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ON GUARD

Dusk Peterson

Hell hath a co-operation with Heaven.

—St. John Chrysostom, as loosely translated by John Donne.

On Guard
PROLOGUE
 

The junior Seeker stood in the entrance, awaiting death.

He did not turn his head to look at the guard moving behind him. Instead, his eyes and thoughts remained focussed on the chamber around him. Unlike most other parts of the Eternal Dungeon, this chamber had no artificial walls. Instead, the chamber was a vast, semi-circular cavern, with niches carved into the walls to serve as shelves for glass-enclosed candles. Many of the candles were lit; their smoke created a haze in the upper part of the chamber, drifting slowly up to a smoke-hole at the very top of the ceiling.

The ground below was littered with ladders and extra candles and matches; otherwise it was stark. The floor consisted of nothing but the rough, uneven stone of the cavern, gleaming faintly in the light. In the middle of the chamber, a low railing guarded a circular area larger than a prisoner's cell. This area was made of stone as well, but the stone was manmade, as could be seen from the fact that it rose up in the middle to form a hook. From this hook rose a chain as vast in width as the chain that holds a steamer's anchor.

In the brightly lit chamber, only one other person stood: a woman from the outer dungeon, lighting a candle in honor of some Seeker or former prisoner she had known. The guard, stepping past the junior Seeker without a word, went over to the woman and said something to her in a whisper. She jerked and looked over her shoulder, staring with wide eyes at the hooded Seeker by the doors, as if she had seen a ghost. Then she nodded and hurried toward the only other exit from the chamber, a small door to the right of the junior Seeker.

Once she was through this, the guard closed and bolted the smaller exit before returning to the Seeker. Still silent, he stepped past. In a minute, the junior Seeker heard the great, booming sound of the crematorium's doors shutting behind him.

Only then did he move. He went over to one side of the chamber, used a key to open a metal panel set within the wall, and contemplated the switch there. With a wrench, he pulled up the switch.

A screech filled the chamber, like the grieving howl of a soul trapped in afterdeath. He covered his ears as the slack chain above the circular stone tightened, and then began rising. The screech of the metal was accompanied by a low, harsh rumble as stone scraped against stone.

He looked up at where the chain travelled over a pulley hanging from the ceiling, as it had for a century. The chain, though frequently replaced, was old in design; the machinery pulling the chain onto a vast wheel nearby had stood there for only twenty years. It was said to be the most powerful mechanical crane in the world, far more powerful than the cranes that had been used to build the mighty train-bridges that awed foreign visitors to the queendom of Yclau. Watching the rise of the stone lid, as heavy as any train, the junior Seeker did not doubt the boast about the crane. He only wondered how, by all that was sacred, the Seekers had managed to raise the lid before the existence of mechanical engines.

The lid stopped and hung, swaying, barely high enough for a man to crouch under it. This the junior Seeker did, feeling, as he always did, the breathless fear of an ant who has deliberately walked under a man's boot. He grabbed a nearby safety lamp as he ducked down, swinging it forward so that he could locate the top landing of the stairs spiralling round the pit below the lid. The light also landed on the circular wall of the ash-pit that the spiral staircase curved around. The ashes themselves were hidden from view.

He felt a little better once he was on the iron stairs, climbing his way down. The stairs, though of open ironwork, were steady under the feet and had strong handrails on both sides. There was little chance he would slip and fall, provided that he kept the lamplight spilling upon the steps to come. The stairs wound their way gradually round the pit, with manmade stones on both sides, so it was easy to pretend that he was going down a circular stairway in the palace above the Eternal Dungeon, rather than circling in a spiral around a pit of death-ashes.

He could no longer hear the crackle of candle-flames above him, but he could hear the hiss of air, and occasionally the air would brush him when he passed a vent. The sound was reassuring. He had heard tales that, when the mechanical Lungs that kept the Eternal Dungeon alive had broken down, back in '42, the only person who failed to escape alive had been a Seeker who was in this pit at the time, mourning the death of a parent. Forgotten in the mad rush to evacuate the dungeon, he was found later at the top of the iron stairs, his hands pressed futilely against the stone lid that would open from below for no man, no matter how strong.

The junior Seeker looked back up the stairway. He could see dim light above, a sure sign that the lid remained raised. He told himself that the doors to the crematorium were now locked and guarded; he told himself that, even if by some chance a Seeker entered the crematorium and closed the lid, not knowing he was there, he could still survive here for weeks, and his absence would be noticed long before that. It made no difference. This place felt to him as it had on his previous visits, as though it were his grave.

As of course it was, he reminded himself. He looked at the convex wall next to him, wondering whether he had yet reached the level of the pit where, one day, his own ashes would rest.

He took a deep breath and continued down.

The only sound was his boots tapping the steps, and the thump of his rapid heartbeat. It was difficult, at times like this, not to think of the ashes that lay in the pit because of him. He could tell himself that his former prisoners' souls had been reborn into new life, but the only certainty he held was that the ashes of their bodies lay in the cold earth. Despite the autumnal coolness of the air, he paused a minute to raise the face-cloth of his hood, knowing that no one could see him here. Sweat lay thick on his face.

He walked more carefully after that, his palms now slick upon the railing. He felt sure that he must be nearing the end of his journey, and he knew that certainty to be an illusion. The pit was wide and deep, made to hold ashes for many centuries in the future. Travelling down to its bottom took as much time as walking across the whole of the capital's Parkside district.

He could feel himself shaking by the end. He was strong, for a man of his class; he did not spend his days idling in a parlor chair but instead stood for anywhere up to twelve hours a day, searching prisoners. But walking down an endless staircase, holding a lamp in the dark and trying not to stumble to one's death, was an exercise that would exhaust even the strongest man. He tried not to think of what the journey upward would be like.

The door came so suddenly that he nearly walked into it. He stood a moment, trying to catch his labored breath, and feeling his heart drum inside him. He did not bother to look up; he knew he was too far down to see any light now. After a minute, he hung his lamp on the hook designed for it, next to another lamp that was dark. He closed the shutter of his own lamp, more out of respect for where he went than out of fear that some unknown gas would set the stairwell ablaze. He could still hear the ventilated air sighing, like a mother soothing her frightened child. He groped a moment in the dark, found the latch, and opened the door as quietly as he could.

He was just as quiet closing it. The small cubicle he stood in was nearly pitch-black; he paused a moment before soundlessly pushing back the curtain in front of him. Then, as he heard the unmistakable hiss of another ventilation shaft, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the light in the chamber of death.

"The vigil chamber" was its official title, but the junior Seeker had never heard this room called that except in documents. It was as stark in design as the crematorium: nothing more than a circular floor that was the width of the pit, with a stone wall curving round the sides. Its ceiling had begun, in the past two years, to bow under the accumulated weight of a century's worth of death-ashes. The junior Seeker did not like to think of what the scene in this room would be like if the ceiling gave way while he was there. He knew that the palace engineers were still battling each other over the best way to preserve this place. In the meantime, the High Seeker had broken with decades' worth of tradition and ordered that a small electric light be installed above the only exit, in case there should be enough warning of an impending cave-in to give the vigil-keeper time to dash for the stairwell. No longer would vigil-keepers be plunged into the dark once the oil in their lamps gave out, permitting them to share in the lonely darkness experienced by the newly dead. For now, the vigil-keepers' prayers would take place in dim light.

The junior Seeker could not see that the light made any difference to the atmosphere of the chamber. This place still looked like what it was: an ancient burial tomb.

As his pupils widened, his vision took in what lay in the chamber: Crates of tinned food and tinned milk, enough to supply this place for a month. Other supplies necessary for a long sojourn. An inconspicuous metal plate in the ground that the junior Seeker knew led to a waste pit that would be cleaned out later by dungeon workers. A bed that looked as though it had not been slept in. A chair that had clearly not been sat in, for it was holding one of the crates. And in the midst of this all, kneeling on the stone floor in the center of the chamber with his body upright but for his bowed head, was the High Seeker.

His head was bare of his hood; his back was to the junior Seeker. He said without turning, "I was told I could have a month."

The junior Seeker stepped out of the darkness of the tiny antechamber. "Another message arrived from Vovim. The Codifier needs to speak with you."

The High Seeker did not move for a moment. Then, with a sigh, he made a gesture that was foreign to the junior Seeker but elaborate enough that it appeared to convey meaning to something unseen. The High Seeker rose slowly to his feet but continued to look down, as though his thoughts were not on the ashes above, but on something that lay much further below.

After a minute, he moved over to one of the crates, picked up an incising instrument that lay atop it, and stared at the wall that surrounded him. The junior Seeker, sensing what he was searching for, went over to one curve of the wall and pointed to his own initials, carefully incised into the stone. The carving was surrounded by hundreds of other initials, some overlapping each other as the Seekers who had visited this place vied for elbow room in the remaining space on the wall.

The High Seeker nodded and began incising his initials next to the junior Seeker's. The junior Seeker watched him work without speaking. He had carved his own initials here three years before, when he had come here to honor the delayed interment of his sister's ashes. He had been here twice since then, once to mourn the death of his father, and a second time when he learned of the death of the schoolmaster who had taught him his letters. The High Seeker, though, had apparently never entered this chamber in vigil before, not even after the death of the man who had first trained him to be a Seeker.

Behind him, the junior Seeker heard a faint, irregular beeping, like the peep of a newborn chick. He looked round the dim chamber until he found what he was searching for: a niche in the wall, holding a pair of headphones and a signalling instrument.

Leaving the High Seeker at his work, the junior Seeker went over and put on the headphones. The code, as he had suspected, was from the Codifier's night secretary, signalling the vigil-keeper in the required daily pattern. The junior Seeker waited for a pause, and then acknowledged the signal with his own name and the High Seeker's, tapping in the code with the painstaking care of someone who has learned his code in school rather than at work. He added the information that he and the High Seeker would be returning to the dungeon.

The acknowledgment from the Codifier's office came immediately; the acknowledgment from the palace above the dungeon took longer. The junior Seeker was not surprised. The signalling office of the Yclau palace was the largest in the world, hooked by cable to dozens of governments and receiving hundreds of messages each hour. Most of these messages required no more than a token acknowledgment, so the palace signalling office had developed machines to punch the code onto paper that could be read and transcribed at a later date.

Out of all the signalling instruments in that room, the junior Seeker had been told, only one had a bell attached to it to alert the code-men that a new message had arrived. Even so, three minutes passed before a code-man responded.

The junior Seeker used that time to marvel at the marriage of old and new that was represented by this signalling instrument in the ancient vigil chamber. He knew that the High Seeker had received strong opposition from the other senior Seekers when he had proposed this addition several years before. They had argued that a true vigil required that the vigil-keeper share the conditions of the dead.

The High Seeker had not tried to argue with his colleagues; that was not his way. Instead, he had placed before them a list of the names of the vigil-keepers who had died from illness of body or mind in the death chamber over the past century, because the chamber lacked any direct means of communication with the world above. Then, equally silently, he had laid before them the passage in the Code of Seeking which required that Seekers preserve life wherever possible.

The signal from the palace arrived, a terse acknowledgment followed by a reminder that the palace would require word from the Codifier's office once the vigil-keeper and his companion were returned to the Eternal Dungeon. Both the junior Seeker and the Codifier's secretary acknowledged the message; then the junior Seeker pulled off the headphones and turned to look at the High Seeker.

The High Seeker had by now stepped back to gaze at the initials and year he had incised, which were hidden in the shadow of his body. The junior Seeker wondered whether he was seeing instead the initials of the man for whom he had come here.

The junior Seeker said, "He is reborn. You can be sure of that."

"Can I?" The High Seeker often pronounced questions like this in the presence of prisoners. When he did so, it was with a light voice, mildly inquisitive, no matter how deep his actual interest in the prisoner's answer. Now his voice sounded as though it were dipped in dark liquid. "He was Vovimian, believing that he would spend eternity at hell. Perhaps that makes a difference."

The junior Seeker stepped forward then, touching the High Seeker lightly on his sleeve. "Love, he abused prisoners," he reminded the High Seeker solemnly. "If he is undergoing pain now, it is no worse than the pain he often gave others."

The High Seeker did not look his way. "The last words he wrote were of his apprehension that I would despise him if I learned that he was afraid when he was brought to his final moments. Despise!" The High Seeker's voice was halfway between a laugh and a sob. "He tried to reform his dungeon, knowing what fate awaited him if his efforts were discovered, and yet he believed I would think less of him because he feared that ending when it came!" He turned away abruptly, went over to the bed, and picked up the hood that lay on the pillow there.

He did not put it on immediately, though. He remained where he was, staring at the ground in the cool room, saying softly, "And it was all for nothing. All the work he did, all the pain he endured at the end – it was wasted. His dungeon is returned to what it was; his blood was spent for nothing."

"Then see that his death was worth it."

The High Seeker raised his head slowly to look at the junior Seeker. Though his face remained naked, his expression was unreadable. The junior Seeker gave an impatient shrug of his shoulders. "Love, you've told me often enough that, if a prisoner dies before he has accomplished what he should in his life, it is up to those who were close to him to bring to fruit the deeds that remain to be done. He wouldn't want you to give way to despair like this. If he sent you his last thoughts, it was because he hoped that you could make something of his death."

The High Seeker was very still. His eyes were opaque. Then, without any expression entering his face, he pulled his hood over his head.

"Yes," he said softly as he walked forward. "I will make something of his death. I swear that, by the name of hell's High Master."

The junior Seeker felt uneasiness enter him then. He opened his mouth to speak, but the High Seeker walked past him without pause, flicking a switch in the wall as he did so. The chamber plunged into darkness.

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This text, or a variation on it, was originally published at duskpeterson.com as part of the series The Eternal Dungeon. Copyright © 2008-2010 Dusk Peterson. Some rights reserved. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0). You may freely print, post, e-mail, share, or otherwise distribute the text for noncommercial purposes, provided that you include this paragraph. The author's policies on derivative works and fan works are available online (duskpeterson.com/copyright.htm).