society where the police are in here”—he smiled, tapping his temple—“so it becomes impossible to even think criminally. You are never alone in Verneytha. Never.
“So you see, Mr. Hawthorne, how careful you have to be when you enter a new land. Perhaps you hated Greycoast’s dungeons, but believe me, for a free man like yourself, there is nothing more terrible than continual surveillance. Nothing. In time you would yearn for the rack and the gallows, Mr. Hawthorne. You would plead for a torturer to let you pay your penalty and cover those awful, lidless eyes that watch you day and night. A few months in my cells, and you would never know what it was to be alone again. Even when no one was there you would feel them, watching, listening. Controlled madness, Mr. Hawthorne. Regulated insanity for the good of the state. Go and tell your stories about that, and leave the magic for the children and the very, very stupid.”
He gave me a long, hard look and then snapped, “Upstairs! Quickly!”
I stumbled blindly back up the spiral. The others stared at me when I emerged. I must have looked pretty haggard.
“Now leave me,” snarled the governor, his tone suddenly harsh. “I will summon you after I have decided what is to become of you.”
“We are staying—” offered Mithos.
“I know where you are staying, you idiots. Now get out.”
I tried to tell the others what I had seen in the tower but I couldn’t convey its awfulness. Garnet had just looked bemused and shrugged it off as something that “didn’t sound too bad.” He told rival tales of dismemberment in Thrusia that once would have made me sick. But he understood with his gut what he didn’t grasp with his conscious mind. He developed a new irritation at the way people watched us pass. We all did. Even at night, from time to time, lying there in the darkness of your bed, you thought you could feel the eyes.
It was impossible to tell who was in the pay of the governor, so we locked ourselves in our tavern room and tried to decide what we were supposed to do next. To my mind it was clear: “We’ve got to split up and spread out. We can’t move around Verneytha as it stands. It’s a waste of time. There are people watching everywhere I look. When I go to the bathroom I feel like I’m playing to a capacity crowd.”
“Will’s right,” said Lisha. “We should leave quickly, before the governor decides he wants us to stay in one of his little windowed prisons.”
“But where do we go?” said Garnet to himself.
“God, this is a mess,” said Mithos. Since the meeting with the governor, he had grown dour and unapproachable. “They’ve probably been watching us since we left Adsine. What a bunch of amateurs we must look like! We do have to leave, but I’m coming back, and they won’t see me this time. Will, check the corridor.”
We were all getting a little paranoid. I stood outside, eyes skinned for anyone who could be a spy. There was no one about, so this was one conversation the enemy wouldn’t hear. Come to think of it, neither would I. That was bloody typical of them. They would send me into the line to prove what an integral member of the party I was, but when it came to making decisions, good old integral Will had to check the corridor.
Garnet flung the door open suddenly, and it was obvious that he was unhappy with whatever had been decided.
“Come in, Will,” he sighed.
SCENE XLVII
Alone at Last
It was noon. The sun was high and the air still and humid. The wagon felt slow and conspicuous, trundling along like a very large beetle, but I had left Harvest two days ago, had just crossed the border between Verneytha and Shale, and hadn’t so much as glimpsed a crimson cloak. Indeed, I hoped to catch sight of Adsine before sundown. Recently, sundown had become a big deal with me: it reminded me that another day had passed and I was still alive.
They had sent me ahead with the wagon figuring that the safest place for me to be was Shale, beyond the jurisdiction of Verneytha and Greycoast, whose leaders considered me a slightly less welcome visitor than, say, some unpleasant disease that made all your gristly bits fall off. This suited me just fine, because things were getting too grim by half for me to want to