My cell was roughly three paces wide and three paces deep—I say “roughly” because it was an irregular chamber that had been formed by widening the end of one of the mine’s passageways and then separating it from the passageway with a brick wall. In the middle of the brick wall was a heavy iron door that had a slot in the bottom so that food could be slid through. On the rare occasions when I was taken out of my cell, I had noticed that the passageway branched off in several places and I surmised that there must be other cells at the ends of some of these. It is said that at one point there were as many as a dozen sorcerers incarcerated in Nincs Varazslat, but I never saw any other prisoners. The passageways themselves were lit by oil-burning lamps that hung on hooks fastened to the walls at intervals of about thirty feet; the only light that reached my cell was from the slot at the bottom of the door.
There were no books or anything else to occupy my mind; I amused myself by imagining scenarios in which I was freed and reunited with Beata—or, on the days when rage dominated my mind, imagining the tortures I would inflict on Major Bertrek. After a year, these fantasies gave way to despair. I imagined that Beata had been killed by Eben the Warlock or, thinking I had abandoned her, had married another. The acolytes are notoriously secretive; she would learn nothing of my fate from them.
I began to wish myself dead, and wishes soon led to consideration of the methods by which I might bring about my demise. Few options were available to me. There was nothing sharp in my cell with which I might open a vein, and although I could fashion a noose from my clothing, there was nothing to hang myself from. I resolved to starve myself.
I didn’t suppose the guards would trouble themselves to force-feed me, but not wanting to risk it, I continued to take the food that was offered to me, secreting it in a corner. At first I worried that the smell of rotting food would prompt the guard to investigate, but I needn’t have worried: the food was taken away by rats nearly as quickly as I deposited it. In fact, the rats seemed to proliferate in response to my offerings, and after a week of starving myself, my cell was overrun with the horrible creatures.
I was weak with hunger and generally miserable, and the sound of the rats gnawing at my food was almost intolerable. It seemed as if there were hundreds of them, and when I grew too weak to swat them away, they swarmed over me on their way to the food. Occasionally a particularly daring specimen would nibble at one of my toes, causing me to jerk upright with a howl, momentarily making the vermin scatter. In an hour or two, the incident would have been forgotten, and another intrepid rat (or perhaps the same one) would take a bite, starting the cycle over again. After this happened three or four times, I realized that the entirety of my awareness was now devoted to anticipating the next rat bite. It was an exquisite form of torture, and this development alone might have been enough to prompt me to give up on my plan, but an even more horrific realization lurked at the edge of my consciousness: my death would not come about by starvation; I was going to be eaten alive.
Unable to tolerate this eventuality, I determined to live. I let the rats finish their meal and then spent a miserable night swatting at them as they tried to make dessert of my toes. The rats were nocturnal by preference, so the next day they left me alone, with the exception of a few stragglers. By the time my daily meal arrived in the evening, however, the floor of the cell was crawling with them. It was as if they had sensed that I didn’t have much fight left, and they were planning to make a feast of me.
When the plate of food was at last delivered, I seized it greedily. I sat cross-legged with the plate on my lap, shoving food into my mouth with one hand and swatting at rats with the other. The rats, whom I’d inadvertently trained to expect a lavish feast at this hour, were incensed. They bit ferociously at my hands and legs, drawing blood, the scent of which excited their fellows who had not yet joined in. It is a terrifying thing to realize that you are about to be eaten alive, and it is perhaps only my terror that saved me. Insensate with hunger, pain and fear, I screamed, and the sound startled the rats. With newfound strength, I shook them off and held them at bay long enough to finish the food. The rats tormented me for another night, awakening me with a bite whenever I drifted off to sleep, but the next morning they were gone. That evening I fought them off more easily, and after that they began to learn that the feast days were over.
I half-expected to develop lockjaw or the weeping plague as a result of the dozens of bites I’d received, but over the next several days I grew stronger. Strange as it is to relate, my struggle with the rats had given me a feeling of accomplishment; I now felt in possession of a sort of mental strength that I had previously lacked. I still had no hope of being released, but I came to realize that even in such a place as this, I was the master of my own mind, and therefore of my own reality.
I reviewed in my mind the lessons that I’d taken from Beata, and then the books that I’d read while serving as General Janos’s adjutant. I began to remember individual phrases from books, then passages, and then entire pages. Eventually I had entire books at my disposal; I needed only to imagine riffling through the pages until I came to the passage I wished to review. I soon found that I could transcribe my thoughts in the same way. I created a book in my mind with an infinite number of pages, and began to create in it various headings for different topics and then filling each section with discourse and essays, using an imaginary pen that never ran out of ink. I even tried my hand at poetry.
I had by this time completely lost track of how long I had been imprisoned; I could only guess by the length of my hair and beard. The guard had been instructed neither to speak to me nor to listen to anything I said, presumably so that I would not be able to work any sort of enchantment on his mind. Hoping to wear down his resolve, I began to ask every time he brought my food what the current date was, promising never to ask again if he would answer me only once. Finally, after forty-seven requests, he relented. True to my word, I did not ask again. I had been in Nincs Varazslat for seventeen months and three days.
I created in my book of infinite pages a calendar, on which I began to mark the passage of days. This information was of no practical use to me, but it was one more thing with which to occupy my time. Knowing how much time had passed allowed me to better imagine what might now be transpiring outside the dungeon. Sometimes I would imagine what Beata or Rodric or General Janos might be doing.
Other times my thoughts went to the shadow world that I had seen after Eben had touched me. I did not at this point think it was anything more than a hallucination brought on by the pain of his touch, but I began to wonder if it was something more. Was it a real place I had somehow traveled to? Had Eben inadvertently transferred something more to me that just his brand?
The truth was that in Nincs Varazslat, the very idea of “real place” had lost much of its meaning. I spent my days traversing the pages of books in my mind. Were these “real”? They certainly seemed more real than the monotonous gloom of my cell. At last I mustered the courage to do what I had been afraid to do since I had first begun to delve deeply into my own mind: I traveled back to the shadow world.
When I say I traveled to it, I mean only that I brought it to mind, in the same way that I brought to mind the books in General Janos’s library. And yet as I sat there in my dark cell, it sometimes seemed as if I really was transported to that strange land. Perhaps it was the affinity the dark, rocky and sparse terrain shared with my cell that made it seem more real, although the more I visited it, the less similar it seemed. In comparison to my cell, the shadow world was vast, dazzling and teeming with activity—for although I had at first thought it devoid of life, I now became aware of figures moving in the distant mountains and in the castle.
One might well suppose that I imagined these figures, filling the shadow world with phantoms to compensate for the isolation of my cell. I can only say that the shadows were not the sort I would imagine if I were looking for comfort. They were strange, twisted things, somewhere between animals and m
en, but with little of the beauty of either; it was as if they had been constructed from the pieces left over from more noble creatures and then adorned with superfluous limbs, vestigial wings or horns that seemed as likely to wound their bearer as any predator. Their sizes were as varied as their composition; some seemed to me larger than elephants, others as small as foxes. With nothing to gauge them against but the mountains and others of their kind, it was difficult to make any judgment on the matter. The creatures moved about the crags and fissures of the mountains, nimble as goats despite their deformities, engaged in business as inscrutable to me as the actions of a farmer must seem to a field mouse.
From my descriptions of these creatures it may seem that I was free to explore the shadow world at will, but the truth was that I found myself unable to move from the spot where I had stood in the vision I had first had of that land. I could examine the castle directly ahead and turn my head to view the mountains on both sides, as I had in the original vision, but I could neither move my feet nor turn to see what lay behind me. Yet although I was frozen in place, the vista was not: I could stand and watch the creatures move about the mountains and on the parapets of the castle for hours. Sometimes they fought with each other, usually one-on-one, but occasionally in groups of dozens or hundreds. My forebodings aside, the creatures seemed to be unaware of me. Only rarely would one of them venture onto the plain, and never as far as my vantage point.
Another curious aspect of my visits of that place was that by concentrating on some facet of the vista, I could enlarge it to fill my field of vision, so that details I should have been unable to discern at that distance became clear to me. As with my ability to recall passages in the books I had read in General Janos’s library, this faculty improved with time, and there seemed no limit to it: although I could not see through the rocks or the walls of the castle, I was eventually able to make out striations where the masons had molded the stones with their chisels. I knew every tower and buttress of that castle—at least those that were visible from my vantage point—and developed a likely floor plan for it. (The floor plan, detailed as it was, never possessed the vivid clarity of the vista itself, although both were ostensibly products of my imagination.) When I tired of this, I worked on honing my other senses in that place, but this was less rewarding: the creatures spoke an ugly language of grunts and snarls that, to the extent I could make any sense of it, seemed to be employed mostly for threats, commands and obsequious pleas for mercy. The odors of the place were even worse.
I never saw any of the creatures enter or leave the castle. I got the impression, after watching for many hours, that the beasts inside the castle, although they lived fairly miserable lives, were rather better off than those in the mountains. I occasionally heard the sounds of quarrels from within the castle, but these were of a smaller scale than those outside and were ended quickly. It seemed that some great demon ruled within the castle and kept order there, although I was frustrated in my efforts to learn more of the hierarchy by the great stone walls that concealed most of the goings-on. Although I had initially assumed that the guard house on the near side of the moat concealed a bridge that led to the castle, I began to wonder if the castle were completely cut off from the surrounding plain. The guard tower appeared to be completely unmanned; I never saw any movement there.
Observing this strange landscape might have made for a diverting pastime but for one problem: time seemed to pass there much slower than it did in my cell. I had no reliable way to gauge the passage of time in the shadow world, but I had learned to measure the passage of time in the dungeon by observing the gradual fading of the lamp light that penetrated my cell as the wick burned lower. This may seem impossible, but to a man whose entire world is near darkness, an innumerable gradation of grays are visible. I practiced this skill until I could predict the arrival of the guard with my dinner within ten minutes. I recall watching a battle that seemed to rage for days in the shadow world only to find that less than hour had passed in the dungeon. Thus, by spending time there, I was in effect lengthening my sentence. Despite the respite offered by my visits to the shadow world, the days crept by slowly and I once again began to despair.
I might have offered myself up to the rats after all if it had not been for a fortuitous change in my circumstances: one day, as I sat in my usual place, paging through a volume on the mythology of the Barbaroki, I heard a man’s voice singing. My memory had become sharp during my incarceration, and I frequently called to mind the singing of Beata or other pleasant sounds of my youth, but this sound was more distinct than any memory. It might have come from the shadow world, but I had never heard anything more pleasant in that place than a chorus of foul beasts howling over the defeat of some shared enemy. This was a human voice, singing in words that I could understand—although the lyrics seemed to be nonsense.
I listened for hours, not daring to move or make a sound for fear that I would frighten the man into silence or break the spell that brought his voice to me. He went from song to song, sometimes switching in the middle of the refrain. Some of the tunes were familiar to me, but none of the words; they were like the semi-coherent gobbledygook of nursery rhymes. At last he seemed to tire, and, fearing that the voice might disappear as mysteriously as it had arrived, I ventured a word.
“Hello? Who is that?”
There was no reply, but I heard a sharp movement followed by silence, as if someone had started and then frozen.
“I mean you no harm,” I said. “I am a prisoner here, and I heard you singing. I thought perhaps you had suffered the same fate as I.”
“A prisoner!” cried the man. “Pitiable wretch! What is your crime?”
“I’ve been convicted of sorcery, but it was a case of mistaken identity. Are you not then a fellow inmate?”
“No, I am only awaiting the Governor. He is a very busy man, you know.”
“Undoubtedly,” I said, “but this is a strange place to wait for him, is it not?”
“It is an antechamber,” the man said. “I suppose it is no worse than most. It matters little, as I don’t plan to remain long.”
I began to get the sense the man was mad. Still, his company was welcome. “How is it that I hear your voice? I didn’t think there were any other… rooms nearby.” I had nearly said cells.
“There is a crack in the wall,” he said. “It must connect to your cell.”
I had not dared to move since first hearing the man’s voice, but now I stood and felt along the wall. “Speak again,” I said.
“Are you in a dungeon below the Governor’s palace?” the man asked. His voice was coming from a barely visible crack in the ceiling just out of my reach.
“I’m in a place called Nincs Varazslat,” I said. “It’s an abandoned salt mine.”
“It sounds dreadful,” he said. “When I see the Governor, I will ask him to release you. What is your name?”
“I’m Konrad.” I considered explaining that I’d been sentenced under the name of Eben the Warlock, but there was no point in confusing him, as he had as much chance of obtaining an audience with the Governor as I did.
“I’m Bolond,” he said. “Glad to meet you, Konrad. As it seems I shall not meet the Governor today, I will go to sleep so that I will be ready when they call me in the morning. Goodnight.” Soon I heard snoring, which was almost as pleasurable to my ear as the singing had been. Shortly thereafter I fell asleep as well.
I awoke the next morning to singing. Bolond seemed to have an endless repertoire of his nonsense songs. After he’d sung three of them, I interrupted.
“Good morning, Bolond,” I said. “Did you sleep well?”
There was the startled sound and then silence.
“It’s me, Konrad,” I said after a moment.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“In my cell, in Nincs Varazslat.”
“Why do you speak to me through a crack in the wall?”
“It’s the same way we spoke to each other yesterday.
There seems to be a channel connecting your cell to mine.” I had hoped, if he really had forgotten the events of the previous day, that I might have a fresh chance to convince him of the reality of his situation.
“I’m not in a cell,” he said. “I’m in an antechamber awaiting the Governor.”
“You have no memory of speaking with me yesterday?”
“I only arrived this morning.”
“We spoke yesterday, in this same manner.”
“There’s no point in talking to you if you’re only going to spout nonsense.” He began to sing, performing several of his gobbledygook songs in a row. At last he paused, but as soon as I spoke a word, he started up again. This went on until dinner, by which time I had given up trying to talk to him. We ate in silence. His dinner had arrived about three minutes before mine, by which fact I judged that his cell was perhaps a hundred yards or so down one of the passages. After dinner, he quickly fell asleep.
The next day he once again seemed to have no memory of our previous conversations. He was convinced that he’d just arrived at the Governor’s antechamber and was likely to be granted an audience at any moment. This time I did not attempt to disabuse him of the idea.
I could not get him to tell me why he wished to see the Governor or anything about himself beyond his name; he would only say that he was on a very important mission, and that perhaps he could tell me more someday if he came to trust me. Since his memory seemed to extend only a few hours, it seemed unlikely I would be able to earn his trust. I tried for weeks, every morning having some version of the same conversation with him, and every day learning nothing. The next day we would start from scratch: he would remember nothing about me or our previous conversations, and was always surprised to hear a voice coming to him from a crack in the wall. Although I at first considered the possibility that he was pretending, I don’t think any man could have maintained the ruse so effectively and for so long. He was no doubt quite mad.
The Brand of the Warlock Page 8
