“Gods, you must excuse me. I’m not used to traveling by vessel.” Ritcher laid down on his chair, his pouldrons rubbing against the low ceiling, his head craned a bit forward into the bucket. He raised a yellowish face, two eyes with red underlids that twitched and as he was about to talk he puked back into the bucket.

  “Maybe we should do this some other time?”

  He held his open mouth. His adam’s apple jumped. He closed his eyes. Another one, in the bucket.

  “Uh.”

  “You have no idea how urgent everything is.” Ritcher wiped his mouth with his chainmail sleeve. Chunky slobber slipped off the metal.

  “Maybe you haven’t heard about my condition but I really couldn’t tell you anything about anything.”

  “I know your condition well. Tell me your name and how long you’ve been here.” He said, mouth in bucket. “Can you do that much?”

  “Um. I’m Virgil Darko. I’ve been here five months.”

  “Do you remember how to read?”

  “I’ve never had an opportunity to read in here.” I grabbed a small stone off the floor and dragged it across the wall, writing long, white scratching. “I can write. I can read what I write. Sure.”

  “That’s good enough then.” Ritcher said.

  “Uh…Ritcher, was it?”

  "Yes."

  "What are you doing here?"

  “I’m the man who put you in here.” He said. “And I am the reason you've lived for six months."

  I tossed the stone next to him, it struck a chair leg and skittered off the wet floor. The walls cried and the rain outside dripped through cracks above.

  “Thank you for that.”

  “Better than being dead, ay?” He asked.

  “I don’t know about that. What’s a life without the liberties afforded to him that allow him to live it?”

  “Back when you had liberties, you almost killed the king.” He set the bucket down. It was half-full. "Add that to your cave writings."

  “Almost killed? The who?”

  “Poison, a chicken dinner of all things. King Xanthus was sick with dysentery for weeks. You tried escaping afterward when he failed to die.”

  “Why would I kill the king? What?”

  “Allegedly you had an affair with the queen. She escaped.” He sighed. “Which of course made her culpable and eventually hung. Lord knows where she’s at. Which is part of the point of thi-”

  “Wait. Wait. Wait. No offense or anything, Ritter. That’s your name right?"

  "Ritcher."

  "Sorry, sorry. Ritcher, no offense but I don’t believe one fucking word out of your mouth.”

  "Which words? The ones that frame you?”

  “Every word. All of them.”

  “The short of it is, you tried killing the king. You escaped with a few of your friends and most of them were killed, some of them survived including yourself. But where you got yourself caught, they managed to escape.”

  “Survived what?” I touched the top of my head, next to my left temple where my corrugated flesh protruded like the perimeter of a crater and within that crater, scars rough and firm.

  “Oh. I don’t know about what happened at Alvos Cross. But it was brutal, I hear.” He said. “Somehow you survived which is a kind of misfortune, I understand. But how else could you explain being here? Especially considering your crime?”

  “I’m having a tough time believing I’d do something so stupid.”

  “I’m sure all men say that after being in love. But in the throes of it, madness seems second nature. No?”

  I stirred and pushed my feet forward and hay came with me, swept to one side.

  “Allow me to entertain this shit then. Say I did do what you said I did. The killing the king stuff. So I survived. Why put me here then, why not hang me?”

  “I would have answered that but you interrupted-” His eyes lit up. He reached down to pick up the bucket and remained still halfway, with the handle of the pail in his hand. “You’re in Shrieker’s Veil, a place for political prisoners. Prisoners kept alive because the nature of their deaths would be too controversial otherwise. People intermediary between hostage and tortured for things worth more than money. Can you piece it together? Some of your friends escaped. The queen escaped.”

  “You think I know where they’re at.” I raised my hand. “And that’s a stupid thing to think. ‘Cause I can tell you something, I’ve got nothing in my skull but fish and fucking oats. I can tell you when we get up. I can tell you what holes mice come out of and what holes they die in. I can tell you when it rains by the cold feeling I get up my ass. That’s it.”

  He looked at me, his mouth in the bucket and his blue-bordering-gray eyes outside the rim staring at mine own. He coughed, he spat.

  “My mind is like marbles through empty tunnels, you see? Sometimes I get an image or a word in me and it travels but it doesn’t hit anything else. It’s just empty, it’s own lonely entity. Like the other day, staring at the seagulls I thought of planes, flying metal machines in the sky. I don’t know what the fuck a plane is, but that’s what I thought of. The word, the image. No context. I can't seem to get any context no matter how hard I try. Ideas just come and go. That’s it. Which is the crux in your scheme, see. You expect me to know about people I can’t remember being friends, going some place I’ve never seen to do things I’ve never heard of? You’re asking a blind man to hunt ghosts.”

  “What you have are what I would consider lost unknowns. Your memories exist…somewhere. I think.”

  I stood. The hay flew up.

  “You think? What do you mean you think? This isn't a joke.”

  “If words could hurt as much as you make them seem they do, I could win wars by singing.” He set the bucket down. “Plant your ass back on that floor and listen.”

  My nose widened and settled. My pulse calmed, my throbbing fingers eased. I looked around but no one was here. There was no evidence of life at all, no squeaking in the walls, nor squeaking in the halls. Everyone was to some degree asleep or away or both, in their own little dream world and I was here to spend my night with this jaundiced man. Here to entertain the yellowfaced bastard, of who's every other word made my blood rise more and more.

  “I don't believe a single word.”

  “You really like repeating yourself don’t you? Virgil, I’m not controversial. I don’t think so at least. I’m not offering you freedom. I’m offering you answers.”

  “That’s the part that’s too good to be true.”

  “You have it confused. It is true, but it’s not too good for you. Not good at all. If you were to ask me, given the rumors I know about you, it seems like a gift to have forgotten.”

  "That so?"

  "Yes, a gift."

  He threw a blanket at me, green wool, in between the bars where it landed somewhere a top the grime muddled floor and hay. I looked at it for a moment like a primate staring at a fire for the first time and reached over - stopped midway to affirm with his face, he nodded - grabbed it and put it across my lap.

  “Are you trying to buy me out?”

  “It wouldn’t cost much.” He smiled.

  “Alright, friend. I’ll let this go on for a bit more.” A water droplet leaked near the bars. The white smoke rose from our mouths and out the gaps in the walls.

  “What do you remember?” He asked.

  I rolled my tongue across the inner walls of my mouth and prodded the loose tooth until it ached sharp and hot.

  “I remember waking up months ago on a hay stack like this, like I was a bird or something.” I said. “Then the next day I was inmate number five hundred and sixty four without any sense for what'd happened my life prior. The guards had to tell me my name, can you believe that? Far as I’m concerned, I was born an adult and raised an inmate. That’s kind of how it’s been.”

  “And you haven’t tried or thought about knowing anything past that?”

  “If my memories are marbles, than they don’t really like rolling often. The harder I try getting a thought going, the faster I lose it." I breathed in hard. "Remembering really is a strange humor, the memories themselves are even stranger...”

  “What are they?”

  “The metal birds, planes. Giant horses of steel called cars. Things that don’t make much sense, from a time long ago.” I said. “Sometimes I get a face but no name to stick to it, sometimes I get a name without a face.”

  “Vicentius Solarius.” Ritcher said.

  I felt something in my stomach, like a parasite about to burst from my intestines. Something so hot and writhing that I couldn’t help but lean forward and hold my abdomen with one hand. The kicking contraction of a bad feeling birthing. The veins in my fingers pulsed, went numb. I cleared my throat, a hot itch expanded.

  “What was that?” My voice broke.

  “Does the name Vicentius Solarius mean anything to you?” He asked.

  The heat rose in my cheeks.

  “No.” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Sylas. Kal. The Silverfang brothers?” He gestured with his hands like a vacuum salesman salesman in the middle of his pitch. There it was again, that image of strangeness. Vacuum salesman? What the fuck is a vacuum?

  “Nope.” I said.

  “What about Obrick?” His eyes narrowed.

  I looked at myself, expecting a response. Feeling nothing. Not in the way Vincent made me feel at least. Vincent?

  “Naw. Obrck sounds like a pretty dumb name, though.” I leaned back into the long shadows in the corner of the room. “You sure you got the right guy?”

  He scratched the wrinkles on his forehead and set his head down.

  “I hope. For both our sakes.” He said, his arm reaching into the bag once again. Maybe for a new bucket. “I don’t know if we can fix your memory, if it ever could be fixed, but I’ve come all the way here for that reason and that reason alone.”

  “Uh huh. Right.”

  "Doubtful?"

  "A little."

  “Listen. In your head exists the machinations of a plot too terrible to even speak of. You were caught. But some of your friends still live, freely. That can't remain. If you don't believe me, believe that.” Ritcher grabbed onto something thick, he pulled his hand out but kept it close to his lap.

  “I always felt unlucky, now I'm glad it's been proven I've always been-” I said. A laugh escaped, I could feel broken ribs poke at my lungs with each exhaust, fucking fat man.

  “Be quiet,” His voice loud and sharp. “I’m not here to speak niceties or sanction buffoonery.” It quieted everyone in the whole row of cells, every piece of scum pretending sleep and lurking in their corner, every guard wandering about. They all ceased and judging by their fading gasps, they must have reeled away from the voice.

  “I need to know where the others escaped. What they’re doing, how they could still be a threat to the new order.” He said.

  “New order? I thought I failed?” I asked.

  “Stop asking questions that don't matter to you anymore. We're losing time.”

  Ritcher took a deep breath and looked out to the hall, nodding. When his face returned straight ward, he had on him a demure. Low eyes, jaundiced flesh and a weak neck that craned. His hand rose. He had something, red and leather bound and set it forward like a damn brick. I stepped forward, my face through the bars.

  “What’s that? Your magic spells?” He struck my face with the tome. I fell back. My body landed with a thump, I gripped my nose where the blood leaked into drops below. Turning, I saw him staring through the bars. Standing. The light covered behind him, his tired eyes facing me.

  “I don’t think you understand how bad things are.” He said. “But if you’d like, I could go ahead and inform the guards and have them explain it to you. How does that sound, Virgil?”

  Blood spilled down my hand, down my arm.

  "Finally getting sick of me?" I chuckled. "Or are you just getting desperate?"

  “How would you like to be dragged around the prison. Stripped. Beaten, lashed to death?”

  “You don’t scare me.” Coagulated threads of blood ran from my fingers to my face like webbing spun. “You can’t take from me when there’s nothing to take.”

  “There’s plenty to take, Virgil.” He bent over. “Pride. Well being. Life. Your memories even. It’s the one thing I could utterly crush, I can sail across this damn sea and abandon your history into a fire so large you’d see the smoke towers from miles away.” He inched his chair closer and the legs scratched the floor with a shrill noise that seemed to have made the torches around Ritcher buckle and flicker. He raised his hand, there it was. A book with my nose-blood all across the front. A thick journal with a spine as big as my face (which would explain why my nose hurt so much).

  I smiled, the taint of copper taste in my mouth.

  “You hit me with a book and expect me to compromise?” My eyes darted between him and the book and the fire.

  “I expect you to listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “This is your progenitor.” He said. “It’s your journal.”

  “What?”

  “The book you spent years writing, a chronicle of all your adventures with the Flock of Crows. Do you remember that name?”

  My heart thumped. Sweat came over me like a veil of dread draped to the contours of my body. Suffocated me.

  “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I couldn’t even stand with the grease along my palms, I put my palm down on the stone brick floor and slipped.

  “This has every detail of your adventures. This is you, Virgil. The you that was before this whole mess.” His arm stretched out. “Would you like to know who you were?”

  “This a trick?” I said. “How do I know I wrote it?"

  “You won’t until you read it.” He said. “All I want is what’s in this book, all I need you to do is read Virgil. Just read.”

  “This is trouble.” I breathed in harsh, my lungs stung. The brick, the water, the atmosphere carried with it that numbing cold. It was all so horrible feeling that my natural reaction, as it’s always been, was to laugh. “This has got to be a ploy.”

  “And what’s so troubling about it? It's just a book.”

  “The suddenness. The promise. I don’t think I’m meant to know about myself, I think it’s a good idea for me to stay dumb. I can live like that, without my memories.”

  “You can live without many things.” He said. “But would it be a satisfying life?”

  “Being alive is satisfying enough.” I grabbed a protruding stone from the wall and lifted myself. “You know, this's been a nice talk, but I think I’d prefer you leave.”

  “Just like that?” he asked.

  “Just like that.”

  “You won’t even consider it?”

  “I did. Just now.”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked down the hall and into his bucket of filth on the floor. His eyes narrowed as they scanned the low-ceiling and the rats and the prittle-prattle of rain drops.

  “I’ll be back. Think it over.” He stood and walked out. I waited in the corner of the room until his footsteps faded and when they were gone and the hiss of torch was the only overwhelming sound in the room, I went to the bars and let my arms hang like two ropes off the edge. I looked down the hall to nothingness.

  “Don't bother.” I said. The blood stopped pouring out my nose, it was dried across my lips.

  I looked down. The chair. The bucket.

  “You left your vomit here by the way!”

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