I was glad to go, believe me. But before I turned away, the woman who had fallen glanced up at me. Her hair hung in sweaty clumps. Her face was being buried in knots and hills of gray flesh, but there was enough of her features left for me to see her despair.
Did the sight of that despair make me as angry as the sight of the slaughtered mermaid? I’m not sure, because it all made me angry. A fair land had been turned foul, and this was the result: whole people locked in a dungeon, sick people with nooses around their necks forced to run on treadmills to provide electric lights for the Lord High and perhaps a fortunate few others, one of whom was almost certainly the man or creature in charge: Flight Killer.
“Be glad you’re whole,” Aaron said. “At least for a little while. Then you may regret it.”
Just for emphasis he whipped me across the neck with his limber stick, re-opening the cut there.
2
Someone, most likely Pursey, our trustee/warder, had thrown a dirty blanket into the cell I shared with Hamey. I shook it out, dislodging a fair number of lice （ordinary size, as far as I could tell）， and sat down on it. Hamey was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. There was a scrape on his forehead, a crust of blood under his nose, and both of his knees were cut up. One of the cuts had sent runnels of blood down his left shin.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Playtime,” he said hollowly.
“He ain’t got the stuff,” said Fremmy from the next cell. He had a black eye.
“Never had it at all,” said Stooks. He had a bruise on his temple, but otherwise looked okay.
“Shut up, both of you!” Eye called from across the way. “Do for him if you draw him, until then leave him alone.”
Fremmy and Stooks subsided. Eye sat down with his back against the wall of his cell, staring sullenly between his knees at the floor. He had a gouge over one eye. From the other cells I could hear groans and the occasional stifled grunt of pain. One of the women was crying quietly.
The door opened and Pursey came in with a bucket swinging in the crook of one elbow. He paused to look at the gas-jet that had fallen out of the wall. He set his bucket down and put the gas-jet back in its jagged hole. This time it stayed. He took a wooden match from the pocket of his smock, scratched it on a stone block, and held it to the jet’s little brass nipple. It flumped alight. I expected Fremmy to offer a comment, but that fine fellow seemed all out of humorous remarks for the time being.
“Innamin,” Pursey said through the teardrop that had once been a mouth. “Innamin, ooo unt innamin?”
“I’ll take some,” Eye said. Pursey handed him a small disc from his bucket. To me it looked like a wooden nickel, as in the old saying about don’t take any. “And give some to the new boy. If he don’t need it, Useless does.”
“Liniment?” I asked.
“What the fuck else?” Iota began to spread some on the back of his wide neck.
“Each,” Pursey said to me. “Each, ooo oy.”
I assumed he was telling the new boy to reach, so I stuck my hand through the bars. He dropped one of the wooden nickels into my hand.
“Thank you, Pursey,” I said.
He looked back at me. His expression might have been amazement. Maybe he’d never been thanked before, at least not in Deep Maleen.
There was a thick smear of bad-smelling stuff on the wooden disc. I hunkered down next to Hamey and asked him where it hurt.
“Everywhere,” he said, and tried to smile.
“What’s the worst?”
Meanwhile, Pursey was toting his bucket down the aisle between the cells, droning “Innamin, innamin, ooo unt innamin?”
“Knees. Shoulders. Gut’s the worst, accourse, but no liniment will help that.”
He gasped when I rubbed the liniment into the scrapes on his knees, but sighed with relief when I did their backs and then his shoulders. I had gotten （and given） after-game massages during football season and knew where to dig in.
“That’s good,” he said. “Thank you.”
He wasn’t dirty—not too dirty, at least, not the way I still was. I couldn’t help remembering Kellin shrieking Get him out, he’s filthy! As I certainly was. My sojourn in Empis had been extremely active, including a sprawl in cemetery mud and my recent trip to the Belts, which had been as hot as a sauna.
“I don’t suppose there are showers in this place, are there?”
“Nah, nah, there used to be running water in the team rooms—from when there was real games—but now there’s just buckets. All cold water, but—ow!”