Chapter Seventeen

Doc Tanner sat huddled on the floor in the far corner of his cell, with his forehead resting on his knees and both arms wrapped around his shins. The light from a guttering candle on the barred windowsill cast bizarre shapes around the bleak prison chamber, dancing spirit forms. Doc’s mind, because it was a rational organ, and because it belonged to a man well-trained in making sense of nothing, took those fleeting, erratic movements and made them into things familiar. While tears rolled down his cheeks.

He saw children skipping, heard them laughing.

A horse and carriage, clattering as it rushed past.

A ballroom crowded with stately dancers. Stringed instruments tuning up somewhere behind the milling throng.

Only when the candle finally burned out did he regain his sense of surroundings. He was plunged back into the dank and musty cell, oppressed by the weight of the iron collar and chain that bound him to the ring set in the wall above his head.

If this was reality, he told himself, then life had no meaning. Its myriad cruelties were senseless. And largely redundant. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, a man of faith, was coming to the end of his tether.

He tipped up his face to the blackness that hid the ceiling and cried, “I need no more instruction!”

His words echoed, and then the echoes faded away.

Doc could weep no more; he’d emptied himself of grief. In the center of his mind, the terrible curse was already formed and enunciated. On the tip of his tongue, an oath against God, the Creator.

Was to think it the same as uttering it?

Did God hear thoughts?

If the Lord heard prayers, Doc decided, He could hear thoughts.

“I have prayed to you hourly to bring about the moment of my death,” he said aloud, his voice cracked and strained with bitterness. “That I might be delivered from the hands of these malefactors. And you answer me not.”

“Tomorrow,” he said to the darkness, “I will most likely die. When the doors of Spearpoint part at my command, Zeal and Shabazz will surely have me killed. Then I will see at last. I will see whether there is an intelligence behind all this torment, this unspeakable evil, or whether it is merely an engine, a machine running without an operator, the grim embodiment of Descartes’s mathematical universe.”

“Deep in my heart, I now believe that I will find only oblivion on the other side of the eternal gate. No welcoming arms of Emily, no Rachel, no Jolyon. After all this, after all I have suffered, all that I have lost, I tell you now, God who never answers, oblivion will do very nicely.”

With that, Doc Tanner closed his mouth and closed his eyes. In his endlessly long life, this was his darkest hour. The terrible weight of it seemed to suck the energy from his body. Exhausted, he slipped into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

IN ANOTHER PART of Baron Zeal’s big house, in a much more genteel cell, Trader was starting to feel poorly. His abdomen had become severely bloated. So bloated that it was painful for him to move about.

Had he drunk too much ale? he thought. Or perhaps it was the brandy? Trader was a man used to hard drinking, and it had never made him feel like this before. Perhaps it was the rich food? Or the speed with which he had devoured it?

With an effort, Trader pushed up from the bed and propped himself up on an elbow. He was decidedly woozy, not to mention weak in the legs, flushed in the face, sweating like a pig, stomach churning and distended, like it was filled with air.

He let himself slump back to the bed and stared at the ceiling of his room. Could it have been the food? he asked himself. Had some of it been bad? What he was experiencing felt like a case of food poisoning. But when he went over the menu in his mind, there was nothing that he could recall tasting the least bit off. On the contrary, it seemed like only the freshest and highest quality ingredients had been used.

Because Trader was accustomed to the byzantine, dealing as he did on a regular basis with Deathland’s most ruthless barons and backstabbers, and because Zeal and Shabazz had already tried to chill his entire crew with nerve gas, the idea that he might have been poisoned did occur to him. But no matter how he turned it around in his mind, it made no sense to him. If he died in the night, Zeal and Shabazz could forget about using his wags for their pillaging. Trader’s crews would never cooperate with them. From the recent demonstration, tankside, they had to know that.

Could they be trying to weaken him so he’d be easier to deal with come morning? A helplessly ill man would present much less of a danger to them. That was a possibility, he knew, although it seemed like a terrible risk for them to take. If they had slipped him too much of whatever it was by mistake, he could die. And if he died, no convoy.

There was another possibility, as well. One that didn’t require a poisoner’s hand. During the few hours that he’d been in the ville, he’d passed in and around the pestilent shantytown, and come in contact with slaves and sec men. It was possible that he had been infected with some kind of naturally occurring disease, something particularly virulent that had been born and flourished in the unsanitary conditions of the slave quarter.

All of these ideas churned in his head, his mind spinning from one possibility to the next. Then he felt a violent surge of pressure in his bowels. Lurching to his feet, groaning mightily, he staggered for the chamber’s commode. Though he felt desperately ill and had ingested a large quantity of “plutonium dust,” the fates had smiled on Trader that day. The substance Zeal had acquired years earlier possessed only a speck of radioactive material.