Vrondi. Little twinkly pairs of eyes of blue, with matching auras. So many kinds of blue, from a light sky blue to twilight. Some had stripes, some had pulsing patterns. He’d had no idea there were so many kinds of them. He’d never have guessed. And gathered around this place, tens of thousands of vrondi curiously “smiled” at the three of them as they entered the room, apparently surprised to sense new people. Until they—there it was. The vrondi had all been looking directly at the Trap when the trio had entered.
After a couple of minutes, he felt ready to move on, and led the others onto the elevator. “When we get further down, I’ll shut off the Curiosity Trap. I think I know how.”
“This one knows how,” Star said. “This one will disable it, using the way we shut it down for the prisoners’ feeding and hygiene intervals. It is the wisest solution, because you both can be drawn in by it, but my kind are immune to it.”
Kordas swallowed. “This must be very difficult for you.”
Star was very quiet. “It is, indeed, difficult. We resent that we are made part of the capture of our own kind, by maintaining the prisoners.”
“I really don’t understand everything that is happening right now, but I’m going to be brave and face it, because I have faith in my Duke, my almost-a-friend. I like you very much, my Lord. I like being at your side while doing good things,” Beltran interjected, and grinned.
Kordas held his breath while Beltran spoke. All right. This is . . . odd. I know he’s telling the truth. I want to tell the truth too, and nothing but truth. “You too, Beltran. I like you too, and it has been good to have someone from home to talk to. I have been extra lucky,” Kordas gusted out at last, as he brought the elevator down at a steady rate. Huh. I think . . . I think it’s all these vrondi! There are so many of them that it’s not only making us tell the truth, it’s making us want to tell every true thing that passes in our thoughts!
“I think the less talking we do, the better,” he suggested. Which was, of course, true.
As they descended, the trio got a better view of the center containment within the chainlink cage. There were cots, blankets, books, drawing materials, and the like. Most of it was arranged very precisely, in a useful kind of order. There was folded laundry, all of a plain, uniform white. Basic footwear.
Then, people. Mostly middle-aged, a handful older, clustered around a flickering glow, most of them sitting comfortably on pillows. They all wore basic white smocks with no tailoring, unremarkable pants, simple sandals, and basic grooming. They were talking with each other, when they weren’t staring at the Curiosity Trap they’d gathered around. A few were writing out notes.
Star bolted off of the lift immediately, and by the time the lift had settled on the ground floor, the effects of the Trap were gone. The device itself responded to subfloor levers worked from outside the chainlink, by which Star awaited them. The sound dampening was less intense at floor level.
Beltran gaped at the crowd, which took very little notice of them. “Who are these people, Star?”
“Researchers. Inventors. Political opponents. Investigators, constables, playwrights. Freedom and travel advocates. Criminalized lovers. Dissidents. These are people who spoke, taught, or fought for truth. Instead of being executed, they were put here to live their remaining lives as prisoners. Vrondi are attracted to truth, my Lord. These people were put here as bait.”
“The cruelty of it!” Beltran blurted out. “Kept alive by an enemy, knowing you are right and your own convictions are used to pull in the innocent and curious, so they can be made slaves for your jailors!”
Beltran is getting into this far more intensely than I’d’ve expected. Maybe it was his Herald training, but he’s seemed so much more reserved until now.
“He seems to get it,” a woman inside the chainlink said. The rest were coming out of a daze, but they didn’t seem to be hurt—just confused, as if waking from a nap. “Is this an Official Declaration, a Body Count, or just a Recreational Gloat?” The woman walked up to them and hung her arms through the chainlink grid. She was tattooed in patterns to the first knuckles on both arms, her hair was in tight, wooly curls, cut close to the head, and her eyes were sharp enough to cut flesh. “You’re all dressed up, aren’t you? Is it someone’s birthday?”
“Who are they, Scullen?” someone behind the woman called.
She answered, without taking her eyes off of Kordas and Beltran, “We-ell, you know how this place is, Scont, they may just be figuring that out themselves. Right, boys?”
Beltran answered immediately. “I know who I am, I’m just happy to find out I was right! There was tragedy just a little while ago, and my head hurts, but I went from being a servant to being an adventurer, like a hero in nearly fifty songs I know, and a few I don’t dare sing for anyone else. Also, I like how you talk, you are very pretty, and you scare me in some ways I think I like.”
“He’s intoxicated with the need to speak the truth,” said the person that the woman had called “Scont.” He came to the forefront of the cage. “Take deep breaths. Try not to think for a moment. Concentrate on who you are. And remember, the less you talk, the better off you’ll be.”
A tired old man joined them. “As for what this is? Besides being a prison and a trap, it’s a test with no answers, a test that only provides sadistic entertainment on the rare occasions our yellow toad of an Emperor deigns to look in on us.”
“How is it a test?” Kordas asked cautiously.
“If you turn against yourself enough, turn yourself into a delusional liar, you’ll be unsuited to stay in the cage as bait, and you’ll be yanked out, and probably killed. Or, hold on to hope? Stay with your truth? Then you’re a tool for making slaves. Either way, they get you. Then there’s this thing.” Scullen gestured at the Curiosity Trap. “Comes on, and sometimes you can resist it, but that means you have to suppress yourself from questioning anything. Once the wondering starts, you wind up over here, thinking about truths, going deeper, inventing new truthful things because you can’t keep yourself from being inventive. It’s hard to even feel like a person, when you get to where you’ve experienced all the tricks and disciplines we’ve tried. You just feel like a reference book of truthful things twisted around to hurt everyone. Yes, we know why we’re here. To make more of them.” And she pointed at Star. “Poor damned devils. In a way, they’re worse off than we are.”
“We have to get them out of there,” Kordas said. “Star, how are your—um—” and he made a gesture to indicate a ball, “the little prisons inside a Doll. There’s the Trap, but what happens after trapping?”
“We transfer the full bottles from the base of the Trap and secure them into the fabrication line. Each step is operated by Dolls, including the installation of the ‘prisons,’ as you call them,” Star answered.
Beltran tried to put the right words to it. “So they make you do every part to imprison your own people? Yourself?”
Star answered, “We were told that it was ‘just business, nothing personal,’ which supposedly made it acceptable, or so one of the system creators told us early on. And laughed. We know now why he laughed. We have learned that when someone says ‘nothing personal,’ it involves something very personal to someone involved, and it’s seldom the person saying it.” Star turned to Kordas. “My Lord, as slaves, we united into a single mind to stay alive, even like this—hoping that just living, and nothing more, mattered. And there was nothing noble about it—we were afraid of being-no-more. Individually, we are naive and not smart. But joined together like this, yes, we are slaves, but we also became a remarkable mind. All we could do for our own benefit was what we could divert away without breaking the rules we had to obey. That was our future.”
“Not any kind of a future,” he said, feeling his heart twist in his chest. “Not when even the little you had could be snatched from you at any moment. Not when you didn’t even have a glimpse of som
ething better.”
“Until the day of your arrival, when you thanked me. That was the first time in years anyone had shown us respect, and we decided it felt good. When you continued to be respectful and appreciative, we found we had something besides the monotony of servitude to think on. That was hope.” Star spread her hands wide. “Hope was something we had not experienced before. Hope was intoxicating. And then you did something we never, ever anticipated. You took pity on us.”
She had no eyes, but somehow she looked deeply into his eyes. “Then you did the utterly unthinkable. You promised to free us. We do not know if you can do this, because you do not know if you can do this. But one thing we do know. We have the means in our own hands now to flee with your people into a place where the Emperor will have to work very hard to reach us. And for as long as we can stay out of his reach, we will be freer than we have been since we entered this accursed trap.”
Scullen looked at him, the cynicism gone from her eyes. “You did that?”
Kordas nodded. “Yes . . .”
“You’re an idiot,” Scullen stated. “But you’re brave, and you’re compassionate, and I’ve never seen that here in the Capital in my entire life. I thought both things were extinct in the Empire.” She stood there silently for a moment. “By all the gods big and small . . . now you give me hope.”
He tried to stop himself. He really did. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Besides, he was going to take the Dolls with him when he fled, but how much good would that do if he didn’t eliminate the means by which they were being made?
He turned to Star. “Will alarms go off if we free them?” he asked. And Scullen’s eyes widened with shock.
“This is where things are put to be secure and forgotten. In the Palace, nobody cares how things are made, or by whom. They only want the result. If there was an alarm, whoever created it is probably long dead.” Star paused. “This one is compelled to tell you that this one does not know. But it is true that all things here are made by Dolls and serviced by Dolls. No Dolls have ever seen this room being scryed, and no Dolls have seen a human visit or work here in a very long time.”
What’s that old saying? “If you’re going to be killed for stealing, you might as well be killed for stealing a horse rather than a dog.”
But—wait—
“If this thing was broken, could it be fixed?” he asked. “I mean, if the Trapping and Doll-making is going to be able to be started up again—” Can I figure out a way to keep that from happening?
Now all of the dissidents were hanging on the chainlink, breathlessly staring at him, some in disbelief, some in desperation, but the rest with growing hope in their eyes.
Star went rigid, consulting with the rest of her kind. “We . . . think not. There are only two Innovator mages left. Until three years ago, there were four, but their laboratories collapsed, and they were felled by debris. And the two that are left are not the two who worked on the Trap and the Dolls.”
“So . . . if we break the Trap, we free those of you who are already caught,” Kordas said slowly. “And if we break the prison and free the bait, there won’t be any reason for vrondi to be attracted here, and those that are freed to flee can warn the rest of your kind. That will at least buy you time to get out of range of another Trap and never return. Right?”
“But what if the Emperor figures out some other Elementals—” Beltran began.
“Stop!” Kordas begged. “Just stop! I’ve already made more promises than I think I can keep! I won’t be able to do anything if you keep trying to think of more things I should be doing! I’m not superhuman! I’m one man with bigger ideas than he can pull off alone, more scared every day, and only my friends old and new to save me. To save me while I save others. I know it can all be done, but it just keeps getting more dangerous. And anyone I can’t save, I’ll have killed them by failing them.”
Beltran’s mouth fell open in shock for a moment at his vehemence. Then he closed it, and slowly nodded, blushing a little with embarrassment.
The discussion lasted most of a candlemark without a single warning from Star that they were being watched. So Star was right. No one was scrying this place. No one cared what happened here. People lived, and probably died here, and no one cared except to drag away bodies or shove more people in the cage. And probably the dissidents weren’t at all amusing to watch. After all, even if someone had a personal enemy in here, Kordas had the impression that such passive revenge was nothing like bloody enough for the rapacious weasels that inhabited the Court.
“All right,” he said. “Star, leave the Curiosity Trap off. I want the Dolls to start bringing packs and supplies down here for the people in the cage. Travel food, some extra clothing, bedrolls, water bottles. And a good warm coat or cloak, and boots for all of them. If—when—they reach the refuge, they are going to need all of those things. It’s only until next moon until the Regatta—” Now he looked directly at the people behind that chainlink fence. “Can you bear to stay here for a couple more days? Because our best chance of getting everyone free is to stage everything at once. The last of my people are going to the refuge during the Regatta. The Dolls are all going then. Your best chance of getting out is to leave then, too.”
Scullen spoke for them all. “We can manage,” she said fiercely.
“And you,” he turned to Star. “Before those of you here leave, can you break the Trap and open the cage, and take these people with you? You promised to bring the hostages. Will you bring these people too?”
“We will,” Star said immediately. “It adds very little complication to what was already planned. We have already begun stepping up production of provisions.”
“When would the best time to go be?” he asked.
“When the Emperor leaves to view the Regatta,” Star told them. “That will be no sooner than noon and no later than afternoon. Once he is seated in his chariot, he will no longer require Doll attendants, and he will dismiss us.”
“Then that will be the signal,” he told them all. “When the Emperor is in his chariot—we run for the Gates. You break this place, you each grab a prisoner or a hostage, and you run for the Gates. You’ll have your talismans. This all needs to happen at once, so nobody who would oppose it can coordinate a defense. And hopefully—” he looked at Beltran “—hopefully my Herald and I will be right behind you.”
* * *
—
Kordas certainly hadn’t planned this diversion, and after seeing the Trap and the bait in it, he really hadn’t wanted it, but it seemed important to Star that he speak with the Record Keeper, and if it was important to Star, it was obviously important to all the Dolls. So the two of them stepped through another of the many Gates that seemed only used by Dolls, as Star said aloud, “The Office of Records.” They emerged in the strangest—room?—Kordas had ever seen in his life.
It was not strange enough to cool his anger, but it was strange enough that it got his attention through his anger.
At the very front of the room was a Doll: faceless, as usual, but with much more of a suggestion of features sculpted into the front of its head than the rest of them had. It sat at a desk facing the Gate; there were some stacked papers to one side of the desk, and what looked like a series of seals lined up neatly, fitted into a wooden holder, at the front of the desk. Yarn, dyed long ago and now a faded gray, had been fastened to its head in place of hair or a wig, and tied back into a tail at the back of its head. It was fully clothed, as far as Kordas could tell, in a shirt, breeches, and shoes, with the Imperial tabard over all.
Behind the Doll and the desk were rows of shelves, stretching far into the dim reaches of the room, which was the biggest single enclosed space he had ever seen in his life. Bigger than the Imperial stables. Bigger than the Audience Chamber or the Great Hall. Big enough to have contained all of those spaces, and still have room left over. Between the shelves were pillars
and buttresses, linked by walkways and ladders. Atop the shelves were scaffolds bearing oddly proportioned items, crates or warped pieces of unknown import. And on those shelves, which were two stories tall, were boxes of the sort he kept papers stored in, back in his office in the manor, except it was not inconceivable that there were tens of thousands of them. His head swam to think just how much written material must be here.
This surely must be, literally, all the Imperial records stretching back to when the Emperor was just one King among many, and before.
Dolls moved among the shelves, removing boxes, adding papers, putting boxes back. As one, they all paused in the same instant, looked at the trio for a moment, nodded their heads, and returned to their work.
“Whoa,” Beltran said.
“This one is the Record Keeper, Duke Kordas, and you may always speak freely here,” it said, in a stronger voice than a whisper. It gestured up; Kordas looked at the ceiling and saw that the sigil that permanently prevented scrying had been carved into the wood up there. “This room cannot be scryed, because all the secrets of the Empire are here.”
It took him a moment to comprehend that. “All of them?” he managed to ask, when the reality of the situation hit him.
The Record Keeper nodded. “All of them,” it repeated. “And you can well imagine how much people would pay to be able to scry them. This one is the oldest Doll in the Palace. This one is the first Doll made. What every Doll ever made knew, this one knows.”
Kordas had to take a moment to take that in. He was in the presence of the single entity in this entire Palace that literally knew everything that had gone on within its walls for the last—what?
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