The Stars Askew (28 page)

“We've met before, you know,” Armand said.

The man turned his baleful round eyes to Armand. From up close he appeared paler still, as if no blood moved beneath that skin. Tiedmann's stare frightened Armand, who sensed the man couldn't see anyone else as a person, wasn't aware of their hopes or emotions. There was no empathy there.

“Ha!” said Tiedmann.

Armand sensed 7624 standing behind them, ready to pounce and drag him across the room. Armand pictured the man kicking him viciously into unconsciousness as everyone else watched.

Armand refocused on Tiedmann. “
Met
is not exactly the right term. We've seen each other. When you were the Director in Varenis. This is a camp for political prisoners. Of course they sent you here. There's quite a struggle going on since you were removed. Valentin, Rainer—they're all fighting like dogs over a bone.”

Tiedmann's face tightened at the mention of his previous office. Armand tensed, expecting the chief collaborator to call for 7624.

Some crisis point had been reached. Before the man acted, Armand rushed on: “You spoke occasionally to Director Autec of Technis. I was his assistant, you see.”

It was then that Armand's path seemed to open up before him. He hated the next words that fell from his mouth. “In any case, I have come to offer you a trade.”

Filled with guilt, he reached beneath his uniform, hesitated for a second, then brought forth his grandfather's ring, which he placed on the table before them. He then reached forward and slipped it over his finger. In an instant, the ideograms rose from its surface, hovered above it, a hologram of the engravings below. He slid it off onto the table again, and the symbols settled back into the metal. “Thaumaturgy.”

Tiedmann reached for the ring with stubby sausagelike fingers, but Armand's hand closed over it. “You must allow me a full team to rescue the men buried by the rockfall.”

Tiedmann's avaricious eyes settled on Armand. He grasped Armand's hand with his own. “Give me the ring.”

Armand felt the corners of the metal jutting into the skin of his palm. He held tight.

“You can have your team,” said Tiedmann. “Three days. You can have three days.”

Armand opened his hand. A moment later the ring was gone, hidden in one of the folds of Tiedmann's uniform. The former Director smiled cynically.

As he settled back into his seat, Armand's gaze roved across the hall. As he stared out at the gray mass, Armand realized with a jolt that all the children were gone. He closed his eyes and tried not to think of their fates.

*   *   *

Two of the team reconstructed the scaffolding above. The rest of crew dug through the rocks and rubble. Periodically they listened for sounds from behind the rockfall. In the morning they heard a faint tapping, but by the afternoon it had fallen silent. Still, they made good progress, but there was no telling how much of the tunnel had collapsed. When the shift ended in the late afternoon, they still faced a wall of rock blocking the tunnel. Armand hoped the survivors would last another night. They would have water, at least, but would they survive the cold?

The following day they returned, but there was no sound of tapping. Desperation gripped Armand. He felt hope slipping away, but they kept digging. Armand's back entered a new stage of pain, which seemed to shoot down his right leg. He felt numbness and tingling in his toes. But he wouldn't give up.

Halfway through the afternoon, one of the prisoners cried out. “Look, look!”

Excitement buzzed in the darkness. The man had pulled a rock away, but it only revealed a cold and dirty hand jutting out through the rocks. The body they uncovered was crushed and broken, a man-sized rag doll whose legs and arms flopped in unnatural ways.

By the time the shift was over, they still hadn't broken through.

That night Armand lay awake on his hard bunk, staring into the night. White spots drifted across his eyes. There was no hope now, he realized. He had given away his ring for nothing. He would not rescue Ohan, or anyone else. He would not escape. Soon he would die.

On the final morning before his gang would be sent back to the bloodstone veins, Armand approached the rockfall with the same ambivalence as the others. The morning was half gone when one of the prisoners said, “There's that tapping again.”

Armand's heart leaped. This time he didn't have to strain to hear it. It came loud and clear, like someone knocking on a door. He redoubled his efforts, but morning gave way to afternoon and there seemed no end to the slog.

Eventually one of the crew said, “That's it. Time to go.”

“No!” commanded Armand. “We're staying. It's not long now.”

The men leaned against the cart, ready to push, but Armand grabbed one of them, shoved him back to the rockfall.

“Just a little while longer,” commanded Armand.

They began again. Armand almost expected someone to strike him from behind. But on and on they worked, and the others did not abandon him. Until, finally, Armand pulled away a rock that opened up a black and empty space.

A Westerner's voice came through the breach. “What took you so long?”

Armand felt like crying. “Are you hurt?”

“We're alive,” said a second voice. “There are two of us. The rest, dead somewhere. But we're alive.”

*   *   *

They loaded Ohan and Prisoner 8891, whose arm had given in to the bloodstone disease, onto the cart. They were dehydrated, emaciated, injured. Ohan seemed to have cracked a leg, while 8891's chest had been crushed by a rock. He coughed up blood as they laid him down. When they rolled them out into the cold air, the guards were waiting.

Prisoner 7624 sneered. “Get these two to the infirmary.”

About half of the infirmary's cold beds were occupied. Some of the patients lay staring silently, like gaunt cadavers watching for death himself to enter through the door. Others moaned and called out, fevers gripping their bodies and minds.

An exhausted doctor—himself a prisoner—gestured for them to lay the two men on cots at the end of the room. As the others rushed off to the mess hall, Armand fetched water for the survivors. When he returned, the Westerner chief Ijahan was squatting by Ohan, talking in the hushed guttural dialect.

“He says you insisted we be rescued,” said Ohan.

Armand shrugged. “What if it had been me locked in that deep darkness? We must help one another if we're to survive and escape this hell.”

Ohan looked on quietly. “Well, perhaps one day we can return the favor.”

“Let's hope neither of us is trapped beneath the mountain again,” said Armand.

Ohan nodded seriously, but his voice was light and ironic. “What, you have somewhere else to be?”

Armand remained silent, let the joke wash over him. There were so few pleasures in the camp, so little hope, it felt like a moment in a warm bath.

“Perhaps we can help.” Ohan smiled slightly.

When Armand reached the mess hall, the food was gone, but a barbarian was waiting for him with a plate of paste. He gestured to it and nodded. Armand fell on it ravenously. As he lay in his bed that night, Armand felt happy for the first time. He ran Ohan's words through his mind again.
What, you have somewhere else to be?
the man said.
Perhaps we can help.

 

TWENTY-TWO

After the collapse of the tunnel, Armand replaced Ohan as the leader of the mining crew. He kept the time, directed the prisoners, worked hard himself. He watched as those around him lost all initiative and drive and accepted his orders like cattle. His own strength eked away by the day; his muscles wasted into thin and wiry things; his mind lost its agility. His back seared with pain, needles stabbed down his leg and foot. He could only think of the most basic tasks: filling the cart with bloodstone, falling asleep as quickly as he could on his wooden cot each night, scraping every ounce of the morning porridge and nightly paste from his plate into his mouth. The breakdown of a man happened quickly.

Ohan had been transferred into the carpentry shop, which the barbarians ran. He was the last of the Westerners to escape the mining gangs. Now all of them were constructing a new barrack in preparation for a coming influx of prisoners. Safe and warm, they seemed to have forgotten Armand, whose thoughts of escape were now nothing but a child's faraway dream. He had given away his grandfather's ring for nothing.

The prison had been growing for some time, it seemed. The Empire's conquered provinces were resisting, internal dissent had increased, and Varenis had responded with greater violence.

Armand had once thought that for an authority to rule, it must stick to the principles of civilization, respect, honesty. But after Varenis, he saw that power was a vicious game in which such principles often played little part. He should have known that, considering the fate of his grandfather, but he had been brought up on principles and couldn't let them go. He still believed in loyalty, but Valentin had shown him there was little place for it in the world.
No,
thought Armand.
I will not allow them to turn me into them—people for whom there is no good or bad in the world, people for whom there is no meaning but survival, conquest, the lust for power and personal gain.
That was everything he opposed.

It was a surprise when someone whistled to Armand and Irik as they crossed between buildings toward the mess hall. Ohan leaned against one of the barracks, crutches propped under his armpits.

Armand stared at the barbarian blankly, his exhausted mind unable to comprehend what Ohan had said.

“I'm Irik,” said the former oppositionist.

Ohan nodded and turned back to Armand. “Perhaps you'd like to visit the carpentry shop this evening. A little while after eating.”

Armand sensed something was happening. “Irik also.”

Ohan pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Only you.”

Armand glanced at his friend. The oppositionist raised his eyebrows and closed his eyes, resigned to his exclusion. He reached out, held Armand's hand briefly with his own warm one, squeezed, and let go.

Ohan hopped away on his crutches toward the mess hall. Armand watched until the Westerner passed through the open doors and into the sparse building.

He and Irik found their own table to eat at, away from the tribesmen. They didn't speak. Armand couldn't admit that the barbarians might be taking him under their arm but leaving Irik out in the wild. When they left the hall, he, too, squeezed Irik's warm hand, then let it drop away.

Back in the barracks, Armand lay on his cot for a while, resting his aching muscles. For the first time in days he felt something other than exhaustion and resignation.

The carpentry building was a medium-sized wooden hall with just a few strips of paint left on wooden beams. When Armand was halfway there, he saw 7624 staring at him from the square. A shock of fear struck him, but he walked on, feeling the malevolent eyes on his back the entire way.
There's something wrong in that man's head,
thought Armand. Something had broken, and the two parts couldn't be rejoined. Alarmingly, 7624 seemed to be taking quite a dislike to him. Through the open window of the carpentry shop, a Westerner said something to the others inside. Everyone, it seemed, was watching Armand.

Armand stood before the door at a loss, confused by the memories of long-gone etiquette. Eventually he turned the creaking handle and stepped inside. In the center of the carpentry shop sat many of the barbarians, including Ohan and Ijahan. Together they were quite a sight, for they were the only prisoners allowed to retain long hair, strung with red and orange beads, green and yellow feathers. The Commander had never carried through on his threat to shave them, and even in their grubby state, the colors were glorious in the grayness of the camp.

“My barbarian friends,” said Armand.

The chieftain Ijahan smiled, an expression that seemed to shift the great lines across his face. “We don't think of ourselves as barbarians, Armand. The rulers of Varenis are the barbarians.”

Armand saw the logic to the man's argument. The barbarians had their own culture, their own practices. He had little doubt that there was a nobility to it, even if they didn't have the trappings of higher civilization. Indeed, they possessed the same principles he adhered to—loyalty and honor—while Varenis was a cutthroat world of maneuvers and betrayal.

No sooner had he found a seat than three little knocks came from the direction of the far wall. Two of the barbarians quickly pulled the table back from the wall. Another pulled away a mat and lifted a handle hidden in the dirt. A square section of the floor rose, then a hand appeared, holding up burlap bags filled with material. The Westerners rapidly hid these behind a pile of planks. Then a Westerner's head poked through the trapdoor.

Ohan gestured to Armand. “If you want to escape, you must dig. Ten more body lengths and we should be beyond the fence. Then we dig ourselves up and out. When we are ready, we will escape at night. The guards won't notice we are gone until morning. They may expect us to head west toward the plains and away from the mountains. Instead we will journey south along the mountain range. There are still tribes there who live beyond the province of Varenis's empire. They will help us and we will join them. After the winter we will return for the women.”

Armand's skin crawled with an unnerving energy. This chance to escape would only come once, he knew.

Armand descended into the passage and crawled along, a flickering little oil lamp in one hand, two empty burlap bags in the other. He ached terribly. Soon he would be nothing but a bag of bones.

The tunnel came to a rough end. He seized a sawn-off pick that lay on the ground and began to dig away at the rocky earth, periodically filling the bags. Exhausted from the day's work, this task seemed a special kind of agony. His shoulder muscles blazed with pain. He felt his neck spasm. His back was aflame. Yet he forced himself on.