The Spirit Rebellion(104)

“This is kind of a new thing for all of us,” Miranda said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Mellinor rumbled. “What first?”

Miranda blinked in the pitch dark. “How about some light?”

Mellinor made a bubbling sound, and Miranda felt cool water running through her. At once, soft light, like moonlight seen from deep underwater, began to fill the tiny cell, and she got her first good look at her prison.

“Good grief.”

She was kneeling in a circular pit that might have been an old well. The walls were smooth, so either the prison had been cut into a solid block of stone, or they were deep underground, cut into the bedrock. The walls finally ended fifteen feet up at a metal grate sitting atop her cell like a well cap and held shut by a thick padlock. Above the grate, she could see nothing but darkness. The cell itself was more spacious than she’d originally thought, however. She had enough room to sit down, if not to stretch out. Other than herself there was a wooden bucket, presumably to be used as a toilet, and a great deal of gray dust. It covered everything: the floor, the walls, and even, she realized with disgust, her clothes where she had been lying.

Miranda stood up, slapping at her skirt, but the dust clung to the fabric almost like it was sticky. It was on her hands too now, gray and fine as dried silt. She rubbed at it fiercely, but the powder stuck to her, forming dark little rivers in the creases of her skin. She held her hands to her nose. The dust had an odd scent that was strangely familiar. Very lightly, and sure she was being very foolish, Miranda licked her finger. The stuff had a horrid, alkaline taste, and that was all she got before the tip of her tongue went numb.

“Thought so,” Miranda said, coughing. “It’s graysalt. The servants used to put it down as a rat poison when I was a child.”

“And you licked it anyway?” Mellinor said, horrified.

“Well, it’s not lethal to humans,” Miranda said, scraping her numb tongue with her teeth. “As a dust it’s harmless, but get it wet and it becomes a paralytic. So the rats would run through and then get it wet when they tried to groom the dust off, and bam, dead rat.”

“Good thing you’re not a rat then,” Mellinor grumbled.

“No,” Miranda said, “but I’m trapped like one just the same. Look”—she pointed at the piles of gray dust on the floor—“there must be pounds of it down here. Sure, it’s nontoxic now, when it’s dry, but if we were to get it wet there’s more than enough here to paralyze me from head to toe, maybe for good.”

She peered up at the locked grate, high overhead. Even if she could reach it, she didn’t think she could break the lock without Durn or one of her other spirits. Mellinor could, maybe, if he got enough pressure, but in her experience, lots of pressure meant lots of water, which was precisely what they couldn’t have.

“Well,” Miranda grumbled, “nice and trapped. I must admit I never expected something this ingenious, or cheap, out of Hern. Twenty pounds of graysalt probably cost less than one of those bottles of wine he had with dinner.”

Mellinor shifted inside her. “Actually, I don’t think we’re in Hern’s tower.”

Miranda frowned, and the spirit explained. “Generally speaking, spirits who spend a lot of time around Spiritualists are pretty active, but it’s quiet as the dead down here.”

“That’s no different from anything else in Gaol,” Miranda said. “Hern’s got a stranglehold on this place.”

“You keep saying that,” Mellinor murmured. “But something’s been bothering me. You said before that Hern was always in Zarin, right?”

“Right,” Miranda answered.

“Well,” the water rippled in her head, “whatever’s controlling the spirits in Gaol, it’s acting like a Great Spirit. That kind of control doesn’t work if the controlling power’s not constantly in contact with the land, like a Great Spirit is. A land without a Great Spirit becomes sleepy and stupid, more so than usual. Just look at my old basin. But this land is disciplined, and easily woken. That’s not something you see when the commanding power is always somewhere else.”

Miranda bit her lip. Mellinor made a good point, and he would be the expert on this sort of thing. “But,” she said, “if it wasn’t Hern, then who? Who’s running Gaol?”

“The duke, of course,” said a cheery voice above her.

Miranda looked up in alarm, biting back a curse as she whacked her head again. She knew that voice, she realized, rubbing her poor, abused skull, but she certainly hadn’t expected to hear it here.