Incarceron Part 66

She shrugged. "Who am I, Master? A p.a.w.n on the board."

She laughed, the laugh she knew he hated, hard and bitter. "So that's when we go into Incarceron. And this time we take no chances."

Jared nodded mildly. His face had fallen, but the edge of excitement still lingered.

"I'm glad you said we, Claudia," he murmured.

She looked up. "I'm afraid for you," she said simply.

"Whatever happens."

He nodded.

"That makes two of us."

They were silent a moment.

"The Queen will be waiting."

But she made no move to go, and when he looked at her, her face was taut and distant.

"That girl Attia. She was jealous. She was jealous of me."

"Yes. They may be close, Finn and his friends."

Claudia shrugged. She stood and brushed pollen from her dress.

"Well. We'll soon find out."

24.

Do you seek the key to Incarceron?

Look inside yourself.

It has always been hidden there.

-The Mirror of Dreams to Sapphique ***

The Sapient's tower was odd, Finn thought.

He and Keiro and Attia had taken the man at his word, and spent the day exploring all over it, and there were things about it that puzzled them.

"The food, for instance." Keiro picked a small green fruit from the bowl and sniffed it cautiously. "This is grown, but where? We're miles in the sky and there's no way down. Don't tell me he takes his silver ship to market."

They knew there was no way down because the bas.e.m.e.nt rooms where the beds were had been built on the bare rock. Small stalagmites rose up between the furniture, icicles of calcium hung from the ceiling, sediments laid down over the century and a half of the Prison's life, though Finn had thought it took longer, millennia even, for such things to form.

As he wandered behind Attia from kitchen to storeroom to observatory he let himself slip for a moment into a daydream of fascinating horror; that Incarceron was indeed a world, ancient and alive, that he was a microscopic creature inside it, tiny as a bacterium, and that Claudia too was here, that even Sapphique was a dream dreamed by Prisoners who could not face the dread of there being no Escape.

"And then the books!"

Keiro thrust the door to the library open and gazed at them all in disgust.

"Who needs so many books? Who could ever be bothered to read them?"

Finn moved past him. Keiro could hardly read his own name, and was proud of it. He had once gotten into a fight about some supposed insult about him scribbled on a wall by one of Jormanric's bullies; Keiro had come out of the fight alive but badly beaten. Finn remembered being unable to tell him that the graffiti was harmless, even grudgingly admiring.

Finn could read. He had no idea who taught him, but he could read even better than Gildas, who muttered the words half aloud and had only seen about a dozen books in his life.

The Sapient was here now, sitting at the desk in the library's heart, his k.n.o.bbly hands turning the pages of a great codex bound in leather, his eyes close to the handwritten text. Around him, on shelves that reached to the shadowy ceiling, Blaize's library was immense, towers of heavy volumes all numbered in gold and bound in green and maroon.

Gildas raised his head. They had expected him to be in awe, but his voice was acid. "Books? There are no books here, boy."

Keiro snorted. "Your eyes are worse than you think."

Impatiently, the old man shook his head. "These are useless. Look at them. Names, numbers. They tell us nothing."

Attia took a book from the nearest shelf and opened it, and Finn looked over her shoulder. It was thick with dust, and the edges of the pages were eaten away, so dry they fell into flakes.

On the page was a list of names: MARCION MASCUS MASCUS ATTOR MATTHEUS PRIME MATTHEUS UMRA each followed by a number. A long, eight-digit number.

"Prisoners?"

Finn said. "Apparently. Lists of names. Volumes of them. For every Wing, every Level, going back centuries."

Beside each name was a small square image of a face. Attia touched one and almost dropped the book.

Finn gave a gasp, which brought Keiro over to the table, kneeling up behind them.

"Well, well," he said.

For each name a series of images blinked rapidly over the page, appearing and disappearing in quick succession, until Attia touched one with her small fingertip and it froze, opening into a full-length picture of a hunchbacked man in a yellow coat that filled the page.