152 - The wall through which there is no passage

Now speed was everything. While I dangled, the whole city could see me, and someone moving up the wall of Arko by any way other than a lefaetas is committing a crime, so it would be reported many times over. Whoever was winching me knew it, for I was yanked up so fast it didn’t seem much slower than a lefaetas. “Your feet, semanakraseye, get your feet on the wall and rappel up!” the Arkan Yeolis of Ikal all yelled to me, until I did it.

I was above the trees in a moment; to my shield-side, the gilded eagle on the wall above the Marble Palace, as big as a good-sized farmfast’s fields, stretched one enormous wing toward me. The fragrance of forest earth changed to the distant human smells of the city. The cliff became sheer, so I needed only to tap now and then with my toes, and polished, so I could see my reflection, a hands-bound wiry silhouette against the vast sun-white expanse of the city.

Perhaps undrugged I might have felt what I had while rising on the lefaetas Inodem, the sense of returning to myself while Arko fell away from me; or perhaps what I’d suffered since might have prevented me, filling me with dread that my rising would halt any moment, instead. Or perhaps too much of Arko had seeped into me by now to let it fade away as I rose, as before. To part of me, now, the world outside Arko was the dream, too beautiful and kind to be real.

If I’d had my whole mind, I would have known that this attempt was more tenuous than any of other others, because of this very part of it, and that my chances were, in truth, slim.

As it was, Accedence separated me from too much of myself to let me feel much of anything other than the wind in my hair and the prickly chafing of the rope around my wrists. I rose in a dream, my heart in drug-induced Celestialis, as Arkans say, the inability to be nervous leaving me filled with bliss.

That was a mercy when the rising slowed and then stopped entirely; of course if I’d got the urge to heave myself out of the seat harness and fall to my death in despair, I wouldn’t have been able to except perhaps by chewing.

I hung for a time. Something rushed by me unearthly fast, then two more, leaving a vertical trail of words in the air; my mind could make no sense of it. After a half-bead or so, not long enough for the drug to wear off, I began descending. I walked my vertical path again, backwards, lower than the great gold wing again, to and then below the tops of the trees. There were at least a hundred Sereniteers, Mahid and wall-guards waiting in the forest.

“What did I tell you?” one of those who were allowed to speak said; his voice sounded familiar, from atop the lift Inodem. “Right, like any of us were going to bet against you, you moron!” another shot back. “Come on… who else but Karas Raikas was it going to be?”

“Look at that… he’s fikken tied up! Raikas, how were you going to carve your way through us like that?” The words floated by my mind like dandelion seeds in a breeze, bringing no urge to answer. “Silence, inferiors!” an Aitzas-accented, Mahid-dead voice snapped. A good ten dart-tubes trained on me. “Not a move, Shefen-kas, if you want to spare yourself the headache.”

That was easy to obey. When I look back, it is a study in helplessness: hands bound, drugged to imbecility, my life hanging by a thread whose other end was in the hands of an enemy, a hundred full-geared Arkans surrounding me below, and the stun-drug aimed for me ten times over. I couldn’t even say, “I surrender.” If I had truly felt it, it would have been the most helpless I ever felt in my life, but one.

They chained me; the Mahid knew the look of Accedence right away, but didn’t assume I could not fake it. They led me into the Mahid section of the Marble Palace and shackled me to a table.

I knew when I made the desperate wish, Never let it wear off, that it was beginning to. Now and then a Mahid would come in, take his glove off, hold his hand close to my mouth and say, “Lick my thumb, Shefen-kas.” When I stopped doing it, and instead gave him a glare, he went out purposefully. I still felt less than I should, though, my heart armouring itself with numbness.

I expected an old Mahid, perhaps the same one, to come in with a servant bearing the sacred truth-drug box. Instead it was the prim, flat-faced Sereniteer I’d first met in the Ministry after Erilas’s attempt. He had a box, which he laid on the side-table as he sat beside me.

“Well, it’s been a while, Raikas,” he said affably, as he unlatched and opened the box with precise gloved fingers. “You against Kli-fas, that was brilliant… it’s just as I foretold, you were meant for greater things. But now we know who you are, I truly understand why you wish to escape.” That’s why he’s speaking to me equal-to-equal, when before he was angry at me for tongue-slighting him. “And you were telling me the truth, when you said you weren’t one of Fourth Shefen-kas’s guard; you were Fourth Shefen-kas. I got in trouble for that; now it seems I’ll get some of my own back, same time as I get truth out of you.” The box was full of instruments, like a surgeon’s; he lifted what looked like pliers, unbuckled my belt and took my Arkan trousers to the knees with several rough pulls.

“Why don’t you just truth-drug me?” I asked, as he closed the thing’s pincers around my testicles.

“Because, as the last time proved, truth-drug doesn’t seem to work quite right on you. At least not lately... maybe it’s the grium.”

Yes it does! All three doses worked perfectly well! She fikken flew! Now I would suffer the cost of the benefit then. “I’ll stop tightening when you admit it hurts.”

“Of course it hurts!”

“Feh… that was too easy. First drop of sweat on your brow, then.”

The world became pain. Soon I was trying to will sweat through the pores of my brow. “I’ll tell the truth!” I said. “I have no reason not to. I was in the Ring when people began crying ‘Fire,’ then there were two Ikal men dressed as—” Relief from the pain cut me off. He held the pincers close to my eyes.

“Look, Raikas... Shefen-kas. This is how far I had them closed just now. They can close all the way to here… see that?” There was perhaps a half-fingerwidth of space between the thing’s teeth. He applied it again. “Yes, you’re going to tell the truth. The story is that torture does not produce truth, that the subject babbles only what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear, but that’s only when the interrogator doesn’t know what he’s doing. There is no particular story I want to hear. Understand that. Truth is always easier to tell than lies, because it is there in the memory; what I’m going to do is make your mind so riven with pain that you can’t tell up from down, and you’ll cease being able to tell anything but the truth in tiny shreds, which I will then put together.”

“But—” I gasped as he clamped, then steeled myself to talk through it. “You can do that with a drug! I have no wish to tell anything but the truth—I didn’t plan it, I didn’t even choose it, I froze up when they told me, why do you think I was on Accedaaaaaaaiiiiiggghh!”

He tightened until my body was thrashing against the bonds without my willing it, breaths tearing in and out of my lungs. Each worse increment of pain seems like the end, the ultimate, the wall through which there is no passage, until you are taken to the next. When the world was beginning to go black and white by turns, he said, “All right, start now, Shefen-kas. Give me the whole account.”

It was as he’d said. I wasn’t even sure what I was saying, much of the time; now and then he’d give me a draught of water, though he never loosened the pincers to do so, and that would bring me a little bit back to myself, but then he’d take me away again. I’d never have been able to sustain a false version. When it was done I lay limp in the shackles, soaked with sweat and tears, thinking, I have two children, and another coming, and that is all I will ever have.

He scrawled a few last notes and was gone. I lay alone trying to gather myself, to stop the trembling and the twitches by taking long deep breaths. Iska… Skorsas… whack-weed cream… poppy-juice… a hot bath… these things awaited, I told myself. About a bead passed, and I had myself calm if not without pain, when the old Mahid came in with the sacred truth-drug box. Of course they had to double-check.

When it had worn off, they took me back down to the Mezem in a carrying chair, and I was given all I had yearned for in the tenderest way.

The fire had been put out fast, as I’d expected, leaving only some charring on the pillars under the stands, but the boys were still laying out trampled corpses, fifty-seven in all. No one I knew, Skorsas told me quickly.

They’d questioned him, and he’d confirmed I’d been darted. Then Iska, the moment he learned I’d almost escaped but was in Mahid hands again, wrote a letter, and talked the Director into signing it, begging them not to torture me again as I had come to the point where it would impair my fighting ability. I knew that was his true judgment, else he’d never have written it, in case he got truth-drugged himself. Between all these things, like a miracle, I was not punished further.

What precisely transpired on the Rim I will never know, except what the Pages had. The Yeolis were using a winch turned by four people, no less, but Arkans in too great a number got there before I was more than about three-quarters of the way up. I doubted I should believe the Arkan casualty count, as it seemed heroically low, unlikely for regulars against Ikal; I heard on the grapevine later that it was much more.

But the Yeoli numbers were correct, as they plausibly added up to eighteen. The four who had got me from the Ring to the rope were still at large; seven had been killed by guards at the top and one was expected to die of his wounds. Two hanging back to report was routine; another one would have lit the fire; they were all still at large, too, it seemed. Lastly came the words that made what I’d seen while I’d been hanging fall together into sense: “On the approach of a Mahid unit, and knowing their bid was futile, three of the Yeolis leapt to their deaths from the Rim.”

Accedence dulls and yet crystallizes at once, and what is crystallized can come hard back into the memory. The words I’d heard from the man falling past me were suddenly sword-edge clear. “Semanakraseye, I’m sorry…”

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