Authors: Alexey Pehov
Eventually the jailer took another long sniff at the air and shook his head as if he was driving away some delusion. Oh, come on, granddad! There’s no way you can smell me through this stench! Not even if you have the nose of an imperial dog!
The old man started struggling with the stubborn lock again. Meanwhile I tried to keep the remains of my breakfast in my stomach. If I ever got out of these subterranean vaults, I’d have to throw away my stinking clothes and climb into a hot bath for a month.
The lock finally surrendered with a clang and the old man gave a triumphant laugh. There was a creak of rusty, unoiled hinges. He picked up the bowl and walked into the cell, lighting his way with the lantern.
I heard a faint clanking of chains.
“Woken up, have you?” the old man wheezed in a hoarse voice. “I expect you’re hungry after three days, eh?”
The answer was silence. A chain clanked again, as if the prisoner had moved.
“Ah, you’re so proud!” The old man laughed. “Well, well! Here’s some water for you. I’m sorry, I forgot the bread, left it in the watch house. But don’t you worry, my beauties, I will definitely bring it on my next round. In a couple of days.”
He gave an evil laugh.
I glanced out of my hiding place, hoping to see what was happening in the opposite cell, but all I could make out was the dim glow of the lantern and the old man’s back.
“Well, I’m off. Enjoy your stay. And drink your water. Of course, it’s not peacock in mushroom sauce or strawberries and cream, but it’s very tasty all the same!”
The old man walked out of the cell and the door creaked as it started to close.
“Stop!” Ah, so one of the prisoners was a woman. It was a clear, resonant voice, one used to giving orders.
“Well, I never!” the old man exclaimed in surprise, and stopped. “She spoke. What do you want?”
“Take off the chain.”
“And is there anything else you’d like?”
“Do as I say and you’ll get a thousand gold pieces.”
“Don’t abase yourself in front of him, Leta!” another woman said in a harsh voice.
“A thousand? Oho, that’s a lot!” the old man croaked, and the door of the cell started creaking again.
“Five thousand!” I could hear a note of despair in Leta’s voice.
The door kept on closing.
“Ten! Ten thousand!”
The door slammed with a crash, and I shuddered. That crash seemed to bring the sky tumbling down onto the earth. The bunch of keys jangled again, and I moved away from the wall beside the doorway, where I had been all this time, and retreated deeper into the cell, away from the light.
From my new position I would be able to see the old man’s face—and I simply had to see the face of a man who could refuse ten thousand gold pieces in such a simple, offhand manner.
The key grated in the lock and the old man hung the bunch on his belt and turned toward me. What I saw frightened me.
Very badly.
The last time I had been so frightened was that night when I climbed into the Forbidden Territory and met the charming and hungry jolly weeper.
The old man had parchment-yellow skin, a straight, sharp nose, bloodless blue lips, a dirty, unkempt beard, and his eyes … His eyes terrified me so much that my knees started shaking. The old fogey had cold, agate eyes without any sign of pupils or an iris. How can you call two opaque pits of darkness eyes?
They were deader than stone, colder than ice, more indifferent than eternity.
Such things simply shouldn’t exist in our world.
I couldn’t withstand that gaze, and I staggered backward.
All the universal laws of misery united to place a piece of rubbish under my feet. And you don’t need to be a genius to guess that the garbage made a deafening clang. To me it sounded loud enough to be heard on the other side of Siala.
The old man, as was only to be expected, froze on the spot and stared with those dead black eyes straight at the spot where I was hiding.
I couldn’t think of anything better to do than to pretend I was a log or a lump of stone. In other words, I tried not to move, or even to breathe.
The old man drew in air through his nose and I prayed to Sagot that he wouldn’t catch my scent. This jailer with two pools of blackness instead of eyes frightened me so badly, I could have wet my drawers.
The old man shifted the lantern from his right hand to his left and took out a weapon. What it resembled most of all was … Well, what can a large human shinbone sharpened at one end resemble? Only a sharpened bone, nothing else.
In the light of the lantern the bone looked yellow, except that its sharp end, which was shaped just like the point of a spear, was a dirty, rusty color—the color of dried blood. The old man grinned and I caught a glimpse of yellow stumps of rotten teeth. He took a firmer grip on his strange weapon, raised his lantern, and moved in my direction.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that in the final few seconds before death a man’s entire past life flashes in front of his eyes like a galloping herd of Doralissian horses.
It’s a lie. A deliberate, barefaced, godless lie.
I didn’t notice any visions passing through my mind in those few seconds. Who can pay attention to visions when his knees are knocking in sheer terror? The hideous old man had decided to do away with me, there could be no doubt about it.
Either the god of all thieves heard my prayer, or the smell, which I had almost managed to get used to, offended the jailer’s sensitive nose, but either way, he stopped three steps outside the doorway of my refuge. The old man was looking straight at me, and the light cast by his lantern ended just five yards away from my feet. If the monstrous freak had taken just a few more steps forward, the light would have reached me.
I cursed my own careless curiosity. If I’d used my head, I would have pressed myself back against the wall and not just stood there like a statue in the middle of the cell, facing the doorway and hoping that the darkness would protect me from the old man’s eyes.
Those black eyes gazed in my direction without blinking, and my heart pounded thunderously in my chest, louder than a blacksmith’s hammer. I was amazed that the old man couldn’t hear it. He stared for a long time. For a very long time, at least a minute, which felt to me like a year, during which I aged an entire century.
“Damned rats,” the old man wheezed eventually. “Still breeding, the lousy creatures. What do they eat down here, anyway?”
He stuck his spear-bone away somewhere under his rags, shifted the lantern from his left hand to his right, and shuffled off down the corridor toward the stairway. Once he was gone, all I could see was a small piece of the corridor and the door of the cell in which the two female prisoners were languishing. The farther away the old man moved, the dimmer the light in the corridor became.
I didn’t do anything insanely stupid like trying to creep along behind the jailer. Any desire to leave my stinking cell had evaporated the moment I saw his eyes. It would be better to wait and then make my way slowly and quietly to the stairs, even if they did lead into pitch-darkness.
So I stayed where I was.
What if, instead of going up the nearest stairway, I walked to the one that had led me into this corridor and then staggered back to the place where I had come round, and looked for a different way out? I didn’t feel too lazy to cover the immense distance back anymore. I was prepared to do anything at all, up to and including flattening the Mountains of the Dwarves, just as long as I didn’t meet that old man again. The sound of shuffling feet faded away and a deafening silence filled the corridor. But there was still light! The light of the lantern hadn’t completely disappeared. There was a thick, deep twilight in the corridor.…
The old man had stopped before he got to the stairway. But why, darkness devour him?
Keeping my eyes fixed on the doorway, I took a careful step to the left, then another, and another, and another.
And then I almost had a heart attack! On my word of honor, no one had ever managed to frighten me so badly twice in such a short time before.
The monster hadn’t gone away at all. He’d stretched his withered body out on the floor and he was looking into the cell. If I’d stayed in the same spot where I’d been standing only a few seconds earlier, I wouldn’t have noticed him. And if I’d done something even more stupid and moved toward the doorway instead of stepping to the left, I would have come face-to-face with him. And now this monster in human form was staring intently at the very spot where I had just been.
What a cunning devil! How furtively and silently he had come back! He had even duped me. May the darkness drink my blood—it had all been a pretense.
As the old man got up off the floor, his hand dived under his doublet and whipped out his weapon. My back was instantly soaked in cold sweat.
In only two heartbeats the old man leapt into the center of the corridor, stood facing the doorway, and with a movement almost too quick to see, flung the bone at the spot where he thought I was standing. The bone whined as if it were alive as it flew through the air and shot right across the cell, crashing into the far wall with a dull thud and falling to the floor.
My would-be killer grunted in surprise and scratched the back of his head thoughtfully.
“It really is rats,” he said in a rather disappointed voice. “Oh, what a bone I’ve wasted! I’m not sticking my nose into this dump until that smell’s gone.”
Muttering and swearing, he set off in the direction of his lantern. The sound of shuffling feet receded, the corridor turned darker, and soon the impenetrable darkness returned.
I tried to calm the insane pounding of my heart, which was all set to jump right out of my ribcage. I’d been lucky. If I hadn’t moved from my old spot that bone would have been stuck in my chest. The old man had thrown it so quickly that I couldn’t possibly have dodged it; I wouldn’t even have realized what had happened.
I had been saved by good luck, the help of Sagot, and the caprice of fate. My heartfelt thanks went to all of them for allowing me to keep my life.
The old man’s footsteps faded away. My eyes had become so used to the darkness now that I could make out the contours of the doorway. It was very, very quiet all around me, but my fear was still as strong as ever. I was quite simply afraid to move a muscle. What if this was just another cunning trick? I’d already seen how silently he could move. He could easily have pretended to be leaving, taken the lantern away, and could be waiting for me now in the darkness of the corridor!
Waiting … in the darkness of the corridor.…
A cold shudder ran between my shoulder blades and down my back. I distinctly felt the hair on my head move. That cursed old man with his cursed black eyes was as tricky as a dozen orcs and he could quite easily be waiting in ambush, ready to send me on my final walk into the light.
“Stop, Harold, stop! Stop thinking about it, otherwise the fear will seep into your very bones! A few more thoughts like that, and you’ll start to panic. You’re a thief. The calm, calculating master thief known as Shadow Harold. A menace to every rich man’s treasure chest. The Harold that little green goblins with sharp tongues call the Dancer in the Shadows. You’ve never given way to panic while you were working, so don’t give way to it now! Keep calm.… Keep calm.… Calm your breathing now, that’s it.… Breathe in, breathe out.… Well done! Now get out of here, before things get even worse.”
I don’t know if I muttered these words myself or if someone invisible whispered them in my ear, but, with an angry snarl and clatter of teeth, the fear retreated.
Wandering about unarmed in the dark is an absolutely crazy idea, so I held my breath and walked to the back wall of the cell, where the bone had fallen to the floor. I felt around blindly with my feet for a long time, trying to find it. My eyes were watering from the stench and my nose felt as if someone had emptied a wagonload of Garrakian pepper into it, but eventually I found the bone and picked it up.
It was heavy! As I weighed the weapon in my hand, I immediately felt safer. If, Sagot forbid, something went wrong, at least I would have a weapon. I stuck it under my belt and cautiously peeped out of the cell into the corridor.
Nothing and nobody. Black darkness.
I couldn’t see the light of the lantern; the old man must have already reached the stairway. After the stupefying stench of the cell, the stale, musty air of the corridor seemed like refreshing nectar of the gods to me.
I couldn’t get those cursed black eyes out of my mind—I knew they would haunt my nightmares forever. Ah, if only Eel was with me.…
Eel! How could I have forgotten about him!
The veil of forgetfulness fell away and all the previous events of the day flashed through my mind. I remembered what had happened that morning.
First the walk to the mansion and estate of the unknown servant of the Master, then the attack by supporters of the Nameless One, our escape on that absurd wagon, and the crash into the wall before we were taken prisoner and I lost consciousness. And then I had come to in the corridors of this underground prison.
But if I was here, then what had they done with the Garrakian? And why had they left me on the floor of the corridor and not put me in a cell, like the other prisoners? And there was another strange thing—I didn’t feel as if I’d gone flying into the wall of that house at full speed.… My arms and legs were all sound, my side wasn’t smarting. I felt as if I could easily sprint a hundred yards with the guards chasing me.