Page 96 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

as somebody who had by his own admission dispatched people and then gone

straight to sleep afterward, Arkady was the only other person within reach that
the tyrant felt he had a meaningful connection with. Arkady barely
acknowledged his questions, but unwittingly gained the affections of the guards
by asking a variant of the question “Shouldn’t you be staying here in this cell
with me, you piece of shit?” each time the tyrant said his farewells for the day.
As per tyrannical command the guards withheld Arkady’s meals as punishment
for his impudence, but they didn’t starve him as long they could have. One night

Arkady even heard one of the guards express doubt about his guilt. The guard
began to talk about buildings with doors that could all be opened with the same
key. He’d heard something about those keys, he said, but the other guard didn’t
let him finish. “When are you going to stop telling old wives’ tales, that’s what I
want to know . . . anyway no landlord would run his place that way.”

—

LOKUM AGREED to marry the tyrant on the condition that there would be no more
drownings, and he sent Eirini the First and Eirini the Fair across the border and
into a neighboring country so that he could begin his new life free of their
awkward presence. After a long absence, the tyrant appeared before Arkady to
tell him this news, and to inform him that he’d lost the key to Arkady’s cell. The

key couldn’t be recut either, since he’d had the only man with the requisite
expertise drowned a few years back. Lokum had a point about the drownings
being counterproductive, the tyrant realized. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Maybe
it’ll turn up again one of these days. But if you think about it you were going to
be here for life anyhow.”
“No problem,” Arkady said. And since it was looking as if this was the last

time the tyrant was going to visit him, he added casually: “Give my regards to
Lokum.”
The tyrant looked over at the prison guards, to check whether they had seen
and heard what he’d just seen and heard. “Did he just lick his lips?” he asked, in
shock. The guards claimed they couldn’t confirm this, as they’d been scanning
the surrounding area for possible threats.

—

“HMMM . . . SPRING the lock so that the cell kills him,” the tyrant ordered as he
left. The guards unanimously decided to sleep on this order; it wasn’t unheard of
for the tyrant to rethink his decisions. The following day the tyrant still hadn’t