CHAPTER 24:
Dungeons of Sarkelosh
Jallin awoke, alone. Aside from a massive headache, and a nearly sprained ankle, he felt alright.
The room around him was dark, but not a wet, slimy dark, or some forgotten oubliette in the middle of the trith where the light of day went to die as it fell through cracks. No, this was more like a chicken coop kind of dark. The sunlight didn’t come in, but could if the sun went in the right direction.
He had been placed on his rear at the back of the cell against the wall, facing the opening into the courtyard. He lacked maybe three or four feet of leg length, or else his feet would be in the arcade outside his cell. From side to side, his cell would not allow him to hold his arms out as wide as they could go.
Jallin was most surprised to find he still wore his clothing. Why hadn’t they taken it? He was thankful for everything else. He was thankful he wasn’t put in some of the more horrifying cells, perhaps lying down in a box on the ground waiting for some merciful torturer to pull him out by his feet while his nose was pressed against the wall. Every criminal, every thief, brigand, murderer, or anyone who had any reason to fear the law, had heard of the snakeholes: tiny niches or crevices carved out of unrelenting stone, in dark, easy-to-forget-about places, where a prisoner might be forced to sit or stand or lie forever, waiting to be mercifully remembered and tortured.
For whatever reason, this was not a bad place to be, if he was in prison. It wasn’t big, like his hut back at Master Noshó’s house, but it was airy and open, and big enough to fit him with some breathing room. He had no bed or chair or even a place to go to relieve himself, but it was dry and filled with straw, out out of the sunshine.
Jallin stood at his door and carefully put his hand out, stretching his fingertips as far as they could reach without the rest of him. He remembered the nasty spell Counselor Yubrin put on the narg, which flipped and twisted his arm into a pulverized explosion of blood. Jallin wondered how the man could make such spells, and why had he become a Trochiabite and lived underground for so long with the rotting and dying if he could tear a person apart with magic alone.
Jallin’s hand passed, first a finger, then his wrist, then his forearm, through the doorway. He put his hurt ankle into the doorframe next, no sense in hurting both ankles, and discovered that, like his hand, nothing bad happened. He felt safe enough to lean on the wall by the opening to his cell and look around.
Outside was a grassy area surrounded by little doorways like his own. From his vantage point by his own door, he managed to count ten similar doors before he forgot how to count any higher. He held his finger out and kept his place on one of the doors, and counted another ten, then another. He didn’t know how many that was, but it seemed quite a few. Ten, three times over, was…he couldn’t do it.
He noticed a few people walking around outside and he wondered if they were guards or other prisoners. They were dressed in different ways, some dressed in tattered, but once-having-been-fine clothing and others dressed in just what would cover their most sensitive parts. Again, he could not count high enough to know how many people there were.
On the other side of the courtyard, Jallin saw parapets above the arcade and guards with spears on patrol. Not too many guards, Jallin thought. He only counted one, two, three, four, five.
Staring at the guards, he noticed something funny about them. Their spears didn’t have sharp pointed ends like most spears would. Instead, the spears they carried ended in round ball-shapes, like those on top of a minaret. The balls didn’t seem to have spikes, either. Were they used to bludgeon people? Somehow, that seemed foolish to Jallin.
He decided he would go out into the courtyard, if he could, and see what kind of situation he was in. He passed through the open door with ease, and turned around looking himself over to make sure nothing had happened to him. He was whole. His ankle still hurt. His headache was dwindling.
At the side of the courtyard farthest away from Jallin’s cell, a large balcony hung out over the entire courtyard, ending in a miniature tower like a great beehive on a stick. The walkway leading up to it was too far too narrow hold the tower aloft without magical aide. A parapet went around the central tower and two guards stood together as though talking about their day rather than guarding. They leaned their arms against the walls and looked down into the courtyard below lazily. Behind them, in the tower, Jallin only saw darkness.
All around the courtyard, beyond the walls of this place, the rest of the palace of Sarkoshia rose up around him. He was being kept in the palace? The palace prison? Like a gigantic orchard, the towers and walls and minarets of the Sarkoshian government’s heart rose hundreds of feet into the air. Walkways and bridges, some enclosed and some lacking any rail or walls whatsoever, connected the huge, spires. Windows of every variety, from tiny murderholes to huge painted glass structures, looked down into the courtyard here. Turrets like great parasites were latched onto the sides of almost every tower Jallin could see, and other little towers like the one overhanging this particular courtyard, dangled over mid-air like great fruit at the end of almost hilariously spindly arms.
Despite this being prison, Jallin found himself completely captivated by the impossible architecture above him. He found the idea of prison here actually settling rather than terrifying.
A few of the other people in the courtyard looked Jallin’s way and three of them in the best clothes walked away from him, towards the shadows of the overhanging tower. They eyed him suspiciously over their shoulders. Two more prisoners, after them, broke away from the group in the middle and wandered in a different directly, back to the arcade on the other side.
This left four people in the middle, all of them young, but a few years older than Jallin.
All of them held sour expressions for him as he came near, but none of them warned him away. Instead, they stopped their conversation and waited.
Jallin hesitantly raised his hand up to them in greeting. Would they kill him? Would the guards stop them? For some reason, he felt ashamed to even bother them. Did they know why he was here? Would that even matter here?
The group unfolded a little to let him join them and still they scowled at him.
“We wait for trial here,” said one of the boys. He was a big boy, a full head taller than Jallin, and made to work. Underneath the layer of dirt on him were big muscles.
Another boy, just as large, but wider and even stronger-looking, was a kunjel. He seemed friendlier to Jallin, but what he was doing here, Jallin had a hard time imagining. Kunjels were some of the most law-abiding people usually.
Jallin wanted to know who the other two were. He thought he recognized one boy, easily a hundred pounds lighter than the first two, about as short as Jallin but sporting a greasy mustache and beard and several pimples all over his face. The other was gaunt. There was no other way to put it. His clothes were draped over him like shrouds and he looked like he had been, or was still, very, very sick.
“We wait to be set free, ‘cause we didn’t do anything, but we won’t be set free, ‘cause there’s no justice here. They’ll sick their putrights on us, and we’ll confess to everything, and then we’ll be off to slavery. That’s the way it goes.”
“No, there is justice. There will be justice,” the kunjel said. “I’ll let them see. If they will open my mind and read it, they will see.”
Jallin wasn’t sure if the boys merely resumed their conversations from before, or were they actually trying to include Jallin in them. He decided to assume the latter.
“Why are we here, though?” Jallin asked. He hadn’t meant to ask them their business, but he knew he had. “I mean, why are we in the palace here? Why not in one of the regular prisons out there?” He pointed over the wall somewhere, not sure if he was actually pointing in the direction of a prison or an inn. The other boys didn’t seem to care where he pointed. None of them looked.
“We’re waiting on our trials,” the kunjel said. He sounded stupid to Jallin. “They’re going to try us.”
Jallin found something funny about this conversation.
“Why do we get a trial?” he asked. Most people didn’t get a trial. Sometimes, they even made a person pay to have the right to a trial. “I mean, I don’t think I was doing anything all that bad. I didn’t steal anything.”
He put his hands in the pockets of his trousers. The sunstones were not there.
“Well, I didn’t murder anyone, did I?” he asked as though these boys would know.
“Neither did we?” said the kunjel boy. “To be honest, I don’t really know why I’m here at all. I remember I raged….”
The other boy, his friend apparently, raised a hand to stop him from speaking further. Normally, to interrupt a kunjel was to risk them growling, and to risk them growling would risk them raging, but this kunjel only smiled peacefully.
“We defended ourselves is all we did. Apparently, this plague going around’s got the putrights furious. They’re going around arresting innocent people now. They think they can just go in and pillage a person’s home because someone’s sick?”
“Arresting people?”
“Yes,” said the kunjel. “They attacked his family, trying to get the sick people out of his house and we tried to stop them, so they arrested us.” The kunjel spoke like someone detailing a shopping trip in the market. “The mercelians are overstepping their boundaries. They, and the Sarkoshian putrights, are trying to stop the plague, the bloodlung.”
“It’s not even a plague, yet. Not really. It’s merely some people getting sick. I’d think to be a plague, it’d have to be all over, like a fire, but it’s not. A few people getting sick here and there is nothing to get one’s trousers on fire about,” the big human said, crossing his arms. “I ought to be able to leave my house, go to work, and come home without people raiding my house and trying to take my mother away to some damned prison for having a cough. It’s absurd. She’s dying and they’re arresting people for it.”
“You’re not sick,” Jallin said.
“No, I’m not. So what? Not everyone gets sick. I gotta work. I don’t have time to get sick.”
“I…didn’t get sick either.”
“And Gelzor’s not sick either, so what’re you gettin’ at?” The boy gestured at the kunjel, and Jallin guessed he was Gelzor.
“That is why it isn’t a plague,” Gelzor said. “It really only gets a few people, not everyone. I really don’t know how many’ve died, but I’d guess only a few hundred, maybe a thousand.”
“My mother died,” Jallin said, though he didn’t know why. “They didn’t come and get me and my…sister,” he went on.
“Well, I guess that depends on where you are, doesn’t it? We’re from Norwest Village, what faces Morrigar and Ezeerra, and the putrights get all shades of antsy when a disease breaks out.”
“As well they should,” said Pimples. “That’s a major port village over there. Lots of farm stacks, lots of guilders, lots of need to keep military over there. They can’t have everyone sending in sick, now can they?”
“A lot you know about it,” said tall boy. “How many times they recommend you go pushing quills instead of spears?”
“No use worrying about that now. I’ll be lucky if I’m pushing an oar after this mess.”
“How did you end up here?” Jallin asked Pimples.
“I don’t know you, child,” he responded rudely.
“Fine. I’m Jallin…er…just Jallin.”
“Hmmph,” coughed the tall boy.
“I’m sorry,” replied Pimples. “So, when’s your trial?” he asked tall boy.
“Hey, wait. I think this child’s got the right idea. Maybe we ought to introduce ourselves, eh? S’not his fault he came late to the party, is it? Nothing else to do.”
“The less I know, the better my trial will be,” Pimples said. He left the group and walked off towards one of the open doors of a cell. Jallin was glad to see him go.
The other three watched him as well.
“Don’t…mind…him,” said the gaunt boy, between coughs. “Rebel.”
“Rebel?” Jallin asked. He took another look towards the retreating boy.
The gaunt boy gestured at the tall boy.
“Word around the chicken coop’s he tried to get into one military, got rejected, got recruited by some country’s diplomat to do some dirty work, got caught, arrested, denied, and thrown in here. Truth is, he’s just an idiot. Wonder how much they paid him to plant that looking glass.”
“Looking glass?” Jallin muttered.
“He’s a regular Guddrikus bird, isn’t he?” said the tall one. “Someone paid to go put a glass bauble in some wizard’s dressing room or some nonsense. He did it. He got caught. Now he’s here. He’s been dragoning the whole time about how it wouldn’t have happened if the Sarkoshians had let him join the army in the first place.”
“So, you are Jallin,” said the Kunjel. “I am Gelzor, and my friend here is Mallini. The one that just left us, with the…uh…scars…is Fenn.”
“Fenn’s an empire man.”
“An empire man?”
“Mallini means Fenn believes in empires. He believes that Sarkoshia should rule the world.”
“Then, why’d he rebel?”
“Well, I guess I should say, he believes some empire should rule the world. Perhaps he was trying to provoke a war. That is my belief.”
“Gremlin sklut, Gel. He was trying to get money so he could buy his way in. Garden on both sides of his wall. Full of himself is what I think.”
“Well, what does he have to do with us?” Jallin asked, looking at the gaunt one, who now sat down on the grass. “I didn’t get….”
“Probably suspect him of dropping dirty.”
“Dropping…?”
“It means you’re dropping poisons into water supplies or leaving things to make people sick. That kind of thing. Body war.” He thought Mallini invited him to ask these questions, even though continually repeating the last thing the boy said made him feel like an idiot.
“They’re rounding anyone up and putting them in prisons if they’re suspected of dropping dirty,” explained Gelzor, not forcing Jallin to ask. “They think we’re Trochiabites, or some rubbish like that. Honestly, have you ever seen a kunjel be a Trochiabite? I find that stupid to the point of being ridiculous.”
Jallin had seen this, but he said nothing.
“I wonder where they got Mama,” Mallini said as though he were yawning. He stretched his arms above his head and for a moment looked at the ground. “You don’t remember, do you Gelzor?”
“I was enraged. I don’t remember little details like that. Maybe they left her alone.”
“Why did they try and take your mother?”
“Because she was…sick,” said the gaunt boy. “They’re trying to…um…what’s the word Gel?”
“Quarantine?”
The gaunt boy pointed and coughed at the same time. “That’s…the one,” he hacked.
“That’s where they take you and throw you in a pit so you don’t infect anyone else,” Jallin said. Mallini lunged at him and grabbed him by the shirt. For a moment, Jallin wasn’t sure he was still standing, but there was Mallini’s face nose to nose with his own.
“So you think they’ve got my mother in a pit in some dungeon? Is that it? You think they’re feedin’ her scraps and bones? Is that it? You think she was dropping dirty like Pitface over there?”
Jallin couldn’t speak, he was so afraid. His heart raced and for a moment he stuttered.
“Hey, Malli, back down,” Gelzor said soothingly. Jallin wondered how he was the one that raged. It seemed as though Mallini had the shorter temper.
“I’m sorry,” Jallin said. “I didn’t mean…I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m worried about my sister. I’m worried what they’ll do to her if they catch her. She’s lost without me. I wouldn’t want them quarantining her.”
“Hey, boy, you don’t know, do you? I mean, that’s not what they do is it?”
For a moment, Jallin felt a little emboldened.
“I had heard they put you away somewhere…safe…from other people. They just don’t want the disease getting out. I’m sure your mother’s fine.”
Mallini glanced at Gelzor and smiled good-naturedly. Jallin saw him clenching his fists. Nerves? Probably.
Talking to the other prisoners, like Gelzor and Mallini, was among the prison’s only significant entertainment.
The gaunt boy’s name was Levit. He was outright accused of dropping dirty, according to Mallini, and Levit didn’t deny it. He said “…if dropping dirty meant that you…still walked down the street with a cough, then I’m guilty.”
Mostly, he shrugged his shoulders and told everyone he would enjoy his last days on this world. He figured he’d be dead in a couple days, if he was lucky, a couple of weeks if he wasn’t.
Some priestesses of the mercelian order brought down food into what Mallini had called the chicken coop the first evening. The prisoners did not press in on them, like Jallin expected them to do, like Stasser’s gang. They knew better. Jallin wondered what sort of example had taught them to wait their turn.
The servers were quite lovely to look at: clean and young. Jallin particularly liked a brown-haired one who was short and plump, and whose blue and yellow habit curved and protruded at just the right spots. She laughed more than the rest, and in a motherly way, commented on the prisoners who came to her for bread and a boiled egg.
“My, they are arresting all the handsome ones these days, aren’t they? Don’t you fear. If you are healthy and well-behaved, they’ll let you out soon enough.” She handed Jallin his meal and looked him in the eyes. He looked away.
He took his meal to one of the little cells. He expected the other prisoners to rob him, but they didn’t. This was not that place, or at least not yet, where people lost their minds and killed each other for scraps. Not yet, but probably not long from now.
Jallin ate quickly, then balled himself up in the corner and fell asleep.
He awoke and discovered Levit had died in the night. They burned his body, according to the prescriptions and the rites of Lignium, the western death god. Later that day, five more people were arrested. Jallin was glad he didn’t recognize any of these.
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