147 - My will in its cage was laughing

I woke up in a room that I knew, by its starkly-plain walls and deathly-blue sconce-lamps, must be in the Mahid section of the Marble Palace. I was shackled hand and foot to a bed, naked and uncovered; where Chirel was, I couldn’t tell, though I couldn’t imagine it was anywhere but the Weapons Trust.

The Imperial Pharmacist sat beside me, pressing a tiny pad of linen to the inside of the crook of my arm, which hurt with the pain from a vein-needle. They’re wasting no time with the truth-drug, I thought. But he opened another box and filled another vein-needle very carefully to a precise amount, as I’d seen him do with truth-drug before. “What is it you’ve already given me?” I asked him.

“Stun-drug antidote,” he said, though I’d thought it was maybe a one-in-ten chance that he’d answer. “Best to clear your head of the dart-drug before the truth-drug goes into you.” It was merciful; it eased the headache. It did nothing for the desperate wish for a katzerik. “Here.” He lifted my head by a gentle grip on my hair, and put a cup to my lips. “All of it.” It was water. I drank it, and a second.

Niku… all the people of Niah-lur-ana… I’m sorry. How could I get word to her, before the knowledge came to her people that they were betrayed, so she could get away? I wrote a letter in my head. Go to Vae Arahi… ask for Karani Aicheresa… Who was I fooling? She would go home and nowhere else, to argue that telling me had been the right thing to do.

Amitzas sat in unnatural Mahid stillness for a time, and I busied myself with mastering my tears; somehow I didn’t want him, or any other Mahid, to see them. Then he checked me over as only Haians, not Mahid, should know how to do, put the truth-drug into my other arm, held the linen there for a bit and went out with his usual stiff, slow walk, leaving me to feel it take effect alone.

This time they didn’t give me the drug to kill my memory, so I remember the full questioning. Under truth-drug, one falls into a strange state of silence, like the clarity of meditation, or drunkenness, but much deeper and heavier, and with far less of a sense of choice. The words of anyone near seem like the words of the God-In-Oneself, surrounding and filling the soul; though one might consider disobeying them, as well fight them as a river-current; the body will do their will even as one is considering, and the considerations show themselves to be distant, piddling, trivial things. Like torture, the drug has the effect of cutting the mind in two, the will in one half and the power of speech in the other, and no bond between them.

So even as all my soul struggled against answering, my lips answered without even tension, for all my soul was now only half. Though I had no memory of it, the feeling was familiar; now I understood what horror I must have felt, to hear my own voice softly give up my true name, then the secrets that would be death to my people, while my will flailed and shrieked uselessly like a bat in a cage. Even my body was not my own, for while it should tense and struggle, to not say the words that would be death to Niku’s people, it lay boneless and warm, with a sweet feeling all over like the first hint of sleep when you lie down exhausted.

It was another old man, a senior Mahid whose name I never learned, who questioned me. Under truth-drug, you tend to give answers passively, in one or two words, without thinking to explain anything the other might not know. You can’t tell a story or explain a plan; to get one out of you, the questioner has to lead you each step of the way.

So he learned that Mana and I were heart’s brothers, and Niku was carrying our child, and that she’d gone to the top of the lefaetas Patthine and raised Mana and then they’d fled without me; and he learned that Mana’s plan had been to go to Haiu Menshir with me by Fispur unless I hadn’t got out, in which case he’d take the second route he’d planned, but not told me, since I’d be truth-drugged, and Niku’s was to take a route I didn’t know. He learned how I’d got to the top of the lefaetas, and since the rest had been witnessed, he just had me confirm it.

But part of the questioning he had trouble with, starting when he asked how Niku got to the top of the lefaetas Patthine.

“She flew,” my tongue answered, as it must, while my will screamed silently.

He froze staring, for a moment; then asked me again. Three times he asked me, in different ways, and each time the answer was the same, as it must be: “She flew.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that this brown barbarian woman somehow acquired a great machine, such as only Arko’s forefathers had, and rode upon it to the top of the cliffs?”

“No,” my tongue answered, as it must.

“Then you are telling me she is a demon, and sprouted wings?”

“No.”

“Do you mean to say she… transformed into a giant bird, and flew to the top of the cliffs?”

“No.”

“Then how did she get to the top of the cliffs?”

“She flew.”

He decided to come back to this after he extracted the rest, none of which, to his relief, was implausible. Then he asked me the same questions as above yet again, almost verbatim, several times. Finally he decided—even though he’d taken everything else for the truth it was—that this vial of truth-drug must be bad. He sent for another and tried again.

On the third dose, though I’d heard that too much truth-drug could cause harm, my will in its cage was laughing.

What truth-drug compels its victim to speak is what he believes is truth, even if in truth it is false. It cannot confer knowledge we do not have. Barbaric naivete and wishful thinking had left me deluded, he concluded.

Never did he ask me, “How did she fly?” or I would have begun to explain, and he’d have got the whole truth, question by question. To do that he must admit to himself it was possible. The A-niah were lucky I’d been given to an old Mahid, with the ruts in his mind well worn in and the walls iron-clad. One such as Ilesias, the apprentice who’d guarded me while I was being griumed, would have had it out of me.

They took me back to the Mezem with three doses of perfectly good truth-drug in me, two young rock-tense Mahid half-carrying me with my arms locked over their shoulders like a drunken comrade, until they gave up just outside the Steel Gate, and one of them threw me over his shoulder like a flour-sack. Halfway to the Mezem, it was time for the other to spell him, so I was slid sack-like from one black-clad shoulder to the other.

They put me in one of the cells, of course. The two Mahid, instead of leaving as usual, took position outside my door, like two pillars of onyx. “What are you under the influence of?” Iska asked me, speaking very slowly and distinctly, his voice filling my consciousness like a God filling that of a devotee.

“Truth-drug,” I answered.

“What? Usually they let it wear off: why didn’t they?”

“He didn’t believe—”

Iska smacked his fingers across my lips. “My professional God, shen, what am I doing? Don’t answer; don’t say another word until it’s worn off. Skorsas! Your man is here, come take care of him, but you may not ask him anything except what he needs—anything.”

Once my boy had lit my katzerik, from his own, he took me in his arms, and just cradled me until I could speak of my own will, by which time it was bright daylight. The comfort of his touch, too, was much larger than usual, like a mother’s must be to a baby, and I let myself fall into it, and the healing it brought.

A Mahid had come by the Mezem earlier to ask if anyone was missing, and had been told who (including all who were dallying in taverns), but no one here knew why he was asking, since the Imperator’s black dogs don’t deign to give information even when asked by those to whom it is important. When the truth-drug was fully worn off, Iska came to ask me.

“Don’t relish your victory too much,” he said when I’d told as much of the story as I could, including that Niku and Mana were free. “Or perhaps I should say, relish it while you can. You’re going to catch it, not only for your own attempt, but for aiding and abetting their escape. Not publicly, because they will never admit that someone could succeed… and of course they can’t kill you, or leave you unfit for the Ring, since Kurkas wants to keep you here… never mind, lad. Relish it.” His words weren’t touching me, anyway, true though they were. Not betraying Niku’s secret was such a victory, I felt heady even undrugged.

Still, I was back behind bars in the pit, after setting my foot on the other side of a lefaetas wall on the Rim, and thinking of that brought fresh tears. I clung to Skorsas, pain and exhaustion making me into a child. “You’re all I have left here, you and Iska,” I said.

“That’s not true,” he said gently. “There’s Iliakaj.”

“Someone whose counsel I need maybe more than any other’s,” I said. “Get up… take a breath… start again…”

“What you need more than anything is a hot bath, a deep massage on your arms, and sleep,” Skorsas said. I’d been scratched for my fight. As we went to the new baths, the Mahid fell into step with us. Why do I have a feeling they’ll be dogging my heels for the rest of my time here, however long it is and however it ends?

The Immortal was on today, and won, so he came to visit me in the cell after I’d slept, which I did until dinner, even through the crowd-roar. “I just want to ask you one thing, Sievenka,” he said, when I’d told him as much of the story as I could. If the authorities wanted to keep quiet that ring-fighters had escaped, all the more reason to tell everyone who would listen. “Which God did you piss off?”

It would seem that way, to anyone religious, though he wasn’t very, and meant it at least half as a joke. “All of them, probably,” I said.

“Well…” He pressed two knuckles into my shoulder, smiling. His company was strengthening, like a comrade’s in a war-camp. “You’re at twenty-eight. Twenty-two more to go, that’s all, and I know you can win them.” Had he kissed off his own chance for freedom in four fights—he was at forty-six now—knowing, as he must, that if we were both still here for his fiftieth, it would be me, certain as I was Living Greatest? He was at forty-six.

Chirel was indeed in the Weapons Trust, and every gem I’d been carrying, or had tossed to the guards, had been returned. Mahid are too rigid to do that sort of stealing, and the guards had all been too afraid of the Mahid.

By dinner-time, the decree had come down from the Marble Palace to the Director. My room was to be made into a cell, bars added to the window and bolts on the outside of the door. Same with Skorsas; he would be imprisoned too, which he said was small price for being with me. Except inside my room, I would have two silver-buckled shadows every moment inside the Mezem, even in the bath, or stepping into my gate, and they’d guard my door at night. I could not leave the Mezem, even with them, except in wrist-cuffs and hobbles. “It’s all a compliment to you,” Skorsas sniffed.

The other part of the Marble Palace decree was not announced; they just took me into the Hall of Testing, which is closed in, and ordered everyone out, even Skorsas, a little after dinner. There was a whipping-frame set up there, and a Mahid table, perhaps the same one they’d executed Erilas on.

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