Purity of Mind

Chapter 19: The Seventh Pawn

Either way, I had to play along. "The night's fog cleared the desert rain." I said.

"You don't have to identify yourself to me, Bishop," the voice replied. "I've had my eye on you for a while now, trying to warn you away from exactly this."

There was one person I knew who fit that description and would know the code phrase: "Pawn Seven?" It wasn't, strictly speaking, a good idea to use the moniker when someone could overhear us, but at this point that was the least of our problems.

"Yes." She said.

"Are you here to get me out?" I asked. It was entirely possible she was instead here to make sure I didn't have a chance to talk to the Witchdoctor again. Considering I'd spent my time awake trying to do that same thing, I couldn't blame her.

"Yes and no. I'm to bring you to the boss, and he'll decide what to do with you." Her responses were strange - seemingly without emotion. Then again, it might have been the magic-proof walls depriving me of the usual surface thoughts I'd be detecting.

"So you've infiltrated them?" I asked, not sure where she was going with this.

"There's no time for this," she said in the same matter-of-fact way. "I volunteered to be the one to bring you because you know me. But I also did this so that I could warn you: He knows everything."

"Who does?"

She didn't answer that question, instead continuing her speech. "Tell him the truth. All of it. He already knows, because he made me tell him. The organization, our lady, he knows about it. He took away..." she faltered, though still betrayed no emotion. "I cannot lie to him. If he thinks you are lying, he'll do the same thing to you he did to me."

The hope that I'd been beginning to feel died. Pawn Seven hadn't infiltrated anything; she'd been captured, just like I had.

She opened the door. "We have to go, now. He won't want us talking for long."

I wanted to run. Pawn Seven wouldn't stop me, she might even have come armed and so could supply me. But I suspected that she'd been allowed to be the one to get me, that if I ran from her I'd be dooming both of us in the process. Still, my legs tensed and it took an effort of will not to simply bolt through the open door. Pawn Seven just nodded to me, as though she understood everything that'd just gone through my mind. She probably had.

The hallway was also a dungeon, though this time the floors were actually stone. Only my cell and the one across from it were made of iron, the others were ordinary cells. Torches provided little light, but enough to see that the rest of the cells were empty. People apparently didn't stay long down here, and I suspected that was not because they were set free.

Pawn Seven started walking down the hallway, continuing to talk as she did so. "He calls himself King," she said, answering my earlier question. "He finds it amusing because it's similar to our name for our lady."

"So he already knows about the Queen, then?" I asked even though she'd already confirmed that he did.

Pawn Seven paused. "See, you said her name just now, and I still don't know it." She looked back at me. "He took it." She tapped her head, then looked down, breaking the gaze. "Don't let him catch you lying," she repeated in that same dull voice she'd had the entire time. After a moment, she resumed the walk.

What the hell had the Witchdoctor done to her? I recalled the Ephemeral from the confrontation the night before; she'd said she didn't want anything to do with her brother's methods. Was this why?

We went up a stairway, narrower than I would have expected. We entered another dull stone room, this one empty and seemingly abandoned. What its purpose was, I could not guess. It did seem odd; if I were under the Intelligence building or in some other dungeon, I would expect the rooms to be less... desolate than this. People would work here. No matter how fast their turnover, I'd have expected to see someone else in the cells. For that matter, where were the guards?