Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [57]
Why would the gobs let me keep my stolen goods, or anything at all for that matter?
In one corner there was a small wooden pail he hadn’t noticed at first. Crawling over to it he found it full of pure, sweet water. Realizing only then how thirsty he was, Peter drank deeply.
Later he slept.
When he woke again, he first noticed that the small shaft of light coming through the door’s slit window had moved considerably. Its angle was much higher in the tiny room, indicating that the sun outside was much lower in the sky. Even later he woke again to find the room was completely dark, not recalling that he’d slept again. Sometime during the night, someone had come in to refill his water pail.
Much later still, when the diffused shaft of light was once again present in his cell, they came for him.
“So, what do you think?” Someone said from the open doorway. There were two of them, just vaguely man-shaped silhouettes, backlit by the grey daylight. “Are you going to live?” He could hear the soft sound of rainfall behind the two men.
“I think so,” Peter answered, “though my head doesn’t agree.”
“My fault for that,” the same man said. “I didn’t want to have to hit you more than once, but still make sure you dropped without a sound. Perhaps I overdid it. Can you stand?”
Peter didn’t try to answer, since speaking audibly was still difficult. Instead he simply tried to stand, using the wall behind him to brace himself. It took some time and there were a few false starts, but eventually he succeeded. Somewhere along the way the realization sank in that he wasn’t a prisoner of the goblins, and probably not of any other civil authorities either. Who then?, he wondered.
“I see you’ve drunk your fill a time or two, but have you eaten anything yet?” Once again it was the same fellow speaking. “I noticed you were fully provisioned when we first met. Of course we couldn’t allow you a fire in here to cook some of that delicious-smelling bacon, but some of the other things stashed all about you looked tasty enough.”
“You didn’t take any of it,” Peter said. His voice was less of a discordant croak by then, but only just so.
“No, of course not. Why would we? It’s one of the cardinal rules of the Brotherhood. Thieves don’t steal from each other.”
“He’s no brother of mine,” the other one spoke for the first time.
“Not yet, Josef. And maybe not ever. We’ll see.”
“We’ll see,” Josef echoed.
Taking Peter by each arm, Josef and Carl, as the other fellow introduced himself, took Peter out of the cell, supporting him when he needed it, but not dragging him or treating him roughly. They stepped outside into a yard that had been used during the year as a vegetable garden, judging by the patches of open dirt, dressed into a series of long, narrow furrows. It was raining, but only lightly. A glance up at the grey sky, full of darkening clouds, promised harder rain to come. The yard was enclosed by a high wall, built out of the same stone as the small outbuilding that Peter had been kept in. Across the yard was a larger limestone building, with an outwardly curving wall and a high, domed roof that supported a spired crossing tower in the center of it.
“A church?”
“That’s right,” Josef chuckled. “You’re going to church. To give your confession and then be judged,” he added, which seemed to further amuse him.
“It’s not a church any longer,” Carl said. “The Empire’s soldiers closed them all down when they took over. Well, most of them anyway. They couldn’t completely close the two major cathedrals, could they? Not without riots. But these