Poor World (20 page)

Alsaes dug his fingers into my shoulder and muscled me across the street and into the jail. He was chuckling under his breath, the happy chuckle of fun and games ahead. Hoo boy, this was his night, and he was gonna have soooo much fun. You could just feel it stenching off him in fumes.

Torchlight from the guards flared wildly, clashing with the blue of lightning and the weak glowglobe light, but I couldn't see well because of the curtain of wet hair in my eyes, and the rain — and the tears of pain from that slap. Stumbling, I managed to get down the steps without falling, then I was thrust into a cell, the door clanged shut with reverberating firmness, and I collapsed onto the hard packed dirt.

“Suffer!” Alsaes snarled, his gloating enjoyment so intense it was like another slap — not that his opinion mattered, because it didn't. It was my complete inability to respond in the manner in which he deserved that galled me.

Tromp, tromp, tromp. The sound of their retreat diminished, and with it the last red-gold flicker of the torches, leaving me in darkness total, inside and outside.

The dirt was fast turning into mud beneath my cheek. I hauled myself upright and crunched into a corner against the bars, my head on my cold, soggy knees. My clothes felt like ice, and my face throbbed where Kessler had hit me.

Presently faint rustling sounds half-roused me from my funk.

“CJ! Hey — ” Puddlenose whispered.

“Puddlenose, Christoph. Rest of you, I'm sorry I let you down.” It took some effort to get that out.

“Now that's a dumb thing to say,” Christoph replied briskly. “Because we'd — ”

“Oh, shaddup,” I yelled, repressed tears making my voice ragged.

Except for the occasional rustlings of people, and the muted roar of the thunder, silence descended. Self-pity (well-earned and richly deserved!) sought refuge in tears, but sheer rage kept me from giving in.

My clammy, wet clothes began to make me ache, so to fight it, I got to my feet and started pacing the length of the cell. Back and forth, back and forth, while I relived every nasty moment of the plan, and the hours leading up to the plan, in a vain attempt to figure out where I'd gone wrong and what I could have done differently.

Useless. Maddening. But I couldn't stop myself, not until I realized that my eyes had adjusted, and I could barely make out the outline of the two sleeping figures next cell over, and one tall one sitting up, watching.

Unable to sleep because of my restless walking, I thought dismally.

“Uh, sorry about that,” I muttered, and withdrew to the opposite corner, curled in a shivering ball, and tried to sleep.

When I did, the nightmares were worse than being awake.

I slept, despite the acute discomfort in my wrists and arms. I think it was because I'd been overwhelmed.

At any rate, I woke abruptly, snorting as if I'd fallen into a pool, and at first I was bewildered to find myself in darkness. For a moment I was afraid I'd been cast back into Shnit's dungeon — then memory slugged me. I wasn't far wrong.

I sat up, stiff and sore, but I ignored it and wrestled my arms underneath me. This was a slow, frustrating, painful operation, but what a relief when I finally yanked my numb wrists past my feet and collapsed back.

The knots took a while longer, but my teeth were strong, and it wasn't as if I had any other demands on my time. Again relief washed through me when the last knot gave, and I flung away the rope. (Which incidentally was the roughest, scratchiest kind ever made. I wondered if that spacklebrain Alsaes had searched all over the world in order to find it.)

Anyway, I resettled myself more comfortably. My clothes were rapidly drying out, and the air wasn't so cold any more. Again my mind insisted on worrying at my flubbed plans, just like my teeth had at those knots. This time I worried about things outside myself, which was worse.

About the only thing that kept me from yodeling and bounding in a crazy fit was the fact that the girls hadn't been thrown in the jail as well. This meant — I hoped this meant — that Alsaes had not been able to read anything on those notes, or had seen the girls meeting me, so that they were still safe.

I couldn't trust this assumption, unfortunately. That creep of an Alsaes had made it clear that he could pull some kind of horrible trick, just for the sake of his own malicious pleasure.

Even worse, Kessler's Plan had not been halted.

Clair and Mearsies Heili were still in danger.

At least if I'd shown up with Kessler looming next to me, she could have taken one look at my face and known something was wrong. Maybe even — somehow — averted the disaster.

I'd managed to smash even that faint chance.

I rubbed my eyes. They were gritty from mud.

Got to sleep
, I thought.
Sleep, don't think. What's the use of that? You've already proven you're worthless at it.

I wrestled with misery and anger for a while, my head on my knees, until a whisper came from the next cell over. “Psst! CJ.”

I ignored it, my heart flooding with bitterness. All I could think of was Rel's emphatic statement that my plan wouldn't work.

“CJ!” Puddlenose whispered louder.

“Oh, lay off,” I snarled. “I know I barfed up the plan, so there's no use in prunepie-ing the past and the moral-to-be-learned-from-this on me, because it's all over, and hopeless. I just got Clair killed. I just got us all killed.”

Self-pity closed my throat then, but I was too disgusted with myself to actually cry.

Puddlenose said, “Cherene Jennet, listen!”

“Oh, shut up.”

“You shut up.” He sighed, and I heard scrunchings as he shifted near to the bars. “Kessler was just down here a little while ago, while you were asleep — ”

“What didya have to tell me that for?”

“ — which he's never done before, and when he was leaving he said something about having you moved upstairs. So we better solve your riddle, fast. We got a world to save!” He said this last in a fake heroic voice.

“Give us the riddle again,” Christoph said.

Though Kessler had taken the paper, I still remembered it — but I hesitated, wondering if Kessler had read the words. If, in fact, that paper had been his first proof of Dejain's and Alsaes's warnings about me being true.

I repeated tonelessly, “‘When there is darkness outside and within, to dispel it there seems no way to begin. All appears lost but you must fight, then place your writer in the broken light.'”

“Riddle ... secret place ...” Puddlenose mused.

“Maybe there is no hidden meaning,” Rel said quietly.

“That two-headed person made it sound like there was some rule behind the supposed ‘help',” I said. “Of course that might have been a fake as well.”

“We don't know anything about where that was, much less what kind of rules they might have,” Puddlenose said. “Broken light sounds like some kind o' weird reference to, well, Norsunder.”

“Whole thing reeks of Norsunder and its variants,” Christoph said, with conviction. “Put a writer there — would that be CJ? She's the only one of us who keeps records. Sounds to me like some kind of recruitment attempt.”

“Sure,” I gorbanzoed. “They need
me
to write their records. I guess this is proof that mine are as rotten as I've always suspected.”

“Naw,” Puddlenose snarkled. “For your truly rotten, I think Faline would have to be assigned to the case. As she'd be the first to admit.”

“Proudly,” Christoph added.

“Beginning with all the head splatbrains' names mangled with her weird spelling, followed by strings of stinkacious puns — ”

“And that's just the introduction,” Christoph said.

I realized they were trying, in a roundabout way, to cheer me — to convince me, without having to refer to the mess, that they didn't blame me for flubbing.

As soon as I realized it, my emotions wheeled again. Still didn't feel good (of course!) but not quite as rotten. However, all the humor had leached away.

“Okay, Rel,” I said. “Explain what you said by no meaning. Or do you mean there's no point to it at all?”

“I didn't mean to imply that there is no point — though what you say is entirely possible,” he began. “Just that the meaning might be more obvious than we're assuming, just expressed as misleadingly as the speaker could contrive.”

“That certainly sounds like someone forced to follow some rule,” Puddlenose said. “Or an order. Go on.”

“So you break it down to the three points and find the obvious meaning,” Rel said calmly.

“Darkness outside you and in,” Christoph said. “That first one is easy, or we're all wearing wool blinkers and forgot to notice.”

“It's inside as well,” I said grimly.

“Check,” Christoph went on with his characteristic cheer. As if our situation wasn't so bad after all — as if, surely, we could do something about it. “And the second is true because we don't know how to dispel it.”

“‘Still must fight,'” Rel repeated. “True?”

“Yes!”

“So they all add up in circumstances and in time,” Puddlenose spoke with conviction. “We have only to figure out writer and broken light, and we'll probably loose some kind of powerful, sinister magic that will instantly transform Kessler and the rest to multi-colored goo. Question is, what, or who, is the writer?”

“R-I-G-H-T-E-R?” Christoph asked. “Or W-R-I-T-E-R?”

“I dunno,” I said. “The first sounds like some kind of hero, which definitely isn't me, but the second one could be me. Except how can I stick myself anywhere outside this blasted cell? And it doesn't seem — as we noted in Rule Number One — ”

“Nice sarcasm,” Christoph put in appreciatively.

“ — that there is any light anywhere, broken or straight or even braided!”

“What's the most obvious interpretation?” Rel asked. “Everything else is literal enough.”

“Righter could be right hand,” Christoph offered.

“That would double for writer, too, wouldn't it?” Rel asked.

“Nope,” Puddlenose said. “She's a leftie.”

“Then it means the hand she writes with,” Rel said.

“Okay, I agree,” Puddlenose said.

“Me, too.”

“So where do I put it?” I groaned. “We're still stuck with the fact that there's almost no light — ”

Noises from beyond the top of the stairs shut us all up.

I moved away from the iron bars nearest the itchfeet's cell, and back against the stone-reinforced wall of mine.

Torches glared against my vision. I shut my eyes.

But then I heard Kessler's voice.

“Cherene, I want to talk to you.”

Of course I ignored him. Oh, it felt so good to be acting the way one was supposed to act to a villain.

I was so relieved to be quit with lies, to be acting and reacting on the footing I knew best — me, CJ Sherwood, Mearsiean, facing off a villain who wanted to kill people, me included. It was, in a weird way, a relief even to be in that dungeon, surrounded by friends, instead of pretending, for right and wrong were now clear-cut and I was incontestably in the right.

What I refused to face was the cost of my betrayal to someone who'd been betrayed all his life by his own family and people.

And I think that's the reason he came down.

At first he reacted like a regular villain, too. When I refused to answer him, one of the guards with the torches relinquished the light, unlocked the cell door, came in, hauled me up and slapped me on my already bruised cheek.

I already knew that Kessler had unnervingly long patience when he wanted to. He was capable of standing there all day, watching that poopdeck knock me down (and remind me — slow as I am — just who held the power and who had given it up in a mindlessly stupid misfired plan) so I finally responded, but in as surly a voice as I could manage — and using his name.

That no longer mattered. I should have seen that when he came himself into the jail, something he hadn't done before. Hitherto the prisoners had already been dead in his mind, which was why Alsaes had had his chance to indulge his little hobbies. That had changed only when he had Puddlenose there. Shnit's enemy. It wasn't the others he hadn't wanted knowing who he was, it was Puddlenose, the alternate heir — the one who rejected Shnit, but who also rejected Kessler and his plan.

Why detail that awful scene? We both talked at cross purposes.

He expressed his disappointment (without any discernable emotion in that soft, flat voice) that I'd turned out to be stupid, and blind.

The missing ingredient was loyalty, that much I got. But I didn't understand his version of that yet, so I didn't see where my real failure lay.

I just snarled — stupidly — ”You're stupid, Kessler. Stupider than I am if you really expected me to kill Clair, who's my best friend in the world.” And I yelled it, “Stupid!”

“I've been called worse things by my uncle, when I was small,” he said blandly.

“You're just
like
Uncle Shnit!”

“You'll die the same way he will,” Kessler went on, “after you witness the completion of my plans.”

“Oh, of course,” I yodeled, pouring into that sarcastic venting every pent-up frustration of days of fear, and anger, and blistering hot weather in a nightmare environment. “I couldn't have possibly guessed!”

Kessler said, “You caused a brief postponement, but nothing more.”

That meant he had indeed assigned someone else to murder Clair.

“ — and by tomorrow I will have people in key places in the world, readying us for the next stage. From now on position will be earned only by talent, and merit. And loyalty.”

Was he looking for remorse? Or proof of my unworthiness?

I saw us so thoroughly as victim and villain that there was no chance I would regret anything I'd done. Not when Clair's life was the price of his wonderful New Order.