The Liar's Key
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like to leave this with us during your visit, sir?” The thug seemed keen to take charge of my funds. “We’ve had riots here over a dropped silver. Taking this much money in there . . . it’s not sensible.”
“Not safe.” The second thug, younger, his eyes unable to leave my case.
“Not sane.” The last and smallest of them, though still a solid chunk of muscle, and seemingly angered by the sight of such riches in a place of debt.
“It’s all well hidden.” I frowned at the heap of ribbons between whose double layers the spare florins were sewn. “Well it was before you laid hands on me.” I picked up a loose end and started to wrap the length of it, chinking, about my waist and torso. “Ta-Nam will be more than sufficient to protect my interests, with or without his knives.” I dropped that last slowly, letting the words hammer in the fact that the sword-son could end them where they stood. Moreover he could do so with a clean conscience since Umbertide law lays the crime at the feet of any man who can be shown to have paid for its commission. By signing themselves over to contract the sword-sons were virtually immune to charges of criminality, as much a device as a sword or clockwork soldier, and no more guilty.
Despite their avarice the guards made no attempt to take my gold. Ownership and debt were a religion in Umbertide and held in no place more sanctified than in the debtor prisons. The whole prison was essentially a device to bleed dry those that fell into its clutches—to bleed them in a highly structured and entirely legal manner. In the midst of such institutionalized theft on so grand a scale individual thievery could not be tolerated in any degree. Only by strict adherence to the rules of the theft could the illusion of it being lawful and civilized be maintained.
• • •
Our manicured thug took us through the more salubrious quarter of the prison and handed us over to a cell monkey who would lead us the rest of the way. I had to pay him too.
“98-3-8 . . . what was the rest?” He walked ahead of us swinging an unlit lantern.
“98-3-8-3-6,” I said, squinting at my paper. We’d gone past the high windows, past the lantern-lit corridors—the wooden doors punctuating the walls had given way to barred gates and the oil lamps smoked so as to set you coughing. “What does it mean?”
“Means he came in this year, ’98, not so long ago, less than a month, and that he’s poor as shit ’cos he’s about as far back as this place goes.”
I glanced through the next set of bars into an empty cell, stone floor strewn with dirt, a bare bench, a heap of rags for a bed. An eye glittered amid the rags and I realized it wasn’t a bed.
The stink intensified as we went on, a raw mix of sewage and rot. The passage became more tunnel than corridor and I had to bend to keep from scraping my head. Lone candle stubs, balanced amid pools of wax, broke the darkness here and there. Elsewhere things moaned and rustled in the blind and fetid spaces behind the bars and I was glad not to see. Our guide lit a taper at the last of these candles and we followed the glowing ember of it into hell.
“Here we are 3:6.” The man lit his lantern, reintroducing us to the sweaty and lumpen topology of his naked torso. We stood in a square and low-roofed chamber from which eight arches gave onto largish cells, each arch walled with grimy rusting bars. The creatures within turned their faces from the light as if it hurt their eyes. Most were naked but I couldn’t tell if they were men or women. They seemed uniformly grey, smeared with filth, and gaunt beyond the point that one might imagine a person could be reduced to and yet live. And the smell of the place . . . it held less of the sewer and more of rot . . . the kind of stink that wouldn’t quit your nostrils for days after. The smell of death—death without hope.
“What’s the last bit?”
“What?” I looked back at the jailer.
“The last bit. The case number.”
“Oh.” And I held up the roll of parchment to read it off.
We approached the arch that bore the legend “VI” upon its keystone.
“Get back!” The cell monkey ran his baton along the bars and the debtors shrank away, cowering like dogs accustomed to beating. “The new one! Show me the new one!”
The grey crowd parted, edging to the margins of their cell, bare feet shuffling through wet filth. The shadows retreated with them, the lantern revealing a stone floor strewn with litter.
“Where—” And then I saw him. Lying on his side, back toward us, his spine a series of bony knobs beneath pale skin stretched painfully across them. I’d seen dead beggars in the gutters of Vermillion with more meat on them after a night with the dogs chewing at their limbs.