Hart's Hope Part 16

And as for the Queen, I remember that night in the palace, too. She wakened everyone with a flurry of insistent commands. The guards were alerted to stand the walls, and Urubugala was put through excruciating torture until he confessed that he knew nothing. Craven only smiled at the news-she knew he had no power that could do this. And Weasel Sootmouth told the Queen the bitter truth, as was her wont: "You are getting old, and the power you bought is fading." So it was that as you began to a.s.semble your armies again, so Beauty began to look for a suitable father for her twelvemonth child. Once she had found you again, and made sure that none of the G.o.ds and none of your powerful friends had broken free, she compelled the Sweet Sisters to weave a dream for her on their long unused loom. Show me the face of the consort who will father my powerful child, she demanded. And the Sweet Sisters-they knew the face to send her in her dream.

The Wounding of the Hart He would have slept late in the morning, but Gallowgla.s.s awoke him just after dawn. "What have you done?" demanded the wizard.

"Done?" asked Orem.

"Last night the house s.h.i.+vered, and I awoke this morning to hear the cries of a hundred thousand birds. I looked out the window and the sky was filled with them, wheeling and turning, and then suddenly they dispersed, they flew far, but all of them dipped and turned over this house. Was it real or a vision? Did you call them?"

"I don't know how to call."

"No, it was a vision, I know it was. No magic, I'd know know magic, I'm not likely to mistake magic, I'm not likely to mistake that. that. Don't you feel how the floor is trembling?" Don't you feel how the floor is trembling?"

Yes, there was a low, low hum that shook him in his bed. He was afraid now, remembering his foolish bravery of the night before. He dared not leave Gallowgla.s.s ignorant of what he had done, since only Gallowgla.s.s would know what he must do now. So he told him of last night's battle for Palicrovol against the Queen.

"Oh, Orem," whispered Gallowgla.s.s, "no sooner do you have a grasp than you try to overreach! Touch nothing of the Queen's!"

"Is it she who shakes the house?"

"No! No, not Queen Beauty. There's no way she could know where you are. It's bad enough she knows that you exist."

"Will she know I'm a Sink?"

"She'll know that suddenly somewhere in Burland there's a wizard who can undo her doing. It will worry her. She'll search, she'll ask, and then she'll learn that here on Wizard Street also there are spells undone, and then she'll begin to wonder what's abroad in the world."

Up and down he walked, clapping his fist into an open hand. "It's a fool who tries to pit his power against the Queen! The Queen could crush us in a moment. She lets us wizards be because we do no harm. We can cure warts and other blemishes. We can do love words and vengeances on enemies, and pranks and little spies. We can even keep a hart's blood hot on the city wall and go invisible in the daylight when we have the need. But we do not darken skies or move the hearts of ma.s.ses in the city. We do not question the Sweet Sisters and we do not s.h.i.+ver the earth. The river's course is beyond our reach, and the wind must not be spoken to, and we may not poison the milk within the breast or dry the s.e.m.e.n in a man's loins."

Orem made no answer, for directly behind Gallowgla.s.s, stamping intermittently upon the floor, was a hart with a hundred-pointed head, his great neck high upraised to bear that impossible weight. Gallowgla.s.s heard the beast almost as soon as Orem saw him, and he turned and knelt, and said, "O Hart, why have you come?"

The Hart regarded him and did not stir to answer.

"Are you real or vision?" Gallowgla.s.s cried.

The wizard was afraid, but Orem was not. This was the beast that he had seen before, in the bushes at Banning's sh.o.r.e, watching his mother as she bathed. He looked into the glistening eyes and knew he should not be afraid. The Hart had not come angrily. Orem drew the covers from himself and walked forward toward the great stag.

"Don't do anything to frighten him," Gallowgla.s.s said.

"He hasn't come for you," Orem said. "He forgives you for the harts you've bled upon the wall." Now Orem could see that the chest was throbbing with deep, silent breaths, and the hart was wet with sweat, matting his fur.

Where have you been tonight? And running so hard?

Orem knelt and reached for the hart's hoof. The stag lifted the leg, and willingly gave it to the boy; but it was not there, Orem felt nothing, he was holding no weight at all. And yet his hand could not close, and a great dark warmth spread upward through his arm. The Hart, while insubstantial in Inwit, dwelt in flesh within the city of Hart's Hope.

"Why have you come to me?" Orem asked, his voice as reverent as a priest at prayer.

"Silence," Gallowgla.s.s softly pleaded.

Orem looked upward, and the Hart slowly bowed its head. The weight of the horns was too much for any neck to bear, but the neck bore. The Hart set its hind legs and braced backward, and the head sank until the horns danced directly in front of Orem's face, until one single horntip rested still as a mountain right where he could not look at anything else. And he looked, and looked again, and looked deeper, and saw: That the stars of a tiny heaven danced around the horn. That he was falling down into the stars, then past them, and the tip of the horn loomed great as a moon, great as all the world. Then it was was the world, and Orem could not breathe as he raced down and down until suddenly all held still and he hung gasping in the air over the city of Inwit. the world, and Orem could not breathe as he raced down and down until suddenly all held still and he hung gasping in the air over the city of Inwit.

The city teemed with life below him; boats docked and undocked at the wharves; the guard marched here and there like ants upon the city walls. But it was not the life of the city that gave it the look of constant motion. For even as Orem watched the city was unbuilding itself, as if time had come undone and it was a century, two centuries in the past. Roads changed their path; buildings grew new and flashed as brief skeletons of frames and then were replaced by older, smaller buildings. There were more and more farms within the city walls, and the settlements outside shrank and nearly disappeared. Suddenly the Great Temple was gone, and the Little Temple changed so there were not seven circles over every column, and then the Little Temple, too, was gone, and the city bent a different way. King's Street twisted sharp to the west, and the great gate of the city was Hind's Trace, West Gate, the Hole.

Then this, too, pa.s.sed; the walls of the city unraveled, revealing smaller walls, and those too unwound themselves and there were no walls at all, and no castle, either, except the tiny Old Castle at the eastmost point of the King's Town Hill. This lingered, this was steady for a time. And then the castle, too, was gone, nothing but forest there, and nothing left of Inwit but a few hundred houses built in circles around the single shrine. And the houses grew fewer and fewer, and the shrine diminished, bit by bit, and Orem fell again until he saw as if he hovered only a few yards above the ground. There was no village. Only forest, and one clearing with a hut in the middle, and where the Shrine would be there was only a farmer plowing in the field.

This farmer did not plow as Orem's father plowed. The farmer himself drew the soil-cutting knife, and his wife guided it, and it made only a weak and shallow furrow in the ground. It was painful work, and Orem could see why the plot was small-there was no hope of plowing more land than that.

Suddenly there was a movement at the edge of the clearing. To Orem's relief, time was flowing forward again, and at a normal pace. A stag bounded onto the furrows, its hooves plunging deep into the loosened soil. It was frightened. Behind it came four huntsmen with bows and pikes, and dogs that barked madly at the deer. The hart ran to the farmer, who shed the harness of the plow and took the hart's head between his hands for a moment, then let it go. The hart did not move. Nor did it show fear of the farmer, and perhaps this was why the hunters stopped, to see such a marvel.

The farmer raised his hand, and the stag took a step away from him, toward the forest on the far side of the clearing. As it did, the hunters also moved, the dogs bounding forward a single leap. The farmer lowered his hand and the movements stopped, and all waited for him again.

The farmer turned to the plow. He picked it up, heavy as it was, and laid it upside down in front of the hunters' dogs. He knelt, trembling, before the plow. Then, behind him, his wife bent and took his head in her hands, helped him lay his throat against the blade of the plow. For a moment they waited, poised. It was not the wife, for her hands drew back at the last moment, too merciful to do the thing. It was the farmer himself who drove his neck sharply into the plow. Blood spurted, and Orem winced with the agony of it. Now the wife finished what the husband had begun; she drove the farmer's head down and down, until the blood spouted and the blade was almost all the way through the neck.

Then the hunters lowered their bows, and did not notice as the hart made its escape into the trees. They watched instead how their dogs came up and licked the blood leaping from the blade of the plow. The dogs went mad in the aftermath of lapping the blood; they bounded high as if they were dancing, and ran from the clearing joyfully, heading back where they had come from. The hunters knelt, marveling, and the wife dipped her finger in the blood and drew the sign of the hart upon their faces. The hunters also left rejoicing.

It was dark, and the moon rose, and the man's body still lay broken over the plow when the hart returned to the clearing. This time the hart came with a dozen harts and a dozen hinds, and then seven times seven of them, and one by one they came and licked the hair of the dead farmer. When they were through, they came to the farmer's wife, and the hart whose life the farmer had saved stretched out its neck to her. She reached out and took a small sapling tree that grew beside her hovel, and broke it as if it were brittle, though the leaves on it were lush and green. Then with the sharp and jagged end of the tree she cut the hart's belly from breast to groin. The bowels of the hart lurched downward. The bleeding halt staggered to the man and lay beside him, and their blood mingled on the plow.

Then, as Orem watched, the plow became a raft, and the head of the man and the head of the stag lolled over the edge, drifting in bright water. The raft flowed against the stream. Or did the water flow from the wounded bodies of the two broken animals? Along the banks of the river a million people knelt and drank, each a sip, and left singing.

At last the raft came to rest against a sh.o.r.e. Like wineskins the two bodies seemed empty, and no more water flowed from them.

Orem looked up and saw, standing beside the corpses on the bank, the living hart and the living man, whole again, both naked in moonlight.

And the farmer's face was Orem's face, and the hart was the deer that stood before him in the room, its horn lowered to offer a naked brown point.

Orem breathed to calm the violent beating of his heart. How much of it was true, and if true, what did it mean?

As if in answer came the face of a woman. It was the most beautiful face Orem had ever seen, a kind and loving face, a face that cried out like a tragic virgin starved for a man's life within her. Orem did not know her, but recognized her at once. Only one living human could have such a face, for that face cried out for a single name: Beauty. It was the Queen, and she called to him, and a tear of joy stood out in one eye as she saw him and reached for him and took him into her embrace.

Then the vision was gone, abruptly, and Orem and Gallowgla.s.s were alone in the attic room.

"Did you see?" asked Orem.

"I saw you kneel before the Hart, and it offered its horn to you, and suddenly blood came from a deep wound in your throat, and I thought you were dead."

Wound. Orem reached up his hand and yes, all across his own throat was the low welt of a cruel but long-healed wound. "I never had an injury here."

"What was it that you saw?"

"I saw how Hart's Hope came to be the name of this place. And what the Shrine of the Broken Tree is for. And I saw the face of Beauty."

There was no ambiguity when that name was said. Beauty wore only one face in Burland, though few there were who had seen it for themselves. Every man held his image of Queen Beauty in his mind, to fear and adore when he was most alone. Every woman knew her, and every woman knew the ways that Beauty mocked their insufficiency.

"Has she found me?" Orem asked.

"No," Gallowgla.s.s answered. Abruptly he turned and staggered from the room. It took a moment for Orem to know that he was grieving. The boy arose, pulled on his wrap and s.h.i.+rt and belted his clothing as he followed the wizard down the stairs. When he reached the hall, the wizard already had the lid pried up, and now he pried the next, the next, and then lifted up the women's corpses that floated in the brine, lifted them high and draped them limply over the barrel's edges, face upward and outward, hanging upside down and dripping slime in pools upon the carpet. "You betrayed me!" the wizard cried. "You're oathbreakers! You're thieves!" And he seized the golden daughter's shriveled head and held it so close that he spat into the staring eyes. "What are you to me, you bloated, filthy fles.h.!.+ You cheated me of your power, cheated me of your lives within my house, and now the Hart has stepped within my home, and where were you? Where were you when the life flowed from the throat of my terrible boy? A sip and you would have lived, you would have lived, you would have lived!"

And the wizard stood, letting the head dangle again, bobbing back and forth a little. To the shelf, to the bag of powdered blood. Orem could not bear to see the women called forth again from the half-death that Gallowgla.s.s forced upon them. And so he sent himself out, suddenly, the way a cutpurse flashes forth his knife, and in a moment the blood was empty of its desiccated power. He knew as he did it that he was granting the desire of the dead women and breaking Gallowgla.s.s's heart. The wizard cast the pinch of blood, and now instead of quickening the women, it fell like corruption, and their faces blackened, and their hair fell to the floor in gobbets, and their flesh peeled back and slipped to the soggy carpet with tiny slaps, and one by one the heads loosened and dropped, only to dissolve quickly into unrecognizable ma.s.ses of putrefaction.

Only when the bones had come apart and lay in careless heaps on the carpet, only when the bottom halves of the three women had slid back into the water and out of sight, only then did Gallowgla.s.s turn to Orem, and his face was terrible. His eyes shone with ruby light, his teeth were bared like a badger's teeth, and Orem saw murder in the man's hands..

He darted leftward, for the door, and shoved it open. A hand had hold of the nape of his s.h.i.+rt to draw him back, but Orem shrugged him away, letting the s.h.i.+rt tear as he threw himself through the door. He ran out into the bitter cold of the street, his s.h.i.+rt hanging off his shoulders, held to his body only by his belt. He ran out into the bitter cold of the street, under the steady drip of the melting icicles, to race across the face of the frozen street with cold sunlight on his back.

The Shrine of the Broken Tree He ran without purpose, more afraid of what he had done than of Gallowgla.s.s himself. By the time he was on Thieves Street, though, a plan was forming in his mind. He would find Flea again, and ask his help in hiding. The Queen would be looking for him among the wizards, and Gallowgla.s.s would never find him, for he could not use magic.

What he hadn't counted on, of course, was the enemy that always waited for the unwary in Inwit. A troop of guards were patrolling in the Cheaps. One look at the tattered s.h.i.+rt and the frightened face and they knew that Orem was theirs. They did not need to know his crime to know that he was guilty. They cried out for him to stop, demanded that he show his pa.s.s.

He had no pa.s.s with him; nor did he dare to tell them his pa.s.s was with Gallowgla.s.s, for they would take him to Gallowgla.s.s's house to verify it, and Gallowgla.s.s could have whatever vengeance he wanted then. So Orem turned and ran back, ran deep into the Cheaps, dodging this way and that among the narrow, twisting streets.

He was faster than the guards, but they were many and he was one. Wherever he ran they were waiting, and at last they funneled him back until he leaned upon the unkempt Shrine of the Broken Tree. He could see that up and down Shrine Street the guards were coming. There was no avenue of escape. And so he leaned on the low wall around the shrine, and looked down on the stump, and saw that the jagged upsticking point was just as the farmer's wife had left it in the vision. The dream was true, then. It was good to know that something was true. But what, name of heaven, did it mean?

17.

Cages How the other animals kept Orem Scanthips alive until he was recognized.

The Steer Pit and the Zoo Citizens of Inwit whose papers are in order go to Faces Hall to plead before the Judges. Priests are tried at the Temple. Licenses are fined and levied at the Guild Hall. But the pa.s.sless go to the Gaols, for they have no right to be in Inwit. Their very existence is a crime.

They carried Orem with other offenders in a cart up Queen's Road and into the vast canyon between the walls of the Castle. The horses strained to draw the cart up the steep slope, and the walls shut out the noise, so that all the prisoners could hear in their misery was the cracking of whips and the straining of animals. At High Gate the prisoners were addressed by an officer.

He told them their rights: None.

He told them their choices: Loss of an ear on the first offense, slavery or castration on the second, interesting and exemplary death on the third.

And to underscore the point, they were led past the Steer Pit on their way to the Gaols. The authorities made sure that whenever new prisoners arrived some poor criminal who chose a eunuch's freedom was hanging there in manacles, his hips braced in the clamp, naked and waiting for the binding wire and cutter's shears. The men of justice in King's Town preferred their prisoners to choose slavery, so they made castration look as ghastly as possible. Because of that, the machinery of justice paid for itself in sales of slaves to the black traders who carried their captives west across the sea.

Once he had been given a good look at the Steer Pit, they put Orem in one of the cages. The cages had no floors, no furniture, only crossed bars below and above and on four sides. There was no shelter from the wind, and no possibility of finding a comfortable position. The cells were too short to stand in, and yet sitting meant b.u.t.tocks pressed against the cold round iron of the cage. Your feet could not be tucked under you because the bars hurt them, and if you lay down, what could you do with your head? Orem tried every position while the nearby prisoners silently watched him. At last he propped himself in a corner, which of all positions was least uncomfortable for a time.

There were two tiers of cages above him, and nothing below but the ground, yet even that was too far to reach if he put his arm through the cage and reached down. He was hanging in the air and helpless and miserable.

"How long do they keep you here?" Orem asked the man in the cage next to him, The man only kept looking at him, saying nothing. "I said, how long do they-" but then he caught a glimmer in the man's eye that stopped him. It was not that the man had not heard, only that speech was not interesting to him. He got up and came toward the corner where Orem leaned. There was no hint of what he meant to do, but Orem was sure he would rather see it from the other side of the cage. The man, clay-faced and silent, pulled aside his wrap and began to p.i.s.s toward Orem. It struck the floor bars and spattered. Orem retreated to the farthest corner, and for a moment thought himself safe, until he felt the hot-and-cold of his other neighbor's p.i.s.s against his back, running down into his wrap. He spun to escape, tripped on the bars, and fell. His foot slipped into the gap and his hip wrenched as his body weight forced him to fall over, the leg still tangled in the bars. He was in pain, and still they p.i.s.sed on him from both sides, and the man above him spat and spat. In his fury Orem wanted to shout at them, to curse them; now more than ever he wished for some power to destroy an enemy instead of the pa.s.sive, useless power of a Sink.

At last the p.i.s.sing stopped. The spitter above him walked away and sat down in a corner. Only the wind remained, freezing and drying the urine on his skin and in his hair; the wind and the stench. Orem was soon too uncomfortable to be angry. The p.i.s.s was like the cold, to be shrugged at and borne. He could do nothing about it now. He carefully extricated his leg from the cage and rubbed his hip where it ached. Favoring that foot, he found another corner and sat in it, warily eyeing the other men. They no longer watched him.

In a few minutes the guards came for the man above Orem. They wheeled the light wooden stairway along the cages and stopped it in front of Orem. The man above did not get up from his corner. Just waited. The guards came and stood at the door. They did not come in, they did not speak. Just waited. The man inside, the guards outside, and Orem could not be sure they were even watching each other. They waited a long time. Then the breeze blew more briskly for a moment. It chilled Orem. Apparently it also whispered something to the prisoner above, for now he got up and made his precarious way to the door of the cell and watched impa.s.sively as the guards pulled the door away and slid it off to the side. They manacled his arms just above the elbow and drew the chain tight behind his back, so that his arms were straining at the socket. The man gave no sign of pain, just followed docilely.

The afternoon sun brought a sort of warmth, and Orem s.h.i.+vered at it, relished it. He hoped whatever trial he got would come before nightfall, before the bad cold came.

The sky was reddening with sunset and clouds when another man was brought to the cell above him. Orem watched impa.s.sively as his neighbors also began to p.i.s.s on him. Most of it also fell on Orem, and could not be dodged, and with the evening breeze rising, it was even colder. But this time Orem did not cower. He did not move from his place. He only closed his eyes and tightly shut his lips, and waited until it was over. The man shouted and shouted and tried to run from place to place. There was no shelter. But because he shouted they kept attacking him. Spittle when the p.i.s.s ran dry, and the man in the third tier began making as if to defecate through the cage. Finally Orem could bear it no longer. The new man's shouting and cursing did nothing but keep the rain of filth going far longer, and Orem was annoyed. He walked under where the man stood screaming at his tormentors. The man didn't see him-he was watching the silent, expressionless men who spat as often as they could work up the spittle. Orem reached his hands through the bars and fiercely pushed the heels of the man's feet. With a scream of terror the man fell straight down, only barely stopping himself before his crotch bridged the bars. Orem caught and held his feet. "Let go of me!" he cried.

But Orem silently gripped the feet and waited. With the man held still, concentrating only on holding his crotch above the waiting bar while Orem pulled him downward, the spitters found their target enough to satisfy them. With the new man weeping in frustration, they finally quit, and then Orem let go of his legs. With difficulty the man raised himself and extricated his legs from the cage floor. Then he staggered off to a corner and whimpered quietly.

The Gaols seemed nearly full; indeed, it was as if they did not remove one prisoner until another was nearly there to take his place, as if the Gaols required the fulness of misery.

Orem could not sleep; dared not sleep, in such cold. His hands and feet became numb. He got up and walked around the perimeter of his cage, holding the bars so he wouldn't fall again in the darkness, refusing to nurse his sore hip lest that leg become too cold. Toward morning the moon arose, giving little light, just enough to mock the cold. And soon after moonrise the clouds from the west came across the sky. The new man above had stopped whimpering. Orem wondered if he slept or was dead or had simply discovered the uselessness of crying. Orem circled the cage again and again. Once a man's hand covered his on the bar. For a moment Orem feared some sharp and sudden pain, but the hand quickly lifted and Orem realized that his neighbor also was pacing.

At dawn the snow began. It stung Orem when it touched him, falling thick and fast on him. He only walked faster, around and around the cage, until in the scant light he saw that the other men were scooping up the snow from the bars with their fingers and eating it. Of course; he had gone all day without water, and who knew how long these other men had been here without food or drink? Orem also scooped the snow and sucked his finger. The water was cold on his tongue, but so clear of flavor once the first bit of p.i.s.staste was gone that it pierced his throat to the base of his skull.

Walk on, walk on, stay as warm as you can. In the snow the guards came and took the man next to Orem, and the man behind him. Always the guards stood at the door until the prisoner stopped circling and came to them. The snow fell thicker. The man next to him stopped and shat into his hands, then rubbed the warm dung on his belly and s.h.i.+vered in relief.

They soon brought two new prisoners to take the old ones' places. And this time Orem joined in with the others in p.i.s.sing on them and spitting. Both were brighter than the new man above. Once the shock was over, they did as Orem had done-endured. Then they quickly fell into the pattern of the Gaols, eating the slight snow that stayed for a few moments on the floor bars, circling to stay warm, sitting for a few moments when walking was impossible. When one man sat too long and began to doze, the others silently began to spit at his face, to wake him. Not a word. No voices. We have no voices here, but still we are men: we try to keep each other alive.

The man above him, however, lay still and lay still and lay still and at last the snow built up on his cold body. When it was plain that he was dead, Orem reached up through the cage roof and scooped the snow from part of the man's body and filled his mouth. It froze his teeth, but melted into a full swallow of water. When he had drunk his fill, Orem held out a handful of snow to the man in the next cage, who silently took it and filled his mouth and walked on. To each of his neighbors Orem gave a handful of the snow from the corpse above, and when they were done they took the handfuls and pa.s.sed them on The snow built up under the cages. A foot by noon, and by midafternoon clear up to the bottom of the cage. Now there was no more need to sc.r.a.pe snow from the dead man-there was plenty within reach of all on the bottom row. Orem saw that his skin was bluing. How long before fingers were frozen and lost? How long before the poisoning set in? How long before he simply grew too weary? Since yesterday morning he had gone without sleep, and now it was near dark again.

They came and took away the corpse at nightfall, and in the night the guards also took the last of the men who had p.i.s.sed on Orem when he first came. Around the cage, around the cage, around the cage, stay warm, stay warm, and Orem sang and chanted to himself, even prayed, however futile that might be for one who had forsaken G.o.d, prayed and wondered if the vision of the Hart had been only a prophecy of his death.

In the darkness the snow stopped, the clouds slid out of the sky, and the real cold came. Now I will die, thought Orem.

For a while he stopped, sat in a corner, and trembled violently as the cold wind slapped him again and again with ever colder hands. It was only the spittle striking his face and shoulders that kept him from the gathering dream of sleep. He s.h.i.+vered one last, vast quake and then bounded forward, caught the bars of the cage roof and clung with all his strength, regardless of the numbness of his hands. I will live, he decided as he pulled himself up and slowly lowered himself. May the guards' children die by fire in front of them. Grimly he swung his feet up and caught them in the bars of the roof. May the guards' wives be raped by a hundred lepers. With small moans of pain he forced himself to rise, sink, rise, sink.

When dawn at last came, Orem was still staggering around and around his cage. There were many who lay still in their cages. Black lumps in the sunlight, casting inert shadows on the snow under the rows. A spiderweb with bundles safely stored in place for later devouring. Perhaps half still struggled in the web.

As if deliberately to torture him they took two new men before they finally came for Orem. How he hated them for going inside before him. But he said nothing, deliberately showed no sign of his anger, just circled, just hung from the roof and pulled himself up and let himself down with hands as stiff as paws.

Yet when they came, Orem did not run for the cage door, did not hurry. The very change in the routine of survival was too hard; it took effort, it took thought to quit moving in the set pattern. Then at last he went to the door and waited. The manacles were cold iron, but felt warm enough on his arms as they clamped them in place. They caught a little skin in the hinge, but Orem was too numb to feel the pain as the flesh tore away and some blood trickled down his arm and froze.

The Coal House The trial was held in the Coal House. The walls were grey and grimy from the black dust, and in the suffocating air the guards' faces streaked grey with their sweat. The heat of the place was almost more than Orem could bear, and the relief of it made his legs shake so that the guards had to hold him up. The dark morning room was lit only by small high windows and a few torches on the walls. It didn't matter; it was only the floor that Orem watched as it wheeled and spun.

The guards let him fall in the middle of the room. Orem lay gratefully on the unbarred floor and listened as a magistrate's voice intoned, "Crime?"

"Pa.s.sless and unclaimed."

"s.e.x and age?"

"Male and younghorned."

"Prisoner, what do you have to say?"

It took Orem a moment to realize that speech was expected of him, and a moment more to remember how it was done. Don't cut me, he wanted to say. I killed the Wizard's women and deserve anything you do to me, he almost said.

"I'm a farmboy from the north, and I lost my pa.s.s," he said at last.

A guard pulled him up to his knees and turned his head to show his cheek to the magistrates. "Months healed if it's a day," said the guard.

"How did you stay out of the way of the guards all this time?" asked a magistrate.

Orem looked at them for the first time, now that the guard was holding him up enough to see. There were three magistrates on a high dais with a wire screen between them and him. They wore masks, terrible white and green masks like putrefaction, and looked at him as relentlessly as G.o.d, for the masks did not blink. "I was careful," Orem said.

"We caught him out in the open, s.h.i.+rt torn and near naked in the snow," said the guard. "Careful ones don't do that."

"Bring him nearer," said one of the magistrates. Since none of the heads moved, there was no way of knowing which one had spoken. As the guard pulled him staggering forward, another magisterial voice said, "The Hole, no doubt, and a false pa.s.s. Who gave you your pa.s.s, boy? Or do you want your t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es crushed and served to you in a pudding?"

It was not that Orem was courageous then-courage was beyond him after two nights in the open cage. He did not tell all he knew of the pa.s.sage through the Hole because at that moment one of the magistrates let out a small cry and said, "Look at his face."

One of them motioned to the guards, who pulled Orem through a small door in the cage and brought him directly before the magistrates' table. They let him lean on the desk as the masked faces looked steadily at him. Orem was now close enough to see the whites of the eyes inside the masks, to see the lips and teeth and tongues of the speakers.

"How did you come by that scar across your throat?" asked a magistrate.