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Hell's Messenger 1

TRIAL

Dusk Peterson

The year 400, the third month.
 

The dangerous and desperate criminal is often only the hero gone wrong.

—Thomas Mott Osborne: Society and Prisons (1916)

CHAPTER ONE

Hell's thunder reached up from the horizon to the sky, touched Mercy's clouds, and lit them ablaze with light. The pre-dawn glow, struggling to penetrate the thick mist pouring in from the sea, was overwhelmed by the shining splendor of the golden clouds above.

Tyrrell, who had no special fondness these days for the goddess Mercy or any of her earthly representatives, did his best to shrug his uniform so that his collar shielded him from the rain pouring down his back. This exercise wasn't easy, since his hands were cuffed behind his back. He glanced over at Oslo, who was frowning at the narrow, barred gate in front of them.

"Is this a new kind of torture?" Tyrrell asked. "Making me drown in the rain?"

"Shut your mouth, Tyrrell," said Oslo, but in an absent-minded manner, as though his thoughts were elsewhere. Perhaps they were on the rain, which had turned his dark blue uniform as black as the thunderclouds. On the other side of Tyrrell, Bailey shook his head to free some of the spray from it. The spray, scented salty from the nearby sea, shot onto Tyrrell.

"We should have waited in the wagon," Bailey said to Oslo. "I told you that."

Tyrrell looked longingly at the patrol wagon, whose horses were hitched under an overhang further down the wall. But Oslo shook his head as he reached up with his free hand to wipe his nose. "Bailey, when they open that gate, they'll keep it open for exactly half a minute, and if we're not in by then, we'll have lost our chance till noontime."

"Rather exacting, aren't they?" commented Bailey, then sneezed. More spray landed on Tyrrell, who glared at the young guard. Bailey ignored him.

"No more than we are." Oslo glanced over to the left, where the sun was turning the eastern horizon white. "It shouldn't be long now."

Tyrell gave up the struggle to close the gap between his back and his shirt; his entire body was wet now. "At least if I die of chill-fever, you'll be dead as well," he muttered, and was rewarded with a kick on the shins from Oslo that left him hopping on one leg. Bailey took a stronger grip on Tyrrell's arm, as though he expected him to try to escape.

Just where Bailey expected his prisoner to escape to, Tyrrell didn't know. Tyrrell looked over his shoulder at the rocky wasteland they had travelled through overnight. They were miles from the nearest town, and this promontory that jutted out into the sea ended in a sheer cliff on three sides, with nothing but jagged sea-rocks to fall onto if the building before them should suddenly decide to slide into the sea. Oslo had cheerfully pointed all this out to him when they first arrived.

Now Oslo was far from cheerful. He gazed up at the wall, as though hoping somebody would look out and notice them. Since the wall held no windows, that seemed unlikely. It was made of white concrete, and other than a drainpipe or two, it was as sheer as the cliffs. It rose four storeys high and was capped, incongruously, with an elegant, Vovimian-style glass dome. No light travelled through the dome from inside.

Another lightning bolt jolted up from the ground, so close by that Bailey jumped. Oslo, a more seasoned guard, merely looked annoyed. He took out his annoyance by digging his nails into Tyrrell's arm. Tyrrell, a seasoned prisoner, did not bother to protest this small maliciousness. Instead he looked again at the enormous expanse of wall they were facing, trying to calculate how many cells lay inside. Until the day before, he had lived in Mercy Life Prison, which had six levels. There was room in that life prison for roughly fifty prisoners on each of the five storeys that held cells, not counting the punishment cells in the frigid basement. Close to two hundred and fifty prisoners in total, as Tyrrell had long known from his careful memorization of the names of prisoners and guards.

This white lump of a prison in front of him wasn't as high, but it was so broad that it looked as though it could easily house a thousand prisoners, depending on how much of the prison was taken up with cells. Tyrrell wrinkled his nose, trying to rid himself of a raindrop that was tickling him, and trying to think through the crash of the sea waves against the cliffs. He wondered whether he could endure another assignment in the laundering room, if that turned out to be his work here. There were bound to be more uniforms to wash at this place.

Not that he had any choice in the matter. He sighed and tried to loosen his handcuffs for the hundredth time on the trip, which earned him a hard knock on the head from the hilt of Oslo's dagger. Tyrrell went still immediately, knowing from experience that he was pressing Oslo's temper too far. It wasn't as though he would get more than a few yards if he managed to wriggle away, hands free or not. Oslo was carrying a whip, and Bailey a revolver. Tyrrell feared the whip more than the revolver, having been the recipient of its bite on too many occasions.

Thunder clapped in his ear, followed by bells. At first he thought the ringing came from inside his throbbing head; then he realized that it was emerging from the darkness behind the gate. "Here we go," muttered Oslo. "Get ready to move quickly."

The gate in front of them, narrow though it was, stood a full storey high. Tyrrell watched with fascination as the gate began to slide to the side, seemingly without assistance from human hands. He had heard that this prison had the most sophisticated machinery of any prison in the entire nation of Mip, since it was situated not far from their nation's border with the queendom of Yclau, whose engineers were famed throughout the world. Glancing at Bailey, he saw that the young guard was watching the gate's progress with open mouth. He came from a provincial village and had probably never seen a piece of large machinery in his life. Tyrrell had grown up on the streets of the Mippite capital . . . but that was twenty years ago, and even the motorbus they had passed on their journey here had given him a thrill of excitement. So much had changed since he entered Mercy Prison.

And now he was leaving the world again, most likely for the last time. He looked over his shoulder again at the wet, rocky wasteland.

"Now!" said Oslo, and he began pulling Tyrrell forward, heedless as to whether his prisoner could keep up. Bailey was trotting on his other side, trying to reach the gate that had opened barely the width of two men. As they came near, the gate began to close. Cursing, Oslo shoved Tyrrell through the gate. Tyrrell stumbled and fell flat on his face.

Since his hands were cuffed behind him, this hurt as much as though Hell's torturers had decided to smash in his face. He lay on the cold concrete in the darkness, cursing in an indiscriminate manner that embraced every guard he had possessed the misfortune to be serviced by. The chill of the ground, combined with his wetness, had set him shivering, and he could taste blood in his mouth where his teeth had caught his cheek as he fell. In an automatic manner, he checked his teeth. They were all there, except for the four he had lost over the years, courtesy of past guards.

The ringing stopped, except for its echo. He received a boot-thump in the ribs, which told him that Oslo had made it inside and had heard the nature of his cursing. He switched the cursing over to a more specific target and received a harder kick in one of his thighs. He had enough sense then to bite his lip shut.

"I keep the Boundaries," he whispered to himself, and instantly felt better. He allowed Bailey to pull him onto his feet, and as he did so, he realized that laughter echoed in the dark room. The laughter did not come from either of his guards.

He raised his head. He was in a large, high-ceilinged room. That much he could tell from the echoes and from the fact that he could not see the ceiling. Most of the room was lightless. But in the left-hand corner ahead of him, on a balcony about where he would expect a ceiling to be, sat two men lit by wall-lamps. Both wore dark blue uniforms, and both had their boots resting in a leisurely manner on the low, barred railing of the balcony. Both had rifles in their laps, and both rifles were pointed straight at Tyrrell.

Tyrrell felt his empty stomach lurch. One of the men who had been laughing called across the room, "Mercy's man! What gift do you bring us today?"

"Compassion's man!" Oslo called back in a casual manner that suggested he was acquainted with the other guard. "I have a prisoner transfer for you. Fresh meat for the banquet."

The rifle-bearing guards seemed to appreciate this small witticism more than Tyrrell thought it merited; they hooted with laughter. "Tenderizing the meat, are you?" asked the second guard, who held a cigarette between his lips.

"Oh, believe me," said Oslo, grinning, "I've poked the meat quite thoroughly to make sure it's well done."

Tyrrell rolled his eyes. Even Bailey winced at Oslo's poor wit.

The first guard lifted his rifle and set it aside. "Ah, what a pity we will not be able to feast at length on him at our banquet. But we are somewhat more gentle on our prisoners than you are at Mercy. How many rapes a year do you service each of your prisoners with? One hundred? Two hundred?"

"We're working on raising the number." Oslo's voice held nothing but amusement.

"Whereas we are unlikely to see your prisoner more than once or twice this year . . . if that much." The first guard pulled his boots off the railing and leaned over the railing, remaining in his chair as he scrutinized the scene before him. The wavering light of the gas-lamps on the balcony wall moved shadows across his face, which was thoughtful. "Hard to say from this distance," concluded the guard finally. "Why the transfer?"

"Your Keeper knows. You can probably guess. His name's Tyrrell."

The second guard, who had removed his cigarette from his lips in order to tap it over a spittoon nearby, went suddenly still. The first guard raised an appreciative eyebrow. "Oh-ho!" he said softly. "So that's the way of it. I was wondering how long it would be before Mercy's Keeper lost patience with those riot-rousers he's been housing. What happened to the others?"

Oslo shrugged. "We'll know when we get back. The first decision our Keeper made was to arrange this transfer. Your Keeper seemed willing to take him in."

The first guard shrugged as he leaned back in his chair. "Our Keeper," he said, "has all sorts of grandiose plans for this prison, though whether any of them will come to fruit is another matter. I suppose that servicing riot-rousers is part of his plan. Will you break your fast with us? Starke likes to arrive early for his gunner duty . . ." He gestured toward the second guard. "But I prefer to extend my dawn break as long as possible. You're welcome to join me in the guards' dining hall. The night watch will be coming off-duty soon, and I can introduce you."

"Yes," muttered Bailey through gritted teeth. "Warmth. Yes."

Oslo ignored him. "Good food wouldn't go amiss," he said, smiling. "And I hear that Compassion Life Prison is famed for that."

More hoots of appreciative laughter erupted from the first guard, though the second was busy drawing a long lungful of smoke from his cigarette and scrutinizing Tyrrell with an expression he could not read.

"We promise to feed you only the best," replied the first guard, getting to his feet and reaching toward a hand-sized lever set within a small, red hatch on the wall. "Come to the dining hall when you've delivered your charge. You remember the way, I'm sure."

"I hope I do," said Oslo, beginning to tug Tyrrell forward into the darkness, "but everything may be changed here, from what I hear. Your Keeper seems to want to turn things upside down."

"We'll see," said the second guard as his eyes followed Tyrell's progress. His voice was barely audible, and his expression was hidden behind a puff of smoke. "We'll see."

They made their way through the blackness; Oslo was heading toward an invisible goal with unhesitating steps, while Bailey was muttering something about the difficulty of locating targets in the dark. Then the younger guard whispered, "Do you think you should have said what you did about the rapes, Oslo? If people outside Mercy Prison know . . ."

"Bailey, everyone in the life prisons knows what we do to our prisoners." Oslo, who didn't bother to lower his voice, sounded as though he were about to laugh. "In fact, everyone in the Magisterial Republic of Mip knows. It's been reported in the newspapers for years. Do you think anyone cares? The magistrates showed how little they cared last month. Watch your ears."

Following this mysterious remark, there came behind them the unmistakable sound of a lever clicking upward into place. Then the air screamed.

Tyrrell stopped dead; he would have covered his ears with his hands if he could have figured out how to escape from his handcuffs. The loud bell before had been a soft whisper compared to the grating, high-pitched wail of this siren. Tyrrell had never heard anything like it. He supposed it was what would result if a twenty-foot giant blew a mighty whistle.

Oslo shouted to Bailey over the alarm, "A hard target to miss!"

At first Tyrrell thought he was referring to the noise that was about to deafen him. Then he realized that the wall in front of them was parting.

The wall had doors, but such doors as Tyrrell had never seen. They were fully a foot thick, made of a dark material that Tyrrell could not identify in the dim light of the passage beyond. Some sort of metal, he thought as he saw the light glide across the moving gates. The gates were sliding back into the walls next to them, as though they were flat keys entering slots. They moved smoothly, but with a rumble which suggested that only the machinery which was moving them could have parted them.

The passage beyond was grey with dawn-light. A few dim gas-lamps sparkled against the walls, giving evidence that the prison had not been entirely unlit during the night. The ceiling above glittered grey – metal again, it seemed. At the end of the passage there seemed to be an open space. What lay on either side of the open space, Tyrrell could not see.

Tyrrell caught a flicker of movement and saw that the second guard they had been speaking with – the man named Starke – had just brushed past Oslo, carrying his rifle slung across his back. He said nothing, but passed through the metal doors, and then turned right and disappeared through a doorway in the passage.

The air stopped screaming, as though it had tired of giving its warning. The heavy metal doors remained open. Oslo said, his voice thick with amusement, "Bailey, you're drooling all over the floor."

Tyrrell turned his head in time to see Bailey snap his mouth shut. The young guard continued to stare with wonder at the mighty entrance. "How could they build anything this big?" he murmured.

"They're riot doors," said Oslo in a matter-of-fact manner. "If the prisoners try to escape, Compassion's Keeper levers the doors shut, using a special riot key. He has the only keys to the inside lever, and once the doors are shut during a riot, they can only be opened from the outside. As the last lot of prisoners learned who tried to escape here," he added lightly, and then he blinked rapidly.

Tyrrell was blinking too. The passage in front of them, as well as the area beyond, had suddenly turned bright, as though a fire had sprung forth. Looking up, Tyrrell saw that the light came from glass globes hanging from the ceiling. Not gas-lamps, he thought in some confusion, trying to focus his eyes on the odd loop of sun-bright wire inside one of the globes.

"Landry!" Oslo called out. "You've been electrified!"

"Only the best in this prison, I told you," called back the first guard. "Do enter, Oslo. These doors aren't supposed to stay open after dawn – Keeper's orders."

"My apologies, Landry," said Oslo, in the polite manner he always used toward his fellow guards – as opposed to subhuman creatures, such as his prisoners. He pulled Tyrrell forward in the direction of the doorway that the second guard had passed through. Bailey was gaping at the electric lights now.

So was Tyrrell. He had heard of such things from recent prisoners at Mercy, but Mercy Prison was very out of date, still lighting itself through fire pits and oil lamps. Despite the tales of fantastic machinery, Tyrrell had unconsciously assumed, from all that he had heard about conditions at Compassion, that this prison would be similarly backwards, embodying the barbarisms of the past. Mechanical doors and electric lights did not fit his vision of an old-fashioned prison.

Behind them, the doors began to rumble closed, without the siren that had heralded their opening. He and his escorts had followed Starke's path, entering a stairwell, and Oslo was leading them at a rapid pace up the solid metalwork steps. They emerged finally onto a balcony that was also made of metal. That much Tyrrell saw, and he glimpsed above the area to the left of him the great glass dome he had seen from the outside. The dome was high up, and Tyrrell had a dizzying moment of revelation when he realized that the room in which this balcony was located was four storeys high.

Then Oslo turned him round and shoved him through a doorway, saying to someone beyond him, "A new prisoner for you, Medinger."
 

CHAPTER TWO

"Open your mouth, please."

Tyrrell opened his mouth wide, expecting the healer to slide in a jaw-breaking mouth-holder to keep him from clamping down with his teeth. Instead, in a fearless fashion, the healer merely inserted two fingers, probed around inside his mouth for a minute, and then withdrew the fingers, saying, "Drink this, please."

He swallowed the thimbleful of medicine the healer gave him, wondering what foul substances he was being poisoned with, but not having enough curiosity to ask. He was more interested in the view against the opposite wall, showing a row of all the work-plaques that the healer had acquired over the past forty or so years. A black-bordered plaque near the beginning of the row caught his eye; it held the Yclau royal seal.

"You worked in the Eternal Dungeon?" he said, intrigued.

"Yes," replied the healer, in so flat a voice that Tyrrell shut his mouth quickly. He glanced at the other plaques. Drug sanitarium work, mainly, judging from the plants pictured in the seals. Apparently the role of dungeon healer hadn't suited his healer. He wondered what had snagged the healer to this prison.

The healer – FitzGerald was the name, he'd been tersely told upon arrival – pulled his left eyelids open, shone a light in his eye for reasons known only to the Guild of Healers, and then set the electrical lantern aside. "Stomach down on the table, please. Legs hanging over. Pull your drawers down."

Tyrrell, who was already dressed in nothing but his lower drawers, felt a blush cover him. He glanced to the side, where a window and windowed door overlooked the balcony. Beyond the balcony he could see nothing except a black wall that he had barely glimpsed on the way here, but standing just outside the door was the guard named Medinger, who had brought him here. The guard was offering Tyrrell and the healer a certain amount of privacy by facing the black wall, but now and then he would glance inside the surgery to see that all was well.

Tyrrell waited for the moment when FitzGerald had turned away toward the sink; then he hopped off the table, pulled down his drawers a few inches, and leaned over. He had first endured a body search on the day he entered Mercy Prison, when a cache of wrapped sweetweed was removed from a place in his body that he had been sure nobody would search. Those had been his days of naiveté. Since then, he had been searched there many times, but never before by a woman. The thought made him faintly excited.

FitzGerald – she hadn't told him what her title was – returned to him. Without hesitation, she pushed her finger in. Part of Tyrrell, the part presently mashed against the table, decided that it liked this new method of body search very much. He winced against the pain of the confinement of the growing flesh, and then let himself enjoy the probing finger. It wasn't often he received such enjoyment. In fact, it had been over twenty years since he had last enjoyed himself like this.

In the old days, he had laid and been laid by anything that moved, save the alley cats. Twenty years of rapes at Mercy had diminished his interest in men, but not his fantasies about women. Alas, Mip had not gone as far as neighboring Yclau in employing female prison workers. This was the first woman he had spoken to since he entered Mercy.

The examination ended, to the regret of Tyrrell and the part of himself that was worming itself up his belly. "You may dress yourself again," FitzGerald said, and a moment later he heard the sound of water. Not water pouring from a pitcher; this prison actually had running water. Tyrrell wondered whether he could hope that his level of the prison would possess a flushing toilet.

Tyrrell straightened up, pulled up his drawers, sat back down on the table, and did his best to cover his lap with his hands. If FitzGerald noticed any change upon her return, she was too professional to mention the fact. "Now, then," she said, "any family illnesses?"

"Not that I know of," he replied. This was the literal truth, and he hoped that the healer wouldn't quiz him on what the likelihood was that he knew anything about his family's medical history.

"Any long-term illnesses yourself? Heart problems? Anything of that sort?" The healer leaned over and placed her hand against his heart. Her hand was tickling his nipple now, which caused the part of him he was trying to keep hidden to leap with eagerness.

"Nothing to moan about," he replied. He was trying not to stare down at her breasts, which appeared ample from what he could tell through the stiff layers of calico. Her hair was in a severe bun, but silver wisps floated down to her neck. Which was wrinkled, he reminded himself. True, she had good face-bones, which gave her a neat profile, but in his street days he would passed by this old woman with no other thought than whether she was likely to be carrying a purse.

He saw FitzGerald watching him, and he wondered whether he had missed a question. He added hastily, "I have toothaches sometimes."

"Mm." She fished in his mouth a moment; this time he was aware of her fingers brushing his lips. He resisted the urge to suck on her fingers. "Well, there's nothing I can do about that, I'm afraid," she said, exploring the gaps between his teeth. "That's outside my specialization. I'd hoped to get a tooth-healer in to help me once a month, but our Keeper says he can't extend the prison budget that far."

From what Tyrrell had heard about her Keeper, he was surprised the man even bothered to employ a healer, much less a competent one. He made what he hoped was a sympathetic noise as FitzGerald's fingers withdrew. She went over the sink again, leaning over. Tyrrell decided that he really ought not to be taking such an interest in her tailside, and he turned his gaze toward the window. Medinger was staring in, his eyes narrowed. Wondering how much the guard had seen, Tyrrell quickly shifted his gaze toward the glass cupboards hanging from the walls, all filled with colored bottles and bandages and nasty-looking instruments like saws and syringes. The syringes made him pause. He glanced back at the bottles.

FitzGerald said as she turned round, wiping her hands on a cloth, "Try eating more meat. Soft meat, well-done. That should be easier for you to chew."

"I'll try," he agreed. He hadn't seen meat since the day he was arrested, but he supposed that it was just possible that a guard, as a matter of whim, might share his meal with him. "You certainly have a lot of bottles," he said, his gaze distracted to the cupboards once more.

"The medicinal sweetweed is in my locked dispensary," said the healer. "At home, thirty miles from here."

He was glad, for once, for the color of his skin; he felt the blush cover him from forehead to big toes. He looked back to see that FitzGerald's mouth was twitching.

He allowed himself to smile at her. "Am I that obvious?"

"To a trained eye." She had succeeded in suppressing her own smile. Stepping forward, she pulled back his left eyelids again. "How long did you ingest it?"

He hesitated, not wishing to relive old days, but his prison record lay open on the table, next to him. She could find out from that the general story, if not the details. "Fifteen years," he said. "From the time I was seven."

She raised her eyebrows at that. "You started young."

"My street tribe sold it to raise money for food," he explained. "Sweetweed was legal in those days, in small doses. I only chewed on it as a child. The older boys warned me not to do more. But then I came of age and . . . Well, I decided to ignore their advice."

"Drink or syringe?" she asked in a matter-of-fact manner as she leaned over to write something in his record.

"Drink at first. Syringe toward the end. I was only on it full-dose for a year."

The year in which he had committed the crimes for which he was imprisoned, but he did not have to tell her that. He could see that she had calculated dates in her head and was writing the appropriate one down. "And the remaining three years?"

"I was in holding, awaiting trial and then appealing conviction. I wasn't supposed to be allowed drugs then, but . . . Well, it's not hard to smuggle things into a holding prison." Particularly not with the help of guards who didn't want the bother of dealing with a crashing sweetweed addict.

"Hmm." FitzGerald scribbled something more. "Voluntary withdrawal or forcible?"

"Forcible. I was sent to Mercy Prison after that, when I was twenty-two." Where prisoners never received goods from the outside. Never. Whatever you brought with you were the last belongings you would have for your life. Tyrrell had not thought to bring anything with him except enough sweetweed to last him a couple of weeks. That had been taken from him upon his arrival.

He hoped FitzGerald would not ask him the details of what had followed; it made him sweat still to think of it. All she said, though, was, "Any flashbacks?"

There wasn't anything he could keep from her, it seemed. "Occasionally," he admitted. "When I'm under special stress. It's nothing I can't deal with."

She straightened up, nodding. "Well, you were lucky. Only one year, when you were young; enough time to catch you, but not enough time to permanently damage you. You would have been permitted entrance to a drug sanitarium if you had applied."

They had offered him that option at the time he was appealing his conviction. Sometimes he banged his head against the wall to think that he had not taken the offer. "I would still have been locked up," he pointed out.

"With greater freedom inside," she replied. "As I'm sure I don't have to tell you." She glanced at his record again – the portion of it describing his crimes – and then frowned and carefully closed the ledger book. He sighed. He hadn't held any great hope of a transfer to a sanitarium, not with his record. He might have had some luck, at his trial, of convincing his magistrate that he wasn't the sort to commit violent crimes except under the influence of sweetweed. It was true, after all. But he had opted for a lie at his trial, and that had doomed him to where he was.

That was twenty years ago. No point in dwelling on it now, he reminded himself, and he resolutely returned his mind to a more pleasant subject. Namely, the manner in which FitzGerald's ankles showed from under her skirt whenever she bent over.

"Well, that's all, I think," she said as she carefully wiped her hands clean after yet another washing. "Except for your anal tract." She saw his blank look and added, "Your fucking hole."

This time he was sure his blush must be noticeable. He had gradually weaned himself from the gutter talk of his childhood, mainly in order to be a good influence on Merrick, who hadn't talked that way before he arrived at Mercy, but who had picked up the language with frightening fluency. Never before had Tyrrell heard a woman speak such words. It was the first time in his life that he had ever felt sheltered.

He made a rumbling noise in his throat to indicate that he understood and pressed his hands harder against the part of him that greatly enjoyed this turn of conversation.

"Your last healer," remarked FitzGerald, opening the prison record again, "was a bit spotty in providing details about your medical examinations with him. Do you mind if I ask a few questions?"

His last healer had examined him exactly once, on the day he arrived at Mercy. Mercy's healer was drunk at the time. From what Tyrrell had been told later by other prisoners, Mercy's healer was always drunk. Since Mercy's Keeper saw little need to call on the healer's services, this arrangement worked out nicely for both of them. The prisoners learned to heal their own wounds or to beg the services of sympathetic guards. There had been a few of those at Mercy when Tyrrell left. Perhaps fewer now.

He made another sound of agreement in his throat, and she asked, "How long have you had the dose?"

This time he did not need to wait for the translation; he knew what she meant. "About eight years."

"You learned this in a medical examination?"

He nodded. The examination had been done by Merrick, who possessed an alarmingly long catalogue of his own sexual diseases and was therefore the expert among the prisoners of Mercy's second level on how to cure or endure such illnesses. In Tyrrell's case, alas, "endure" was the prognosis, but at least the disease had become no worse.

"And do you inform your bed partners of this?" she asked.

He caught himself in time from laughing. He imagined himself saying to Oslo, "Excuse me, but are you aware that you're about to rape a man with a sexual disease?"

"My partners know of the dangers," he assured her. "Most of them wear sheaths."

She nodded. "And do you?"

This set him to silence for a minute. There had never been any moments of temptation during his years in prison, except with Merrick. Merrick, though, had less interest in sex than any man that Tyrrell had ever known. Given the guards that Merrick had been assigned, Tyrrell could understand why. In any case, Tyrrell had been less interested in Merrick's body than in his company, and once he had achieved the company, it had seemed no great matter that Merrick possessed no desire for bed-sports. And from that point forward, Tyrrell and Merrick had both been so busy that Tyrrell had rarely thought of what it might be like to lie in bed with someone whose company he actually sought.

"I'm always on bottom," he said, this being the easiest way to summarize the matter.

She nodded. "Well, if you should ever do direct anal or direct oral – if you're ever on top," she translated as he blinked, "you needn't worry about a sheath for your partner's sake, for the dose has stopped spreading. But it would be wise for you to take the precaution for your own sake. Prison diseases are rife, I'm afraid."

"Ah." He tried to envision asking a guard to give him a sheath, and failed.

She seemed to be good at reading minds, for she added, "You'll find a medical supply kit in your cell. It's kept well stocked with anything you will need for lesser medical problems: sheaths, bandages, splints, and so on. For more serious problems – chest pains, for example – please don't hesitate to come to me. That's where my service lies."

She said the word without any accompanying look of irony, which he found reassuring. He hesitated, though. "How will I let you know of my injuries?"

"Just alert a guard."

He managed to keep from rolling his eyes. Cursed females and their innocence of the world. Or perhaps all healers were that way; he wouldn't know. He tried his best to explain. "If I'm injured," he said carefully, "my guard may be reluctant to see me healed, if he feels I deserve the injury."

She was standing now with her tailside against the drawers next to the sink, her arms folded against the calico cloth and brightly colored buttons, and her boot toes poking out from beneath the skirt. With her gaze steady on him, she said, "I don't think you need worry much about injuries from your guards. If you receive any injuries from other people here, they're more likely to come from your fellow prisoners."

This was news he did not want to hear. Not about his lack of injuries from guards, which was information he didn't believe for a minute. Rather, she had just confirmed his worst fears about Compassion Prison.

Merrick had warned him. A guard, he said, had told him that Compassion's prisoners had more to fear from their fellow prisoners than from their guards. Given the level of viciousness shown by the average life-prison guard, this was hard to believe. Yet Merrick could only have learned this from one source, and that source, Tyrrell thought gloomily, would know very well indeed what conditions were like in Compassion Prison.

"Any questions?" she asked him.

He shook his head, too miserable to think of any health matters he might want to ask about, though this was the last time he expected to see a healer for the rest of his life.

"Fine," she said, walking over to him. She unwrapped the bandage she had placed round his arm earlier when she syringed him several times for unspecified illnesses he either had or could expect to have in the future. He thought about that medical supply kit and suppressed a bitter laugh. If any such kit existed, it had no doubt been stolen long ago by his guard. He would just have to hope that he was assigned a cell-mate who was skilled at tending injuries.

Or should he be hoping for a cell-mate after all, given the news he had just been burdened with?

His gaze wandered past FitzGerald to the chest of drawers. He wondered suddenly what was inside those drawers. Glancing over at the healer, he saw that she had retreated to the end of the room to write up some notes about him. Medinger was looking the other way.

A minute later Tyrrell began to scramble into his clothes, looking round the surgery for anything else that might be helpful. He could see nothing that appeared interesting, other than a black metal box on the wall. This was open, however, and he saw that it held nothing but lines of metal coil that travelled up against the wall. His eyes narrowed, remembering old days of cutting thief alarms before he entered the houses. He had been rather good at that, and it had been a much more enjoyable activity than cutting the throats of the victims he robbed.

This thread of thought was snapped by the entrance of Medinger, who asked, "Are you finished with the prisoner, ma'am?"

She gave a wave over her shoulder with a hand, apparently indicating that she was much too busy to bother herself with such trivialities as saying farewell to a patient.

Medinger nodded, turned to look at Tyrrell, and in the next moment Tyrrell found himself stomach-down on the examination table.

Medinger located the object in his pocket within seconds. He extracted it, checked to see that nothing else remained elsewhere in his prisoner's trousers or shirt, and then hauled Tyrrell up. After checking Tyrrell's chest and his groin – which had grown soft during the second body search – Medinger twirled him round in one swift movement, jerking his wrists back into a single-handled hold. "Ma'am," said the guard, "I think this belongs to you."

FitzGerald turned round and started as she caught sight of the scalpel in Medinger's hand. "Oh, dear," she said. "I'm most deeply sorry."

"Not your fault, ma'am," said the guard, with no recrimination in his voice. "It's my job, not yours, to take care of such matters. Are you finished with him, then?"

"Yes, I am." Her eyes grew cooler as she looked at Tyrrell, and Tyrrell had the terrible feeling that the next patient who walked through her door would receive a less kindly welcome than he had received.

He felt a familiar sickness of guilt in his stomach. With Merrick around, he wouldn't have made this mistake – not because Merrick was better than himself but because Merrick was so much worse than himself that Tyrrell had spent much of his time trying to be a model prisoner, so as not to drag Merrick down further. Now he no longer had Merrick as his anchor, the man whose presence had kept him within the Boundaries of Behavior for fifteen years.

He was terribly afraid that he had just witnessed a foreshadow of what he would become at Compassion.
 

CHAPTER THREE

His thoughts on the way to the healer's surgery had been so absorbed with what the gunners had said that he had scarcely paid any mind to his surroundings. Now, retracing the same path as they walked along the balcony, he tried to see what lay in front of the black wall to the left, but Medinger would not allow him to get close enough to the balcony railing to look down. The wall itself, Tyrrell saw as he craned his neck back, was a storey short of the prison's ceiling. The dome hovered over the area behind the black wall, spilling light down into it. Almost immediately adjacent to the wall hung what Tyrrell took at first to be banner chains, but they were far too thick for that; they looked as though they could have lifted a small building. He traced them down the side of the wall, but what they led to was hidden behind the intricate metalwork that covered the side of the balcony.

Medinger was hustling him along so quickly that Tyrrell was able to catch no more than glimpses of the rooms on the right side that they were passing. Those looked to him as though they were the work-rooms of the prison, though no prisoners were there now. He saw stacked barrels and crates stencilled with words; most likely these were storage rooms adjacent to the prison kitchen. There seemed to be an overwhelming number of barrels, and Tyrrell wondered again how many cells this prison held. However many there were, it seemed likely they were behind the black wall.

He and Medinger passed another door, closed. Tyrrell heard faint beeping and guessed that this must be the coding room. It was odd to have it so close to where prisoners worked; Tyrrell was sure he was not the only prisoner who had desperately desired communication with the outside world. The location of a coding room was something to remember. . . . He shook his head. Already his mind was plotting, and he hadn't yet been here for an hour. Compassion no doubt had its own leaders among the prisoners, and they would not take kindly to him arriving with a list of rules he thought the prisoners should follow.

"You're the new man," he muttered to himself. "You're untried."

He tried not to let his thoughts dwell on what form that trial might take.

He and Medinger were approaching the final stretch of the balcony now, which ended at a wall. In his old days, Tyrrell had sized up many a house; now he made quick calculations in his mind, based on what he had seen from the outside, and concluded that Compassion Prison must have a second wing next to this one, perhaps where other prisoners were housed. Or maybe the guards? It was an hour's ride from here to the nearest town, so perhaps all of the guards lived at Compassion. Tyrrell had vague memories of Merrick telling him that the family of Compassion's Keeper lived within the prison.

He managed to bow his neck enough to see that no doors lay on the ground floor through the western wall that they were approaching. Ahead of them on the balcony was a single door; if there were any way from this part of the prison to the adjoining part, other than through the riot doors, it must lie through this door. He felt himself give a wry smile. Already he was planning his escape. Well, that was the favorite pastime of Mercy prisoners, and it would do him no harm to maintain such illusions here, even though he knew, from prison gossip, that no prisoner had ever succeeded in escaping Compassion.

But if he did, and if the town nearby sold sweetweed . . .

This temptation was so unpleasant that he felt relief when they passed the stairwell that Oslo had originally brought him up and reached the door against the wall. Medinger opened it with his free hand and then pushed Tyrrell lightly through, his hand still firm grasping Tyrrell's wrists. Tyrrell caught a quick glimpse of the place where Oslo had handed him over to Medinger: a small anteroom containing a cot, a chair, and a desk, with appropriate writing implements. Two doors lay on the far wall; Medinger opened the right one and pushed Tyrrell through, finally releasing his wrists.

The room was bright with those ever-fascinating electrified lights. Tyrrell blinked a moment, looking around as he took several steps forward. It seemed too much to hope that this was his new cell. That was a real bed over there, neatly covered with a brightly woven wool blanket. It had an actual pillow, an implement that Tyrrell hadn't ever used himself, except on one occasion when he was so sweetweed-bleary after a theft-murder that he had fallen asleep on his victim's bed and had awoken five hours later to find patrol soldiers surrounding him. He had resented being taken from that pillow, he remembered.

There was a sink too, with enamel spigots, and a door nearby that Tyrrell fervently hoped led to a toilet, as he had spent too many years of his life squatting over gutters or trash-holes. There was even fruit in a wicker basket; Tyrrell's mouth watered at the sight. He had tasted fruit four times a year in Mercy and rarer than that in his earlier days. Since winter had only just finished in Mip, Tyrrell supposed that this fuzzy-skinned fruit must have been imported, at great expense, from southern Vovim.

A bookcase lay opposite the sink, which Tyrrell dismissed with initial disinterest until it occurred to him that the books might contain pictures. His mother, perhaps because of her heritage, had been fond of drawings and had torn pictures out of penny magazines in order to tack them onto her walls.

The room even had a rug. No winter-cold floors, ever again.

He heard a tell-tale clink of metal and looked behind him in time to see Medinger lock the door behind them.

He felt his pulse race hard and had to make an effort to remain still. The last thing he wanted was to spend this morning the way he had spent the previous night; Oslo, who been his personal guard for fifteen years, had taken a few last dips into Tyrrell during their trip here. Tyrrell was only surprised that FitzGerald had missed the signs of that departing gift when she did her body search.

He wanted to fight off what was coming, but he could not afford to anger his new guard, not when there remained any hope that he would receive the privilege of being housed in such a luxurious cell. Besides, he told himself sternly, he had the Boundaries to consider.

Medinger, though, took no notice of him. Pocketing the keys, he immediately turned to a doorway to the left of the one they had come through, which Tyrrell had missed seeing as they walked in. The guard passed through this doorway and closed the door behind him.

Tyrrell immediately went over and tested all the doors, which turned out to be locked. Then he eyed the fruit. He was tempted to gobble it down before Medinger returned. But this place might be Medinger's own room, and touching a guard's belongings was a very bad idea, as Tyrrell had learned shortly before he received his first beating at Mercy. Theft was not a career worth continuing at Mercy Prison; the rewards were not high enough to compensate for the penalties of being discovered.

Instead he sat down on the rug, next to the bookcase, and began to inspect the spines of the books. They told him nothing, alas, so he took one of the books out of the case and began flipping through it. Toward the beginning of the book, opposite the title page, he found a plate showing an etching. The etching was of a large, black, cubicle building on a promontory overlooking a cliff. Tyrrell recognized the promontory without any difficulty; he frowned as he tried to make sense of the black building that had apparently existed here before Compassion Prison was built. A previous prison, perhaps? The walls did not appear to possess any windows.

His mind wandered away from the picture, like an unwatched prisoner. He remembered the Vovimian-style dome and the machinery that had surely been supplied by Yclau engineers. He was close to both borders here: the Kingdom of Vovim was to the southwest, while the Queendom of Yclau was to the southeast. He could have guessed that, from the fact so many people at this prison had patronymics.

Like most Mippites, Tyrrell had grown up without a patronym; like most Mippites, he had adopted a second name upon manhood, based on his profession. Tyrrell Cutter, he was dubbed by the boys in his street tribe, a reference to the fact that he was a cutpurse rather than a reference to how he would later end his victims' lives.

Patronymics that were not associated with professions were uncommon among Mippites; folk with patronymics usually had foreign blood or had social pretensions linked to the richer nations neighboring them. FitzGerald was clearly an Yclau immigrant; her pale skin and accent revealed that. Medinger . . . Tyrrell was less sure about him. He was probably of mixed ancestry, like most Mippites whose families had lived here for more than one generation but who came from a family that did not try to disguise its foreign origins. Tyrrell frowned, remembering a guard he had once known who possessed a patronymic but never used it. A sign of foreign blood that he was ashamed of? Tyrrell could not remember. It had been long ago, and the man in question had seemed likely to leave the guards. . . .

A cough startled him into dropping the book onto the rug. He looked up and saw Medinger at the doorway, looming over him. For a moment, Tyrrell sat frozen, visions of a leaded whip slinking painfully through his mind. But Medinger simply jerked his head toward the doorway he had come through. Tyrrell quickly reshelved the volume he had been looking at, rose, and followed the guard's order to walk through the doorway.

The room he entered was an office, the same depth as the room he had just left. It had a cot and chair and desk, as well as a wooden filing cabinet that reached toward the ceiling, and a very uncomfortable-looking high stool opposite the desk. The walls were painted the same dull grey as Tyrrell had seen in the surgery, and there was no rug on this floor. There was no door on the far wall either, Tyrrell noticed.

The items on the desk were arranged in so painfully exact a manner as to suggest that the man who had placed them there was an extremely methodical thinker. He was busy now, writing in a ledger-book in a neat, crisp, almost cramped handwriting. He wore a midnight blue cap with the emblem of the magisterial seats etched upon its metal brim. The brim shadowed his face, though Tyrrell recognized the thin, flat line of the mouth from the two occasions during his life on which he had seen Compassion's Keeper from a distance. It did not appear, from the shape of that mouth, as though this prison's Keeper had acquired any more generosity or humor than he had possessed in those days.

He did not look up immediately as Tyrrell entered. Tyrrell stood in front of the desk, trying to decide what to do with his hands. His Mercy uniform possessed no pockets. Crossing his arms might be regarded as a sign of insolence; placing his hands behind him might be regarded as a sign of weakness. He settled for standing stiffly with his hands by his side, as a pupil might before his schoolmaster. The door he had come through clicked shut behind him, and then he heard the step of Medinger.

The guard coughed softly from immediately behind Tyrrell. "Sir, here is the prisoner," he said in a quiet voice, as though fearing he would cause an eruption if he spoke loudly.

Compassion's Keeper put down his pen then and looked up. His eyebrows matched his mouth in straightness, and his eyes had a touch of coolness to them. Those eyes were dark grey, suggesting that he might have a drop or two of Vovimian blood in him. But the tightness of his movements as he folded one hand over the other on the desk seemed more Yclau in its efficiency than Vovimian, and the directness of his gaze was Mippite through and through.

Tyrrell somehow managed to find his voice. "Tom!" he cried. "When did you become—?"

From behind him, a boot jerked his legs apart and then found its home, with unexpected suddenness, inside Tyrrell's crotch. Tyrrell fell like a sack of grain, clutching his baubles. Above him, Medinger's voice said, "You will address the Keeper as sir."

If he said anything more, Tyrrell didn't hear; he was gasping, moaning, struggling not to sob. He had been booted in the crotch more than once by his guards, but never with so little warning. Biting his lip, he concentrated his effort on relaxing, absorbing the pain, accepting it into his body, feeling it melt into his bones.

A conversation was taking place above him; it ended, and a moment later Tyrrell heard Medinger's footsteps recede. A door clicked open and shut. He didn't open his eyes. Now that the pain was diminishing, he was trying to guess what the man above him would do. If it were the man he thought it was, Tyrrell would be helped to his feet.

The man did not move from behind his desk. Tyrrell had a vision of him calmly scribbling more notes while his prisoner writhed on the floor. Keeping his eyes squeezed shut, Tyrrell tried to think. A twin brother? That seemed the most likely explanation. Or perhaps Tyrrell had simply mistaken the father for his son. Merrick's former guard, Tom, had looked very much like his father, Tyrrell knew.

He heard the screech of a chair drawing back, and then footsteps coming round the desk. Kicks might be next. He drew his legs closer in to protect his privates, though he felt that this was a belated operation.

The footsteps stopped. A voice said quietly, "Stand up, please."

The "please" was reassuring; the command was not. At the very least, Tom would have enquired after his health. Yet, curse it, the man sounded like Tom. A twin brother was beginning to seem more and more likely. A twin brother spawned by the High Master of hell.

He managed to scramble onto his knees and then onto his feet before raising his eyes. The man standing a body's length from him was definitely not the father. This was a much younger man, perhaps five years younger than Tyrrell. His right hand was resting on the dagger that hung sheathed at his belt, and his left hand on a coiled whip hung on the opposite side of his belt. Under his cap, he had dark brown hair, almost black. Probably of Vovimian ancestry, then. Tyrrell would just have to hope that Compassion's Keeper wasn't descended from southern Vovimians. Despite the emancipation laws, it was said that quite a few men in that province still owned slaves.

The Keeper looked at him, gaze straight, for a minute more. Tyrrell dared not look away. Then the Keeper said in a soft voice, "Are you all right, Tyrrell?"

Tyrrell's breath came out in a gasp. He hadn't realized he was holding it. "I was somewhat better before I entered this room," he said as he attempted a wobbly smile.

The Keeper did not smile back. "Medinger was trying to help you."

"How, by smashing in my baubles?" The words slipped out of him. Tom was the sort of guard who had always encouraged honesty.

Compassion's Keeper did not speak for a minute. Tom did look very like his father, especially at moments like this, when he was so solemn. But there was no cruelty in his eyes, and he had always been a guard to think carefully before he spoke.

Finally he said, "That too. I am addressed as sir, or by my title, and Medinger considered it important for you to understand that. But in the main, he helped you by disarming you before you entered here. If you had come into my office with a hidden weapon, I would have had to use the leaded whip."

Tyrrell's smile disappeared. His capacity to stand nearly did as well. He had seen Tom use the leaded whip. It was the only time in his life that he had ever witnessed Merrick go pale – and Merrick had not been the one being beaten. Tyrrell himself had been sick afterwards, and it was not as though he was unused to witnessing floggings. The flogging that Tom had given, however . . . It had been the most ruthless, efficient punishment that Tyrrell had ever been unfortunate enough to watch during his years as a prisoner.

Perhaps not an evil twin then. Perhaps Tom had simply come fully into what he was beginning to be fifteen years before, when he had served for seven weeks at Mercy Prison.

"I'm sorry . . . sir," Tyrrell said in a faint voice.

The word felt strange on his tongue; he had never called anyone sir before. Not his guards over the years, who fortunately had never demanded it. Nor Mercy's Keeper, who seemed vaguely surprised that prisoners were capable of doing anything other than assaulting guards, much less addressing him politely. Tyrrell had certainly not addressed as sir the magistrates who determined his sentence.

But he had seen Tom use the leaded whip. That seemed reason enough to call him whatever he wished.

Tom looked at him a while longer. His silences were beginning to seem ominous. Suddenly he smiled. "I didn't have you brought here for a flogging, Tyrrell. Please, have a seat."

He gestured toward the stool. Tyrrell hesitated, but the smile seemed genuine; it was the easy, friendly smile that Tyrrell remembered from fifteen years ago. Slowly, Tyrrell pulled himself up onto the stool, yelped slightly, and then pulled himself forward so that his abused baubles would hang free. The stool was tall enough that he had to rest his feet on the rungs. Perched on the edge of its seat, he felt like a small bird roosting. Within sight of a carnivorous cat, he added mentally, still trying to reconcile the smile with the threat.

Compassion's Keeper was standing where he had been before, immediately in front of the desk, which placed him two bodies' length from Tyrrell. From this distance he said, "Thomas Keeper. I'm not sure whether we were ever formally introduced."

"Tyrrell, sir, as you know." Tyrrell eyed the other man with curiosity as Compassion's Keeper reached to the side to pick up a ledger with a midnight blue cover, which Tyrrell knew must be his prison record, since Medinger had taken it back from FitzGerald. As far as Tyrrell knew, he had never been formally introduced to Merrick's guard; there weren't many guards who would take the trouble even to informally introduce themselves. It made no difference, though, for if Tom Keeper had introduced himself fifteen years before, it would have been under a different name. It appeared that, upon taking his present post, Merrick's old guard had not only adopted a new title but had adopted a new family name as well. Apparently he was no more fond now than he had been in past years of his patronymic. Which was a good sign, considering that his father had been the previous, brutal Keeper of Compassion Prison.

Tyrrell heard himself say, "May I ask how long you've been Keeper, sir?"

"Six months," Tom Keeper replied, not looking up from Tyrrell's records, which he was slowly leafing through. "Unofficially, that is. The magisterial seats have not yet confirmed my title. My father was officially Keeper until a month ago, but he grew weary of waiting for the magistrates to confirm me, so he retired in an effort to encourage them to make up their minds. He no longer lives in Mip," he added, as though this information was of importance. "He and the rest of my family have moved to Vovim, where my mother has distant relatives. She has wanted to move there for many years, since she is a lover of the arts."

Keeper fell silent, pausing to read a page, and Tyrrell took the opportunity to scrutinize his appearance further. Vovimian on his mother's side . . . The Yclau blood must come from his father's side, then. His accent clearly told that he was well-born. Tyrrell guessed that he must belong to one of the high-born families who had ruled Mip until the nation gained its freedom from Yclau forty-five years before. Most of those families acted as though they still ruled Mip; one could invariably identify members of them by the manner in which they projected a sense of power.

Keeper fairly reeked of that quality. Tyrrell's memories were of a shy young guard who only occasionally provided glimpses of the slicing blade beneath his gentleness. Merrick's guard seemed to have shed his shyness as though it were a cocoon; now the blade was all too apparent, in the manner in which he spoke and in each carefully controlled gesture.

Tyrrell shifted uneasily on his stool, eyeing the whip coiled on the left side of Keeper's belt. It was sleek and black. The infamous black whip of Compassion Prison was said to have a destructive potential that was second only to the leaded whip, which was nothing other than a black whip tied with bits of lead. None of the other guards here that Tyrrell had seen bore a whip. He vaguely remembered hearing that the black whip was so hard to control that it was used only for punishment by guards at Compassion, not as a means of defense.

Which meant, of course, that any guard wearing the black whip must be skilled to a high degree at using it.

Tyrrell passed his hand behind his neck, where sweat was beginning to form. He wasn't telling himself anything he didn't already know, he reminded himself. For the moment, at least, Keeper was showing no inclination to make use of his flogging skill. He was carefully perusing a page of the ledger, the right sleeve of his dark blue uniform making a soft sigh as it brushed over the paper. His right hand paused, and then travelled down to tap a code upon the hilt of his belt-dagger. Tyrrell waited, resisting the urge to wipe off newly formed sweat.

Keeper looked up finally. He had been slender in the old days, and still was, but his face had filled out and taken on the lines of middle age. Only his eyes still held a certain youthfulness. "Well," he said in the same quiet voice as before, "your records are good, as far as life prisoners' records usually go. Some episodes of violence against guards during the first year, when you were recovering from your addiction to sweetweed. After that, nothing more than a few fist-fights with other prisoners. You were flogged on a handful of occasions for theft, and on several other occasions for lying – all minor offenses, dealt with by your personal guards. Your record for the past fifteen years is spotless." He looked down and turned a page. "Until the past month."

Tyrrell waited, feeling something hard grow in his throat. He tried swallowing, which made the ball in his throat throb painfully.

Keeper's hand was still tapping an unknown code on his dagger hilt; his eyes had returned to the ledger. "'Prisoner's record for the third month of the year 400,'" he read aloud. "'Conspiracy to disrupt the peace. Smuggling to persons outside the prison. False witness on a court document. Communication with prisoners on other levels of the prison' – that's a high charge." Keeper took his hand off the dagger hilt only long enough to turn a page. '''Persuasion of guards to disobey orders. Persuasion of fellow prisoners to disrupt the peace. Sentenced to sixty lashes of the leaded whip. Sentence commuted to a transfer to Compassion Life Prison.'" Keeper raised his eyebrows. "That's the first time I've ever heard a transfer to this prison described as a commutation. We'll assume that that particular phrasing was meant as a joke." He clapped the ledger shut with one hand and looked up at Tyrrell, who was thinking that it made no difference that he'd been drenched by rain earlier. His uniform was now soaked as thoroughly from sweat as from the rain.

Keeper placed the ledger back onto the desk and began to walk slowly forward, his hand on his hilt. Without needing the order, Tyrrell rose from the stool and stood stiffly beside it, resisting the impulse to retreat backwards to the wall behind him. He tried to read Keeper's expression but failed, even though the electric lamp above them threw bright light upon the scene.

When Keeper reached Tyrrell, he put his hand out. Tyrrell kept himself utterly still as Keeper ran his hair through his prisoner's rain-soaked hair. Tyrrell wondered whether he was checking for lice. FitzGerald had already done that and had been surprised that he had none, which had told Tyrrell more than he wanted to know about conditions in the prison cells here.

Keeper's hand continued down the back of Tyrrell's head and over his neck hairs. Tyrrell felt his skin prickle. With any other guard, he would know what this was leading to, but this guard—

Keeper grabbed the back of his collar, jerked him round, and shoved him face-first against the wall.

Tyrell's hands, which were still free, went automatically forward to save the rest of his body from being smashed against the cold stones; then he froze. Keeper kicked apart his legs with practiced ease. With his left hand still holding Tyrrell's collar, he reached round the front of Tyrrell. Tyrrell's head was lowered; he saw the dagger in Keeper's hand.

He had to close his eyes then. It wasn't merely fear that made him do so; it was the automatic surge of fight-power into his muscles. If he let that take charge of him, the next thing he knew, he would be trying to punch Keeper. Which would be a disastrous decision, for more than one reason.

Keeper's dagger pricked the front of his shins in a light warning. Tyrrell dragged his feet backwards so that the weight of his body was now against the wall. His arms were cradling his head, but Keeper made no move to change this. Instead, having placed his prisoner in the position he wanted, Keeper sheathed his dagger in a whisper of metal against leather that Tyrrell could have identified in his sleep.

Then he reached for Tyrrell's trouser buttons.

Tyrrell's hands balled into fists; his muscles had taken on a life of their own and were flexed for battle. He forced himself to breathe slowly. Usually he was better prepared, but this was the one thing he had not anticipated would happen in this office. He had been quite sure that Tom Keeper didn't molest his prisoners; Merrick had implied that more than once. But that had been fifteen years ago, he reminded himself. . . .

Keeper had pushed back the flap of Tyrrell's trousers; his hand was now exploring the flap of Tyrrell's drawers. Heat was surging through Tyrrell's body, and the heat had nothing to do with embarrassment or lust. He took another deep breath.

I keep the Boundaries, he reminded himself. I attack no one, even in self-defense. I take no one unwilling—

He realized suddenly that he was whispering the words, and he bit his lip shut. The hand exploring his groin had paused. Opening his eyes, he saw Keeper standing beside him, scrutinizing his face.

There was a breathless moment in which Tyrrell's fists refused to unclench themselves, despite his awareness of the whip at Keeper's belt. Then Keeper took several steps back. He said, in a manner almost conversational, "You'll find your new uniform next to the door."

Tyrrell turned his head to look. There, on a chair next to the door he had entered through, was a neat stack of clothes – grey clothes, he realized with a start. He wondered whether this meant he had risen in rank, in the eyes of his new Keeper.

He pushed himself away from the wall and took a step toward the chair, eager to retreat from the scene that had just occurred, but was halted by the voice of Keeper saying quietly, "You may leave your other clothes on my desk."

His gaze flew to Keeper. The man was giving a very good impression of being interested only in a bright red box with a gold lock, which hung upon the back wall of his office. Tyrrell was not fooled. No guard worth his salt ever let a prisoner out of his sight when that prisoner was in the same room.

Tyrrell was grateful to him for the pretense, though there was no need. Tyrrell had stripped himself many times under a guard's eye, under far worse circumstances than the one he appeared to be in at the moment. He crouched down and unhooked the buttons on his boots – not an easy task, without a button-hook, but Mercy's prisoners weren't permitted boot-laces, lest they try to end their own lives with them.

Nor were they permitted suspenders or belts. Tyrrell undid the old-fashioned trouser-knot where his belt buckle would have been and gave the usual sigh of relief at the loosening of the pressure around his waist. His flap buttons were still undone; his trousers slid off easily.

Next came the buttons on his shirt. Like his trousers, his shirt was striped bright red, a humiliating sign of his status as a second-level prisoner at Mercy. Third-level prisoners wore all-white, while the prisoners on the top three levels were permitted to wear sober grey. Tyrrell had started on the fourth level of Mercy, but he had plunged downwards on the week that his crash began from the sweetweed. Once you were sent down to the second level at Mercy, you remained down, almost always. That had ceased to bother Tyrrell once he had gained Merrick's friendship.

Nothing was left after that except for his half-stockings and drawers. Mercy's prisoners did not wear undervests, and Tyrrell had lost his jacket and vest to a vengeful guard about five years past. It had not been replaced, naturally.

Now, having deposited his clothes on the desk, he went over to his new uniform and fingered it. The cloth of the trousers and shirt and jacket and vest was thick and soft, the cloth of the pure white drawers and undervest and half-stockings even more so. The leather belt shone as though it were new. When he donned the uniform, he found that it fit him. His measurements would be in his prison record, he supposed. He noticed, with some concern, that he had not been given boots. He hoped that did not mean he would be barefoot from this point forth. Mercy was well-heated, but even so, its floors could be frigid in cold weather, as he had learned on the first occasion that a guard had decided to punish him by making him lie naked on the winter floor.

He looked over at Keeper again. The guard was sitting behind his desk now, carefully inspecting Tyrrell's old uniform: pockets, linings, every inch of the cloth. He seemed wholly absorbed in his task.

Tyrrell cleared his throat. Without looking up, Keeper said, "You have a question?"

"Yes, sir. I was wondering . . . What you did before . . ." He faltered.

"You were wondering at the purpose of my inspection?" Keeper looked up finally, though his fingers continued to work their way along the trouser cuff.

Tyrrell nodded.

"Two reasons," said Keeper. "I needed to be sure that you weren't carrying any more weapons; Mr. Medinger is not always as thorough as he could be in his inspections of groins. My second reason . . . I wished to see how much control you had over yourself. You were still engaging in fights with other prisoners during my time as a guard at Mercy."

Tyrrell felt his hands form into fists; he quickly loosened them. He said, in what he hoped was a steady voice, "Did I pass your inspection, sir?"

Keeper suddenly flashed him a smile. "You did better than I would have done under such circumstances. Your self-control is admirable. I hope you managed to teach Merrick—"

He stopped suddenly. His fingers, which had been travelling along the cuff of the trouser, stopped also. As Tyrrell held his breath, Keeper's hand disappeared below the line of the desk; when it re-emerged, Keeper's dagger lay in his hand, unsheathed.

He used it to cut the threads binding the cuff closed. There weren't many threads to cut. Tyrrell knew that, because he had been the one to sew them, borrowing thread and needle from a Boundaries-bound guard, one who trusted him enough not to require to know why he needed such implements.

Now Keeper extracted from the cuff the small piece of paper hidden there and unfolded it on his desk. For half a minute he did not speak, as Tyrrell's heart raced pell-mell. Then he said, "Merrick wrote this."

"Sir?" Oh, this was worse than he had imagined; it hadn't occurred to him that anyone besides himself would be forced to answer for the presence of this paper. But then, Keeper must know he couldn't have written it himself. He should have thought . . .

"I recognize his handwriting. I loaned him some books when I was his guard, as well as paper and pencil, and he scribbled all sorts of notes in the page margins – obscenities, mainly. I still have the books." Keeper folded the paper carefully closed, and then looked up. "Do you mind if I borrow this for a day or two? I'll see that it's returned to you after that time."

Of all the things he had imagined might happen to him at Compassion, this was not one of them. The only thing he could think to say was the truth. "You can keep it, sir. It's for you."

"Me?" For the first time, Keeper looked startled.

Despite himself, Tyrrell felt his face stretch into a grin. "We placed it there for you, sir. We didn't know that you were Compassion's Keeper now, but Merrick said that, if he or I or both of us were transferred here, you'd do your best to see that you were made our guard. And he said you were too skilled a guard not to inspect the clothes of any new prisoner. So we put the paper there, where you would find it."

After a moment, a puff of laughter escaped Keeper; he quickly leaned forward to rest his chin on his hand, so that he could hide his smile. Tyrrell continued to grin.

They had planned this, he and Merrick, back when they had begun to imagine what would happen if their revolution failed. The worst that could be done to them, they had both agreed, was that they would be sent to Compassion Prison. No worse punishment could be given to Mercy's prisoners; the Magisterial Republic of Mip had outlawed the death penalty at the time it gained its independence from Yclau.

Exile to Compassion had been a real possibility, and it had been Merrick who had pointed out that such exile could have its benefits. Tyrrell had been skeptical; Tom had only been Merrick's guard for a short time, so how could Merrick be so sure that he would treat their revolutionary activities with sympathy? Yet Merrick had insisted that the gamble was worth taking.

"Easy enough for you to say," Tyrrell had grumbled at the time. "You've tasted the leaded whip before. This will be my first time, if you're wrong."

Now he felt his muscles relax as he said, "You must have seen these before, sir."

"Oh, yes. Mercy's Keeper sent a copy of them to all the life prisons fifteen years ago, as a warning to the rest of us of the sort of seditious activities that might arise amongst our prisoners. He obviously knew little about Compassion, or he wouldn't have bothered to send a copy here. So I've seen the words before . . . but it's a very different thing to receive them from the men who actually constructed the Boundaries of Behavior."

Feeling bold now, Tyrrell said, "Merrick told me that you were the one who created them."

"Did he?" Keeper unfolded the paper again and glanced at what lay there. "Some of what he and I discussed may have served as inspiration, perhaps. But the concreteness of the rules, the high-spirited manner in which they are worded . . . No, the world owes that to you and Merrick. Thank you for honoring me with this."

Tyrrell could not think of what to reply. He silently pulled his jacket closed, fumbling with the buttons; after twenty years, he still was not comfortable with using buttons, rather than the ribbons that had bound closed the shirts and trousers of his childhood and youth. The life prisons, though, preferred buttons to ribbons that might be torn off, tied together, and used to allow a prisoner to escape. Tyrrell had never bothered to point out to the guards that a prisoner who swallowed a handful of buttons was just as likely to die as a prisoner who hanged himself.

He winced as he thought of the early days, soon after he emerged from the shock of his crashing, when he had considered killing himself. The nightly rapes, the arbitrary punishments . . . Sometimes he wondered how he had made it through those years with his sanity intact.

Not that much had changed after he and Merrick had allied themselves to spread word of the Boundaries of Behavior. Life had improved for the prisoners of any guards who chose to adhere to the Boundaries, but Mercy's Keeper, in an act of petty revenge, had permanently assigned Oslo to guard Tyrrell. Tyrrell had spent many a night on his hands and knees, wondering why his mother had been so insistent that self-slaying went against the gods' will. As far as he could tell from his memory of the sacred dramas, the gods had never had anything to say on this topic.

Perhaps his mother had simply been trying to prevent him from following in his father's footsteps.

It had been the thought of his father – of how that mood-driven man had allowed poverty to conquer his will to live and had left his wife and son and infant daughter bereft of money and hope – that had prevented Tyrrell from taking the same path. With gritted teeth, he had endured Oslo's nightly plowings – sometimes thrice-nightly plowings – and had vowed to continue to help the other prisoners, having failed to find a way, as a young boy, to help his mother and sister.

And now it would all begin again. Clenching his teeth as he pulled on the last of his clothes, Tyrrell felt his jaw ache. Whether or not he could find a way to help Compassion's prisoners, he would not allow himself to undergo what he had undergone with Oslo. He would kill his guard first . . . and any prisoner who tried to take him.

At this thought – not at all in keeping with the image of peace that he tried to project as a Boundaries-bound prisoner – he jerked with guilt. Looking over at Compassion's Keeper, he found that Keeper's eye was on him. He jerked again, this time in fear. Tom Keeper was much too gifted at reading prisoners' thoughts.

Whatever Keeper might have read in Tyrrell's expression, all that he said was, "You may keep your current boots. We're short of supplies at the moment."

"Budget cuts, sir?" Tyrrell replied automatically as he sat on the floor and slipped on his old boots. He had trained himself to respond sympathetically to the endless whinings of Mercy's Keeper.

"Our budget was never high to begin with. Most of it goes to food, and the cost of feeding the prisoners has risen in recent years . . . though not as much as it should." Keeper frowned.

Tyrrell paused while buttoning his boots. "What do you mean, sir?"

Keeper scrutinized him, his expression shaded. Not liking to meet that gaze in a way that might be interpreted as defiance, Tyrrell took the opportunity to glance around the room again. No door here through the western wall, no door through that wall in the adjoining room. . . . Even if the guards' sleeping quarters lay west, in an adjoining wing, the mighty doors he had entered through appeared to be the only exit from this part of the prison. He had heard long ago of Compassion's infamous riot doors, built after the Riot of 385 had resulted in the deaths of nearly every guard at Compassion. The prisoners had paid the price for that riot, but Tyrrell had heard that Keeper's father, unwilling to trust that the lesson would stick, had proposed the creation of new riot doors. They certainly seemed a formidable barrier.

For every door, though, there is a key. Tyrrell glanced again at the red box on the wall, with its gold lock and hinged panel. The box could simply be a wire-hatch, of course – a hatch holding electricity wires that could be spliced by repairmen. On the other hand, it bore a strong resemblance to the hatch that had held the lever that opened the riot doors from the outside. It would make sense that the lever's interior counterpart would be placed in the office of Compassion's Keeper.

Tyrrell imagined himself trying to get past Keeper's whip to pull down the lever, and he shook his head ruefully. He returned his attention to Tom Keeper.

If the man in primary charge of prison security was concerned by Tyrrell's wandering gaze, he said nothing. Instead, he rose from behind his desk and gestured. Tyrrell hastily finished hooking the boot-buttons and came over to join him, halting an arm's length from Keeper.

Keeper gestured again. He had half-turned to pull over the ledger-book that he had been writing upon when Tyrrell arrived. Tyrrell, coming reluctantly within arm's reach of the guard, looked down and saw a list of numbers.

"You can read numbers?" Keeper asked, glancing at him.

"Yes, sir." His mother had been able to teach him that much before she died.

Keeper pointed to the top of the list of numbers. "What happened before my appointment as Keeper I'm not certain of; the records from my father's period as Keeper are missing." He was successful in keeping any note of irony out of his voice as he spoke. "However, when I became Keeper, I made an estimate of the number of prisoners, based on how many barrels of waste product were produced daily by the prisoners."

Tyrrell felt a moment of pity for whichever guard had been assigned the task of collecting the evidence. It seemed an odd way to conduct a census. If Compassion's records were in such disarray that its new Keeper did not know off the top of his head how many men the prison housed, why had he not simply counted the prisoners? At Mercy, each prisoner was counted when he arrived at his workplace within the prison and when he emerged at the end of the shift; the numbers had to match, or the guards would be immediately sent on a search for the missing prisoner.

"This is the number I estimated," Keeper reported, his finger still on the number at the top of the list. "I may be off by a few dozens . . ." Tyrrell blinked as Keeper concluded, ". . . but the number is accurate within a hundred prisoners, I believe. This" – his finger moved down to the next number – "is the number of prisoners who have been admitted into Compassion since my arrival."

Tyrrell blinked again. "You must have a large amount of space for housing prisoners, sir."

"Not as large as the other Keepers like to think." This time Tom Keeper did not succeed in keeping irony out of his voice. "We receive the leavings from the other life prisons; whenever another prison can't cope with a prisoner, they send him to us. Mind you, their estimates of a prisoner's recalcitrance are often in error," he added with a glance at Tyrrell.

Tyrrell grinned. "No need to be tactful, sir. My mother often said I was so stubborn that I could give lessons to mules."

Keeper gave a soft laugh. "My father has made similar remarks about me over the years. Stubbornness is not, in itself, a bad quality; it is simply a matter of using that stubbornness in the proper manner. But I digress." He turned his attention back to the ledger-book as his finger drifted down to the third row of numerals. "This is the number of prisoners whose bodies have ended up in our crematorium since I became Keeper."

Tyrrell scrutinized this number carefully but could see nothing wrong with it. It was high, by the standards of mid-class life and elite life, but not high by the standards Tyrrell had grown up with. Disease and wounds took their toll in the life prisons, as they did on the streets of Mip's capital. At least the life prisoners, unlike Mip's poor, could depend on being provided with adequate amounts of food, clothing, and shelter.

Tyrrell straightened up from staring at the book. "And the number below it, sir?"

"A second census, conducted by me a fortnight ago; again, I used waste products to make my estimate, so even if my exact figures are wrong, the proportions between this number and first one should be correct."

Tyrrell frowned as he bent forward again. Even without Keeper's total number carefully noted on the bottom, he could tell that the three numbers did not match up. If the figures were right, far fewer prisoners lived in Compassion than could be accounted for by the number of deaths that had occurred in the past six months. Tyrrell pointed at the page. "Sir, if your estimates for the number of living prisoners is wrong . . ."

"Then that could account for the missing prisoners. Yes. I hope that is the explanation."

Keeper's expression had grown bleak. He stared down at the ledger-book, lightly brushing with his finger the figure for the number of deaths.

Tyrrell looked at that figure again, then at Keeper. "You think the number of deaths is higher than that?"

"I fear so." Keeper's voice was quiet. "Tyrrell, you know, I am sure, that Compassion has a reputation for prisoner-to-prisoner violence."

There seemed no adequate response Tyrrell could make to this observation. "Yes, sir."

"That reputation is well earned. When I briefly took charge of the prisoners fifteen years ago, at the time that this prison was being renovated following the riots, the prisoners were little more than savages. They preyed on each other, the strong assaulting the weak. Some of the higher-minded prisoners, I will admit, protected their favorite prisoners – but those favorites paid the price of protection by becoming slaves to the men who protected them."

Tyrrell decided that he would not make a very good impression on Compassion's Keeper if he retched the contents of his stomach onto Keeper's desk. "And now, sir?"

"That is the question I want an answer to. How many prisoners are dying at the hands of other prisoners? Have the surviving prisoners been destroying the dead prisoners' corpses in an effort to cover up how many murders take place in Compassion Prison? The watch-guards have reported seeing smoke rise from within Compassion, and they say that the smoke sometimes smells like burnt meat. Although the prisoners are not permitted matches or old-fashioned flint-boxes, they may be finding another way to burn the corpses. Healer FitzGerald is dubious of this idea; she has charge over our crematorium here, and she says that burning bodies to cinders is not as easy as one might think. Yet the possibility continues to prey at my mind."

Keeper's voice was soft and strained now. For a brief moment, Tyrrell thought he glimpsed the shy youth that the guard had once been. Then Keeper turned his eyes toward Tyrrell – steady and hard as the riot doors – and the illusion was mangled.

Tyrrell found his tongue finally. "Sir," he said, "there is much here that I don't understand. If you're not sure of how many prisoners there are, why don't you simply count each one in his cell?"

"We have only one day-cell here, Tyrrell."

Tyrrell winced. He had hoped that this particular rumor about Compassion would prove to be wrong. "I don't suppose that it's easy to count prisoners from outside the cell, if they're all crammed together. Even so, you could count them when they emerge to go to their workplaces—"

"They are not assigned work tasks. It has always been the tradition at Compassion to hire laborers to do what work is needed to keep this prison running. Indeed, food preparation is considered so important a task that it is handled by the guards."

Tyrrell tried to decide whether this was good news or bad. He had countless burn marks on his hands from his years spent sweating away at hard tasks in Mercy's laundering room . . . but if he had spent those hours idle in his cell, he might have gone mad long ago. And he did not like to think what amusements Compassion's prisoners might choose to fill their idle hours.

He set aside the question as less vital than the ones that were tickling his mind. "But sir, whenever your guards enter the cell, they could count the prisoners. And the watch-guard could investigate the source of the fire, whenever it occurs."

"That is forbidden. Prison regulations, as set down by my father after the renovation of Compassion, do not permit guards to enter Compassion Prison, except under carefully defined circumstances, for brief periods. Because my appointment has not yet been confirmed, I do not yet have the power to change those regulations."

Tyrrell stared at Keeper. "You mean that the guards are never allowed to enter the prisoners' cell?"

"I mean that they are not allowed to enter Compassion Prison."

In the long silence that followed, Tyrrell could hear the muffled sound of someone moving around the anteroom between Keeper's office and the balcony. Medinger, he supposed; that must be where that guard did his own work.

Finally Tyrrell said, "I thought that this was Compassion Prison, sir."

Keeper shook his head as he closed the ledger-book and pushed it back to its previous location. "These are only the outbuildings of the prison. Originally, they were used as places for storage of prison goods, while the guards and laborers of the prison lived on the second and third floors of the prison. Their work quarters were next to the prisoners' cells, on the first storey of Compassion. At the time of this prison's renovation, though, the courtyard of the outbuildings was roofed over, and the guards' work quarters were moved here, to prevent the guards from having intimate contact with the prisoners. A new wing, just to the west of this one, provides living quarters for the guards and the laborers, as well the mechanics that are now needed to keep Compassion's machinery running. The motive that my father put forth to the magisterial seats for removing the guards from within the prison was that it would keep the guards from misusing their power over the prisoners. But of course the main motive was to prevent the prisoners from having access to the guards, lest a repeat occur of the Riot of 385."

"Then where—?" He halted abruptly, seeing in his mind's eye the black stone building in the etching, next to the sea.

Keeper said nothing; he simply took Tyrrell by the elbow, steering him through the main office door, past Medinger at his desk in the anteroom, and through the door to the balcony. When they reached the balcony railing, he released Tyrrell and pointed.

Tyrrell already had his eyes turned that way. The three-storey black wall he had seen before could now be seen clearly as a cube-shaped building, scarcely smaller than the outbuildings that surrounded it. It looked as though it could house a small army.

"There," said Tom Keeper. "That is Compassion Life Prison."
 

CHAPTER FOUR

Tyrrell leaned his forearms against the balcony railing. From this vantage point, at the northwest corner of the square of outbuildings, he could not see whether the prison lay flush with the east and south walls of the outbuildings. Probably not, if the outbuildings had been built to surround it. So two barriers now lay between the prisoners and freedom: the prison walls and the walls of the outbuildings. And the walls of the outbuildings could only be penetrated, it appeared, through a lever in the office of Compassion's Keeper.

Tom Keeper's father had been fiendishly clever in directing the reconstruction of the prison, Tyrrell had to admit. Still, so had many of the men who had created the thief alarms that Tyrrell had disabled during his years of work. Tyrrell put his professional mind to the problem. The lever was too far away from the riot doors to directly activate a system of gears; most likely it was activating an electrical line that ran to the gears. Tyrrell had encountered a few of those during his year as a thief; electric alarms had recently become fashionable in the richer houses of Mip's capital. They were childishly simple to disable. All that you had to do was find the electrical hatch – which was always placed outside the houses, for reasons known only to the gods – and then identify which switch turned the alarm line on and off. That had taken Tyrrell some work at the beginning. You couldn't just flip any switch, because you might end up turning off the house's lights at the very moment that the householder had risen from bed to use his water-closet. But alarms usually had a line of their own, and the city's alarm manufacturer – blessed be his name – used the same color coding each time for this line. Once Tyrrell had figured this out, it had taken him only seconds to disable any alarm he encountered.

So he needed to find the electrical hatch. If the hatch was in the entryway or in the adjoining wing, then his luck was out. But it would make more sense to place such a hatch in the outbuildings, in case any problems arose with the lever that needed to be corrected by the guards.

He thought of the hatch in the healer's office.

His mind had skittered away from the subject at hand; he only returned to the present when Keeper said, "We guards can see into the prison through its barred gate, but not far. Essentially, the prisoners have been in charge of Compassion Prison since the time of the renovation. We feed them, and we remove waste products; we give them other vital supplies, such as medicine. We keep them clothed and warm, and we supply them with water. Other than that, what happens in the prison is determined by the prisoners."

Tyrrell turned his gaze toward Keeper. The guard had his vision focussed upon the prison; he was making no effort to watch Tyrrell to see whether he would escape. Even without the riot doors in place, Tyrrell guessed he would not get far if he tried to run – not with Keeper's hand lightly stroking the curled whip at his belt. "That was part of your father's plan, sir?"

Keeper nodded without moving his gaze from the prison. "When I was young, I and my sisters used to act out the sacred dramas of Vovim that our mother read to us. My father came across us one day when I was play-acting that I was hell's High Master. I was telling my sisters – who were playing quailing prisoners – how the most terrible punishments of hell occurred in hell's holding cell, where prisoners were permitted to prey upon fellow prisoners.

"I don't think my father ever forgot that speech. To a certain extent, he was merely following long-standing tradition at Compassion. Prisoners were granted separate sleeping cells before the renovation, and the renovation did not change that. But in the daytime, for many centuries, prisoners were placed in a single living cell, so that they could be easily watched by a skeleton crew of guards. The guards made little effort to interfere with the prisoners' activities. Now we have no way to interfere if we want to – we are not permitted to set foot in Compassion."

Tyrrell fingered the smooth metal railing for a moment, saying nothing. The cool of the early morning had disappeared; now the air was growing warmer – warm enough to make Tyrrell sweat. If this was what it was like in springtime, he hated to think what summer would be like in this windowless place, when he was stuffed into a single cell with many other prisoners. The heat must be unbearable.

And yet Tom Keeper spoke as though he were a prisoner, because he was unable to enter Compassion whenever he wished. Tyrrell felt a momentary stab of annoyance, followed by pity. Even the best guards, he had found, were unable to truly understand what life was like as a prisoner. They did their best; the ones with empathy could understand a great deal. But none of them could fully understand what it was like to have your each and every action determined by forces beyond your control. They thought they understood, which was why Tyrrell felt pity for them. The well-meaning fools of the world should always be pitied, his mother had taught him.

Keeper, though, was a keener-minded fool than most guards, so Tyrrell ventured to say, "That must make life difficult for many of the prisoners, sir – not having access to the guards when they need them."

"Life is harsh for many of the lads there, yes."

Tyrrell frowned, glancing back at the black walls of the prison. "Are juveniles permitted in the prison, then?" It seemed unlikely; Mip had long ago established separate juvenile prisons to protect its weakest prisoners. And Tyrrell had never heard of a juvenile being sentenced to life imprisonment.

"Not for many centuries," Keeper replied. He had left off fingering his whip and was now drumming his fingers on the railing, the only indication he offered that this conversation was causing tension in him. "Many of Compassion's customs developed during that early period, though, when this prison was under Vovimian control. Tyrrell, do you know of the Vovimian custom of men and lads?"

"I may have heard of it," he replied cautiously. His reply was an automatic one that he had developed toward any probing to see how knowledgeable he was in Vovimian ways. His coffee-brown skin told too clearly where his ancestry lay; though nearly every Mippite citizen had a blend of Vovimian and Yclau blood, scorn still abounded by Mippites toward the descendants of southern Vovim, the most backwards of Vovim's provinces. After having explained countless times in his boyhood that the southern Vovimians held a position of high power in their native kingdom, Tyrrell had finally surrendered to necessity and had fallen back on faking innocent ignorance in response to any question posed to him about Vovimian ways.

In actuality, there was no question as to whether he had heard of the custom of men and lads; his mother had talked of it almost nightly after her husband's death, urging Tyrrell to find a good man to care for him when he was old enough. She had died long before Tyrrell was old enough to be of interest to any but the most unscrupulous Vovimian-born men, and by the time he entered into his youth, he was cared for by his street tribe and had no need to offer his body to any man in exchange for that man's protection.

He could see, though, why such a custom would find a place in a life prison. "Is that what you meant, sir, when you said earlier that some of the prisoners here are enslaved by other prisoners?"

Keeper was slow in responding. He had not turned his eyes toward Tyrrell since they reached the balcony. "I simplified matters when I said that. It is hard to explain the custom of men and lads to people who are unfamiliar with it, especially since that custom has come close to dying out in Vovim. My mother's brother was a man's lad when he was young; that's the only reason I knew of the custom before my father became a guard here at Compassion. To be a man's lad is . . ." He hesitated.

Tyrrell decided to save him from further quandary over how to explain matters. "It's different for each man and lad, I've heard. It can be anything from outright rape to a willing offer of service."

"Yes." Keeper drummed his fingers on the railing for another minute before adding, "The same variety occurs in Compassion, except that, here, being a lad has nothing to do with age. We no longer take juvenile prisoners, and some of the so-called lads here are older than the men they serve. Yet the basic custom – one prisoner offering his service to another in exchange for the other prisoner's protection – has survived. Some of Compassion's men take their responsibilities seriously, seeking to nurture and strengthen their lads. Others simply use their lads' labor, heedless to the lads' welfare."

"And some simply rape their lads?" Tyrrell said. He did not like the direction this conversation was taking; images of Oslo were beginning to crowd into his mind. Oslo sometimes talked in that manner, as though his rapes were a way to protect Tyrrell.

Again Keeper was slow in responding. "Yes and no. The structure of life in Compassion is so complex that I'm not sure I've ever fully grasped it. I've tried to have one of the prisoners explain it to me in the past, but I felt like a rustic farmer trying to figure out, from descriptions by a city resident, what these new-fangled objects called sky-scrapers are. But the problem here is that the customs at Compassion are very old, and I grew up in the modern world. To a certain extent, I understand the customs, since I lived in Compassion Prison when I was a boy; my father was privileged with family quarters there after he became Keeper, and I later served within the prison as a guard until the Riot of 385. But after all these years, much about Compassion is still a mystery to me."

Tyrrell thought to himself that he had never heard a guard give such a brave speech. Every guard he had met was ignorant of prisoners' conditions, but few would admit this to themselves, and none that he knew of would admit their ignorance in so frank a manner to a prisoner. "Perhaps, sir, you could enlighten yourself further by talking more to that prisoner. Even rustic farmers can grasp the nature of sky-scrapers if the speaker is skilled enough."

Again, Keeper was slow in responding. Under the cloud-cast sky beyond the dome, his expression was difficult to read. His fingers had stopped drumming, though. Finally he said, "That prisoner proved not to be a reliable source of information, in many respects. In any case, he is no longer willing to supply me with the information I need."

"Well," said Tyrrell, "with the prison as large as it is, I suppose that you need only choose another prisoner to help you."

Keeper said nothing, but now, for the first time, he turned his eyes toward Tyrrell. He waited.

This time it was Tyrrell's turn to be silent. Avoiding Keeper's eye, he looked down at the floor below. It was made of wood, a striking contrast to the stone floors of Mercy Prison. New-come prisoners to Mercy sometimes thought that they need only pry up flagstones to burrow their way out of their cells, but they soon found that nothing lay below the flagstones but steel bars holding up the prison, and a thin plaster. More than one newcomer had fallen through that plaster, only to discover himself in the cell on the level below him. He had acquired nothing for his pains except bruises and perhaps a set of broken legs. None of the cells at Mercy were placed at ground level; even the first-level punishment cells were in the basement, with locked storage rooms above them.

But here at Compassion, where prisoners could evidently wander where they wished within the prison . . .

"Why me?" Tyrrell asked to cover his actual thoughts.

"Merrick trusts you."

It was an answer of sorts, though Tyrrell wondered how Keeper knew of Merrick's skill at identifying which prisoners and guards could be trusted. Certainly Merrick had shown no signs of that skill at the time that Tom Keeper had served as his guard; in those days, Merrick had been an acid-mouthed loner, inclined to make poisonous remarks that tested everyone's patience with him.

Then Tom Keeper had practiced with him the Boundaries of Behavior, and Merrick had become a very different man. Tyrrell supposed that news about Merrick's change in character must have been travelling around the life prisons for these past fifteen years.

He looked down at the ground again. From where he stood, a storey up, he could see that the floor was riddled with holes, as though a very large termite had been at work with it. Staring at the pattern of the holes – which formed lines criss-crossing each other – Tyrrell wondered whether armed guards who were visiting from the holding prisons had been using the floor for target practice.

He felt very much as though he had just been selected as the object for such practice. There was a word for what Keeper wanted him to do, and it was not a pleasant one.

This time, Keeper appeared to sense his thoughts, for he said softly, "I'm not asking you to be a stool-pigeon. If any prisoners are making plans to escape or otherwise to subvert matters within the prison, you needn't tell me that. All I need to know is how badly matters are going for the more vulnerable prisoners within Comapssion. I was under the impression," he added slowly, "that you were in the habit of supplying such information."

Tyrrell turned this thought over in his mind. It was true that, for the past fifteen years, much of the work that he and Merrick had undertaken was to alert Mercy's Keeper to abuses taking place within his prison. It was never a matter of trying to convince that man that such abuses took place; rather, their struggle had been to convince Mercy's Keeper to get out of his lounging chair and stop the abuses. Mercy's Keeper was not so much a cruel man as an exceedingly lazy one; it took a great deal of work on the part of Merrick and Tyrrell to persuade him to pick up his pen to sign an order.

Tom Keeper, on the other hand . . . There was no doubt in Tyrrell's mind that Keeper would act to stop abuse if he knew of it. This time, though, Tyrrell would not be reporting on abusive guards but on abusive prisoners. And whatever Keeper might wish to call this, Tyrrell's fellow prisoners were likely to put an ugly name to such an act.

"I realize that I am asking a great deal of you." Keeper's voice was still soft. "I've reached the point of desperation, though. Every few days, smoke rises from within the prison. There may be murders within there weekly, twice weekly, thrice weekly. . . . Merrick warned me long ago that I could do no good for the prisoners if I broke prison regulations; that would simply result in my dismissal as a guard. So I cannot break the regulation forbidding me from entering Compassion Prison – not while there remains a chance that I will be confirmed as Keeper and be given the power to put an end to that regulation. Yet in the meantime, the murders continue. I must find a way to put a stop to the killings and to any other needless suffering that the lads are undergoing."

Keeper's fingers had not returned to drumming; instead his hands were in fists. His blood tendons stood out in his neck; his jaw was set. There was an icy quality to his eyes that made Tyrrell's stomach clench, even though he knew that he was not the object of Keeper's anger.

He had seen brief shards of that anger a few times in the past, when Tom Keeper witnessed cruelty by his fellow guards. It was not a matter of prisoner versus guard, Tyrrell realized suddenly; Keeper did not care whether a man who committed abuse wore the uniform of a prisoner or of a guard. He would be just as inclined to give the leaded whip to any guard who practiced cruelty as he would to any prisoner.

"Sir," Tyrrell heard himself say, "I don't know whether the customs among Compassion's prisoners will permit this, but if I can be of service to you, I will try to help."

The anger died in Keeper's eyes, replaced by something else that Tyrrell could not identify. Keeper searched Tyrrell's face, and then said, in a voice as emotionless as a corpse, "You will have time to consider this matter at length. I wouldn't ask you to provide service to me immediately."

Tyrrell nodded. He was already regretting his impetuous offer. If guards never entered Compassion Prison, and if prisoners never left the prison, then how was he to provide Tom Keeper with the information he wanted, without this offering of information being witnessed by a dozen prisoners who would probably beat him bloody for consorting with the enemy? For in any prison, guards were considered the enemy of prisoners. It had taken Tyrrell and Merrick more work than he liked to think of to convince Mercy's prisoners that guards could sometimes be their allies.

Well, if Keeper wanted service from Tyrrell, he needed to learn that Tyrrell did not offer service without requiring due payment. What Tyrrell wanted right now was information, and Keeper might be able to supply such information.

"Sir," he said carefully, "do the prisoners enter into tribes? And if so, how do I qualify to become a member of a tribe?"

He did not ask how he would qualify to become a "man." In any tribe that divided its members into first-class citizens and second-class citizens, Tyrrell was certain to be named a second-class citizen. Whichever god or goddess had decided that he would be born of small stature had determined that. Tyrrell had picked his own street tribe with care; it was one of the few tribes in Mip's capital that did not rank its members. Once he had qualified for the tribe, he was potentially the equal of any other boy there, though in his early years he had been one of the "young 'uns" who had to be taught the ropes.

Keeper frowned, and for a moment, Tyrrell feared that he had gone too far in questioning the guard. But it appeared that Keeper's frown was merely at his own ignorance, for he said, "I'm not sure. The prisoner who provided me with information spoke of his 'tribe' within Compassion, but he may merely have been using terminology with which he was familiar. What I do know – for this happens at the prison gate, where guards can witness it – is that you will be offered a trial when you first arrive."

"A trial?" Tyrrell's heart pulsed; the word was too close to the one he knew to prevent hope.

"You will be asked, in some manner or another, whether you are a man or a lad. If you state that you are a man, you will be given the opportunity to prove that you have the ability to protect a lad. I fear," he added somewhat apologetically, "that the trial is a physical one."

Tyrrell smiled. He might or might not be able to pass a physical test – some tribes required weight-lifting or other trials that Tyrrell was bound to fail at – but at least it was a chance. He would not be automatically ranked; he would be given a chance to prove himself.

Correctly reading his smile, Keeper said, "You prefer, then, to take on the responsibilities of a man?"

There was a note to his voice that Tyrrell could not quite read, so Tyrrell picked his way carefully to an answer. "I imagine I'd be happy enough to be lad to the right man. But you know, sir, what little choice lads usually have in such matters. I'd rather be a man than be forced to serve a man who misused me."

After a moment, Keeper nodded. "You will have time to make your decision about this as well. Rank is not immutable in Compassion, I am told, and it holds complexities beyond which I've described . . . but it would be better to have you see for yourself, for I'm sure I would give a muddled description of such matters, knowing them only second-hand. Shall we go?"

His light invitation caused Tyrrell's throat walls to collapse, like a cave-in. Trying to swallow, Tyrrell swung his eyes toward a passageway on the ground floor, to the left of him, which he knew led back to the riot doors. This might be his last chance . . .

But Keeper was standing next to him, and Tom Keeper's "requests" were not to be trifled with. Tyrrell tried again to swallow and found that his mouth had grown dry. He could not seem to push himself away from the railing.

Quite low, Keeper said, "The last Boundary of Behavior states, 'I am willing to suffer for the sake of the prisoners.'"

Yes, it did. Merrick had added that Boundary; he had said that he had read the line somewhere. It was the Boundary that Boundaries-bound prisoners and guards were most inclined to ignore, but it was – Merrick had insisted one day when he was in so much pain from a beating that his tongue seemed to have taken on a life of its own – the foundation for all the other Boundaries.

Tyrrell said nothing, and Keeper added, as though coaxing a nervous horse into its stall, "Tyrrell, I'm not merely sending you in there to gain information for me. If you decide that you don't wish to serve me, that will be your privilege. But I know that Merrick would not have paired himself with anyone less gifted than himself, and I've heard the reports emerging from Mercy Prison – both the official ones and the unofficial ones. If any prisoner has the ability to bring an end to the abuse at Compassion, it's you."

Tyrrell ran his hand over the stubble on his cheek, wondering when – if ever – he would have another opportunity to be shaved. "I've just spent fifteen years trying to do that at Mercy, and now you want me to start over from the beginning?"

Keeper raised his right eyebrow. "Whether or not I did, you would, wouldn't you?"

He thought about this, and thought too about all the plans that had been running through his mind for escape – mind games, he now recognized, to keep himself from acknowledging what he was most likely to do in Compassion Prison. Finally he said, "It depends. If I do, will Compassion's Keeper throw me into a punishment cell?"

Tom Keeper laughed then – an outright laugh unlike his previous soft smotherings. "Come," he said, steering Tyrrell away from the balcony. "Let's get you settled in your new home."
 

CHAPTER FIVE

The prison was still night-quiet as they approached it from the balcony. Tyrrell, who usually began each day by awakening to the sound of prisoners moaning in pain – or awakening from his own guard eliciting such pain – wondered whether the abusive prisoners here were more merciful or whether they simply gagged their victims. Or perhaps, he thought, eyeing again the black wall of the prison, no sounds emerged from Compassion.

They passed the same doorways that he and Medinger had passed before: the coding-room, the store-rooms, the healer's surgery with its plate-glass window. Medinger stood in the latter room, having somehow made his way past Tyrrell and Keeper during their discussion; he was in the midst of conversation with FitzGerald, and paused only to tip his cap at Tom Keeper.

Keeper tipped his cap back. He had not touched Tyrrell during the long trip along the balcony, nor had he spoken, a fact for which Tyrrell was grateful. His stomach was roiling, anticipating both the trial and what lay beyond his success or failure.

He wished now that he had quizzed Keeper on what sort of physical test he would undergo, but there was no time left; they were approaching the east wall of the outbuildings. Dimly, Tyrrell could hear conversation and laughter coming from somewhere on the ground level, but the source of the light chatter was hidden to him.

They approached a waist-high gate barring their way from the end of the balcony. Beyond it, the balcony curved in a semi-circle, jutting out from the north wall. Just beyond the gate, to the right, was a staircase leading down to the ground floor. From where he stood, Tyrrell could see that a second staircase lay on the far end of the balcony, where the balcony met the east wall. Altogether, the semi-circular balcony and its flanking staircases looked like a rock crab, with its foremost claws curled round the front of its body.

In between, in the area that jutted out, was a gunners' post, similar to the one he had seen in the entry hall. Here, though, the guns stood fixed upon tripods, untouched by human hands. The tripods were attached to a thick, curving, waist-high wall which replaced the open balcony railing that had hitherto been the only barrier between the balcony and what lay beyond. Sitting behind the wall, absorbed in a book, sat the second rifleman that Tyrrell had seen upon his arrival.

He was still smoking his cigarette, letting the ashes fall in an absent-minded manner to the floor. He was leaning back in his chair, and his feet were resting upon a box that lay next to the wall holding the guns. The rifle he had carried before was propped against the wall, pointing upwards.

Keeper, having escorted Tyrrell silently through the gate, gestured to him to pause. Tyrrell did so, watching with interest as Keeper walked up behind the other guard. The guard showed no sign that he was aware of Keeper's presence.

"Feet off the ammunition boxes, Mr. Starke."

The guard jerked round at the sound of Keeper's voice. "What?"

"Feet off the boxes. Put away the book. Extinguish your cigarette. Place your rifle in the proper position. Put on your cap. Sit up straight. Have you carried out your morning check of your gun yet?"

"Not yet, Keeper." Starke was moving almost as quickly as he was given orders. Tyrrell caught a passing glimpse of the black volume as the guard shoved it on top of the box that his feet had just vacated. "I thought, since the day watch hasn't begun yet—"

"Your watch begins the minute you walk through the riot doors. A quarter day's pay for neglecting your morning check. Another quarter day's pay for smoking on duty. And yet another quarter day's pay for not staying on the alert. If I'd been a prisoner, you'd be dead now."

"The prisoners are locked in for the night," Starke responded, gesturing with his chin as he lay his loose rifle onto a set of boxes next to his chair.

As he gestured, Tyrrell noticed for the first time what the gunners' post looked down upon. The mighty chains he had seen earlier in the day extended upwards from a great shield-wall, one that hid the portion of the prison wall that was closest to the gunners' post. The shield, which was the same height as the balcony, looked as thick and massive as the riot doors.

"A prisoner is standing a short distance from you," Keeper replied, "one who was committed to prison for cutting throats. Never assume that all the prisoners are locked within Compassion, Mr. Starke. On the day you make such an assumption, it's likely you'll die."

Starke said nothing. He picked up the loose rifle, pulled down the stock, and peered into the chamber. Curious, Tyrrell took a few steps over to get a better look at the second of the two rifles that were resting on the wall. He had never seen guns on tripods before, though they reminded him vaguely of the pictures he had seen of the great wheeled cannons that had been commonly used in the Vovimian civil war during his childhood. He supposed the principle was the same: that it was easier to control the gun if it was settled in place rather than being held by a man.

He stared down. He could not see any sign that the rifles on the tripods were different from the rifle in Starke's hand, but he was no expert in such matters. The boys in his tribe had never carried guns – indeed, they had been contemptuous of the Gutterway tribe, who dealt a black market in firearms, and who were not averse to using such weapons against rival tribes. Even as a child, Tyrrell had been able to guess that his tribe's contempt was largely a cover for fear of their deadly rivals. Knives were no match for a gun.

He had seen a few more guns since that time, in the holding prison he was kept at between his trials. Firearms were rare in Mip, however. The Yclau, having come to understand the error of selling weapons to their enemy Vovim, now refused to sell weapons to their ally Mip. The Mippites had neither the knowledge nor the technology to produce their own guns, so what few firearms trickled into the republic were channelled into the army. Prison guards, unless they were assigned special duties, were expected to make do with their whips, their daggers, and their wits.

Tyrrell wondered why Compassion was so very different in this regard. He ran his eye over an opening at the bottom of the rifle, trying to make sense of the gun's presence.

Nearby, Keeper was saying, "Where is Mr. Landry?"

There was a pause before Starke said, "On his dawn break. He was providing orientation to the Mercy guards who arrived this morning—"

"His dawn break was over long ago; he's due for duty now."

"Shall I fetch him?" Starke reached for the black volume, as though eager to depart his post.

"You are on duty as well." Keeper's voice was so sharp that Starke immediately sank down in his seat. Keeper leaned forward and said something in a low voice, evidently not intended to carry. Tyrrell, who was close enough to the wall now that he could hear Keeper's cool threat, concentrated his attention on the gun. It was beautiful, in an odd sort of way: the long, two-cylindered barrel; the sight-pieces poking up their heads at front and back; the shiny, dark wood of the stock. He reached his hand out to see whether the wood was smooth to the touch.

A whiplash, cracking down, barely missed his hand. He stumbled back, his heart pounding, and then turned as he heard footsteps thundering forward.

It was Medinger. The guard leapt over the barrier of the gate as though it were a turnstile and took hold of Tyrrell, grasping him hard. "Has the prisoner caused trouble, sir?" he asked Keeper.

Keeper was busy coiling up the whip in his hand. He glanced briefly at Tyrrell, who was staring at the whip, feeling sweat trickle down his face. "No," said Keeper quietly. "The error was mine. I failed to make clear to the prisoner that he was not to step within the gunners' post. Tyrrell, I trust you are well?"

He managed to nod. Starke gave Keeper a sharp look, as though he had said something significant.

Medinger showed no sign of wishing to slacken his tight grip. "Shall I take him downstairs, sir? It's almost time for the day watch to begin."

"Yes. —No, wait." Frowning, Keeper leaned forward to look over the wall, holding onto the brim of his cap as he did so. Tyrrell could hear the chatter and laughter continuing, as though nobody below had noticed the whip-crack from the gunners' post.

Keeper's eyes met Medinger's. "Yes," he said. "Take him down the stairs. Slowly."

"Sir." Medinger promptly steered Tyrrell toward the stairs to the right of the gunners' post. Keeper had already moved swiftly to the stairs to the left.

The metal stairway that Medinger guided Tyrrell to was gently curved like the semi-circle above; it reminded Tyrrell of the beginning stage of an elegant spiral staircase he had once seen at a department store he had thefted from. As Tyrrell made his way down the steps, he began to see that the gunners' post was positioned over a hollow area beneath the semi-circular balcony. Guards were standing or sitting in that area, which was lit by electric lights in the ceiling that also formed the floor of the gunners' post. None of the guards appeared to be armed, except with daggers. The back of this lower guard-post held seats, and even a table. Sitting at the table, a couple of guards were playing cards.

None of them noticed Tyrrell and Medinger. Neither did they notice Keeper, who was descending quietly on their other side. Tyrrell tensed as he noticed that Keeper still had his whip in hand, but in the next moment, as Keeper reached the ground, Tyrrell realized that the whip was not aimed toward him.

The lash landed full upon the card-table, sending cards and money spraying in the air. One of the men who had been at the table tumbled from his chair, shouting with surprise; the other man leapt to his feet and turned to face Keeper, who standing within easy reach of the men. At that moment, Medinger, evidently understanding the message that his Keeper wished to convey, sent his own lash flying to nick the arm of the guard who had just risen from the floor and was stumbling backwards. The guard turned round, fury in his face, but before he could step forward, Keeper said quietly, "Surrounded on both sides by your captors, gentlemen. At least two of you, possibly more, would be dead by now if Mr. Medinger and I were escaped prisoners. Mr. Pugh, what is the meaning of this?"

"We're off-duty, Keeper." The man who had leapt to his feet from the card-table gestured, and the man who had been nicked with the whip, still looking furious, came forward to gather up the scattered proceeds of the game.

"Mr. Pugh, I should not need to remind the superintendent of the day watch that you are never fully off-duty when you enter the outbuildings. Nor should I need to remind you that gambling by guards is strictly forbidden throughout the life prisons. I'll see you in my office later. —Mr. Niesely."

"Eh? I mean, Yes, sir?" The nicked guard paused from where he was pocketing the game money.

"Your ill-gotten gains are confiscated. Consider yourself lucky if I don't dock your pay as well. The rest of you . . ." Keeper turned his gaze upon the other guards. He was still holding his whip, and it became clear that the other guards were acutely conscious of this fact. Several of them shifted from foot to foot, like small boys caught playing marbles by their schoolteacher.

"Mr. Itzol," said Keeper, "I am gratified to see that you and Mr. Goff are still standing to duty, but I would remind you that the custom which permits on-duty night guards to socialize with off-duty day guards is a privilege, not a right. Mr. Pugh outranks you, so you are not responsible for the behavior of him or his men, but you are in charge of the night watch, and I do not expect to see a scene like this go unreported to me."

"I'm very sorry, sir." Unlike the other guards, Itzol sounded genuinely regretful rather than defensive.

Keeper nodded, evidently in acknowledgment of the tone of the apology. "As for those of you on the day watch, there is work to be done. Mr. Pugh, was this week's food supply delivered this morning?"

"Starke is in charge of the initial check," Pugh replied. He was watching with a frown as Niesely handed Keeper the money from the game.

"The delivery hasn't arrived yet," Starke called down from the post above as he rested his forearms of the wall there, leaning over. He was smiling, evidently amused by what had taken place. "The merchants have been late recently. We still have plenty of food in storage, though."

"Mr. Pugh, see that you make clear to the merchants' delivery lads that timeliness is of the utmost importance to this prison. If a storm should cut travel between ourselves and the nearest town, we would not have enough food on hand to feed the prisoners for more than a week or two unless delivery times are met with regularity. Mr. Itzol, you and Mr. Goff are relieved from your watch-duty; I'll let you out of the riot doors shortly. Mr. Black, I'd like to know what progress the mechanics made on the repair of the waste disposal unit yesterday . . ."

The instructions streamed forward, as effortlessly as a tumbling brook. Day guards snapped to attention as they were addressed, and hurried off to carry out their assigned duties. The night guards wandered away, heading in a leisurely manner toward the riot doors. Niesely, taking a deep breath after he had dragged the table to the side, broke into Keeper's flow to say, "Almost time, sir."

Even as he spoke, light suddenly sprang up. Tyrrell lifted his head: from here he could see the dome, which arched over the prison in front of them, but the sky beyond the dome was still dark grey with dawn-smudged clouds. Instead, the light was coming from the ceiling holding the dome, from beams of electric lights. They turned the area between the prison and the guards' posts as bright as a stage. As he turned his eyes away from the bright lights, Tyrrell noticed metal glittering at the top of the prison walls: a barbed-wire fence made up of so many intertwined strands that it nearly reached the full storey between the prison and the ceiling above it.

"Mr. Starke."

Starke raised a hand in acknowledgment of whatever order Keeper had given and rose from his post. As he walked back from the edge of the balcony, he was gradually hidden by the wall, but in the next moment there was an audible click, and then a rumble began, such as a giant might make if it decided to dance.

Tyrrell turned his head just in time to see the mighty shield in front of the prison lift from the ground, as though it were no more than a piece of paper that the giant's child had chosen to raise. The great iron chains creaked as they were drawn upwards by some mechanical device hidden high above, in the ceiling area holding the lights. As the barrier slowly rose, what lay behind it came into view.

It was merely a door with open bars, such as Tyrrell had known in the cells of Mercy, but the bars criss-crossed each other, and the door was so long as to be a gate. It spanned the full area that the shield had taken up – the length of many men. And many men indeed were behind the bars.

They were crammed together next to the gate: some sleeping on the ground, others standing and stretching and yawning. A few men were walking around, while others were chatting together. None of them took any particular notice of the rise of the shield-wall; it was as though they hadn't yet noticed they had an audience.

Most of them were stripped. Some wore nothing but trousers and undervests and boots; others had no more than drawers to cover their lower bodies. Incongruously, other men were dressed in prison uniforms, with or without jackets and vests. A quick glance told Tyrrell that this was not by accident, for the clothed men were almost invariably talking to men wearing fewer clothes, and in some cases the lesser-clothed men were on their knees as they listened.

"At least figuring out rank here won't be hard," Tyrrell muttered under his breath, and then paused in his thoughts as he noticed a man in his thirties, who was standing next to the bars. The man's auburn hair was longer than shoulder-length, cut roughly and pulled back into a knot behind his neck. His skin was light brown, but it seemed to shine with a golden pattern under the light: pictures of whorling vines twisted their way around the muscles of his arms and his thighs, across his hairless chest and abdomen, into the area of his groin.

He was naked. In fact, he was being serviced by the mouth of a younger man who knelt at his feet. It appeared that neither of them would take any more notice of the other prisoners than the other prisoners were taking of them.

Then the golden man, turning his head slightly, saw Keeper. His back went rigid. Pulling himself away from the prisoner at his feet, he turned and faced Keeper full on, his hands now formed in fists at his side. His whammer pointed outwards, like an Ammippian's cocked arrow.

At that moment, others in the prison noticed Keeper. There was a general rush for the barred gate, so swift that Tyrrell nearly stepped backwards. But the bars held true.

"Murderer!" one man shouted at Keeper. And, "How many of us must die before you take notice?" screamed another. Within seconds, the voices were too loud and shrill to be heard individually.

Keeper took a step toward the prison. Mr. Niesely grabbed his arm and said something rapidly. Keeper's response could be heard clearly through the hubbub: "Thank you for your warning, Mr. Niesely, but I'm well aware of where the line lies, since I painted it there myself." He took three more steps forward, and then halted.

Tyrrell's gaze fell to the floor. There on the wooden floor was a thin red line, like a border between two nations. In the next moment, he realized the purpose of the line when something came flying through the air in the direction of Keeper. It fell just short of the line, landing with a thump and rolling. It was a blackened skull.

More objects flew through the air, but not many; evidently most of the prisoners knew well enough the futility of trying to attack Keeper this way. Keeper stood solid, his body turned in the direction of the golden man, who had not moved in all this time, though his whammer's potency had flagged. Finally, in a lull between the shouts, Keeper raised his voice.

"Gentlemen," he said, "and gentlelads. I cannot respond to your complaints if I cannot hear what you are saying. Kindly allow your true men to speak on your behalf. Mr. Farnam?"

A short, middle-aged, balding man, somewhat stout and with round spectacles, stood at the front of the crowd. He wore a dark green necklet of cloth that lay against the buttoned jacket of his uniform, and he was holding in hand a dark green ledger book. He gestured with his hand, and the prisoners nearest to him stopped shouting. The other prisoners gradually grew quiet.

Farnam said, "We're in need to medical supplies."

"The medical kit is replenished at the beginning of the month," Keeper responded.

"We ran out of supplies days ago; there are many more of us here now than there were ten years ago, when the current quota for medical supplies was determined. There are men and lads in here who will die before the beginning of the month if they must wait that long."

"There is no need to engage in hyperbole, Mr. Farnam; I take your point. Mr. Medinger, I want you to check with Healer FitzGerald concerning the proper amount of medical supplies for the prison's current population."

"It's going to cost," Pugh warned. "The prison budget is already stretched to its limit."

"I'm aware of that fact, Mr. Pugh, but one of our duties as guards is to care for the life prisoners' health. We'll have to make monetary cuts in other areas."

"No pay elevations this year, I'm guessing," muttered Niesely, which earned him a sharp look from Keeper.

"Bandages will do us no good if we're without heat again next winter." The speaker was in his fifties and was a southern Vovimian, judging from his accent and his appearance; he wore a gaudy orange necklet against his vest, which contrasted well with his dark brown skin. He was casually kneading the hair of a prisoner sitting at his feet. "When are you going to keep your promise to fix the heaters, Keeper?"

"I've had an application in for repairs for the past six months, Mr. Valdis. I'm confident the magisterial seats will arrange for repairs before next winter—"

Shouts rose again, mainly cries of "Liar!" An elderly, light-skinned man wearing a black necklet turned his back on the proceedings, evidently scorning to talk with Keeper. Keeper began to speak, and then hesitated. His gaze travelled over to the naked golden man.

"Ahiga." Keeper's voice was quieter than it had been before, and Tyrrell noticed that, for the first time, Merrick's former guard did not use a title when addressing another person. "What have you to say?"

"Nothing that I haven't said to you a thousand times over a thousand times." The fury in the golden man's voice was barely contained. He had an odd accent, neither Yclau nor Vovimian, nor of any other tongue that Tyrrell recognized. "We suffer and we die while you make promises – always promises, always requests for our patience. When will you come in here and see for yourself what matters are like among those you claim to care for? Or have you not enough manhood for that?"

The prisoner still kneeling next to Ahiga flinched, as though he had sensed a hard blow. Keeper himself was silent for a long moment as prisoners and guards alike exchanged looks. Finally he said, in a voice so quiet that it barely reached Tyrrell, "Regulations do not permit me to enter Compassion except during a claiming, as you well know, Ahiga. And these days there is no one for me to claim."

Ahiga gave a derisive snort. "And did you enter to claim when the opportunity was given you? Oh, Keeper, I could almost sorrow for you if it were not that others pay for your willful blindness." He gestured toward the skull that had been thrown earlier. With a jump in the heart, Tyrrell realized that the skull was that of a human.

Keeper did not appear to notice this. He opened his mouth, but what he might have said in response was swallowed up by the roar of agreement that arose from the prisoners. This time, Keeper did not try to stop the cacophony. Instead, he hand-gestured to Medinger, and then turned to say something to Pugh. Pugh shook his head and pointed upwards toward the unmanned gun on the wall above.

Keeper nodded and said something briefly back. Then he leapt lightly for the stairs, taking them two at a time as he returned to the balcony. He disappeared from view briefly behind the wall above; when he came into view again, he was busy shrugging off his jacket, which he neatly arranged on the back of the chair next to the unmanned gun. Then he sat down, so that most of his chest was hidden behind the wall. He pulled down the stock, peered into the chamber, pushed the stock back into place, and reached down, disappearing briefly behind the wall. When he emerged again, he was holding a black magazine box in his hand. He shoved this into the opening at the bottom of the gun, inspected the chamber again, closed the stock, flicked a switch, and pivoted the gun on its tripod, so that it pointed toward the floor to the east of the guards' post. A gun-shot followed, faint under the shouting. Keeper pulled the gun back into its earlier position, inspected the chamber yet a third time, flicked the switch, and then smoothly turned the gun so that it was pointed toward the end of the prison gate that was closest to Melinger and Tyrrell.

He gave a slight nod toward Starke, who rose from his seat and disappeared from view. A moment later, the giant's whistle began – the same cruelly loud siren that had heralded the opening of the riot doors.

This time, Tyrrell did not have to endure their full force. "Put your hands over your ears!" Melinger shouted to him, and then shifted his grip on Tyrrell in order to permit his prisoner to do so. It occurred to Tyrrell to wonder, as he clamped his palms over his ears, what Medinger would think of the Boundaries of Behavior.

The prison gate, moving westward, slid slowly to the side a couple of feet, and then stopped. None of the prisoners appeared eager to approach the narrow gap except for one monkey-faced prisoner, who seemed for a moment as though he were about to slide his way out.

Over the siren, with sudden ferocity, came the sound of gunfire. Not two guns, not three – a couple dozen guns firing at once. Tyrrell, jumping back so hard against Medinger that he nearly toppled the guard, saw with disbelief that a neat row of bullet-holes had just appeared in the floor-boards directly in front of the open portion of the gate. The wood there was so riddled with such holes that there barely seemed to be any floor left.

At the same moment, as the siren ended, there came a cry from within the prison. The monkey-faced prisoner scrambled backwards, apparently frightened rather than hurt; then there was a short silence.

Tyrrell turned his head. Starke was still missing from the gunners' post; only one man sat there, and he was leaning forward in an expectant manner. "Gentlemen?" said Keeper, his voice cautiously curious.

Half a minute passed before Farnam appeared at the bars, close to the gap. "One of the bullets ricocheted off a bar," he reported. "It hit an unclaimed lad. Shallow wound on the leg; he's still standing."

"I'll see that your medical kit is replenished today, then," Keeper responded. From where he stood in the prison, unmoved, Ahiga gave a loud snort, as though Keeper had made a dark jest. Keeper paid no attention to that; instead, he flicked a brief glance at Medinger and Tyrrell before returning his attention to the gap he was guarding. Starke had just slipped back into his seat and taken hold of his own gun.

As though it were needed. "What in Hell's name was that?" muttered Tyrrell.

He expected no reply, but Medinger said, "Machine rifle. It's an experimental model made by the Yclau. The Vovimians got their hands on a shipment of the rifles – don't ask how – and resold a handful of them to us last year, for a pretty penny. The rifles deliver bullets in rapid sequence." He released Tyrrell's arms and gave him a nudge between the shoulder-blades. "Go on. He had the gate opened for you."

Aghast, Tyrrell looked back at Keeper. Keeper's hand was still steady upon the gun; it was still pointed toward the opening. Keeper didn't look his way.

Medinger gave a humorless chuckle. "He's not accustomed to killing prisoners before they've entered Compassion. Just stay out of the path of his fire until the last moment, and get inside as quickly as possible once you reach there."

"And pray that I'll be reborn," Tyrrell muttered, but Medinger gave him another nudge, harder this time, and Tyrrell stumbled forward.

He was conscious of many eyes upon him. The guards had fallen still at the sound of the gun's cry at the same moment that the prisoners had; both groups were waiting in as deadly a silence as an execution party. Tyrrell just managed to keep himself from looking up again at the gunners above. After far too long a time, he crossed the yards between the lower guards' post and the gap in the prison gate. Without looking back, he slid his way through the narrow opening.

The gates began to rumble closed almost immediately; Starke must have retreated from his seat again and had his hand on whatever switch controlled the gate. Tyrrell, moving carefully aside from where the bullets were most likely to land, did not think about the closing gate. He was too busy staring at the prison ceiling.

Or rather, the lack of a prison ceiling. The prison, three storeys in height, had only one floor, the ground floor. The walls rose high, naked of any barrier along the way, though certain stones jutting out suggested that – as Keeper had hinted – the prison had once been designed in an ordinary manner, to accommodate three levels. Above them all was nothing but open air; the roof was missing. The dome, still grey with thunderclouds, hung over the prison like a canopy.

The gate crashed closed, and it occurred to Tyrrell to look downwards. He could see no sign of whatever inner walls hid the sleeping cells that Keeper had spoken of; the prison appeared from this perspective to be one giant room, packed to capacity by prisoners of varying ages and states of undress.

All the prisoners that he could see were looking at him.

Standing out, slightly apart from the others, were the four men with necklets – the "true men," Keeper had called them. Ahiga, seeing Tyrrell's eye light upon him, gave a smile. It was not a friendly smile.

"Well, well," he said softly. "So a new lad has come among us."
 

CHAPTER SIX

Tyrrell, his back to the gate, looked slowly round the semi-circle of prisoners surrounding him. He felt as though he were surrounded by all the provinces within Mip, Vovim, and Yclau combined. Prisoners of every possible shape and color stood before him; Tyrrell and Valdis were hardly the only men there of southern Vovimian ancestry. There were scrawny men, muscled men, men with the hawk noses of Vovim's southeast province, men with the pale skin of Yclau, men with the red hair common among Mippites whose ancestors had raped Ammippian tribeswomen, men whose tightly curled hair suggested that they came from places further south than even Vovim's southern province.

None of them looked at all pleased to see Tyrrell. They were waiting expectantly, to see how he reacted to Ahiga's remark.

Tyrrell was grateful then for the warning that Keeper had given him. Without that warning, he would likely have ignored the word "lad" in Ahiga's greeting. He was used to being jibed for being the height of a youth; he had learned to ignore such idle insults.

But this greeting was meant, not to insult, but to assess.

"I'm not a lad," he responded in as forceful a manner as he could. "I'm a man."

Ahiga's cold smile remained frozen in place. "Prove it."

Tyrrell did not wait to see whether Ahiga would follow this up with an invitation for the new prisoner to lift weights. Quickly, Tyrrell said, "Send out your best man against me."

The prisoners burst into laughter.

They laughed a hundred different ways: in the hee-haw imitation mule-noise of Yclau's commoners, in the belly-shaking laughter of Mip's elite, in the giggles of Vovim's mid-class, and in dozens of other varieties. One prisoner was so overcome with hilarity that he lay down on his stomach and wept.

The true man Farnam smiled along with the rest, but he said, in a voice that sounded kindly, "That's not how custom works here, stranger. You are the challenger; you must choose the man you wish to overcome."

Tyrrell took another quick look around as the laughter trailed to a halt. It was tempting to choose Ahiga or Valdis or one of the other tall men there, in order to settle the question of his rank once and for all, but he knew his limitations. Farnam was a more likely target, but Tyrrell knew of street tribes that would tear apart any boy who made the mistake of challenging one of their leaders. Besides, Farnam, with his clerk's glasses, did not look as though he had ever fought a man in his life. Tyrrell needed to demonstrate his prowess in fighting, not his ability to swat a fly.

His eye fell upon a prisoner standing beside Farnam. He was a youth, perhaps in his early twenties, with hard muscles and a sassy smile. He was about the same height as Tyrrell. "You," Tyrrell said, pointing.

The laughter this time would have taken off the roof, if the prison had possessed a roof. With a wide grin, the youth waited until the noise had died down enough for him to say, "I am not a man; I am a lad." He held up his left wrist, which was encircled with the same dark green cloth as encircled Farnam's neck. "But I will fight you anyway, for I think you are no man, but a lad. With your permission, sir?" He looked over at Farnam.

Farnam, who continued to smile, gave a brief nod. Someone with a Vovimian accent called out, "Smash in his baubles, Davidson!"

"Does he have any?" the youth shouted back as he pulled off his shirt, leaving on his undervest. More hoots of laughter rose toward the dome. Tyrrell, taking off his own jacket, vest, and shirt, reflected that he had been wrong about clothing signifying rank here, for the youth possessed trousers and a shirt, while Ahiga was at that moment re-clothing himself with nothing more than an old-fashioned groin-cloth.

Then his mind was focussed on the fight to come. He took another look at Davidson, surreptitiously this time, as he dropped his jacket and vest and shirt to the ground. The youth had scars on his arms – more scars on his right arm than his left, so that was the side he favored. His feet were bare, allowing him to grip the ground easily. He spoke good Mippite, but his accent and reddish-brown skin was that of Vovim's western province.

The youth would know Mippite fist-fighting, then, and most likely would also know Vovimian wrestling. Tyrrell prayed to the gods that the youth had not been trained in Yclau scuttling.

Tyrrell took a moment to send a more careful prayer below, to the god who might or might not wish to take custody of his body if he lost this fight; then he sent a second prayer above to Mercy and added a third, hasty prayer to his patron god, Tyrone, lord over the poor and friendless.

Then he had no thoughts but to keep his gaze on Davidson's eyes as the youth approached.

They circled each other first, crouching, as the other prisoners backed up to give them room for their battle. Tyrrell was dimly aware, as his body turned to face the bars, that he had audiences in both directions; though he did not take his eyes off Davidson, he could hear the guards making wagers on the outcome of this fight. The wagers were mainly in favor of Davidson, though he heard Medinger add one in favor of him.

He was so heartened by this sign of confidence in him that he nearly missed Davidson's attack when it came. It was a leap into the air and a kick – a movement favored, not by Mippite fist-fighters or Vovimian wrestlers, but by the kick artists of one of the nations west of Vovim. Tyrrell ducked to the ground and rolled just in time to avoid being kicked in the head.

That told him what sort of rules he was working under. No above-the-belt maneuvers would work in this case; he was fighting for his life. He recovered again before Davidson had a chance to leap for a second kick, but he did not bother to rise. As prisoners and guards alike hooted derisively, he lay motionless, his legs sprawled, as though he were stunned. Smiling, Davidson walked toward him. . . .

Several of the prisoners, more alert to danger than Davidson was, shouted warnings, but it was too late. As Davidson came within range, Tyrrell suddenly brought his legs together in the scissors movement favored by Yclau scuttlers, who liked to have their opponents on the ground before stabbing them.

Startled, Davidson tripped and fell. Tyrrell leapt onto the youth's chest, wishing that he had a scuttler's knife with which to end this quickly, and without further harm. A knife at the throat was sufficient incentive to make an opponent surrender; as it was, Tyrrell would have to end this in a more nasty manner.

He closed his hands round the youth's neck.

Davidson tried to buck him off, of course, but it was no use. His arms were trapped by Tyrrell's legs, and Tyrrell had seated himself high enough on the youth's chest that Davidson's knees could not reach him. He pressed hard on the youth's windpipe, watching Davidson's face turn red, and then white.

There was shouting all around him, though no one interfered. He thought he heard Ahiga's voice say coldly, "Let him speak," though Tyrrell was not sure whether the directive was aimed at himself, another prisoner, or the young man beginning to turn purple under his hands.

But at that moment, without warning, he heard Merrick's voice in his head. It said, "I attack no one, even in self-defense."

He stumbled to his feet, his skin turning cold as the blood drained from it. On the ground, Davidson rolled to his side, his breath rasping as he drew in great gulps of air. The crowd had grown silent.

Finally, Davidson gasped out, "I surrender!"

"Do you accept his surrender?" Ahiga's voice was as cold as before.

Tyrrell nodded, unable to speak. He was afraid he would vomit. It had been fifteen years since he had last fought another man – fifteen years since he had adopted the Boundaries of Behavior. How could he have forgotten the rules he abided by? Was he so weak a man that a single threat to his life would make him forget the tenets of his life's work?

"Good," said Valdis flatly. "Because, if you had killed him, we would have killed you."

It took him a moment to connect what Valdis had said with Ahiga's previous question. He stared blankly at the true man, and then turned his eye toward Farnam, who had come forward to help Davidson to his feet. Farnam, meeting his gaze, said quietly, "We have no need here for ruthless killers – no need for men who will create harm beyond that which is needed to defend themselves and their lads. If you were such a man, you would be a danger to us, and we would kill you at once."

Tyrrell reached back to wipe sweat off the back of his neck. "You must kill a lot of new prisoners."

There was more laughter, but it did not appear to be directed against Tyrrell this time. Valdis shrugged. "Not so many as you might think. Most murderers murder for a reason. And not all of us here are murderers." He gave a feral grin as he kneaded the hair of the prisoner beside him.

"What say you, then?" asked Farnam, who now had Davidson within the cradle of his arm. "Has he proved himself, Walker?" He looked over at the true man with the black necklet, who had not yet spoken. Walker shook his head.

"He took Davidson by surprise," Valdis declared. "Let's see whether he can defend himself again, now that we know his methods."

Ahiga said quietly, "We know that he will not kill without need. We must know more than that."

"I agree," Farnam said briskly. "Stranger, this time you must meet a contender of our choosing."

Tyrrell took a deep breath, feeling the warm morning air fill him. "No."

The prisoners murmured amongst themselves. Walker's eyes narrowed. Valdis's voice was light as he said, "No? You are only man enough to fight in one battle?"

Tyrrell's fists tightened as the laughter returned. He forced himself to respond, "I can't fight anyone, even in self-defense. I've taken a vow not to."

Valdis raised his eyebrows. Ahiga said in his cold voice, "You have already broken that vow, I think."

Before Tyrrell could figure out how to respond to this accurate assessment, Farnam said, "Stranger, many of us arrived here with no intention of fighting. We did not wish to add to the lawlessness of this place. But in Compassion, to fight is not a matter of lawlessness but of law. Our tribe's customs require that any prisoner who claims manhood have the ability and willingness to fight for his lads. You are being tested, not for your ability to defend yourself, but for your ability to defend your lads. Surely whatever province or nation you come from permits you to fight to defend others who are being harmed."

Tyrrell did not respond for a moment. The answer to Farnam's query was a complex one. It was true that the Boundaries of Behavior made exceptions to the rule against fighting. Guards were allowed to fight prisoners in self-defense or to defend others, because part of their duty as guards was to keep the prisoners in order. A prisoner who witnessed another prisoner trapped in a life-threatening situation could and should defend that prisoner's life.

But that was as far as the Boundaries went. He and Merrick had held long conversations about this late at night, after their respective guards had left them, battered and penetrated. There was nothing that Merrick would have liked better than to break the jaw of any guard who touched him, and there was nothing that Tyrrell would have liked better than to defend any prisoner who was being cruelly beaten by his guard, simply for the guard's pleasure.

But he and Merrick had known the consequences if they extended the Boundaries that far. The Boundaries had been established, not out of any idealistic belief in the shamefulness of fighting, but because fighting in their situation did no good. The guards were already convinced that they were violent men who deserved unremitting punishment; fighting, even to defend themselves or other prisoners, only confirmed that impression.

It was by refusing to fight in situations where any man might be forgiven for fighting that Tyrrell and Merrick and the other Boundaries-bound prisoners had been able to convince some of the guards that, whatever their crimes might have been in the past, they were now law-abiding men who deserved decent treatment.

That was the situation at Mercy. But the situation at Compassion appeared to be very different. If Keeper was right, little contact took place here between the guards and prisoners; what mattered here was not how the guards regarded Tyrrell, but how his fellow prisoners did. And if Farnam spoke truthfully, the tribal customs here made fighting lawful. To not raise his fists to defend another tribal member would be as shameful an act as not defending a member of his old street tribe.

He said hesitantly, "There are rules here which govern fighting?"

"Yes." Ahiga's voice was flat. "We do not permit battles to take place that would threaten the tribal unity. If a man's lad is threatened, the man must defend him, but a lad or man who fights to have a greater share of the food than he has been granted, or who seeks to break our customs in some other way, is under my belt, at my word."

Since Ahiga had no belt, it took Tyrrell a moment to translate what he had said. He looked back at Farnam. "And all of you agree to this?"

Farnam nodded. "Ahiga has charge over discipline in this prison, but the rules for discipline are decided by the true men together. Nor are our rules arbitrary; we do not seek to interfere with the relation between any man and his claimed lad or an unclaimed lad. We merely seek to keep this prison from degenerating into anarchy."

Valdis yawned loudly. "I was pulled out of my warm bed to listen to all this chatter? Enough; make up your mind, runt. Are you a man or a lad?"

Heat covered Tyrrell's face, but he answered evenly, after due consideration. "A man. And if the laws of this place require me to prove that, I will. Send me your challenger."

"Done." Valdis turned to speak to someone over his shoulder. "Hernandez, do your duty to me by wiping this runt's face on the floor. I want to get back to my bed for a quick taking before mealtime. —Eh, lad?" He turned his attention to the prisoner sitting at his feet, twisting the prisoner's hair so that the lad was forced to look up at him. The lad gave him a smile that seemed forced.

Tyrrell scarcely noticed. His eye was on a prisoner who had just elbowed his way past several other prisoners. He was wearing trousers, a shirt, and a vest, and while he had an orange-colored band on his left wrist, he was also wearing a white necklet. He was about a foot and a half higher than Tyrrell, and his shoulders seemed twice as broad; he had a chest to match. He was cracking his knuckles, one against the other.

He stared down at Tyrrell, contempt on his face. "Frightened, runt?" he said in a deep voice.

"Frightened?" responded Tyrrell. "No, not frightened; terrified. You're three times my weight."

The laughter this time had no mockery to it. Glancing round the crowd quickly, Tyrrell guessed that he had reached the stage in the trial where the tribe would just as soon take him as a member as throw him out. Even Davidson appeared to bear Tyrrell no ill will; he was watching the proceedings with a frown of concern.

Hernandez gave a broad smile. "Don't worry," he said. "This won't take long."

He was right; it took only ten seconds for him to flatten Tyrrell on the ground, stomach-down. As Tyrrell struggled to breathe under the weight of his opponent's body, Hernandez twisted his arm behind him. "Surrender," said Hernandez.

"No." His voice was muffled; he could still barely breathe. Then he gasped as a sharp pain entered his body.

"Surrender," repeated Hernandez in a voice that almost seemed good-humored. "If you don't, I'll break your arm."

Sweat sprang onto Tyrrell's forehead. Broken limbs could lead to death at Mercy, where the healer was too drunk to know how to splint a limb. Here at Compassion, the chances of dying from an untreated bone-breaking must be even greater, with the healer far away in her office.

"Surrender and name yourself a lad," suggested Hernandez, twisting Tyrrell's arm as though it were a corkscrew. "There's still time."

Death, or rape for the next thirty or so years – what a splendid choice. "No," Tyrrell said, his voice choking on the word. "I'm a man."

"Enough." Valdis sounded bored. "My bed is growing cold. Let him up, Hernandez; I say he's a man."

Tyrrell's arm was released; the weight was lifted from him. He remained panting on the ground, dimly grasping the nature of the final test that had been offered to him.

"Walker?" Farnam's voice had the briskness of a clerk taking a tally. Tyrrell turned his head in time to see Walker nod slowly.

"He can defend his lad, and he will defend his manhood to the point of breaking." Farnam summed up the situation tersely. "I say he's a man. Ahiga?"

Tyrrell managed to pull himself into a sitting position. He had time enough to do so before the next response; Ahiga made no quick reply. Finally the golden man said, "He is a man. Whether he will stay a man . . . that I am not sure of." He looked down at Tyrrell. "Welcome to the Tribe of Compassion Prison, little man."

Tyrrell rose to his feet. His arm still throbbed with pain, but his greater concern at the moment was keeping himself from punching Ahiga in the stomach. He said, "Call me little again, and you'll face a challenge from me."

He half expected laughter; instead, several prisoners gasped. The young prisoner kneeling at Ahiga's feet glanced swiftly up at him.

Ahiga looked over Tyrrell as though he were a beetle that might need to be stepped on. After a long moment, he replied, "A suggestion for you, new man: Learn our ways before you offer challenges. You will save yourself sorrow if you do." He turned his head and murmured something to the prisoner standing beside him. The prisoner, who had the yellowish complexion found in Vovim's northwest provinces, nodded in response to whatever was said.

Then Ahiga and the other prisoner were hidden by the crowd. The remaining prisoners had begun to turn away, now that the trial had ended. Farnam and Valdis and Walker all disappeared, along with their lads; none of the other prisoners approached Tyrrell or even looked his way. They brushed past him as though he were a motionless pillar.

Tyrrell looked down to see whether his jacket and vest and shirt were being trampled by the passersby. Then he cursed, glancing quickly round at the crowd. There was no sign of which prisoner had stolen his clothes, and he doubted that he would be able to guess, even if he encountered the prisoner face to face. One prison uniform looks much like another.

"A lovely start to the day," Tyrrell muttered to himself. So far on this day, he had been hit and kicked by Oslo, poked by FitzGerald, dragged to and fro by Medinger, scared nearly out of his wits by Tom Keeper, mocked by guards and prisoners alike, battered by a fellow prisoner, and ignored thereafter by everyone.

And now half his clothes had been stolen. It did not appear that he was going to enjoy his time at Compassion Prison any more than he had enjoyed the past twenty years at Mercy. He turned away.

At that moment, facing the bars, he saw that he was wrong. Though most of the guards had their backs to him as they paid Medinger for their failed gamble, one guard continued to look down at Tyrrell, from where he stood on the balcony. As Tyrrell watched, the guard lifted his cap.

Having no cap with which to return the salute, Tyrrell smiled and offered a discreet little wave of his hand to Tom Keeper. He felt his spirits lift as he returned his attention to the other prisoners. He was in the worst prison in all of Mip, and would remain here until his death. But he had won his manhood, and one man, at least, understood how great an achievement that was.
 

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