23. The Dungeon (1)

Cold, hard, and damp. Where do all three of those come together?

That was it. I’d woken up on the cold, hard bed of a prison cell.

If Rose’s explanation held up, this was a hundred and fifty years ago, the height of the Empire’s wars of conquest, an age of upheaval. I lowered my head to look at myself and found a drab prisoner’s outfit, black and white stripes crossing each other. I’d clearly been taken captive, but whether by the Imperial army or by House Arne, I couldn’t say yet.

I sprang up off the cot, jogged in place, and ran a check on my body.

Test results: this body was very, very ordinary. The muscles weren’t bulky, but it wasn’t all sinew and bone either, just plain average through and through. And that ordinariness moved me to tears. I could draw a deep breath without my lungs feeling like they were ripping; I could jump without my ankles twinging. It drove home all over again, deep in my bones, just how cursed a piece of glass Arden’s body had been.

Good. Body — pass.

Now that I’d confirmed the body had no defects, the next step was finding a way out. Stuck in here all day, I wouldn’t get a sniff of the truth, let alone see the Saintess’s face.

Eve, a ghost yet apparently not ghost enough, strained to slip through the gap between the bars and failed. Why on earth had she been designed unable to pass through space? To make matters worse, there wasn’t so much as a spoon to be seen inside the cell.

On the off chance, I grabbed the iron bars and rattled them every which way.

— Clang, clang, clang!

The noise rolled out through the silent dungeon, and from the cell next door came an irritated man’s voice.

“Christ, that’s some godawful noise. Hey — you in there alone?”

Setting Eve’s cheerful answer aside for the moment, I kept the conversation going.

“By the way — where is this?”
“…You insane?”
“Looks like I took a knock to the head and lost my memory.”

A clichéd routine, but there’s no easier setup for fishing out information.

The man snorted.

“Hah, you really are a piece of work. They hauled you in with your skull cracked open, and now your brain’s gone soft? Bleeding like that and still alive — guess you’re either lucky or really unlucky.”
“Guess so. No wonder my scalp keeps stinging.”
“Hah, the lunatic!”

Luckily, this was someone I could talk to. His guard was down, so it was time to get to the point.

“So tell me — how’s the war going?”
“How’s it going?”

I sounded him out in the most neutral tone I could manage.

“As in, is the Empire winning.”

The instant I said it, the laughter from the next cell cut off. When the man’s voice came again a beat later, it was much colder and more cynical than before.

“…You really did get hit hard, didn’t you.”

Had I slipped up? No. A soldier asking about the state of the war was the most natural thing in the world.

When I went silent, the man clicked his tongue and went on.

“The Empire winning? Dream on. As long as that goddamned Saintess is still standing, this war isn’t ending.”

Bingo. Information acquired.

If he was calling the Saintess “goddamned,” then we were unquestionably prisoners of the Imperial army. And House Arne was holding out far better than I’d expected.

“It was clearly a wound that should’ve put the guy down for good, but the second the Saintess’s light touched him, he was back on his feet like it was a damn lie. Not a scratch left on him — clean as if it never happened.”

The man was running back through his battle against the Saintess.

“Honestly — enemy or not, it was awe-inspiring. Enough to make you believe that if there were gods, they were really standing on their side.”

Genuine admiration, from an enemy’s mouth, awe shot through with the defeat that came with it.

Is the Saintess’s healing really that broken?

Not just healing wounds. Apparently she’d shown holy power overwhelming enough to flip the entire flow of a battle. So “the greatest Saintess in history” that Rose had talked about wasn’t an overstatement after all.

“Still, it’ll be over soon.”

Meaning the war was ending? A spark of hope flickered. Maybe the reason the Saintess vanished was about to be revealed right here. I leaned in closer to listen.

“They just hauled another guy out a minute ago. You know what I mean? The ones brought in here — they’re disappearing one by one, in order.”
“Disappearing?”
“Yeah. They say it’s for interrogation, but not a single one’s ever come back. Now there’s just me and you left.”

A chill slid up my spine at his words. This wasn’t simply a prison. Interrogations no one returned from meant the prisoners were either being summarily executed or sold off somewhere.

“So get yourself ready. Next round’s me — or you…”

The man muttered, sounding resigned.

And that was when it happened.

— Shrrring.

I heard the man stand up in the next cell. He came right up to the iron bars and, through the single wall between us, asked me in a strange voice.

“Hey — new guy.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s been something I’ve been wondering.”

The air grew heavy.

“You — when they brought you in, you were limp as a sack, dragged in like a piece of cargo, weren’t you? Didn’t budge even when the guards kicked you.”

So the original owner of this body had apparently been unconscious right up to the moment of possession.

“Was I? I don’t remember.”

I played dumb the same way, and the man fell silent for a moment before speaking again.

“Guys who get rolled up on a battlefield and dragged in here are all the same. Something’s broken on them, or they’re so wiped out they can barely breathe. Like me.”

Listening more carefully, I caught a pained, metallic rasp mixed into the man’s breathing. It wasn’t a normal way to breathe.

— Click.

I heard the man grab hold of the iron bars. The warmth had drained out of his voice, replaced by a sharp wariness.

“You wake up and start jogging in place, you rattle the bars. That’s not the kind of movement you can pull off with a single cracked bone. You’re way too fine — not so much as a scratch.”
“…”
“What are you? Some spy the rebel scum planted in here?”

I was honestly impressed. I’d never imagined someone would size me up by my breathing.

“You faked being injured to sneak in, didn’t you? Trying to dig our information out of us!”

The instant the man’s shout broke loose, heavy boot-falls came thudding down the corridor.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Footsteps closing in fast. And then a harsh metallic crash slammed into the iron bars.

— KWANG!

“Which one of you bastards!”

A massive jailer carrying a torch had stopped in front of our cells. His brutal face twisted in the firelight, radiating a foul, murderous aura.

“Shut your damn mouths! Which one of you bastards dares to run his mouth during the sacred evening prayer hour?!”

The jailer’s gaze swept back and forth between the man in the next cell and me. The man flinched and stepped back. Maybe his time as a prisoner had run long; an instinctive fear of the jailers seemed drilled into his body. Of course. This wasn’t an age that fussed over prisoners’ human rights the way modern society did.

I grabbed the iron bars and stared the jailer dead in the eye.

“It was me, you son of a bitch.”
“…What?”

The jailer’s brow twitched.

“Got bored. Did a little talking. You got a problem with that?”

A chill silence spread out from my provocation.

— Clatter, kreek.

The jailer pulled a ring of keys from his belt and unlocked the cell door. His hulking body shoved its way into the narrow cell. In his hand was what looked like a wooden club.

“Today I’m going to separate your meat from your bones for you.”

— THWACK!

“Khu-uggh!”

The club slammed into my stomach without preamble. The breath was knocked clean out of me, my organs twisting in pain, and I collapsed to the floor and curled up on instinct.

“Fight back! Bark some more, you bastard!”

Thud! Thud! Thud!

The jailer’s merciless beating went on. His boot caught me in the side; the club came down on my back. I covered my head with both hands, kept the vital points protected first and foremost, and silently weathered the blows.

Hurts like a son of a bitch, sure.

But it was bearable. Compared to the bone-melting agony I’d lived through inside Arden’s cursed body, this was nothing more than a dull physical impact. Or so I brainwashed myself into believing.

“You… tough little bastard…”

The jailer beat me a long while before he finally stilled the club, breathing roughly. Whether he found it unsettling that I refused to so much as groan no matter how hard he hit me, or whether he’d simply worn himself out, he spat on the floor.

“Ptui. Filthy rebel scum. Tomorrow morning, you’re the very first one being dragged out. Remember that.”

The jailer stormed out of the cell, huffing.

Slam. The door shut and the lock turned.

I stayed sprawled on the floor until his footsteps had faded completely.

“Uuugh…”

Only when the tension drained out did the groan finally break through. The spot where I’d been struck throbbed under my hand, but luckily no bones were broken. I staggered upright, propped myself against the cold wall between my cell and his, and sat. The inside of my mouth must have split; a coppery taste of blood washed around it.

I spat the blood-mixed saliva onto the floor and lobbed a casual line at the wall.

“You hear that?”
“…”

There was silence on the other side, but I could hear his breathing. We couldn’t see each other’s faces, yet the sounds of the violence that had just played out had passed vividly between us.

“Still think I’m a spy?”
“…No.”

After a moment, the man’s voice came through, low and settled.

“Nobody beats their own people like that. Sorry I doubted you.”

The sharp suspicion had drained out of his voice. True enough. What jailer beats a planted spy to a pulp to extract information from him?

Eve, who’d waited for the conversation to wrap up, looked over my swollen face and made a tearful expression. I waved a hand at her as if to say don’t worry about it.

Eve quickly wiped her eyes, then nodded with a grave look.

“Old and well-worn” wasn’t enough to go on. I turned it over for a moment, and then a flash of an idea hit me.

To help Eve, who hadn’t understood, I sent a chat sample of my own.

Eve’s eyes lit up, and she closed them. A moment later, a strange combination of characters floated up in front of my eyes.

Simple as it looked, that combination of characters was, in effect, the blueprint of the key.¹

I tapped the wall with a fingertip.

“Hey — neighbor.”
“What.”
“You happen to have, like, an iron spoon or chopstick on you?”
“…What’re you asking for?”
“I can’t stand breathing the same air as guys who beat people for being loud.”

A puff of dry laughter came from the other side of the wall. A moment later, something came rolling through the gap under the iron bars. — Tok.

A spike of iron, about as long as a finger.

“…It’s not a leftover bone from a meal — it’s a spoon-handle ground down.”

The man added, matter-of-fact.

“I sharpened it to stab the jailer in the throat and kill myself the next time he came in. I’ll invest it in you instead.”

A weapon for suicide, and a last act of resistance. He’d handed that precious thing over to a perfect stranger.

“I’ll put it to good use.”

I picked up the iron spike. The tip had been ground to a sharp point all right, but for a key, the shape was just too plain.

I crouched on the floor and ground the iron spike against the cold stone.

— Shrk, shrk, shrk.

A nerve-grating scrape rang through the cell. I worried about the jailer hearing it, but thanks to the beating he’d given me earlier, I trusted he wouldn’t be back for a while.

Failure wasn’t an option. There was no way the man in the next cell had another spike.

Eve became my eyes; I worked my hand like a machine. The fingertips gripping the cold piece of iron blistered and my nails chipped, but I didn’t stop. The man in the next cell listened, breath held, to the sound of metal being scraped.

How long had it gone on like that?

In my hand sat a misshapen spike, but one that would now do the job of a key. I steadied my trembling hand and slid it into the keyhole.

— Clatter.

I felt a faint catch at my fingertip. I stopped breathing and twisted my wrist.

— Click.

I pushed the iron door open, hinges squealing, and walked out into the corridor. Cold air brushed against my sweat-soaked forehead.

I pocketed the iron spike and went straight to the next cell. To the man whose eyes alone glittered out at me from the darkness, I shook the key through the gap in the bars.

“Easy.”

At that, the man muttered as if he couldn’t believe it.

“…You lunatic.”