The Liar's key

TWENTY-SEVEN

The saving grace of the Central Bank prison is that the inmates are not criminals. They’re not murderers, addicts, and thieves, but instead they’re the kind of people who could run up debts serious enough to warrant action and with sources reputable enough to make that action incarceration rather than a knife to the guts. Add to that the fact that the people surrounding me in my dark and stinking cell were three-quarters starved, weaker than a healthy child, and an utterly terrifying prospect became merely very grim.

The debtors around me proved so in awe of the handful of change in my pocket that I was able to establish order with the promise of a couple of copper halves. If they’d known I was wearing enough gold to buy out the debt of everyone in all eight of the cells facing into the central chamber then perhaps more base instincts would have taken over and the crowd would have become a monster. Hennan lay silent beside me while I fended off the more persistent of our cellmates with promises and shoves.

I watched the darkness and worried. My immediate fear of course was that the guards would come to take my remaining wealth but Umbertide was not like other places, and its debtor prisons were bizarre institutions, run on the strictest of rules. A debtor entering the prison could buy themselves out at any time if they had the means, but they were not compelled to do so. A debtor owned whatever assets they managed to keep and the hope was that many would be able to continue their enterprises from the comfortable front of the prison, earning sufficient coin to balance their ledgers. A portion of any coin spent maintaining life and limb in the prison went to the creditors in any case, so every day I survived I would be chiselling away at my mountainous bills.

After what seemed forever, and might have been less than an hour, the jailer returned. His tardiness and the relaxed slope of his shoulders told me that he’d not yet spoken with the boys at the entrance. Perhaps they didn’t even know I’d been detained-but sooner or later news of the wealth about my person would spread. What had drawn the man back was the change he’d seen earlier when I paid him to unlock the cell. He knew I had copper hexes left and a handful of halves, and came not to steal but to sell. Such was the way of things in Umbertide.

He set his lantern on the floor and held out a candle, a fat thing as thick as his forearm and half as long, cheap yellow tallow that would smoke and sputter, but it’d burn a while.

“Some light, yer lordship?” He offered me that same grin he’d had when locking the gate. By rights it should be gap-toothed and off colour, in truth he had small even teeth all polished to a surprising whiteness.

“Your name, jailer?” Always good to make the personal connection.

“Racso, they call me.” He glared around at the pale faces pressed to the bars on all sides. “And don’t you lot forget it.”

“Racso then.” I knew without coin I’d be no more to him than the dying flesh clinging to bones on all sides. “How much for the candle?”

“Two halves. Or I can let you have a third of it for one. Lighting it is free.” He smiled. “First time.”

Although I had Umbertide’s civilized ways to thank for not being robbed with violence and stabbed in my cell, “civilized” seemed the wrong word for it. A set of rules to die by. Clinging to life by pennies and halves until the money ran out. Somehow the beatings and shivs offered by the jailers and inmates of more usual prisons felt more honest at that moment, sat there bartering for the rudiments of life.

“How much to buy the boy out? What’s he owe?” It couldn’t be much. I was amazed he could have run up any official debt at all.

“Ah.” Racso scratched his belly, an uneasy look on his face. “That’s a puzzler that is.”

“A puzzler? He’s in debtors’ prison. He’s a debtor. How much does he owe?”

“Well. .”

“It’s just a number.”

“Sixty-four thousand.” A mutter rippled through the cells.

“Pennies?”

“Does it matter?” Racso asked.

“Well. . no. Sixty-four thousand? That’s not even a number.”

“It is-”

“Nobody has sixty-four thousand!” I doubted even Grandmother could lay her claw on sixty-four thousand in crown gold without selling something holy or spilling some blood. “Who lent him that kind of money?”

“It’s a code, see.” More scratching and Racso bent his balding head as if the admission shamed a man who was paid to watch people starve. “Means the bank has them here for its own reasons. An abuse of the system is what it is. Puts honest men in a questionable position regarding the law is what it does.” He shook his head and spat dolefully.

I took us back to the more immediate questions. “A penny for the candle then. And food, for me and the boy, bread, butter, apples?”

“A hex.” Again the grin, pleased to be on more familiar ground. “Better hope you can eat fast though.” An eye to the bodies behind me, a shiver of anticipation running through them.

“How much to get out of here, a private cell back up the corridor?”

“Ah.” A slow shake of the head, almost regretful. “That’d take silver that would, yer lordship. Don’t think I’ve ever seen the colour of it down in the dark cells. You got silver on you? Have you, yer lordship?” He seemed to think it unlikely.

“Just the food for now,” I said. “And the candle.” I fished in my pocket and brought out a hex and a penny.

Racso took my money on a flat wooden paddle hooked upon his belt. A device that meant he never had to come within grabbing range of the bars. “Done and dealt.” He stowed the coins away, nodded to me, and handed me the cold end of my candle. Transaction complete, Racso wiped his hands across the sides of his trousers and sauntered away whistling some spring tune that remembered flowers and joy.

• • •

When Racso returned he carried a reed basket containing three crusty loaves, a wedge of blue cheese, and half a dozen apples of a good size, bursting with the summer. He also brought with him a barrel on wheels from which he doled out ladles of water to those who could pay. Water exchanged hands for the clippings of a copper, for a left shoe, for one of the tin mugs into which he was pouring-that man took his ration in his cupped hands-and for promises of company from several of the younger women. I had to pay over a penny for two cups and their contents, my earlier order not having made mention of water.

“Give me two apples first,” I said. And Racso rolled them over to the bars.

I tossed them to the two largest and least dead of our inmates, Artemis and Antonio, men I’d selected and negotiated with before. They cleared a space and kept the others back while I took the remaining food.

“Behave yourselves and there’ll be crusts to share out. Give me any shit and jaws will get broken.” It’s easy enough to be the hard man when you’re fit, fed, and hale and the foe are skin and bones.

Backs to the wall, bread between us, cups on the floor and the candle burning at our feet, Hennan and I began to eat. The boy dipped his bread in the water to ease it past his sore gums. I still couldn’t pin an age on him and he’d never had a clear idea of it himself. Today I settled on twelve. He looked older starved. All of them did. Ancients with young men’s fears. Old women with children like tiny old men. A mother with breasts as withered as any crone, the baby in her arms black with dirt and unmoving. I choked down what food I could and threw the rest at them, cursing the lot for beggars and thieves. Fear stole my appetite.

Hennan recovered faster than I thought possible, wrinkling his face at the cheese as he wolfed it down.

“Steady-you’ll be sick.” I say “recovered”. . he remained a skeleton dressed in skin, but the light returned to his eyes, the words to his tongue.

“Why did you come?” he asked.

I’d been asking myself the same thing. “I’m an idiot.”

“How come they locked you in? You’ve got money.”

“I owe more than I’ve got.” That had been the story of my adult life. A short enough tale but one that had never got me locked up in hell before. “In debtors’ prisons you own what you carry in. They call it bankruptcy.”

“How are we getting out?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and reached for his water. Across the cell fights were breaking out over the loaf I’d thrown.

“I don’t know.” Honesty always pains me. Telling it to a child who considers you a hero puts any number of barbs on those words, making them harder than you’d expect to spit out. “You shouldn’t have run.” Recriminations are useless but it takes a better man than me not to kick someone close when they’re down. “You were in the palace of Vermillion for God’s sake! And now. .”

“I wanted to be with the others. .” He kept his eyes on the apple in his hand, red with his blood where he’d bitten it.

“Yes, but you didn’t find them did you?” Snorri and the others were back in Vermillion enjoying my grandmother’s hospitality-the second time for Snorri. There was no way they could have beaten the Red March riders to the border and I’d seen the riders returning, so they must have been captured.

“I did find them.” So quiet I almost missed it.

“What? Where? I’ve been here weeks and not a whisper of them.”

“Kara’s here. In this prison.”

“She is not!” I couldn’t believe that. How could this place hold a völva? I imagined her watching from the bars of the cell opposite, one more grey face among the rest, and found I didn’t want to pursue the thought. “Where?”

“She’s serving at the front.” Hennan put the bread down, a hand clutching the distended ache of his belly. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”

“But you know she’s here?” I raised a sceptical brow.

“News travels front to back, not the other way. They say Lady Connagio has a heathen maid with white hair and white skin who can do charms that cure warts. Came in the same time as me.”

“God’s sake!” A thousand questions fought to exit my mouth at once, but the biggest one won. “Where’s the key?”

Hennan shuffled closer and spoke lower, the bread wars were coming to an end with the victors pitting wobbly teeth against the crusts and the losers licking wounds.

“Can’t talk about it. That’s what we’re in for.”