The Universal Mirror (23 page)

All Asahel could do was nod.  He didn’t know what the reward would be for his treachery, but he suspected he was to find out.

“You’ve knocked at the wrong door.”  Quentin could barely hear Felix’s voice through the sounds behind him, the movement of steel clanking steel.  He had little time to register more than the motion of the other man’s lips, mouthing a word he couldn’t recognize before Felix was cut off by a rough hand that pressed against his arm.  Carnicus gave way, staring with narrowed eyes at the guardsmen who flooded out the door.

“You—” Quentin choked out as a pair of them grabbed his arms, twisting them behind his back until he fell to his knees.

“I was the one who betrayed you,” Felix answered, but there was something in his eyes that didn’t quite match the words.  “They’ve seen Soames here often enough, Quentin.  It was reasonable to think that you’d follow, and I’ve no desire to be tricked by whatever magic you’ve learned since university.” 

The sentences came one after another and Quentin struggled to stand, regarding the other man with disgust.  “I told him you’d been watching us.  He said you could be trusted.”

“He was wrong,” and that sounded true, more so than anything else that had fallen from his lips up to that moment.

One of his captors gripped his forearm so hard that it felt about to bruise.

“Lord Tycho wants Mathar in the prisons.”  The use of his name, rather than Catharine’s, did not escape Quentin.  Does this mean that I’ve died already?  He jerked backwards as he was dragged a few steps further into the street.

“Yes.  I am aware of that.”  Felix said.  He looked at Quentin, shaking his head.  “You poor fool.”  It was spoken with pity, rather than hate.  The redhead’s face twisted up as he watched Felix step back indoors, his hand at the door.  “Haste be with you, then.”  It closed and with it, his last chance at freedom, faint though it was.

The first thing that Quentin noticed as the guard shoved him into the dark cell was the smell.  Hot and stale, the wet stone reeked of urine and mold.  He opened his mouth to say something but the bars had clanged shut, his guard’s heavy footsteps loud as he barreled away.  There was no need to linger in the prisons—he had heard it before, but understood it better now as he stepped into the small space that he had been discarded in.

“Oh, Asahel,” he muttered, “What would you say if you saw this?”  He imagined that the other man would smile at first, that shy, amused half-grin that so often haunted his face.  The smile wouldn’t last long, however, not after he saw the cell.  Instead, Quentin pictured, Asahel’s wide brown eyes would go wider, so worried that they would take the darkness inside his face and wear it even as he bit his lip.

There was no Asahel here, however.  What he could see in the flickering light cast by a candle in the hall was minimal.  A bed of straw was piled up in the corner, the ends of it damp.  His own feet were sodden from the murky water that pooled at the incline in the floor.  He tried to ignore the smell that rose up from the pool or to think about what might have caused it.  There would be time enough for that later.

In fact, Quentin reflected, he had more time than he’d ever had before.

“How long before they call for me, I wonder?”  Speaking out loud was comforting.  He walked over to the straw and knelt on it, spreading it as even as he could with his hands.  A small clay pot sat near the bars and a bowl still stained from its last meal.  There was little here to concentrate on.  He took off his tunic and spread it across the straw, frowning at the way that the velvet crumpled.  His undershirt was thin for this place—had it not been summer, he would have struggled even with the tunic.  As it was, the hot air of the prisons made him grateful to strip down as he settled himself on his lumpy bed.

As he reclined on the straw, Quentin tried to recall what he remembered about the prisons.  It was a subject he’d heard little about since university—few noblemen went to the prisons under Pallo’s hallowed streets.  Only the most heinous of crimes could not be expunged by coin.  Quentin could not recall the last time he’d heard the threat of imprisonment spoken, save the Heresies.

And that, the magician thought.  Is something different altogether.

He stopped thinking and began to listen.  The cells were not as quiet as he had first thought.  Raspy, hoarse breathing seemed to echo from his left.  He could hear soft moaning in the distance, bracketed by a series of harsh coughs.  The only conversation audible was muttered.  It was not distinct enough for Quentin to be sure that he hadn’t imagined it all.

You’re not alone.  It was a relief.  He relaxed a little, not yet ready to call out to the others.  There was too much to consider—Asahel, Felix, and Catharine, jumbled together in his head with Taggart’s daughter thrown into the mix.  Quentin realized that he was listening, in part, for Asahel.

“Felix was the one who gave us up,” he said.  “Asahel must be here somewhere.”  The words rang out but were left unanswered.  The silence made his arms prickle in revulsion.  How many times had Asahel reminded him of the penalty that poor men faced for committing Heresy?  It was one that even now, Quentin did not expect himself to face.

What if he’s already dead? 

He curled himself up on the straw, willing himself not to think about it.  It made his stomach ache worse than it did with the smells from nearby.  There was little else to consider, however, but to start turning their conversations over and over in his head, trying to face the fact that his friend was in graver danger than he. 

Finally, he closed his eyes and invited sleep.  There was nothing to do but dream.

Quentin remained in a state ranging between slumber and boredom, though he could not say how long it lasted.  There was no hint of time passed within his small cell.  Underground as the prison was, Quentin couldn’t determine time’s passing by the change of sun and moon simply because there was no window.  He recalled a story he’d once been told of a man notching the days of his captivity on the walls of his cell.

“I won’t last that long,” he told himself as he made a long scratch in the grimy film that coated the floor.  He’d just been brought a plate of food—chalky, dark bread and a hard chunk of cheddar.  Quentin mistrusted the water that they gave him, carefully plucking a fly off the top before he gingerly sipped at it.  Meals were unpleasant, but they were some indicator of time passed, although he doubted they came with any regularity.

He thought, too, of trying to call magic from the ground.  Quentin could feel a hint of it, just waiting past the walls.  To be encased in earth was to be surrounded by the very thing that gave him power.  It throbbed when he pressed his hand against the floor, the energy begging for release.  The risk was too great for him to try to harness powers that he had never excelled with.  If Asahel comes, he thought. He would be able to control the magic and guide it.  And he might even be willing to do it, given that his only option is freedom or death.

The idea sent Quentin into another daydream.  He envisioned a cell in which Asahel had done just that, the stone cracked and broken on the floor.  A large seam of earth ran through his imagined cell, with a schism so deep no jailer could repair it, and a hundred men trying to burrow their way through the earth to find a way out.  He smiled as he thought about it, and was still smiling when he heard the guard clanging the iron bars next to his face.

“Mathar.” Quentin winced at the sound of his own family name.  It had been painful to abandon it for his marriage, yet now it felt worse to reclaim it.  He did not protest, however.  It would only get him a fist to the cheek or a boot to the stomach.

“Yes.”  Quentin stood, clinging to the bars for support.  There was little room to walk in the cell.  It was slowly making an invalid of him, he could feel, by the quaver in his knees.

“Brought you company.”

Asahel?  He strained to see what man the guards were dragging behind them.  He shriveled back when he realized it wasn’t Asahel at all, but some strange commoner.

There was no resistance left in the stranger.  The two guards who held him were rough men—their forearms twice the size of Quentin’s.  No delicacy lingered in their movements.  His cellmate might as well have been a sack of meat by the way that he was being carried, his body flopping with every step.

He was dropped on the cell floor at Quentin’s feet, a quiet moan escaping his lips.  He seemed all bone and hair, the only bulk of him in the crackling brown mop that adorned his head.  The guards pulled away from him so quickly that Quentin didn’t even have a chance to step forward before the bars shut.

The guards did not leave.  He looked at them, seeing emotions in men he’d only allowed himself to think of as faceless.  One guard’s face snarled, while the other’s was amused.  The look on his regular jailer’s face was an odd mix of fearful and curious, almost as if he himself expected to be punished.  Quentin stared down at his fellow prisoner, watching as the man uncurled.  The stranger’s face was covered in a purplish mass of bruises but beneath it, he himself seemed young.

Then he coughed, his chest rattling.  Quentin stopped, halfway through a step forward.  The man lifted his hand to cover his chapped lips.  A scabbed, weeping sore covered his first knuckle, trailed by two newer scabs on the back of his hand.

“The Plagues,” Quentin breathed.

By then, the guards had stepped so far into the hallway that their figures were obscured by shadow.  His words had only confirmed what they had already believed to be true.

“You’d best heal it then,” his jailer said, staring at him a moment longer before he turned his back and walked away.

Asahel came to expect Catharine’s coming at night.  They met in secret, a traitor and the wife of a heretic.  It was a risk to them both and greater than the ones that he had betrayed Quentin over, he believed, but the Geographer remained silent.  No Council’s men came to the docks or tried to batter down the doors of his home.

The silence bothered him only slightly less than his fear.

“You shouldn’t come here so much, aye?”  He told Catharine as she sat at the desk in his office, her fingers ink-stained from writing appeals.  It had been seven days since Quent had been imprisoned, and still no word of what the government planned to do with him.

“Where else should I go?”  She asked.  He could see the weariness in her by the way that her shoulders sunk down as she asked the question.  “My father has no sympathy, nor my mother.  Those… admirers who sought Quentin out have no interest in him now, nor did they ever care for me.”  Catharine rubbed at her ear with an ink-splotched thumb.  “I had few allies before.  Now?  All he’s left me is…”

“Me,” Asahel finished.  It didn’t matter if it was the right answer or not.  It was clear that Catharine had been struggling for an end to her own words, and he couldn’t bear to watch her falter.

“Yes.”  Her dark eyes caught his.  It startled him how willing she was to look men in the eye and as he’d grown used to doing, he turned away from her sharp gaze.

“It’s not safe for you here,” he said.  “It’s not safe for me either.  Don’t you think that they watch this place?  They’ve got to know that I had a hand in it.  Can’t you see that I’m being watched?  Surely I must be, to find out who else Quentin was dealing with.”  The only reason for him not to have been watched was the one that Catharine must not know—that it had been him who turned in his partner.

“If you’re being watched, they haven’t come for us yet,” she replied.  “If you’re being watched, then why are you here?”  Catharine shook her head.  “No, I don’t think the Council knows of you at all.”  There was a certainty to her words he didn’t like.

“You don’t know that, aye?”

“They took him at the Carnicus estates,” she said, her voice dropping a pitch.  “The Council’s men were waiting there.”

“But Felix was never a part of this.”  Not where Quentin was concerned.

“Of all the things I’d accuse Quentin of, constancy is not one.”

 Tell her, Asahel thought to himself.  That it was you, that Felix only knew of this from you and that it was he who encouraged you to bring it all to the Geographer’s attention.  The idea sickened him as he began to realize that it had, perhaps, never been Felix’s intent to show him kindness but rather, to prepare Quentin’s downfall.  But why?

“I should go to see him,” he answered instead.

“Why?  So you can join my husband in a narrow cell?”  Catharine’s dark locks shook as her head bobbed, loosening from their coiled braid.  “I don’t think that’s a road you’re meant to follow.  If you’re to meet him at all, it can’t be at a place of his choosing.  Clearly, he’ll choose to line it with guards.” 

“What am I meant to do then, Catharine?”  Asahel said, his voice strained.  “You can sit and write appeals at my desk, but it hasn’t got us anywhere.  The Council’s said naught of Quentin or what he’s done—does anyone actually know the Heresy he’s been imprisoned for?”  From the stricken look on her face, he could tell that he’d found something.  He pressed on.  “That’s what you’ve not told me.  All those people at court… your father… they don’t know, do they?  Not all of it.”