160 - Skorsas's door, closed

Now they decided to use the ram, a four-handled thing short enough for two to swing in a corridor, but they called in one each from Skorsas’ room and the window, so they were four again. “Keep your feet planted,” the Mahid who was in command ordered the pair who took up the ram, so they too wouldn’t end up running in unintentionally; a dart-tube man aimed between them.

The bang of the ram shook the door on its hinges and bent the bolt so badly on the first blow that it would never slide again, but I knew it would take a few more blows at least for them to break through. With a knife in one sword-hand I went to Skorsas’s door. Did the Mahid behind it have it bolted? I unjammed the chair from the latch without being quiet about it; he whipped his dart-tube to his mouth, stood silent for a moment, then slid the bolt.

I opened the door enough to let him see a flash of my head, ducked back as the dart flew by, then sprang out and throat-thrust him, in the brain-artery so he’d pass out too fast to get off another shot. I let out a laugh just to alert the others where I was now; but the door from Skorsas’s room to the corridor was closed. I found myself staring at it, frozen; something very deep in me whispered, ‘Remember this.’

I considered going through it to flank them; but if the Mahid at the window thought to check Skorsas’s window, he’d have a clear shot at me. That gave me an idea; it was time to try my own dart-tube skills. Peeking out Skorsas’s window, so innocently unbarred, I saw the man waiting, poised, every cell in him a study in focused attention, in the obsessive Mahid mode, on my window. Luckily, considering how often I’d aimed one of these things before (never), he was one of the unarmoured ones. I aimed for his middle, and hit him in the shoulder. He managed one shot before he passed out, but, expecting it, I’d drawn my head back in.

I went back into my room, jamming the chair under the latch of Skorsas’s door again. They’d hit with the ram three or four more times; the door was starting to splinter. It seemed I’d have to tell them. “You black-clad morons, you’re down two more,” I yelled, chuckling. “Check next door!”

The ramming ceased; I could sense their indecision: ‘Never listen to the enemy!’ ‘But what if it’s true?’ One of them went into Skorsas’s room, and froze, seeing. “Now look out the window!” I yelled through Skorsas’s door. He thought better of that, rejoining the others. All four of them went away down the corridor. Now they’d inform someone higher yet.

I took another swig of water, and a katzerik, then a bite of bread and sausage. “I’m sorry,” came the faintest whisper from low down in the wardrobe. Was that the smell of fresh piss? “I couldn’t help it… I made sure none of it got on your things, just mine that I’m wearing. I’m really, really sorry, Rai… Shefen-kas.”

“It’s all right, I understand,” I said, and lit Skorsas a katzerik from my own. He poked his head and hand out to smoke it, sucking gratefully. “That’ll be easier to clean up than the scraps of me.” I’d meant it as a joke, but he made a choking sound, so I apologized.

I found out later what happened downstairs. While one Mahid ran to the Marble Palace, the other three stayed by Iska’s desk, and ordered everyone who was not Mahid, except Iska and two spare boys, to leave the quarters.

“The fik we will,” Karel the Aenir said. “This is our place.” The Mahid all tensed, and put hands on weapons; Karel leapt up and went into his typical swaying-like-a-snake fighting-stance. “Our chance to kill Arkans!” said someone else—the Black Shark, I think—seizing up a broom handle, and several others grabbed makeshift weapons, including one who snatched up the hefty stone pieces of the sha set, saying he was losing anyway. Steel necklaces and belts turned into chains whirled over heads. “They can’t kill us because we’re too valuable. Besides, we can blame it all on Raikas, saying his act inspired us.”

On a barked word from one of the Mahid, all three whipped out their dart-tubes and put them to lips. Everyone froze, chains still whirling. About then, Koree came in with a quarter-staff. “Well, well, well!” he said, grinning. “Feisty, are you, today, gentlemen? You all look in the mood for a good hard work-out! Training begins early today for the stable, starts again for the greenhands. It starts now!” He drove them all out at a run, cracking legs and butts with the staff; the boys fetched those other than me who were in their rooms, including Iliakaj, but knew to leave Mana in the cell.

That was all Koree could do. He told me later, “I said to them, ‘Why don’t you ask us, who know him? The man can see through walls, if you’re armed, did you know that? Fighting him is suicide, just ask Riji Kli-fas’s shade; talk to him!’ They just told me ‘Shut up, barbarian.’ So I did, and a couple more of them died.” He shrugged. “No great loss.”

This time, however, the Mahid took it to the highest Senior, and soon the place was crawling so thickly with Mahid they seemed like giant black roaches, by all accounts. The aged Senior—I would later learn his name was Meras—took the reports, and let Iska speak. “He’s not usually like this?” the old lizard-eyed Mahid said. “So other people mean something to him?”

“Yes, normally, Honoured Mahid.”

“Who is closest to hand who means the most to him?”

Though he knew what it would mean, and could have argued to himself that it was Iliakaj, Iska said himself.

I should have known they’d get me this way, since I valued the life of virtually anyone in the Mezem more than Meras valued Ilesias’s. At heart, I suppose, I had known it, for surrendering came easily enough, when Iska said, “Raikas, he has the point of his knife to my eye.” I took off my crystal and wisdom tooth so they wouldn’t become trophies again, before I went out. Though I offered my wrists crossed, they stun-darted me, so much I had terrified them.

†

To describe is to relive, and we can choose what we relive so much more easily than what we live. I will make it very short, what they did to me.

They wanted to kill me, and make me feel myself dying for a very long time, of course, but Kurkas didn’t want me ruined for the Ring, let alone dead. He gave them three days with me, and forbade them causing me any harm that would not heal within an eight-day.

That left plenty of leeway, though, especially when no one told me they were forbidden to kill me. I clung to Jinai’s reading and the certainty I’d had myself that I wouldn’t die in Arko, at first. Fairly soon after that I was hoping he and I had been wrong, and death would take me in the next heartbeat.

All the Mahid from whom I’d taken someone close had their turn, even the women and children. How many times they smothered me senseless, I don’t know, nor how many times I was raped one way or another, or hit, or rubbed in shit. Second Amitzas branded me, with his initials, the Arkan letters A and M, above and below my navel, scars I will wear to my pyre.

Last came Ilesias, as the one I’d made suffer most; I’d killed his uncle, as well. He’d got away, so far, with the crime of mercy. The cut on his cheek was neatly stitched. He had a vial of Mahid’s Obedience, the pain-drug they use in their own training; its effect is to make all the veins feel full of fire. No one can bear it without screaming and convulsing; one must have a gag in one’s mouth or break one’s teeth. But he committed the crime of mercy again, partly sparing me.

When they dumped me on the floor in front of Iska’s desk, he knew me only by my eyebrows, so badly they’d bruised me, and hacked my hair. Just getting me clean took a while, since I had no strength and could not bear water that was anything but the same warmth as a body; then he and Anhunem were a good bead stitching and salving me, while Skorsas held one katzerik after another to my lips. Once the drugs they filled me with finally took effect, I slept.

I was away from myself, watching it all at a distance; I didn’t truly realize I had been until I woke up after a day and a half almost solid sleep, and was back in myself. Then I could talk, a little, and Iska said I should. I wasn’t allowed a psyche-healer, he said, but he’d sent Skorsas to Sasaber to ask what I needed, and letting out what I felt was one thing (just as Mirasae had told me years before), as were many doses of several Haian medicines.

I remember saying, “You Arkans, you have pain and pleasure so mixed up you don’t even notice; it’s in your customs, your traditions, your language, everything; you’ve stopped even knowing the difference, so you calm your own confusion with herb and drink and everything else, it’s why Arko is so obsessed with and good at drugs. You see the madness in the Mahid, but you don’t see that it’s just the extreme of the madness you all have. I’m a Yeoli; I’m not used to this shit; I fight to keep it out of me because I know what I have to keep out; I let it into me and I know very well that it is madness.” They weren’t offended, but they took it all as the ranting of one who’d been tortured.

It was an eight-day before I felt as I had before, as much as I could tell, and another four days before I was cleared to fight. As I was regaining myself, the sight of Skorsas’s door, closed, kept coming to mind, with the admonishment to remember it. Now that I could think about it, I did. Who’d have thought that with my mind as bad as it was right now, I could ever get the sweet flash, with the whisper of the harmonic singer? They separate themselves, from each other and from knowledge, even inside their own minds, even when they fight. That is how they can be defeated by a smaller force. That is how I will win the war.

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