Chapter 78: A Harvest
The corridor went down in earnest, not by a few steps but by a long steady slope cut into the rock, and the further we went the more the heat came up to meet us. The carpet had gone a long way back, the lamps too, and there was nothing left but torches set far apart, and between two torches it was almost dark.
Then the smell found me, at a turn, and I nearly took a step back. Fouled straw, standing water, droppings, and underneath all of that something more persistent, alive and numerous, breathing somewhere in the dark.
They haven't put me in a cell. They haven't hit me. We're going down, that's all.
The guard in front pushed a gate open, and the noise came down on us.
It wasn't really noise. It was a hum made of hundreds of separate things, breathing, scraping, chains shifting, voices if you could call them voices, all of it rising and falling without ever breaking off, along the whole length of what opened up in front of us.
A gallery. Enormous, vaulted, running straight ahead further than I could see, only a line of torches shrinking into the distance. On both sides, the whole way down, barred cells, tall and wide, set against each other without a gap, divided by walls of stone. And behind every grate, something.
The guard shoved me between the shoulder blades.
"Move. Take a good look."
They're not punishing me. They're giving me the tour.
The first cell on the right held creatures that looked cut out of stone, broad across the shoulders, with grey cracked skin showing paler lines underneath. There were five of them, sitting in a circle, and not one moved as we passed. One had an arm snapped clean through at the forearm, the break still sharp, and nobody had put it right.
Opposite, smaller things covered in brown feathers threw themselves at the bars screaming as we went by. Then lizard-men, tall enough to nearly touch the ceiling of their cell. Then something I never saw at all, staying at the back in the dark, that only stirred when the torchlight reached in. Then a pool sunk into the floor, out of which gilled creatures all rose together to watch us pass before going back down at the same moment.
Then others. Then more. I kept walking and it didn't end.
Ten. Twenty. No, more. A great deal more.
Every cell is a different people. Every single one.
From then on I looked at them properly, and the first thing I saw was the injuries. Every one of them carried some. Missing limbs, badly closed scars, twisted things that must have knitted crooked for want of anybody to see to them. Some cells were full, others held three, or two. One, on the left, held a single occupant, a thin creature with bluish skin and eyes far too large, sitting against the back wall of a cell built for ten. It didn't even lift its head as we went past.
And every one of them wore chains. Ankles, wrists, around the neck for the larger ones, the same dull metal with the same cut lines that gave off no light at all.
They've fitted the whole place out. Every cell, every people, no exceptions.
How much does that take? How many forges, how many runes, how many years?
This isn't a prison. It's an industry.
The guards walked without hurrying, without saying anything, without explaining anything, simply letting me move along between the rows. At one point the one behind me sniggered at my back.
"Well? Do you like it? One of them in here is going to kill you. We don't know which one yet."
He laughed at his own line, and I didn't answer.
That's why they brought me. Not to frighten me. So I'd see the scale of it.
Thirty-odd peoples. Maybe more. Thirty whole peoples locked up under an arena, and upstairs they call it a harvest.
"You."
The voice came from my left, at hip height, and I stopped dead.
A creature had come up to its bars, small, barely a meter, brown-green skin and a head too big for its body, with four-fingered hands closed around the metal. Its eyes were yellow and perfectly calm.
"You, you come from upstairs. They brought you down to see. They do that."
It spoke our language. Badly, with an articulation that caught on the consonants, but it spoke it.
The guard behind shoved me. "Move."
I took a step and stopped again.
"How long have you been here?"
"Me? Long time." It tilted its head to one side. "The ones who came with me, longer. They're not here now." It glanced toward the back of its cell, where three others of its kind sat against the wall. "There were a lot of us."
I found nothing to say to that.
"Do you know when you fight?"
"No." It shrugged something that must have been shoulders. "Never. They come, they open, we go up. Sometimes it's us. Sometimes it's the big ones down there." It pointed a finger along the gallery without looking. "Nobody knows. It's better for them that way."
Of course it's better for them. If you don't know when you go up, you prepare nothing. You don't organize, you don't work anything out with the cell next door, you don't count days. You wait, and you're ready all the time, which means never.
"What about the ones opposite?"
"I don't talk to them. They don't talk like me."
It looked me over, up and down, taking its time, and something settled behind those yellow eyes.
"You won."
"How do you know that?"
"You're clean." It nodded at my stomach. "And no hole. The ones who come back with holes closed up, they won. The others don't come back."
The guard behind me shoved harder this time and I had to take three steps.
"Hey."
It called after me and I turned my head without stopping. It had both hands on the bars and it didn't shout, it said it in a perfectly level voice.
"If it's us. Make it quick. For the small ones behind. They're frightened."
I found nothing to say, nothing at all, and I kept walking without turning round, and I think that was the most cowardly thing available to me.
It asked me to kill it well. It looked me in the eye and asked me to kill its own properly, because that's the only thing I have left to give it.
Blackbeard was right yesterday, and wrong at the same time. He said they aren't the problem, and that's true. He said it would have to be done anyway, and that's true too.
He didn't say what it would look like.
The rest of the walk was worse, because I was looking at them differently now and seeing what I hadn't seen on the way in. In one cell, two large white-furred creatures were sharing a bowl, and one was pushing the food toward the other with the back of its hand. In another, an enormous shape lay on its side breathing badly, with three smaller ones curled against its belly.
Further along, somebody was singing. One voice, very low, in a language that exists nowhere among us, something slow and repetitive rising out of a cell that the neighbors must have heard a thousand times.
Them too. They sing before they die as well.
I passed a cell where two creatures were fighting each other, and the guards didn't even slow down. Then another where there was nobody left, the straw still fresh, the door standing open. I didn't ask.
And at the end, the gallery stopped.
It stopped at a wall, and set into that wall was a door, far larger than anything around it, double-panelled, in a black metal that gave nothing back to the torchlight. No handle, no grate, nothing to see through. There were no cells on either side of it; several meters of bare floor had been left in front of it, as though nothing were allowed to be stored too close.
The guards halted of their own accord, at a distance, and the one in front didn't take another step.
I looked at the door. Nothing stirred behind it, nothing breathed, nothing scratched, and in that entire gallery full of living things that never stopped making noise, it was the only perfectly silent place. The air was cold there too.
The guard behind me took my arm again, and his hand closed harder than it needed to.
"We're going back up."
He turned me before I'd finished looking.
Again.
Another door nobody opens for me. The apartment, the box, this one. Every time I'm shown something and taken away before I understand what.
I let myself be led, and we went back up the whole gallery the other way. This time I didn't look at the cells, I looked at the floor, and I thought.
Thirty-odd peoples down there. All chained, all cut off, all waiting for somebody to come and open up without knowing when.
One door nobody goes near.
And upstairs, a seraph telling me I don't know how to use my own power.
Somewhere behind me, the voice that had been singing was still going.