Avram Davidson - Rogue Dragon

“It’ll bring enough. What do you says, Wards? Sell it and keep half for yourself and buy booze and bites with the rest.”

He held out the palm. The warder took the band with restrained eagerness, sighed with hypocritical regret. “Too bad… too bad… a nice ring… a nice fellow… Sure. Sure. Glad to do what I can. Glad to. Never mind my cut. I won’t take a thing. Depend on me. I’ll see you get what you need.”

The ring vanished into a pocket inside his greasy old shirt. Trond thanked him, led Jon-Joras away. “There’s a rogue, if you like,” he muttered. “‘Won’t take a thing’! He won’t take more than two thirds of it, is what he means.”

Only now did the fear of death enter the younger man’s heart. He felt it chill and swell. “Listen,” he said, uncertainly, “I don’t want to have any parties, I want to—”

“Want to get out. Right.” Trond took his hand and patted it. “Have no fear, friend. Wards can’t dispose of that bandy in any regular jewels shop. One look at him, they’d call the guards. No… Only a fence will buy it from him, and there’s only one fence in Drogue that handles bandies of that value: Old Boke: Old Boke will have the whole story out of him before he pays him a penny.

“And—” he gave Jon-Joras’s cold and sweating hand a final pat-pat, “Old Boke will pass the word along where it will do the most good. The Poets have their friends in town. Have no fear, I tell you again. And sleep light tonight. You listening? Sleep light…”

In fact, of course, Jon-Joras didn’t really sleep at all. As, one by one, the scant oils in the tiny slut-lamps of the prison room were used up and the smoldering wicks vanished into winking red little eyes in the darkness and then were gone, he sank into a kind of feverish phantasmagora. He felt ill and dizzy; the vertigo helped persuade him that he could feel what it was like to be upside down; the ankle-bands of his shoes became the bonds fastening his feet; and every rough rush penetrating his loosened clothes became the shaft of an arrow penetrating his frightened flesh.

Then, suddenly, the illusion changed. All, all had been a dream: the raid on the great, gaunt Kar-chee castle, the time spent with the nomad tribes, the duel with Thorm, the long trip down the great river, capture and imprisonment: all a dream. He was still in the Kar-chee castle and none of the rest had happened. But — and this he knew with frightening and absolute certainty — it was all going to happen, every bit and detail of it. And he could not prevent it, it had already begun, and the proof of this was that once again he smelled the smoke of burning torches.

With a stifled groan and a sigh, chiefly of relief — for even the uncertainty of life with Hue was better than lying under sentence of death — he raised his head in order to see the light of the flambeaux he was sure he smelled. He wondered, as he did so, if he must follow the predestined pattern of events indeed… or if there were not some possibility of escape. And then his mind became suddenly as wide-wake as his body.

There was a curious scuffling sound faintly over his head. A change in the rhythm of their breathing told him that both Trond and Serm were also now aware of something unusual going on. They rose cautiously in the darkness without speaking. Someone took Jon-Joras’s arm, felt along it to the hand, guided the hand, unresisting, through the darkness. He felt rope… a stick of wood… more rope. Trond — it must be Trond, those sturdy arms — pushed him upwards. He seized hold of the rope ladder and began to climb.

The door from which the ladder depended had probably once been intended to open onto a corridor in an upper floor which had never been built. For uncounted years it had opened onto nothingness, onto air — except, of course, that it had never been opened at all. Along with the rest of the wall the door had once been whitewashed, along with the rest of the wall it had long since been covered with dust and dirt and soot. Jon-Joras, below, had never even noticed it.

The torch which he had smelled burned at the end of the corridor above. At first he did not know any of the faces belonging to those who held the other end of the rope-ladder. Gradually, in the darkness, as, first Serm, then Trond, mounted to join him, his eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light. And when one face turned, having carefully seen to the careful closing of the door behind it, he recognized it at once.

Henners!

Even in a darkness dispelled only by the sullen glare of the single torch, the halls and rooms through which they now soon passed had the naked and unresisting look of things long concealed. The bricked-up windows gazed blindly, sagging and dust-covered shards of furniture lay in limp tangles all about. Once, Jon-Joras stepped on the dry bones of a rat, and they crunched and snapped. He shuddered, pressed on ahead.

At length they left narrow confines behind them and came to a wide hold emptying on one side down a broad cascade of steps into a vast pool of darkness. Following a gesture by Henners, all advanced to the carven balustrade, paused to fling down the torch and extinguish it by a method as primitive as it was effectual (and easier on bare feet than stamping). Then, in utter blackness, felt their way down the board steps, each holding onto the shoulder of the man in front in a sort of shuffling lock-step.

The stairs seemed endless, and the floor they finally led onto, even more; and here and hereafter they hugged a wall. Once, by sudden, unspoken and common consent, they stopped and held their breaths. Far, far off, someone crossed at right angles to their own path, a slut-lamp held unsteadily in hand, and either moaned or sang… something… in an inhuman, crooning sort of voice which froze Jon-Joras’s blood. Voice and light and sound died away at last. They moved on.

They moved on.

After endless black years (and the ground grew rough, and the ground grew damp) he saw, like a fabled wanderer ages uncountable before him, overhead, the beauteous stars.

“But I would feel easier in my mind,” Jon-Joras explained, not for the first time, “if I were with my friends.”

The old man nodded, gently and carefully applied another coat of sticky liquid to the oddly-shaped wooden box. “I know… I know…” Absently, he wiped his fingers on his tangled beard. “But, as I have explained to you — I think — before — it makes much sense to divide you up. If the troopers get wind of something and make a raid, why should they get all of you at once?

“No, no… Let them swoop down just once, and, poof,” he blew out a breath which scattered his long, untidy mustaches; “we scatter you again. See?”

Jon-Joras did not take as much encouragement as his host intended. “But what if I’m the one gets taken? Eh? A lot of good your poof will do, then,” he said.

The old man pursed his hairy lips. “You won’t be,” he said. “None of you will.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Within wheels—” he plied his small brush with absorption; “—there are also sometimes wheels. So. The Chairman is supreme; true; may he burn like a moth fallen into a slut-lamp; but even if he is too strong to be gainsaid, he isn’t too strong to be envied. Do you believe, young outworldling, for one moment, that it was a criminal underground alone which managed your escape?”

Jon-Joras, who had indeed imagined that very thing, paused in his pacing up and down the crowded and rather pungent little loft (wood, paint, varnish, breakfast, dinner, supper), looked at the old man in surprise.

“Ha!” Enjoying and prolonging the moment, the old man ignored him, sighted down his work, murmured, “Ah, what a beauty fiddle this will be. No one in Drogue can make them like I make them, mmmmm, no…”