Purity of Mind

Chapter 19: The Seventh Pawn

I came to in a dungeon.

I'd woken up in a prison cell a number of times in my life, and while this bore a certain resemblance to one, the word 'dungeon' was definitely more applicable. This cell had no bed, no water, no chamberpot. It was a stone box with a heavy door that did not open from this side.

I got up tentatively, probing for injuries as I did so. My memory of the previous night wasn't entirely clear, but I'd been knocked out somehow, and I knew that if you hit someone hard enough to knock them out there was a decent chance they weren't going to wake up again.

The fact that I seemed to be entirely uninjured was little solace, because that meant I'd been knocked out by someone capable of doing so without hurting me. A wizard might have managed that, but the only wizard I knew was on another continent at the moment. A much more likely candidate was the Witchdoctor. He no doubt knew a dozen ways to pinch off consciousness without causing permanent injury. That meant that whoever the mystery voice had been, he had not been there to rescue me.

I paced out the confines of the cell, but something about the texture of the walls disturbed me as I did so. I'd thought they were stone, at first, but that wasn't what they felt like. I sat down and felt the floor to see that it was the same not-stone material, but it wasn't until I tried using magic that I was sure.

It was a simple handful of fire, the kind I'd used to light my way in Chankota. Unlike then, however, this was barely a flicker of light before it vanished entirely. I couldn't work my magic, which meant that the walls and floor weren't stone: They were iron. Magic-proof, like the room back at my house. My cell wasn't just designed to hold ordinary people, it was designed to hold anyone.

That didn't bode well. Iron wasn't exactly expensive, but you didn't waste it building magic-proof cells unless you had a good reason to and weren't terribly concerned about the cost. Whoever had me in these cells apparently had reason to imprison those more magically talented than I was. The only thing that came to mind was the Empire's Intelligence Service.

If the Ephemeral were going to interrogate me, it'd be one thing. My cover story would take care of that. But the Witchdoctor had indicated he'd be asking the questions, and he could torture me to death's doorstep without worry that he'd overdo it. The cover story would hold up, but would I?

I understood why the previous Bishop had elected for a *Zìshan Mon Zhouk*; likely the same thing as the *Antimahatana Abshishaal* that Ephemeral Daya had referred to the night before. It was almost certainly the less painful way out, and it gave up no useful information to the enemy.

I doubted that I could create one for myself, but I had nothing else to do in the cell. I knew that everyone had unconscious blocks in their mind that prevented them from being harmed by their own magic - it was the reason I could hold my fire in my hand without burning myself. Each was unique to the person - my magic, thin though it was, could harm someone else, just not myself. The first step of constructing my own curse was to dismantle those defenses.

By the time someone arrived at my cell, I'd gotten precisely nowhere. It turned out that unconscious defenses were almost impossible to undo because they were almost impossible to even find in the first place. How could I locate something I couldn't perceive? I'd long been of the opinion that I could have mastered the more powerful forms of magic had I dedicated my life to wizardry, but it seemed the reality was that it was much more hard work than I'd hoped.

The door, it turned out, had a slot near the top. I discovered this when it opened and a faint light poured in, light that was almost immediately obscured by someone's head.

"The desert's rain came without fog this year," a voice said from outside the cell.

My thoughts swam. It was the same code phrase that Pawn Eight had used to identify himself to me. Had one of my people infiltrated the Empire's Intelligence Service? Or had Daya pulled the words from my mind and then removed my memory of her having done so? The voice outside was a woman's, though it didn't sound quite like the Ephemeral.