Page 51 of Of Love and Treason
XX
VALENS SANK TO THE FLOOR,long past caring about the human filth covering it. The suffocating darkness surrounded him with fear and swirling doubt, threatening to swallow him whole. And then there was Hades, whispering through the darkness, offering repeatedly to end him one moment, then treating him as an honored guest and bestowing him with gifts of moldy bread the next. He prayed Bea would be safe and that she would not do something foolish on his behalf. His late uncle’s reason no longer held Beatrix’s passion for justice in check. His mind swam with worries and what-ifs. His hands shook. He felt as if someone had him by the ankles, spinning him round and round and round.
“God!”The prayer pushed from somewhere deep in his gut and echoed off the rounded walls. The shrieking hurricane in his mind came to an immediate still. He recalled that this round, tomb-like hole had been the holding place of the disciple Peter before his upside-down crucifixion, and where the apostle Paul awaited his beheading. Those thoughts, dark though they might be, comforted. Valens was neither alone in the belly of the earth nor powerless. The power of the One who formed the stones beneath his head lived within him, and there was no place Valens could go where He would not see or hear. He began to pray. For his friends, his family, the couples he’d married in secret.
As the truth calmed him, Hades began to rage and scream. Heprowled opposite Valens, pacing the circular edge of the domed cell, snarling in the back of his throat like a savage beast. Bones clattered around his feet.
He gave Valens a wide berth.
“Kill him, kill him now,” Hades muttered under his breath as he paced. The size of the cell did not allow for things spoken aloud to go unheard. Valens braced himself but didn’t stop praying. Hades paced but kept his distance.
A single, small loaf of bread dropped through a sliver of red light in the ceiling, and a skin of water lowered only long enough for each of them to drink once before being retracted. Hades paced himself into a muttering heap along the opposite wall. Food and water came twice, hours and hours and hours passing in between.
From the snatches of sane talk coming from his fellow prisoner, Valens gathered that the man had once been the son of a Gothic chieftain, sent to Rome to kill the emperor before his capture and slow metamorphosis into Hades, god of the underworld. He’d ruled the Tullianum with unquestioned authority for nearly a decade.
How long would it be before Valens became as crazed as Hades?
A scraping noise from above woke him. His stomach stabbed with hunger as he sat up, expecting the usual loaf and waterskin. A blazing half-moon appeared in the center of the black dome, slowly waxing to full and pouring blinding yellow light into the cell.
Hades cowered against the wall, the whites of his eyes wide and flashing. “The executioner comes!” He wheezed and shook a bony finger in Valens’s direction. “You should have listened to me!Iwould have killed you gently.”
Metallic clicks echoed as a lone chain lowered through the hole, a large metal loop dangling from the end. The executioner should have been lowered on that chain, one foot in the loop, standing and spinning slowly like a sinister circus performer, a leather garrote in hand.
The clicking stopped. The chain swung empty, two feet off the floor.
“Valentine. Grab hold.” The voice came from somewhere above.
Valens did as he was told, his hunger-weakened body shaking withthe effort to hold on as the metallic clicks came once more, this time withdrawing the chain, and Valens with it, inch by inch. They had not sent an executioner. Perhaps they were letting him go. Perhaps he would be taken to trial. Or perhaps he was to be executed publicly.
His head emerged through the hole in the center of the dome. He squinted against the light of a single lantern and saw the jailor winding the chain with a large wooden crank. Quintus stopped and gestured for Valens to climb out the rest of the way. He complied all too eagerly.
“Strip.” Giving Valens a wide berth, Quintus wound the loop of chain up to an iron ring in the ceiling.
Valens yanked the tunic over his head, hard and crusted with filth he did not want to identify. He dropped it on the floor and stood shivering, wondering if this was it. Maybe they strangled prisoners up here. The other prisoners who’d been chained to the walls when he’d first been cast into the Tullianum were gone, shackles dangling empty.
Quintus kicked a grimy bucket toward him. “Wash. But don’t drink from it.”
Valens knelt and scrubbed his hands and arms, legs and feet. There was no soap. Surely they did not make prisoners wash before executing them. Hope sparked. Perhaps they were releasing him.
Quintus tossed him another tunic of mushroom gray that looked as though someone had died in it. Considering the nature of the prison, that was a good possibility.
“Will you still refuse to give allegiance to the gods of Rome?” Quintus tilted his head, fingering the club at his waist.
Valens stood. “Always.” He pulled the tunic over his head.
“You should reconsider.”
“I cannot.”
Quintus’s mouth tightened. “Then kneel.”
Valens obeyed. Quintus shackled his wrists to chains dangling from the ceiling and locked his feet into stocks behind him. He would not be able to move from his knees. He needed to use the latrine. Still, this was better than the Tullianum. Better than being strangled.
The jailor dumped Valens’s tunic and the contents of the bucket into the Tullianum before securing the cover back in place. He left the lantern hanging from the ceiling and went up the set of stairs, disappearing through the door to the prison office without another word.
Everything went quiet. Valens stared at the shimmering light dancing over the grime-darkened walls. It was warmer here, slightly better-smelling, and best, Hades was no longer begging for permission to wring his neck. Valens took his first deep breath in days as the relief of his new circumstances overcame him. And then, in a barely perceptible whisper, he started to sing.
XXI
