin, I’m sorry you had to go to such lengths to reach me. I did write to you, after my two months of mourning for Father were over. I’ve written to you several times in the past year, actually. Each time, I’ve received a note back from Manfred – you kept him as your valet, I take it? – telling me that the master of the house would respond to me when he had the time.” There was a light query in Elsdon’s voice – nothing more than that.

  Yeslin had not forgotten Elsdon’s skill at pulling out the information he wanted, with no more than a light query. There was no need in this case, though. He quietly gave Elsdon the information he wanted: “I wonder whether that message came from Manfred . . . or from the master of the house.”

  It took Elsdon only an instant to understand – yes, he did indeed have the talent of a Seeker – and then his brother stepped back, as though he had been struck. “No.”

  Yeslin shrugged. His own shock at the treachery – which had been acute at the time – had faded as the months passed, his mind occupied with the far more urgent problem of how to survive.

  “Yeslin, no!” The Seeker shook his head, his fine, gold-touched hair shimmering in the lamp-light. “This can’t be! Father wrote to me before his death that he’d adopted you, that he’d made you his sole heir . . .”

  “He did,” Yeslin agreed. “He did what you asked him to do . . . but in his own fashion. He had his half-brother draw up the documents, and he had Manfred sign as witness. Oddly enough,” he added, the irony thick on his tongue, “neither Mr. Pevsner nor his new valet Manfred recalled afterwards seeing such documents. And since Father gave the only copies of the documents into their custody . . .”

  Elsdon smashed his hand into the steam engine.

  The Seeker had aimed carefully – not for the hard steel that would have broken his hand, but for the flexible accordion cloth. The cloth was evidently thick enough to stand mistreatment, for the steam engine gave no more than a slight wheeze at this attack.

  As for Yeslin, he had taken several steps backwards. He had not forgotten what event had preceded Elsdon’s own entrance into the Eternal Dungeon.

  “Sorry,” murmured Elsdon, the former murderer, cradling his hurt hand. “I didn’t mean to give way to my emotions like that. It’s just . . . Yeslin, I’ll give witness for you. I didn’t keep Father’s letter – I regret that now – but I’ll give court witness against Uncle Harden, describing the letter’s contents. I’m permitted to do so, in important cases. With a Seeker’s witness—”

  “With a Seeker’s witness, but no physical proof of the documents, it would only take four or five years for the case to wind its way through the courts,” Yeslin said wearily. “And I’d have to spend those five years proving to each magistrate that I’m worthy to be a member of the elite. At the end of those five years . . . what sort of man would I be?”

  His hurt hand forgotten, Elsdon straightened, his eyes scanning Yeslin, as though seeing him for the first time. Finally the well-born Seeker said, “You make it sound like a tragedy, to be high in rank and wealth.”

  Yeslin shrugged. “Not for you, perhaps. I know that you do your best to help the commoners.” Elsdon Taylor’s best, Yeslin believed, fell far short of what it could be, but there was no point in attacking the efforts of the kindest torturer in the Queen’s dungeon. Yeslin would save his attacks for other members of the elite: men who made no effort to help the commoners who labored for them.

  “I thought that you were going to use Father’s wealth to help the commoners – wasn’t that your plan?” Elsdon’s quiet stillness remained. Yeslin began to feel uncomfortable. It was going to be difficult, telling his brother enough about his goals, but not too much.

  “It was,” Yeslin acknowledged. “But even before Father died and his half-brother stole my inheritance, I’d begun to question whether that was the right route to my goals. Listen, Elsdon,” he said, feeling once again the strangeness of addressing such an elite man by his first name. “What you did for me – that meant everything to me. It allowed me to stay by Father’s side during the final months of his life. It allowed me to have you as my brother. I’ll forever be grateful for that.” He was able to infuse his voice with genuine warmth as he spoke. He still remembered clearly his first meeting with Elsdon T
aylor, three years before, when Elsdon had persuaded his father to adopt the street-lad that the older man had been caring for.

  At the time, it had seemed that Yeslin’s street days were over. And as time went on, that began to make him uncomfortable.

  He struggled now to explain. “I want to assist the commoners. I want to create our queendom’s first guild of commoners, to help the laborers of this nation fight their employers for their rights. But how can I do that, if I’m one of the elite myself? I’ve known since my birth what it means to be cold and hungry and struggling to survive. But if I spent five years living in a posh house, waited upon by servants and receiving money from the sweating labor of my manufactory workers . . . what would I have in common then with the men and women I’m seeking to help? No, Elsdon, Mr. Pevsner did me a favor when he stole our father’s house and manufactory from me. Much as I hate the discomforts of commoner life, it’s the only life I should live, if I’m to be of any use to my fellow commoners.”

  He paused, out of breath. Beyond him, the steam engine puffed noisily, its twin accordions moving up and down. The noise drowned out any sound from the rest of the dungeon; it was as though he and Elsdon were alone, in their own universe.

  Elsdon was smiling now – a sad little smile. “Oh, Yeslin,” he said, “I had nearly forgotten how high your honor is. I still think that, in five years’ time, you’ll regret the loss of that fortune – you’ll regret the loss of the use that your guild could have made of such wealth. But I’ve no doubt – none whatsoever – that you’ll find your way to your goals some day, however hard the road may be that you scrabble your way upon.”

  It was difficult for him not to say, “I’ve reached the doorway to my goals, and you’re going to help me open the door.” He wanted so much to be honest with his brother.

  But when all was said and done, his brother was a member of the elite. He was the Queen’s agent, duty-bound to break the wills of criminals. And though Elsdon himself did not possess the power to arrest criminals, it was best not to reveal to him how very close Yeslin was to committing his first crime.

  “But enough.” Elsdon stepped forward and slapped him on the back, in a brotherly manner. “This isn’t the right place to talk; someone is likely to walk in on us while I’m naked-faced.” He made it sound as though his entire body was nude. “How did you know it was me, anyway? I was fully hooded and facing away from you when you first entered this room.”

  Yeslin pointed silently. Elsdon glanced in the direction he was pointing and laughed. “Oh, I see. Not just a Seeker. A Seeker looking at a machine. Yes, I’m afraid I still have a weakness for mechanical devices, but you have to admit that this one is well worth staring it. We call it the Lungs,” he clarified as Yeslin raised his eyebrows. “It draws in good air to the dungeon, and pushes out bad air.”

  Yeslin suddenly felt as though someone was standing on his throat, choking him. It had not occurred to him that the inhabitants of the Eternal Dungeon would need an artificial system of air circulation in order to survive. But this was a cave, he reminded himself. Despite the artificial walls, the Eternal Dungeon was entirely located within a vast network of caverns beneath the Queen’s palace.

  What sort of living quarters would elite torturers build for themselves in a cave? It was an interesting question.

  “We can go back to my rooms to talk,” said Elsdon, as though he sensed Yeslin’s curiosity. “We’ll have privacy there.”

  Yeslin cleared his throat. “Don’t you . . . share your rooms?”

  He had the privilege, then, of seeing a Seeker blush. “Oh,” said Elsdon. “So you’ve heard.”

  “Yes, though not from you.” Yeslin raised his eyebrows again.

  The blush deepened. “I’m sorry, Yeslin. I would have told you before if I could have, but some things I’m not supposed to talk about with people from the lighted world.”

  “Well, I’m here now,” he pointed out. He hoped that the nonchalance of his tone passed muster with his keen-eyed brother.

  Evidently it did; Elsdon nodded as he pulled down his face-cloth and reached for the door-knob. “So you are! And you’ll have signed your oath of silence, so I can talk freely to you. Yes, I’m love-mate to Layle Smith – the High Seeker, that is. Do you remember me telling you, when I visited Father, how worried I was about a Seeker who was ill? That was when Layle was quite ill – well, anyone in the dungeon could tell you . . .”

  They proceeded down the corridor, Elsdon chatting in a quite matter-of-fact manner about the terrible aspects of the High Seeker’s illness. Twice they passed servants lugging mops and buckets. Elsdon didn’t bother to lower his voice, so Yeslin surmised that the High Seeker’s madness – Elsdon didn’t use that word, but there was no other way to interpret his description – was common knowledge in the Eternal Dungeon.

  Yeslin remembered the rumor he had heard, oh so long ago, that a Seeker had gone mad. It had only been a rumor, with no proof behind it. But if people in the lighted world had known the truth, that the Eternal Dungeon was being run by a madman . . .

  “Layle is much better these days,” Elsdon concluded. “He’s been back at work, searching prisoners, for nearly a year now.”

  Yeslin winced. Fortunately, Elsdon failed to notice. He had turned to place a key in one of the unmarked doors along the eastern side of the corridor. “Here we are,” Elsdon said as he opened the door. He gestured Yeslin inside and began his tour.

  Yeslin was impressed with Elsdon’s apartment – genuinely impressed.

  The bedroom – which Elsdon assured him was the largest bedroom possessed by any Seeker, since it also belonged to the High Seeker – was barely the width and breadth of three doorways. Into this space was jammed a double-sized bed, a single night-stand with toiletry items within, and a single chest for undergarments and one change of clothing. Nothing more. Only two lamps and a face-mirror adorned the wall; the mirror had a dull iron frame.

  There was no water closet in the apartment. Yeslin found a chamber-pot beneath the bed. A circular iron tub offered a place for bathing.

  The rest of the apartment was a single room, scarcely larger than the bedroom. There was no dining area, merely a kitchen area without a stove – the apartment held no source of heat – and a few bins with dry food in them. A counter, such as might have been found in any workshop, was the sole table in the place, and two high stools served as its chairs.

  The adjoining parlor was somewhat more luxuriously furnished, but here too the furnishings seemed purely practical: a desk piled high with papers, shelves filled with the type of books that Seekers might require in their work (after one glance at a volume, Yeslin winced and left the books alone), a chair for the desk, an armchair, and a padded bench – just the number of seats needed by two Seekers hosting two guests. The tea table – which was piled high with books and mugs and other such items – seemed like the heights of luxury.

  “What do you think?” Elsdon asked, smiling.

  Yeslin was not yet ready to voice his full thoughts, so he said, “It’s quite a change for you.”

  Elsdon’s smile deepened. “I’ve grown used to it. Truth to tell, if I returned to our old house, with its dozens of rooms and hundreds of pieces of furniture, all gilded and finely carved, I wouldn’t be sure what to do with it all. . . . It’s harder for the High Seeker. He finds it too cramped.”

  “He had greater riches than you, before?” Yeslin picked up a wheel that was leaning incongruously against the wall, then hastily put it down again as he recognized what it was: the wheel of a rack.

  Elsdon laughed. “Hardly. He dislikes being away from the open sky. As a child, he slept on the streets.”

  “Oh?”

  Yeslin’s comment could not have emerged in as disinterested a fashion as he would have liked, for Elsdon laughed again. “You’re curious about him.”

  Yeslin gave a bit of a smile back. “Isn’t everyone? There are so many tales about him. Some say he’s the bastard son of the queen
, others that he’s a murderer . . .”

  Elsdon’s smile faded. “I’ll tell you the truth later. For now . . . You didn’t say what you thought of my living quarters.”

  Yeslin was beginning to have the uneasy feeling that Elsdon would prove to be a formidable . . . No, he couldn’t call his own, affectionate brother an enemy. But Elsdon would prove a barrier, there was no doubt of that.

  He looked again at the apartment. Storage bins to be filled, pitchers awaiting water, a chamber-pot under the bed . . . He asked, “Who cleans the chamber-pots?”

  “Why, a maid, of course,” Elsdon replied easily.

  “And the tub? Is it filled by a maid?”

  Elsdon hesitated for the first time. “I think a manservant brings in the water for that.”

  He bit his tongue in time to keep from saying, “You think? Haven’t you ever noticed?” Instead, he asked, “What about the food? Is that delivered by the same servants? Or by other servants?”

  “Yeslin.” Elsdon’s voice had grown quiet again. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I was just wondering, sir,” he said, keeping his own voice quiet, “whether you have fewer servants now than you did as a boy.”

  There was a long silence, long enough that Yeslin felt the instinct to go down on one knee – the safest response, he had long ago learned, when in the presence of an angry member of the elite. From outside came the sound of the day-shift stokers shoveling coal into the furnaces that warmed the prisoners’ cells.

  Then, unexpectedly, Elsdon smiled. “I think you should meet Mr. Chapman,” he said.

  o—o—o

  Despite his carefully laid groundwork, it took Yeslin another day to discover the point of vulnerability among the stokers.

  The problem – the ironic problem – was that he had chosen to start his mission with what turned out to be the most satisfied laborers in the history of the Queendom of Yclau. The stokers seemed pleased with all aspects of their work: their tasks, their equipment, and their pay. Their nominal superintendent confined his duties to training new stokers; most of their instructions came from the High Seeker, who would issue his orders by quietly offering suggestions on how the stokers’ work could be done better. The “suggestions” invariably turned out to be good ones.

  Even those aspects of the work that the stokers disliked – the hours, the closed confines of the dungeon, the food that they occasionally bought from the dining hall – they were not inclined to blame on the Seekers. “The Seekers, they have the same hours, same dungeon, same food as us,” said Curt. “They have it worse than us – they’re not allowed to leave the dungeon for even a bit of fresh air.” And everyone nodded.

  Finally, in desperation, Yeslin homed in on what he would never have thought of as a grievance: the fact that the stokers loved their current jobs so much that they didn’t want to leave their employers.

  “What’s this ’lectrifying anyhow?” growled Wade as he leaned over to scoop another shovelful of coal into his portion of the corridor-long furnace. It was the first hour of their work-night, so the stokers had shifted over to the western furnaces, across the dungeon from where the Seekers slept.

  “You know about that, Wade,” replied Jerry. “We all learned about it in school.”

  Wade mumbled something inarticulate. Yeslin, who knew that the First District was the only part of the Queendom of Yclau that still did not supply education to its commoners, straightened up his aching back and said, “Electricity is like lightning. Lightning in a bottle. Works as good as coal or gas at supplying heat and light, and makes less mess.”

  “Oh, aye?” Wade sounded skeptical. “Well, ’twill make one fucking mess to tear up all this dungeon to put in that ’lectrifying stuff.”

  “Watch your language, Wade.” Leo frowned as he hit a nasty bit in his coal pile. “The High Seeker might hear you. You know how he hates cussing.”

  Everyone looked over their shoulders. Any mention of the High Seeker invariably had that effect.

  “He won’t come here today,” said Curt confidently . . . or perhaps with a bit of bravado. “He’s taken leave this month. I heard he’s in mourning.”

  Wade snorted. “Who’d he be in mourning for? He ain’t got no family. Ain’t got no friends neither, far as I can see.”

  “There’s Elsdon Taylor—”

  “Who’s alive,” interjected Jerry.

  “So far.” Wade flung more coal through the yawning doorway of the furnace. Faintly behind the flames of his own portion of the furnace, Yeslin could see the thick, frosted glass bricks that separated the furnace from the prisoners’ cells. He wondered whether the prisoners could hear this conversation, and what they made of it.

  He set aside all temptation to question Wade about what danger the High Seeker might pose to Elsdon; Yeslin had already heard the dungeon rumors of what took place in the High Seeker’s bedroom and had determined they were just that, rumors. So far, Elsdon had remained discreet about the exact nature of his entanglement with Layle Smith, but he did not show any signs of being misused. Yeslin certainly knew what signs to look for.

  No, the High Seeker’s destruction of Elsdon was likely to take a more subtle form, if these stokers were any indication of Layle Smith’s usual methodology. Yeslin wondered what means the High Seeker had used to persuade the stokers that working in a dungeon of torture was a privilege.

  He tried again. “The boss men did that at Miller’s Rubber Stamp Manufactory. Put in new, electrified equipment, hired men from the Electricians’ Guild to run it, and threw out all the laborers. Some of the fellows there had worked at the manufactory forty, fifty years, but that’s all the thanks they got.”

  All around him, the stokers frowned. He’d touched the heart of their vulnerability, he judged.

  Continuing with his pre-prepared speech, he said, “They wanted to try something like that in the Mippite manufactories too, but the Mippite laborers fought back. Not with weapons,” he added hastily, seeing Leo frown again. “With courage and wit. First word the commoners had that the boss men were planning to replace them with new equipment and new men, they sat down on the job. Thousands of them, all over the Magisterial Republic of Mip. The boss men, they were forced to rethink their plans.”

  The stokers exchanged glances. Finally Jerry broke the silence. “Thousands of them? All at once? How’d that many men decide to act together like that?”

  “Because they acted like a guild.” Yeslin took out his handkerchief, wiped his hands clean, and pulled the paper bag out of his trousers pocket. He held up one of the cloth badges for the stokers to see. “So can we.”

  The stokers slowly drifted together, staring at the badge, with its neatly woven words: “Commoners’ Guild, Chapter 1.”