Emperor of Thorns

14

Five years earlier

While the old woman worked to expose Sunny’s ribs, the girl brought me her latest find. She held the scorpion’s claws together in one tight fist and kept the stinger stretched out with the other hand. Eight legs writhed in a fury of motion. The thing had to be a good twelve inches from claw tip to sting. I could see the strain of holding it in the small knots of muscle along her arm bones.

‘What?’

‘It’s not right!’ She had to shout to be heard amid Sunny’s screaming.

‘Mutant?’ It looked fine to me, just much bigger than I like my scorpions.

The old woman tossed down another strip of skin and two scrawny chickens chased after it. The men, crowded before the posts, cheered. Most of them sat cross-legged with some kind of liquor to hand in waxed leather tubes from which they sipped. All of them seemed content to let the crone ply her trade. Some chatted between themselves, but most showed an interest and would applaud the deft knife-work at the completion of each stage. I noted that one man had found Lesha’s head and held it in his lap, angled toward the posts. There were few among the Bad Dogs who matched the intensity with which she watched us.

‘Not mutant. Wrong.’ She strained to crack the creature’s back but couldn’t. The legs kept up the frenzy of writhing. ‘Can’t you hear it?’

I could barely hear her over Sunny’s screaming, let alone her new pet. In truth I think he screamed to take his mind off what was being done, the real hurting had yet to start. Torture is more than pain and the Perros Viciosos knew it. Certainly the old woman knew it. She hadn’t really begun on him yet, but the mutilation hurt worse than agony that leaves no mark. When the torturer does damage that obviously won’t heal they underscore the irreversibility of it all. This won’t get better. This won’t go away. It lets the man know he is just meat and veins and sinew. Flesh for the butcher.

The girl, Gretcha, held the scorpion to my face. I craned away, rewarded by a full view of Sunny’s chest, the white of rib bones showing through the narrow slots cut to reveal them. Veins stood out in sharp relief across his neck, eyes screwed shut.

I heard it then, the strange whir, click, and tick behind the dry thrashing of legs. It set me in mind of the noise when I put the Builders’ watch to my ear, the sound of cogs, of metal teeth meshing with impossible precision. I turned and stared at the thing and for one fragment of a second its black eyes blinked crimson.

Gretcha threw the scorpion down and started to chase it, beating at it with a heavy stick. One blow broke most of the legs along the left side. She vanished from the corner of my eye still chasing the crippled arachnid. I could turn my head no further. The red flash echoed behind my eyelids and for some reason I saw Fexler’s red star once more, blinking over the Iberico.

It took the better part of an hour for the old woman to finish her work and in that time she used most of the tools from the wrap she had rolled out at the start. She made an artwork of Sunny’s chest and arms, cutting, searing, tearing pieces away, unpeeling layers, pinning them back. He howled at her of course, and at me, demanding release, that I do something, begging me, and before long he swore terrible revenge, not on his tormentors but on Jorg Ancrath who had brought him to this fate.

Fear ran in me – how would it not? Terror ran through me in a hot rush, then as ice along veins, making my fingers and face prickle with pins and needles. But I tried to fool myself that I sat in the audience, watching with the casual cruelty of road-brothers at rest. And to some degree I succeeded for I have sat and watched, on too many occasions, from the times before I really understood such suffering to the times where I understood it and didn’t care. The strong will hurt the weak, it’s the natural order. But strapped there in the hot sun, waiting my turn to scream and break, I knew the horror of it and despaired.

At last the crone stepped back, red to the elbows, but with scarcely a drop on her clothes or face. She turned to her audience, mocked a curtsey, and went back to her shack with her tools in their roll beneath one arm.

Cheers from the crowd, some quite drunk now. Harsh rasping breaths from Sunny, his head hanging low, one eye wide and staring, the other tight shut. The tall man, Rael, stood and advanced to secure Sunny’s head to the post with leather straps. Off by the shacks someone took a piss, another man scattered grain for the hens.

‘Gretcha!’ The round-bellied man, Billan, called out for the girl.

She came from behind the posts with the slash of a grin on her skull face, dropping a handful of broken insect parts, legs and glossy black plates. Billan set a stool for the girl to stand on, close to Sunny’s post.

Gretcha went to the fire without further prompting and took the iron that had been set there. I hadn’t seen it placed. She grasped it by the cloth-wrapped end and held the dull orange end toward us. ‘No!’ Sunny understood the leather straps around his forehead. I couldn’t blame his struggles. I would be struggling and telling them no when my turn came.

In the fire strange shapes danced. The sun made ghosts of the flame and I had to squint, but I saw them, shapes and colours that had no place there. Delirium setting in from the heat and terror. Perhaps madness would claim my mind before they even started on me.

‘You’re too loud.’ Gretcha pushed the hot iron into Sunny’s mouth. His clenched lips shrivelled away before the iron’s glare. Teeth cracked at the iron’s touch. I heard them. They became brittle and shattered as she pushed. Steam poured from his mouth, steam and awful screaming and the smell of roasting.

I looked away, blinded with tears as the little girl put his eyes out. I could say I wept for Sunny, or for the horror of a world where such things happen, but in truth I wept for myself, in fear. At the sharp end of things there is only room for ourselves.

The Bad Dogs whooped and cheered at the sport. Some called out names, presumably of the men who we had killed, but it meant nothing. We would have suffered the same tortures if they had captured us in our sleep without loss.

‘Gretcha.’ Billan again. ‘Enough with that one. Mary will find something more in him later. Put the other’s eye out. Just one. I don’t like the way he’s been looking at me.’

The girl pushed the end of the iron into the hot embers and stood watching it, her back to me. I pulled at my bonds. They knew how to tie a man, not just at the wrists but at the elbows and higher too. I pulled anyhow. Anger rose in me. It wouldn’t stand before the iron, but for a moment at least it chased away some measure of the fear. Anger at my tormentors and anger at the foolishness of it, dying in some meaningless camp filled with empty people, people going nowhere, people for whom my agony would be a passing distraction.

When Gretcha turned back I met her gaze and ignored the hot draw of the iron.

‘Keep a steady hand, girl.’ I gave her a savage grin, hating her with a sudden intensity so fierce it hurt.

Are you dangerous? I had asked the Nuban when they held the irons over him. I’d given him his chance, loosed one hand, and he had seized it. Are you dangerous? Yes, he had said, and I told him to show me. I wanted that chance now. Let her say the words. Are you dangerous?

Instead her smile fell away and her hand wavered, just a touch.

‘Stop!’ Rael called. ‘His head isn’t bound. You could kill him.’