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.
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?
We exited the room, to the outside, and I found out.
The building I'd just left had once been a police station; now it was crumbling and neglected. I saw any number of other buildings, all in similar states of disrepair, some worse. Most were stone, and what little wooden structures remained were either almost entirely rotted or completely ad-hoc. It was a bizarre landscape of broken architecture, lit fitfully by torches or luminescent fungi. Despite its alien seeming, I recognized it instantly, because I'd grown up somewhere just like it: I was in Utijan's undercity.
Like Opal, Utijan had been around a long time, and had weathered several disasters. Each time, people would rebuild atop the ruins, but in many cases those ruins remained, just underground. The Queen had set up shop in a place not too dissimilar from the one I was in now. And like that area, this one was filled with people who couldn't live in the streets above. Homeless, criminals, abandoned children... it was just like back home.
On one hand, I felt relief. The Empire's Intelligence Service no doubt had their own dungeons; they wouldn't have needed to co-opt ruins to detain their prisoners. I wasn't in their custody. That left the other hand: If not them, then who had me? Who had coerced Pawn Seven out of her cover? If King wasn't the Witchdoctor, then who was he?
"Seven," I said as she navigated us through the various debris and around the growing crowd of people following us, "I came to Utijan to-"
"Don't tell me." She ordered, not looking back. "I told you, I can't lie to him. If you tell me, he'll make me tell him. Only tell him if he asks, and do not lie!"
I was about to tell her my mission, because I was beginning to suspect that it and this King were very much related. Who could have knocked me out without harming me? Who had the ability to compel the truth, to know lies? The Ephemeral, sure, but that was a 'she' and she certainly wouldn't have brought me here instead of the intelligence service's dungeons. What about the mysterious man who'd showed up last night and apparently gotten me away from both a Witchdoctor and an Ephemeral unharmed? Who could do all of those things?
A Pure Mind could.
If the man calling himself King was in fact my ultimate target, then my job here was nearly done. All I had to do was tell him my mission - as Pawn Seven advised - and get him to return to Opal with me. It was only if he refused that my job would go from 'impossible' to 'deadly impossible'.
I began to wonder, as we walked, if I was even a prisoner here. Waking up in a dungeon had certainly indicated so, but I hadn't been manacled, and while we were certainly objects of curiosity for the people we were passing by, they didn't regard us with fear or hate. Besides Pawn Seven herself, I hadn't spotted a single person I would have called a guard. I could probably leave right now. Sure, I didn't know my way around the undercity, but growing up in one had honed my sense of direction to a point. I would start out lost, but I wouldn't end that way.
Of course, if King were who I thought he was, escaping would be counterproductive. He was exactly the person I needed to see.
As we walked, I noticed something: There were people who were better dressed, running across the remains of the ancient roads. They weren't dressed like me, though my suit had certainly seen better days, but they did have a certain bearing that I only recognized when one got close enough to a torch for me to see clearly.
"Those are the servants for the government quarter." I said to Pawn Seven.
"Yes." She replied.
"Then we're underneath it right now?" I asked.
"Yes." She said again. She hesitated, clearly not wanting to say more, but then: "This is the reason I warned you away from here, Bishop. I did not want you to fall prey to the same trap that I did."
I shivered. I'd been hoping that my target, the Pure Mind I was to bring back with me, would be like the only other one I knew: Reasonable and uninterested in altering the minds of their subjects. But I had only to reflect on what had been done to Pawn Seven to realize this was not likely to be the case. Still, what choice did I have?
We came at last to a larger building, this one spanning the entire height between the ground and uneven ceiling above. It had likely been some government building once, but had been extensively vandalized in its time belowground. Crude columns had been carved into its side, and across the top were the words "*Vah Ashoon Saamraalj*". It was obviously a parody of the Empire's Intelligence Service, though these words were in Hidna and the spy headquarters' name had been in Trade, likely to intimidate foreigners.
"What does that say?" I asked Pawn Seven. I didn't know if she could speak the language, but she almost certainly spoke more of it than I did.
She just shook her head and changed the subject. "Whatever happens in there, know that I am loyal to our lady." She said with solemnity. "I was forced into where I am now. No matter what he says, no matter what he does, no matter what he makes me say or do... I remain loyal."
With that, she opened the door to the building. I followed her through.
Like the dungeons, this building was mostly abandoned. Some of the homeless had found a place here; those that I saw seemed less haggard and more well-fed than their brethren outside. More children were here as well, though those only on the bottom floor. Pawn Seven led us up.
The second floor was more damaged than the first; this is where it and whatever government building it served as support for intersected. There was no way up to that building, whatever it was, just the ragged stone hanging above our heads.
The people in this room were healthy and armed. These were the kind of people I expected to hold the undercity; gang members and their supporters, all hard people whose eyes held no kindness for me.
They didn't matter, though, because like many gangs they were held in place by their leader, and in this case that could be none other than the one who called himself King.
He wasn't hard to spot: he was better dressed than nearly everyone in the room. He held himself differently, as though he knew he had absolute power over everyone and everything he could see. And of course the large stone throne he'd chosen for a seat was a bit of a clue as well.
"So," he said. "Fancy meeting you here." It was the same voice I'd heard the night before, which explained how I'd apparently escaped unharmed.
"I've brought the prisoner, as ordered." Pawn Seven said.
"'Prisoner' is such a strong word," he replied. "I mean, I did rescue you from the clutches of the empire, I don't think it's too much to ask you to be my guest for a while?"
"I woke up in a dungeon." I said.
"To be fair," he replied, "we're having a bit of a shortage on guest housing at the moment." There was a rumble of laughter from the crowd and he grinned at them, then turned back to me. "What should I call you?"
"Bishop." I said.
He made an impatient gesture. "Yes, yes, that's very thematic, what with the Pawn," he gestured to Pawn Seven, "and the King," he gestured to himself, "but I want to know your real name."
If it had been Daya questioning me, I would have answered with my Luthra identity. The spell that the Queen had put on me would allow me to believe it beyond any ability of hers to deconstruct. But the person before me was on the Queen's level. He alone was capable of seeing through it, and Pawn Seven's condition had indicated that that would end very badly for me. Instead I told a truth that I'd shared with very few people: "If you want my birth name, I don't know it."
"Oh?" He said. He seemed intrigued but didn't seem to disbelieve me. "And why is that?"
"Because I was abandoned as a child in the Opal Undercity, in a place very much like this." I said.
"Well!" He said, apparently full of good cheer that I instinctively knew I couldn't trust, "That makes two of us, doesn't it? Abandoned by those who were supposed to support us, cast low yet more driven to rise up because of it? Oh yes, I can see we're going to get along splendidly."
I tried to fit in what he was saying with what little I knew about the Subtle Man. The person before me was far too young to be the father of the four enforcers I'd seen previously. But of course, appearances were deceiving with the Pure Minds. Assuming he wasn't just wearing an illusion outright, he could have easily kept himself young over the years. And if he'd somehow been overthrown by his children - at least one of which had seemed very angry to see him - that would certainly fit his abandonment narrative. I wasn't sure how that was possible, but even the Pure that I'd talked to in the Ward seemed to think that enough of the enforcers was a match for them.
"So," he said, bringing my thoughts back around to the present, "Bishop: that is what I will call you because I don't feel like coming up with a real name for you, and you may call me King. Bishop, why are you here? And don't say 'because you brought me here', I know that part. I mean why are you in Utijan? It's a long way from Opal."
"My cover story," I said, taking care to speak only the truth, "is that I'm a merchant's son, who inherited his business from his father."
King smiled a predator's smile. "I see that Seven has impressed upon you the importance of being truthful. That cover story, you could believe that if you needed to, couldn't you? I can see the spell in your mind. Very subtle, very good, but not hidable from someone like me. Our reluctant recruit," he indicated Pawn Seven, "had something similar in her mind when I first found her. Tell him what I did, Seven."
"You took it from me." Pawn Seven said in her cold, emotionless voice.
"And why did I do that?" He asked.
If Pawn Seven were embarrassed or uncomfortable with the line of questioning, she did not betray it in any way. "Because I would not tell you what you wished to know."
King frowned. "Careful, Seven, you know what your limits are." Without explanation as to what that could mean, he turned to me. "My point is, you can't rely on your patron's protection. I expect full cooperation. So while your cover story is a cute little anecdote and you did not lie by telling it to me, it did not answer my question." His jovial tone, impermanent at best, disappeared entirely, "Why are you here?" He demanded.
"I was sent here by an underground organization in Opal." If what Pawn Seven had said was true, he already knew where I was from, but that didn't make it feel any less like a betrayal to speak those words. I knew I would have had to tell the target the truth regardless, but I would have prefered to do so on my own terms, in a way that felt less like I was a prisoner under interrogation.
"Now we're getting somewhere!" King exclaimed, jovial tone back. He sat back on his throne and gestured for me to go on.
Time for the truth, then. I didn't like the fact that I had a room's worth of people as an audience, but something told me that King would have no compunction about making them forget what they'd heard. "I was sent here to find a Pure Mind, and persuade him to return to Opal."
Pawn Seven reacted to that, but I couldn't interpret what her sudden tenseness meant. She hadn't known my mission, true, but it shouldn't have been that surprising. King just chuckled. "To what end?" He said.
"Our organization," I said, still hating to acknowledge that it even existed, let alone its goals, "works behind the scenes to improve the overall course of life in Opal. It is such a goal that our leader does not believe she will attain in her natural lifetime. She wishes for.. continuity."
"Wait wait wait wait," King said, "Are you seriously telling me that your Queen hired you to travel across the continent so that you could play matchmaker?" He laughed, and the room laughed with him.
I waited for the mocking to die down. "Yes. The Queen is... she's a good person. Not just a good Pure, but a good human being. I'd like you to consider what such continuity would mean not just for the people of Opal, but everyone." It was reaching, but I had to sell him on this somehow. "Opal is a trade city, improvements there go a long way. We have a saying: Opal's gain is the world's gain."
"You'd like me to consider." He said, laughing again. "Oh, wow, that is very flattering, let me tell you that. I can honestly say I've never been propositioned in such a convoluted manner before. But I believe your story if for no other reason than you can't possibly have made up something that bizarre. I need some time to contemplate your proposal. I need to confer with my generals." He gestured at the crowd, which laughed again. "Seven, I'm pulling rank on Bishop's behalf. He gets your room. I don't care where you sleep. Now get out of here, the both of you."
Pawn Seven didn't object to this, instead gesturing for me to follow her out of the room. Occasional chuckles went through the crowd as we passed through it, then down the stairs to the rest of the building below.
"Well," I said once we were out of earshot, though of course King could probably read my mind anywhere, "that went about as well as could be expected."
Pawn Seven stopped where she was. She turned around to face me. "No." She said.
I immediately felt guilty - Pawn Seven had had her mind tampered with by the man above, and when backup from her own organization had finally arrived, it immediately attempted to recruit him. "I'm sorry, Pawn Seven, the mission-"
"Not that." She interrupted. "Not the mission." She added unhelpfully.
"Then what?" I asked.
Her jaw tightened; clearly she could feel frustration, at least. "King is... a very... dangerous... man. He is not... safe." she said finally. I could almost sense something in her surface thoughts, but then it was gone and she was back to her usual placid tonelessness.
"I'm sorry." I said again. I could tell she was trying to talk around whatever constraints he'd put in her mind, but I couldn't determine what she was trying to tell me that I hadn't already figured out. I'd known when I accepted the mission that I'd be dealing with a danger that I'd previously thought to be nearly mythological.
Pawn Seven relaxed her jaw, seemingly giving up for now. "Come this way. I'll show you to my old room."