The Guva

By gesture they provoked him deeper into that subterranean cave, until a stark black hole gaped before him in the floor. They stopped, and his jailers held out their torches so he might examine it in the flames.

The hole was nine feet across and eleven feet deep. It was in the shape of an inverted bell, carved from the base rock of the island on which Castel Sant’Angelo was built. The smooth perfection of its symmetry and the flawless circularity of its maw won Tannhauser’s amazement. Not even the largest and most athletic of men could get out of this pit unaided. And in this geometric punctiliousness lay the source of its power to terrify. Tannhauser might almost have applauded, for it was, without doubt, the most exquisite prison in Creation. It could only have been conceived and built by the Religion.

Then in the flickering yellow light he saw that its integrity had been blemished in its lower reaches by a screed of markings, as primitive in execution as those left in caves by the vanquished races. The bald walls below were gouged by—he knew not what. Rings, fingernails, bones, or teeth, perhaps. The carvings were scattered in confusion random and wild, as if authored by a blind man gone insane: numerous crosses, often eccentric in dimension; the words “Iesus” and “God” and “mercy” in various tongues; scratches to mark the days, yet too higgledy-piggledy to serve; representations of tombstones; most artful of all, a portrait of a gallows, complete with a dangling man. They were the last marks left upon this world by the pit’s former occupants. Corro looked at Tannhauser, and Tannhauser looked at him.

“This is the Guva,” said Escobar de Corro. “It is the dungeon reserved for false and wicked knights. Once delivered into its keeping, the only destination hence is the place of execution.”
-TR, pg. 669-670
...
Silence. Darkness. Stone. Time without days. Time without nights. Without sun. Without stars. Without wind. A purity of absence designed to strike despair into the dishonored. Those ignominious wretches who had suffered the unscalable geometry of the Guva had withered for want of hope. Like the knotted tails of rat kings, the contents of their brains had tangled and drawn tight. Like castaways driven to feast on human flesh, their thoughts and nightmares and fears had consumed their minds.

Not so the brain or thoughts of Mattias Tannhauser. Of the Guva’s many occupants, Tannhauser was the first to enjoy his dark sojourn. Suffused by a heady elixir decocted from exhaustion, solitude, opium, and peace, he wandered through far-flung dreams, where faces smiled and wine flowed in rivers from the rocks, and where all women were comely and all men mild, and where many a strange beast prowled without offering harm. The relief from battle, from the clamor of war, from the anxious burden of companions—from the need to ponder, determine, and act at the turbulent core of Chaos—was as profound a tonic as the drug.
...
He did not dwell upon the fate of his loved ones, for it served no useful purpose. He did not dwell on the plots of the Inquisitor, for he was powerless to affect them. Thus he made the Guva his fastness, and he used his desolation to refortify body and mind. He slept in prolonged bouts, curled around the Guva’s bell-shaped bilge, and he coaxed himself back into oblivion when consciousness summoned.
-TR, pg. 691-692
...
Tannhauser said, “What day might this be?”

“The feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. Saturday the eighth.” Six days. It had seemed both longer and shorter.
-TR, pg. 694