“I don’t believe you, Charlie.”
“It’s the truth,” I croaked. “I found it in the ditch beside the road.”
“And those?” He pointed to my filthy sneakers. “In a ditch? Beside the road?”
“Yes. With that.” I pointed to the wallet, then waited for him to produce Mr. Bowditch’s revolver. What about this, Charlie? We found it in the high grass outside the main gate. I was almost sure that was going to happen.
But it didn’t. Instead of producing the gun, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Kellin threw the wallet across the room. “Get him out!” he shrieked at Aaron. “He’s filthy! His filth is on my rug, on my chair, even on the cup he used! Get this lying scum out of my quarters!”
I was very glad to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Belts. Innamin. Not a Spotch of Gray. Dungeon Days.
1
Instead of going back the way we’d come, Aaron directed me down three different flights of stairs, walking behind me and occasionally giving me a tap with his limber stick. I felt like a cow being driven to a pen, which was ugly and humiliating, but at least I didn’t feel that I was being driven to the slaughterhouse. I was number thirty-one, after all, and thus valuable. I didn’t know why, but an idea had begun to glimmer. Thirty-one was a prime number, divisible only by one and itself. Thirty-two, though… that was divisible all the way down.
We passed many doors along the way, most closed, a few either open or standing ajar. I heard no one inside these rooms. The feeling I got on our journey was one of desertion and dilapidation. There were the night soldiers, but I had an idea that the palace was otherwise not very populated. I had no idea where we were going, but at last I began to hear the sound of loud clattering machinery and a steady thudding drum, like a heartbeat. By then I was pretty sure we were even deeper than Deep Maleen. The gas-jets on the walls were increasingly far apart, and many were guttering. By the time we reached the end of the third staircase—by then the drum was very loud and the machinery even louder—most of the light was being provided by Aaron’s blue aura. I raised my fist to beat on the door at the foot of the stairs, and hard—I didn’t want another slash on the back of my neck from the hateful stick.
“Nah, nah,” Aaron said in his strangely insectile voice. “Just open it.”
I lifted the iron latch, pushed the door open, and was hit by a wall of sound and heat. Aaron prodded me inside. Sweat sprang out on my face and arms almost immediately. I found myself on a parapet surrounded by a waist-high iron railing. The circular area below me looked like an exercise club in hell. At least two dozen gray men and women were speed-walking on treadmills, each with a noose around his or her neck. Three night soldiers lounged against the stone walls, holding limber sticks and watching. Another was on a kind of podium, banging on a high wooden cylinder like a conga drum. Painted on the drum were bleeding monarch butterflies, which was probably inaccurate—I don’t think butterflies bleed. Directly across from me, beyond the treadmills, was a clattering machine, all fanbelts and pistons. It shook on its platform. Above it was a single electric light, like the kind mechanics use to look under the hoods of the cars they are fixing.
What I was seeing reminded me of the war boats in one of my favorite TCM movies, Ben-Hur. The men and women on those treadmills were slaves, just as the men rowing the war boats had been. As I watched, one of the women stumbled, clawed at the rope sinking into her neck, and managed to lunge to her feet again. Two of the night soldiers watched her, then looked at each other and laughed.
“Wouldn’t want to be down there, kiddie, would you?” Aaron asked from behind me.
“No.” I didn’t know which was more horrible—the prisoners striding along at a brisk walk that was just short of a run, or the way two of the skeleton-men had laughed when the woman lost her footing and began to choke. “No, I wouldn’t.”
I wondered how much juice that treadmill-powered rattletrap of a generator could put out. I was guessing not much; there had been electricity in the Lord High’s apartments, but I hadn’t seen it anywhere else. Only the gas-jets, which didn’t look in very good shape, either.
“How long do they have to—”
“The shift is twelve hours.” It wasn’t hours he said, but my mind again made the translation. I was hearing Empisarian, I was speaking it, and I was getting better at both. I probably wouldn’t have been able to utter a slang term analogous to awesome sauce yet, but even that might come eventually. “Unless they choke out. We keep a few in reserve for when that happens. Come on, kiddie. You’ve had your look. Time to leave.”