Prisoner of Conscience

by Susan R. Matthews

  Belan also knew better than to even hint as much, to a Pyana like Geltoi.

  And Geltoi was still talking, as he moved past Belan where he stood to go back to his gracious home in Rudistal once more and enjoy his middle daughter’s birthday. “Won’t do them any harm. Have a schedule ready for me in the morning, Merig, we can discuss the furnaces, all right? I’m sure you didn’t have anything else planned.”

  No. He didn’t have anything planned. And Geltoi knew quite well that Belan couldn’t leave the Administration building if he was caught here after dark. The fog rose. And there were voices. “Of course not, Administrator. I’ll get right on it. The least I could do, sir, after failing you so miserably in the first place.”

  He had to say it. He did feel utterly miserable: though he wasn’t quite sure it was because he’d failed Administrator Geltoi. How had he failed? What could Geltoi have done differently?

  Why was it wrong to reveal the corruption at the heart of the Domitt Prison, rather than conceal it?

  “Never mind that, Merig, we’ll recover.” Geltoi didn’t think it was a problem. Geltoi only thought that other peoples’ mistaken perception that it was a problem could create awkwardness. “We’ll speak no more of it, but see you have that schedule in the morning.”

  There was work to do in his office, waiting for him.

  And a bottle to drink himself stupefied as soon as he was finished with it.

  ###

  Caleigh Samons rejoined the others in the officer’s front room, shaking her head. “No luck, your Excellency. Locked down. Tighter than drunk-detention on an abstention ship.”

  Koscuisko sat on the couch, leaning well forward with his hands clasped across his splayed knees. He’d finally stopped shaking.

  They were prisoners here.

  Kaydence knelt down next to his officer with a cup of hot sweet rhyti, holding Koscuisko’s hands around the cup as Koscuisko drank. All right, Koscuisko hadn’t quite managed to stop shaking. As shocking as the impact of the furnace-room tour had been, she didn’t think that was the entire explanation for Koscuisko’s fit. This had to be something that had been creeping up on him, perhaps for weeks, possibly without his conscious notice.

  “It is clear to me what must be done.” Koscuisko’s voice shook, even as his hands did. “Administrator Geltoi. I have given him too much time in which to understand. He means to keep us out of the way until he can get orders to relieve me.”

  The housekeepers had locked themselves into their rooms; Cook was in the kitchen, with nowhere else to go. The emergency exits were sealed shut: blast walls, solid across the floor of the stairwells. Solid as the lift-accesses were sealed, both of them.

  This had been coordinated.

  “What is happening? Sir.” Ailynn was much more confused by this than anyone. She hadn’t been down to the furnace-room.

  “Thank you, Kaydence. Again, please.” Koscuisko seemed to have recovered sufficiently to be able to drink his cup of rhyti on his own power. Kaydence hovered over him like an anxious parent, and it was always funny to see Security being protective of Koscuisko, when they could so easily have needed protection from Koscuisko instead. And not gotten it, being bond-involuntaries.

  Beckoning for Ailynn to come and sit beside him, Koscuisko waited until Kaydence had come back with more rhyti, bringing the brewing-flask with him.

  “Ailynn, I do not know what they say in service house about the Domitt Prison. I do not want to know,” Koscuisko said quickly, to forestall a reply. “There will be time in which to provide testimony, later.”

  Chief Samons didn’t think the penthouse was on monitor. They’d swept during the first few days, and periodically since. Koscuisko was being careful not to compromise Ailynn, just in case there were monitors that they didn’t know about.

  “We made an unannounced inspection of the furnace-room just now, Ailynn. We have seen things that will be difficult for the prison administration to explain, and you heard Geltoi, they do not wish to be called to account for any of it. I hope they feed those men in second-holding.” The thought seemed to distract Koscuisko for a moment. But he was surrounded by people waiting for his word; after a moment he returned to his main stream.

  “The prison administration is fatally corrupt, and the people who have been responsible must be brought before the Bench to face extreme sanctions. It is called failure of Writ.”

  Koscuisko was speaking so calmly and carefully for the benefit of a woman who might not know the jargon that the critical phrase almost passed before Caleigh snagged on it.

  Failure of Writ?

  With the sanctions the Administration potentially faced, it was not out of the realm of imagination that the prison administration might try to arrange an accident —

  “Administrator Geltoi must have me replaced before I can go on Record, if he hopes to evade his responsibility. Or face the possibility of a Tenth Level command termination.”

  Ailynn should have some idea. Surely. She had been the one to translate the narrative, after all. On the other hand, Koscuisko did not discuss the results of interrogation with anybody: and Ailynn might easily have assumed that Koscuisko would take the torment of Nurail prisoners as inconsequential, the way the rest of the Judicial establishment seemed inclined to do.

  “Sir, have you found — all true — ” Ailynn’s horror reached out and touched Caleigh’s own feelings about the furnace-room; and Caleigh shuddered. She’d read the narrative, too.

  Koscuisko nodded. “And the evidence I have taken in these last three days is damning. I have been blind to the enormity of this thing, Ailynn. And now that I understand what has been going on I must not fail in my duty. There are so many dead to cry for justice.”

  “If the officer, and his party. Should meet. With an unfortunate – accident – ”

  Erish had trouble getting the words out; Caleigh was surprised he spoke at all. It was a good sign, though. All of the things that had happened to them here. And her troops still knew that they could trust Koscuisko.

  “It is an option.”

  Koscuisko’s frank endorsement of what she’d been thinking was a little unnerving, in its calm acceptance of the possibilities. Calm? They had pulled Koscuisko away from the furnace-room in a fit. Maybe he was just in shock. He sounded perfectly lucid. But shock could do that.

  “It would create more problems than it might solve, however, and upon this I must rely for now. There has been one threat against my life in Port Rudistal already, if one may be excused for interpreting Joslire’s death in so selfish a fashion.”

  Well, that was all Fleet and the Bench made of it. Security’s job was to die in the place of senior officers of assignment. Koscuisko simply wasn’t very rational about the issue. But he did have a good grasp on the official interpretation of the incident.

  “The Port Authority would be called upon to validate that any accident was not sabotage or terrorism, and if it could be covered up there would still be my family to deal with. The Combine would be sure to take an interest in how an accident could be permitted to damage the management resources of the Koscuisko familial corporation.”

  This seemed to comfort Koscuisko as he spoke; he even smiled. “In fact it would be almost certain to invoke the Malcontent, and no secret is safe from the slaves of Saint Andrej Malcontent, gentles. They are the Bench intelligence specialists of the holy Mother’s church. No. I do not think a prudent murderer would try it, and we have no reason to suspect that Geltoi is a desperate or imprudent murderer. For now I think we are just prisoners.”

  There were pieces in Koscuisko’s logic that Caleigh didn’t quite follow. That was all right. She had no need to follow his meaning. She trusted his judgment. And it was true that Koscuisko was a political figure in his own right, even only in the Dolgorukij Combine, even only as an inheriting son.

  Geltoi might not know that . . .

  “For now we are safe. I must cry my claim to the Bench before orders of reassignment are receiv
ed by the Domitt Prison. And I must do so before Geltoi has a chance to destroy the evidence of his crimes. Miss Samons. We will need to get to the Administration building tonight; please explain how we are to do so.”

  Desperate men did desperate things. Anybody with a potential Tenth Level facing him could be excused for becoming desperate. Koscuisko was right, if for different reasons than Koscuisko might think.

  Koscuisko was determined to declare failure of Writ while he still could.

  Once Koscuisko was on Record, killing him would no longer be of any earthly use to anyone.

  ###

  Night, and the sky was black and clear and cold. The breeze that had blown from the river to the land in the hours around sunset had fallen still and calm, but the damned furnaces still sent their plumes of milky smoke into the sky. Andrej shuddered at the sight of the white feathers in the night. To think. No. He could not afford to think.

  “Miss Samons, please forgive me, and I hope to ask you this question only this one time.” He stood a little apart with his Chief of Security, watching Toska and Erish secure the cable around the anchors they had built in the garden. “It is a reflection of my ignorance, I do not mean to challenge your judgment. You are sure that this will work. It is a long way.”

  He was the one who had said they had to get to the Administration building.

  That she should go over the wall on a cable braided of torn sheeting had not been something he could have anticipated.

  “It’ll hold, sir. And the distance parses out.”

  Two eights until daybreak, two hours until sunrise. The lights had been on in the Administration building all night. There would logically be someone in there on night-watch, if only for appearance’s sake.

  For the rest of it, during all the time they had been here there had been no surveillance or patrol of the space between the prison and the containment wall that anyone had noticed. Chief Samons was convinced that that was reasonable, given Kaydence’s analysis of the other securities built into the installation. Andrej could only hope that she was right.

  The Administration expected anyone who managed to escape from the prison to make straight for the containment wall, not break into Administrative offices. Andrej leaned cautiously over the low safety barrier that spanned the vista gap in the wall, looking down. Chief Samons pointed. “And the fog is on our side, look there.”

  She was right.

  There was a filled-in construction pit to the south side of the Administration building. And from the pit, a mist he’d seen in the early morning hours, rising in frothy columns from the ground, tendrils of moisture curling in the absence of any breeze. Fog rose strangely when it rose. Andrej had never quite understood what it was that caused the mist to creep or rise; something to do with warm moist soil and cold air.

  The fog from the construction pit had risen much more thickly than he had ever seen it; or perhaps it was just the difference in time? It was a solid blanket in the night; not even the lights from the Administration building could penetrate far into that fog. The fog would cover them for most of the descent down to the ground.

  Would they be able to find each other in the dark?

  There would be the lights from the Administration building.

  And his gentlemen had their gear with them, and that meant one of them was carrying the night-scope.

  Toska went back into the darkened penthouse to fetch something or another, and Erish came up to salute.

  “We’re ready, sir. Chief. Cousin Ailynn to go with Kaydence, sir?”

  That had seemed best. Chief Samons had assured him that his Security were fit to make the descent safely, and that he himself was not to lose his grip and fall upon pain of her displeasure. Kaydence was the man they all agreed had the most strength in his upper body; he was to carry Ailynn on his back. Leaving her behind was out of the question, because of the evidence she had in her mind. Andrej had rather hoped they would suggest building a harness of some sort in which to lower her down; but he had not been so lucky.

  Here was Toska back. Security formed up at the wall, the coils of braided cable glistening on the ground. It was a very great waste of sheeting, in a sense, and they’d been lucky that the linen stores had held clean linen for the ten souls that had been expected to sleep there. Good quality sheeting it had been, too, especially that intended for his bed and that of Chief Samons. Excellent for load-bearing.

  So Security was kitted up and ready to go. The housekeepers had been barricaded into quarters, to ensure that there would be no interference. Cook locked into the pantry for prudence’s sake, and very understanding Cook was about it all, too.

  “You have the narrative?” Andrej asked Ailynn, who stood close to Kaydence in the line. She opened her front-wrap and showed him: tied on a cord, and hung around her neck. Yes.

  All right.

  “Chief Samons, your action.”

  She had briefed them.

  They all knew what they were to do.

  “Switch on your night-scope, Code.” Code and Toska would go down first. There were two cables, and Kaydence and Erish were letting them down over the wall in preparation for the descent. “Two tugs, then three, when you’re ready. Kaydence goes next with Ailynn, Code, on your side. The officer next on Toska’s side. Erish and I come down last. Then we move.”

  Didn’t he know they could do it?

  Didn’t he know they would be all right?

  Code and Toska saluted briskly and stepped forward. The braided cables were stretched taut between the anchors and the wall, now, and Code and Toska each sat down on the low lip of the vista gap. Feet to either side of the knots they’d set in the cable at intervals. Leaning well back to slide slowly down the other side of the vista gap and start down.

  Andrej made a prayer to the fog in his mind. Hide these people. Protect these people. It is no disrespect we mean to the walls or the grounds of the Domitt Prison. It is only what has been done here on these grounds, within these walls. We come to remove the shame of those crimes from these grounds and walls. Protect these people, hide them from unfriendly eyes.

  They seemed to wait forever.

  But the signal came up the cable strong and reassuring at last. Two long slow pulls at the now-slackened cable. Followed by three shorter pulls. Code and Toska were on the ground, and at least so far there was nothing they could see or hear that indicated the potential existence of a problem.

  “Tuck up your skirts, cousin, and wrap your legs around my waist, now.”

  Kaydence’s cheerful advice was carefully quiet, but the fun he had in his mildly suggestive comment was clear even so. It was too dark to see if Ailynn blushed. Kaydence took a moment, sitting on the lip of the vista gap with Ailynn pick-a-back, making sure of his grip, settling himself for the descent.

  Andrej hated this.

  Carefully, slowly, Kaydence edged himself over the wall, creeping down the rope in small controlled movements with Ailynn holding fast to his shoulders with her arms around his neck.

  Kaydence could do it if anybody could.

  Kaydence could do it.

  The tension on the braided cable was terrible, and Andrej remembered the tests Chief Samons had insisted upon, unable to quiet his fear that it might fail regardless. He couldn’t see them, when he looked; the fog was too thick. It had run well past the top of the Administration building; was it his imagination, or was it even thicker than it had been when Toska and Code had gone down?

  Oh, clever fog, Andrej praised it, in his mind. Gentle fog. Nobly born fog of a wealthy house begotten.

  The cable went slack.

  Andrej stared at it in dread, willing his anxious gaze to travel down to the ground through the cable, desperate to be able to see what was happening.

  Two tugs.

  Three following.

  Thanks be to all Saints.

  Kaydence and Ailynn were down, and safe.

  But now it was his turn.

  Andrej sat down on the lip of the vis
ta gap as he had seen the others do, and took the braided cable in his hands. Wondering what had possessed him to agree to this.

  He had to get down from the roof, and his people with him.

  “Find the rope between your feet, sir.” Chief Samons had crouched down next to him, encouraging. “Let yourself slide the first few eighths. You don’t want to knock your hands or your head against the wall. You’ll be on the ground before you know it, all you have to do is hang on and control the speed of your descent. Let’s go.”

  The braided cable was soft-edged and cool between his palms. Which were sweating. It was cold, and he was afraid of the drop.

  He could feel the thickness of the cable caught securely between the edges of the soles of his boots.

  He couldn’t sit here and stare at the fog below him forever. He had people on the ground. The longer it took to get them all down, the more vulnerable they were.

  Be soft for me if I should fall, you princess of fogs, you prince inheritor of fogs, you well-bred fog of regal parentage.

  He let himself slip down the length of the cable.

  It felt too much like falling, and Andrej clutched at the cable between his hands in a sudden fright. No. He was not falling. He was climbing down. He had only his own weight to manage, and Kaydence had just done this with Ailynn on his back, and he was Dolgorukij. He had more than enough strength in his hands and shoulders to hang on.

  Hand over hand, the cable held close between his feet, sliding past his ankles. Hand over hand, Andrej descended into the fog.

  Once the mist took him, his anxiety seemed to vanish, his apprehensions evaporated, his fear gone.

  He felt secure.

  He could do this.

  His people could do this.

  They would see justice done at the Domitt Prison.

  He felt the ground brush against his feet, familiar hands reaching out to him to steady him as he stumbled away from the cable, stunned to find that he was already here.

  It was colder on the ground. The fog was wet; the chill of it went through to the bone. But Andrej embraced the dank discomfort of it; sound did not carry, they were safely hidden in the fog. It was a shield in the night. It would conceal them until he could reach his goal.