Breath of God (g-2) by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: det_crime

While he wondered about such things, time seemed to move at its normal rate. When his river of thought ran dry, though, it was as if everything stopped. He might have been in the cell for centuries, with another eternity or two to look forward to. He wasn’t too hungry. He didn’t need to ease himself. In the unending dim, damp twilight in there, those were his only clues that he hadn’t already spent a very long time indeed down below all the parts of the palace he’d ever visited before.

If I do stay here long enough, my nails will grow out into claws and my beard will reach down to my waist. He might measure months and years that way. Days and weeks? The gauge wasn’t fine enough. Sunrise? Sunset? He was even more cut off from them than he would have been in winter up beyond the Glacier. The sun might stay below the horizon for weeks up there, but you knew it would come back sooner or later. Down here, he had no guarantee of ever seeing another sunrise again.

He must have slept, for he jerked in surprise when the cell door opened and a guard threw in another miserable loaf. He still had some left from the last one. They weren’t trying to starve him, anyway. Was that any favor to him? Again, he wasn’t so sure.

He listened for Ulric Skakki’s sly tones and Trasamund’s bellow outside the door. It wasn’t that he wanted them mewed up in here with him. But he did expect them to come after him. When they didn’t, he wondered what had happened to them – what had gone wrong with them, in other words.

He’d been there for seventeen loaves – another way to count the time – when a guard looked in through the grate and said, “C’mere, Thyssen. You’ve got a visitor.”

“A visitor?” Hamnet’s voice sounded rusty even to himself. He hadn’t used it much lately. He also sounded astonished – and he was. He had trouble imagining any of the travelers talking their way down here without ending up prisoners themselves.

“That’s right,” the guard said. “You want to talk or not?”

“I’m coming.” Count Hamnet hurried to the door. Somebody thought enough of him to come down here. That had to be good news, didn’t it? He eagerly peered out.

Gudrid looked back through the grate at him.

She wore attar of roses, the same scent she’d brought with her when she traveled beyond the Glacier the year before. The flowery sweetness seemed even more incongruous against the stenches in the dungeon than it had up on the frozen steppe.

“Hello, Hamnet,” his former wife said. Her red-painted mouth stretched into a broad, happy smile. “So good to see you where you belong at last.”

“I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” he answered. “Whatever it is, by God, I’m paying for it now.”

“I thought the very same thing when we were together,” Gudrid said.

He’d thought she loved him. He’d always known he loved her.

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