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

by Dusk Peterson

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Seward held the High Seeker’s forehead until the retching had stopped and all that was emerging from Mr. Smith’s mouth was vile yellow-green bile. Then, as Layle Smith sat back on his heels, Seward began to reach up toward the lavatory chain, but a weak gesture from Mr. Smith stopped him. Seward hesitated, still on his knees, awaiting orders.

  None came. Finally, hesitantly, he raised his eyes to Layle Smith’s face. It was not a face he had ever expected to see again. His decision, the year before, not to pursue a friendship with his Seeker – in a word, not to see Mr. Smith’s naked face – had contented them both, since what they had achieved in its place was, in certain ways, as firm a binding as though they had become love-mates. A great man and his faithful guard – that was the tale of which ballads were sung. Seward had grown up hearing such ballads from his nurse, never guessing that he would one day live them out.

  Nobody had told him that one of his loyal duties would be holding the great man as he vomited. Seward glanced over at the water-basin nearby, which had a newly installed faucet above it, but he dared not stir. Layle Smith looked as though he might keel over at any moment.

  The High Seeker’s face was paper-white, which would have been bad enough if he had been native Yclau, but Seward had seen his hands often enough, and even his bare arms on the occasions when he gave whipping demonstrations to new guards, and so he knew that the High Seeker was normally much browner than the average Yclau man, despite the fact that he had lived most of his life in lightless dungeons. “Partly my father’s skin-color,” Mr. Smith had once said when Seward asked. “Partly sun-darkening from my years as a street-boy.”

  Seward shied away from both thoughts. He handed the High Seeker the rag he had been groping for and watched as the other man wiped away the remaining vomit from the corners of his mouth. Cold eyes, tight mouth – Layle Smith looked the very image of a torturer, and a Vovimian one at that. Only his breath was unusually rapid-paced, but Seward had seen that often enough, when Mr. Smith tended a prisoner on the rack.

  He wished he could be sure that the cause was not the same this time.

  Layle had sat down on the floor now, his body leaning back against the rough cement wall of the lavatory. There was only one light in here, a flickering electric bulb that had been installed just this week by the laborers. It was supposed to be safer than the oil lamps that had previously lit the dungeon, but the shadows from it made the High Seeker look like some ghastly specter from a Vovimian myth: hollow cheeks, hollow eye-sockets, hands like claws. With one nail, Mr. Smith was picking at his sleeve.

  “Did I ever tell you,” he asked, “about my final murder?”

  In an instant, Seward was covered in sweat. Layle Smith could still do that to him, after all these years. “Just before you left the Hidden Dungeon, sir?” he asked hopefully. Mr. Smith had recounted that tale once – the story of an attempted execution that had gone awry when the young torturer’s conscience finally bettered him and drove him to seek out the Eternal Dungeon. It was a terrible tale, filled with torture and rape and a desire for death that was intimately bound with the other two acts . . . but it was not as terrible as certain earlier portions of Layle Smith’s life.

  Mr. Smith shook his head, and his hood slid askew as he did so. Seward, upon seeing Layle Smith’s body jerk as they had entered the dining hall and had overheard the remarks being made by the dungeon inhabitants about the day’s events, had barely managed to get the High Seeker into this room with the door barred before the High Seeker had fallen to his knees in front of the toilet, raised his face-cloth, and retched his guts out.

  “Not that one,” Layle Smith replied. “Not an execution – a murder. The final murder before I was caught and delivered to the Hidden Dungeon.” His gaze drifted up toward the high ceiling, dusted with shadows, as though he saw something there. “It was my first – my only – murder of a woman. A girl, actually; she was no older than myself and was still a virgin. I don’t know what her parents were thinking, to leave her in an isolated wing like that. Perhaps they merely imagined that nobody would dare to touch so distinguished a child. But I would dare anything in those days.

  “At first I thought only to frighten her into telling me where her father was, so that I could torture him into revealing where he kept the key to the guild’s treasure. But her fear was so sweet – I had never seen a fear like it. Nobody had ever been afraid of me in the way she was. And when I finally realized where the nature of her fear lay – it took me some time to comprehend, for I was a virgin too – I could not resist committing the act.”

  Layle Smith’s arms were round his knees now. His body was relaxed. His voice was soft as he stared at the ceiling and said, “I remember the supreme sweetness of her screams into her gag as I entered her. I’d never experienced such joy before. Oh, I had known what I was for many years; I knew my body’s own reactions, and one doesn’t live on the streets without hearing whispered talk of folks like me. But it had never before occurred to me that I could have more than the pleasure of going cock-high. I had not known that I could pursue my pleasure to the zenith.”

  His gaze finally drifted down. His eyes were steady upon Seward’s as he said, “It happened again an hour ago, when I watched the prisoner dangle from the noose, at my orders. He trusted me, and that is why he confessed what he had done to me. He believed that I would show him mercy. He had trusted me so greatly, and had held such affection and respect for me, and there he died by my orders. . . . It brought back all the sweetness of my childhood murder. I reached my zenith and passed it.”

  Seward could not have spoken if a pistol had been placed against his head, with orders for him to speak or die. Behind him, faintly, he could hear the rumble of the diners as they discussed the news that had just arrived in the Eternal Dungeon, through the official announcement made by the Codifier. The voices were faint, almost like the whispers Seward remembered from his days as a young guard, when Layle Smith’s predecessor had killed any man in the inner dungeon who stood in his way, with little consideration of whether justice was being upheld. But this news was far worse.

  Layle Smith jerked his head in the direction of the voices. “They are speaking of me.”

  “Yes, sir.” That was a safe enough response to make.

  “They are saying I am heartless – that I have become what I was before I arrived here: an abusive torturer. And they don’t even know what happened to me in the execution room when I saw the prisoner hanged.”

  Seward could not help but notice that Layle Smith had ceased to speak the prisoner’s name. He was not surprised. He doubted that Mr. Smith would ever possess the courage to speak that name again.

  The High Seeker leaned forward. All the relaxation was gone from his body; the veins stood out in his hands and his neck as he said in a low, urgent voice, “Tell me the truth, Seward Sobel. Have I become what they say? Tell me what I am, please.” His voice broke on the final word.

  There were many responses Seward could make, all of them truthful. He could say, “In trying to uphold the letter of the Code, you have broken its spirit.” He could say, “Most of these men and women would willingly die out of loyalty for you, but you have driven them beyond where their consciences will go.” He could say, “If you continue this way, not even the prisoners will be safe from you.” He could say, “Even before this happened, Elsdon Taylor had begun to lose faith in you, and I have nearly done so as well.”

  Perhaps he would need to find some way to make these statements, all but the last. But if he said any of them now, he suspected, Layle Smith’s mind would snap, and the High Seeker would plunge back into madness.

  Perhaps that would be best; perhaps that was the only resolution to what was occurring. But Seward had been assigned to protect the High Seeker, and he could not bring himself to kill the man he was meant to guard.

  So he said, “High Seeker, when you raped and murdered that girl, I’m willing to lay odds that you were pleased with yourself af
terwards. And I’m willing to lay my life on the line that you didn’t vomit afterwards at the thought of your bodily pleasure at what you had done.” He gestured toward the ugly liquid in the toilet. “Sir, abusers and murderers don’t have consciences – or if they do, they stop abusing and murdering. I can’t guide your conscience, but I know that you have one.”

  Mr. Smith closed his eyes. He was still a minute before he opened his eyes and spoke. “There are flaws in what you say, Mr. Sobel. I had a conscience as a boy; I merely chose not to act on it. But . . . Yes, I think my conscience is a little healthier than it was in those days, or we would not be having this conversation. Thank you.”

  His voice had grown firm again, as it had been when he pronounced the prisoner’s doom. Seward felt his stomach twist, wondering whether he had only made matters worse.

  The High Seeker flipped down his face-cloth and rose to his feet, giving his body a long, languorous stretch. His tone was normal again as he said, “Thank you, Mr. Sobel; I very much appreciate your assistance. However, I wish to have a few moments alone, if you would not mind.”

  His voice held the firmness of an order. Seward automatically glanced toward the ceiling, toward the walls, toward any place that might prove an entrance to an assassin. But the walls here were of cement, the ventilation shaft was too small to crawl through and too long to place poisoned gas in, and so the only vulnerable point was the door, which he could guard from the outside. Murmuring an acknowledgment of Mr. Smith’s order, he rose to his feet and turned toward the door.

  He was not looking forward to what lay outside. For one thing, there was Mr. Urman. The junior guard had deliberately refused to escort the prisoner to his death. Understandable, but it meant that Seward would be forced to place him under discipline, which could only mean a beating for Mr. Urman. And Mr. Urman, he knew, would never be able to understand why Seward had beaten him. From the junior guard’s perspective, Mr. Urman had shown tremendous restraint in not fighting Seward for the prisoner’s life.

  And then there were the other dungeon dwellers. There would be questions, endless questions, as to whether Seward backed the High Seeker’s decision to execute a Seeker.

  Seward had no mind for abstract matters of right and wrong. He had known, from an early age, that his best chance for rebirth lay in placing his trust in a good man or woman, and pledging his loyalty to that man or woman. And so he had served a succession of lieges: the Queen, the old High Torturer, and the High Torturer’s successor, Layle Smith.

  But was Layle Smith still a good man?

  Seward finished closing the water-closet door and leaned back against it, feeling the sweat break out anew on his skin. Mr. Smith must be right in what he had done. He must be. For if he was not . . .

  If he was not, then Seward had just helped the High Seeker commit the most treacherous murder the Eternal Dungeon had ever known.

  o—o—o

  o—o—o

  Code of Seeking: The book which guides the consciences of all members of the Eternal Dungeon.

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

  On Guard 7

  JUDGMENT

  Barrett Boyd

  The year 360, the ninth month. (The year 1881 Fallow by the Old Calendar.)

  Some accounts of the Eternal Dungeon have suggested that, in the year 360, a group of men rose en masse, united in their opposition to all forms of physical punishment.

  Poppycock. Historians who believe this are projecting the beliefs of our own, enlightened age onto men who were products of their time.

  Let us clarify matters by distinguishing between the different types of physical punishment in the fourth century.

  Did anyone oppose physical punishment as a means to prevent further disobedience?

  No. In the fourth century, the use of physical punishment as a means to keep control of unruly members of society was ubiquitous. Fathers beat their disobedient sons, schoolmasters beat their disobedient students, employees beat their disobedient employees, and so, following from this, guards beat their disobedient prisoners.

  It is true that, around this time, concerns began to grow that certain types of beatings were too severe; at the very end of the fourth century, for example, the Yclau army banned use of the one-hundred-stroke beating, which had led to so many deaths. But even Elsdon Taylor, who had endured abusive beatings at the hands of his father, did not argue against the use of the lash as a means to control disobedient prisoners.

  Did anyone oppose physical punishment as a means to dissuade others from committing crimes?

  For the most part, no. The one notable exception is the Magisterial Republic of Mip, which banned executions at the time of its founding in the year 355, on the grounds that executions did nothing to deter crime. But even Mip reversed this stance some years later.

  Did anyone oppose physical punishment as a means of obtaining information from prisoners?

  Yes, but this was nothing new. For as long as torture had existed, a small minority of society had argued that torture was ineffective – that a man in pain will tell lies in order to escape pain. So when some of the members of the Eternal Dungeon began saying this in 360, few eyebrows were raised. The efficiency or inefficiency of torture was a longstanding dispute that would not be fully settled until many years later, when scientific methods were developed to judge when prisoners were lying under torture. By that time, the use of torture was no longer needed. Scientists had developed more effective means of force for obtaining information from unwilling prisoners – and more importantly, of forcing the prisoners into a belief that they should follow societal rules. “Forced therapy” is the latest of science’s insidious means of changing the beliefs of prisoners.

  But those means have been repeatedly banned by our nation’s courts. The reason for this is that the dispute in the Eternal Dungeon in 360 was not over physical punishment at all . . .

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