5
I woke up with Hamey shaking me. Which was better than slapping. My hangover was gone. That was what it had been, and how my father had taken those, morning after morning during his drinking days, was beyond me. My left shoulder throbbed; probably I’d strained it when I fell from the pedestal, but the other aches and pains were much less.
“What… how long was I—”
“On your feet! It’s them! Mind the limber sticks!”
I stood up. The door at our end of the corridor opened and filled with blue light. Three night soldiers followed it in, tall and pale inside their auras, the skeletons inside their bodies appearing and disappearing like shuttering shadows on a day when the clouds are racing. They held long sticks that looked like old-timey car aerials.
“Up!” one of them shouted. “Up, time to play!”
Two of them walked ahead of the third, their arms outstretched like preachers welcoming a congregation to worship. As they went down the corridor, the cell doors squalled open, dripping down showers of rust flakes. The third stopped and pointed at me. “Not you.”
Thirty prisoners stepped out into the corridor. Hamey gave me a despairing grin as he went, shrinking away from the stationary night soldier’s aura. Eye grinned, raised both of his hands, made circles with his thumbs and forefingers, then pointed his middle fingers at me. Not quite the same as an American bird, but I was pretty sure it meant the same. As the prisoners followed the first pair of night soldiers down the corridor, I saw that two were women and two were black. One of the black men was even bigger than Iota, with the broad shoulders and wide butt of a pro football tackle, but he walked slowly, with his head down, and before he passed through the door at the end of the cellblock, I saw him stagger. That was Dommy. The women were Jaya and Eris.
The waiting night soldier extended a pale finger to me and curled it. His face was stern, but beneath it, coming and going, his skull flashed its eternal grin. He gestured with his stick for me to walk ahead of him to the door. Before I could go through it, he said “Hold,” and then, “Fuck.”
I stopped. On our right, one of the gas-jet fixtures had fallen out of the wall. It hung askew from its metal hose below a hole like a gaping mouth, still flaming and blackening one of the stone blocks with soot. As he put it back in, his aura brushed me. I felt all my muscles weaken and understood why Hamey had taken such care to avoid that blue envelope. It was like getting a shock from a frayed lamp cord. I stepped away.
“Hold, damn you, hold I say!”
The night soldier grabbed the fixture, which looked to be made of brass. It must have been hotter than hell, but he didn’t show any pain. He jammed it back into the hole. The fixture stayed put for a moment, then fell out again.
“Fuck!”
A wave of unreality washed over me. I had been imprisoned in a dungeon, I was being taken God knew where by an undead creature that looked quite a bit like the Skeletor action-figure I’d had when I was small… and the creature was doing what was essentially a housekeeping chore.
He grasped the fixture again and cupped one hand over the flame, choking it. He dropped the dead fixture against the wall, where it made a little clink sound. “Go! Walk, damn you!”
He struck my bad shoulder with his limber stick. It hurt like fire. Being whipped was both humiliating and infuriating, but it was better than the debilitating weakness I’d felt when his aura brushed me.
I walked.
6
He followed me down a long stone-throated corridor, close but not close enough for his aura to touch me. We passed a Dutch door, the top half open to let out the smell of good things cooking. I saw a man and a woman pass, one carrying a pair of buckets, the other a steaming wooden tray. They were dressed in white, but their skin was gray and their faces were subsiding.
“Walk!” The limber stick came down again, this time on the other shoulder.
“You don’t have to hit me, sir. I’m not a horse.”
“Yes you are.” His voice was strange. It was as if his vocal cords were full of insects. “You’re my horse. Be grateful I don’t make you gallop!”
We passed a chamber filled with implements I wished I didn’t know the names of, but did: the rack, the Iron Maiden, the spider, the stretcher. There were dark stains on the plank floor. A rat as big as a puppy stood on its hind legs beside the rack and sneered at me.
Christ, I thought. Christ and dear God almighty.
“Makes you glad to be a whole one, eh?” my warder asked. “Let’s see how grateful you are when the Fair One starts.”