“Glad to see you’re awake.” His voice was falsely cheerful. Berkyavik had not been fooled by her stillness and her controlled breathing. She gave up the pretense and rolled her head toward him.
As she cast bleary eyes over that impassive face, she felt something rise inside her. A sensation like heat, or maybe acid; an unbearable burning as if some chemical agent were eating its way through her flesh and organs. It was rage: a bitter, venomous hatred that insinuated itself into her every cell, wrenching her senses beyond even their normal keenness.
She felt it as a push: the clear dark brightened further, deepened, the shapes within haloed with clarity. Sounds shot up and up until everything was painful: the Urd’s harsh breathing; the jangle of the tools and key rings they wore on their vests; the rustle of Berkyavik’s robe against the concrete floor; the jumbled, rapid beating of five heartbeats—jagged shards of glass driving themselves into her brain.
And scent . . .
Every aroma jumped out at Shomoro from the dark corners of the room. Where before there had been vague hints were now memories in odor of everything that had happened in her cell. And above these, the odors of the present: the rawhide-and-sulphur smell of two excited Urd filtered in from both sides, making her squirm in disgust . . . but what came straight at her, overwhelming her nostrils, was Berkyavik’s scent.
Emotions fought each other there—his apprehension, acrid and layered with disdain, underlaid by a kind of sweaty excitement. A strange sweetish pride beneath even that. And under it all, Shomoro smelled the blood in his veins—a hot, heavy, metallic smell.
Shomoro wanted that blood. She wanted to see it turn the floor red as it spilled out of him, flowing from rent veins; to taste it as her teeth took him . . .
Wanted it more than her next breath.
She lunged up from the floor toward him, muscles going through the instinctual motions to unsheathe blades that were no longer there as she bared her teeth to strike.
Claws like steel vises wrapped around her arms and yanked her to the floor, slamming her against hard concrete. She snapped wildly at the two Urd, hating them with all of her being for getting between her and the man who had so irrevocably mutilated her. The three of them struggled on the floor, a mostly silent tussle punctuated by the harsh panting of the saurian guards and Shomoro’s baleful hisses.
“Let her go.” Both Urd looked up from their viciously struggling captive, their golden eyes questioning. Slowly, they lifted her from the floor, giving her a moment to get all four feet on the ground.
“Let her go?” the wiry male on Shomoro’s left repeated. His raspy voice was edged with bewilderment. “She will hurt you, Berkyavik-leader!”
“She won’t lay a finger on me.” Berkyavik looked not at the Urd who had spoken but at Shomoro, into her eyes. “Now have some confidence in your leader and let her go.” The last words slow and deliberate. A moment later, the guards’ grip on her arms loosened and she stood free.
She smiled, her dark blue tongue running along the row of needle teeth hidden just behind her thin lips. She didn’t have her blades, but that didn’t matter right now. She was still seph—still dangerous.
Berkyavik was about to learn just how dangerous Shomoro could be.
She grinned and leapt for him. A hand span away, she saw his arm move with blurring speed from behind his back. She glimpsed a flash of gold-trimmed white and shiny metal as he caught her in the jaw, just below that predator’s snarl of a smile. The blow sent her spinning to the floor to land in a puddle of blood and scattered teeth.
There was surprisingly little pain. The shock of the sudden blow had driven it away, and for the most part there it remained. She lay on the slimy floor and tried to process what had just happened. Her breath came slow but ragged; each time she exhaled, the puddle of blood inside her injured cheek bubbled and gurgled. It dripped out in long dark strings like slaver from the jaws of a wild beast.
“Get up.” She turned her face upward, found his eyes. The feral instinct that had welled up inside her was still there, still tearing at every nerve, but caution had tempered it. Shomoro rose stiffly, her gaze never straying from Berkyavik’s smug features.
When she had regained her feet, she twitched her gaze from his face to his left hand: the pale fingers clutched a stubby silver slug gun by the barrel, its short stock facing her. That was what she had been struck with. Shame joined the anger in her chest as Shomoro realized what a crude trap she’d fallen into. Was her mind that addled?
“Lesson one.” His voice was hard. “Do not try to bite off the hand that feeds you. It will lead to pain. Threatening our guards or our special assistants, or defying any of their direct instructions, will lead to pain. Refusing to answer our questions, or giving us answers that make no sense, will lead to pain.” He tucked the gun away in his robes. “Now. That said, I believe if you comply with us we can come to an information-sharing arrangement that is agreeable to all parties concerned.”
“Rot in Krenkyr, sunspawn. You took my blades,” Shomoro seethed. Yet she stood her ground, not daring to move now she knew Berkyavik was armed. He wouldn’t kill her, of course: she hadn’t gone through the whole elaborate ceremony of capture and battle and humiliating, degrading surgery just to be shot dead here and now. But he could injure her. Could choose to wound her in some non-vital area that would still hurt like nothing she’d ever felt before.
Shomoro was tired of being in pain. She knew herself well enough for that.
“Yes, we did,” he said. The regret in his tone made her head swim. “I know this is a loss, but I hope you will come to see that it’s for the best. You must be prepared to make sacrifices if you want to learn the truth of what you are. Parts of your old identity must be cast aside.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He nodded thoughtfully, as if disappointed by her answer yet half-expecting it. “In a few months, perhaps you will.”
At his signal, the Urd grabbed Shomoro roughly, propelling her out the door into a brilliantly lit hallway (white, of course). Berkyavik shut the cell door and trailed after them.
He spoke from behind her. “Don’t worry. I’m sure your operation will prove to be the hardest step. It only gets better from here.”
On the first day of her new existence, Shomoro was taken to a small soundproof room lined with white ceramic tiles.
On that first day, it was very simple. The white-tiled room was empty except for a high block of metal that rose from the center of the floor, and a metal Terran-style chair facing it. The two Urd guards half walked, half dragged Shomoro over to the block and made her lower her belly onto it. She felt claws dent but not puncture her flesh as Grelshk grabbed her arm in a sharp hold calculated not to draw blood. Firlz cuffed her hands behind her back and retreated to a corner of the room, bowing to the larger female Urd the whole time.
Berkyavik circled around them to the metal chair, his pace unhurried. Spinning the chair around with one hand, he lowered himself into it with a sweep of his white robes, his arms coming to rest along the top of the metal backrest. He gazed at her with a faint, indulgent smile on his lips. Shomoro did not look at him. Her gaze roved the room until she found what she was looking for, the faint glint of light tracking them from a corner of the ceiling. A camera.
“So, Shomoro.” She started; he’d been silent so long that the innocuous words struck like a cliff spider’s pounce. “Let’s begin at the beginning. Where were you born?”
Silence from her.
“Or do Osk hatch from eggs? I’ve never been clear on that one.”
“I’m not telling you anything.” Her voice flat, amazingly unafraid.
Berkyavik sighed heavily and slumped in his chair, as though tired after hours of questions instead of just one. He rubbed a hand across his flat face.
“Shomoro, what did I tell you before?” Without waitin
g for a reply he rose and walked to the other side of the room. Two doors she hadn’t even seen slid open in the walls. White-uniformed Terran soldiers poured into the room, surrounded her block chair. She lost sight of Berkyavik behind them, until only his voice was left.
“We could have avoided all this,” he said from the open doorway. “I want you to remember that. And we still can. All you have to do is call my name when you’re ready to say something. When you’re ready for the pain to stop.”
She heard the door whisper closed. An armored glove crushed down on her shoulder, and she whipped her head toward the soldier—turning into the path of the first punch.
It landed across her injured jaw, white pain exploding into the roots of her teeth as the impact catapulted her from the rude bench and onto the hard tile floor. Shomoro stared up at the ceiling through tears, a white circle shrinking as the ring of Arrow troops closed around her.
The world dissolved into a blur of fists and boots. She had been thrown into a mortar and the guards were pestles. Pummeling her flesh into a paste. Grinding her into nothing. Laughing as they unmade her, as their beating squeezed all the air out of the world. She curled up on the floor under the rain of blows, legs drawn in toward her center, gasping again and again for breath that would not come. Each inhalation brought pain and the merest trickle of air into her lungs. She twisted away from one blow into the next, her arms aching from being pinned behind her back, her blood roaring in her ears.
And under it all—the roaring, the laughter, the soft, agonizing thocks of leather and Kevlar meeting her flesh—were awful gasping sobs that seemed unending and without source, until she realized they were coming from her own throat.
Slowly, slowly, Shomoro listened to the sobs quiet, become a raw, rough approximation of her voice.
Heard them form a name.
Footsteps on the white tiles, uncomfortably loud in the sudden silence. She was dimly aware of the soldiers filing out of the room, another presence returning. The metal chair scraped and creaked as Berkyavik resumed his seat. Gloved hands reached down and lifted her by the armpits, propping her against the metal block. The hands belonged to a Terran doctor, white-coated and masked like the ones who had taken her blades away. He crouched beside her and began to remove bits of equipment from his bag, quickly fading from the umbra of her attention.
She stared up at Berkyavik through a wash of blood. It was impossible to tell if he was smiling, but the man’s voice was smug.
“Being uncooperative hurts, doesn’t it?”
“No,” she spat painfully. Her mouth felt wet and sticky inside. “You did. You hurt me.” She did her best to glare at him, but her head kept trying to loll forward.
Berkyavik spread his arms wide in feigned disbelief, his voice taking on an aggrieved tone. “Why, Shomoro, I wasn’t even there!” He leant forward and tilted her head up to face him. “But I’m here now. I’ve come to take the pain away.”
The doctor gripped her upper arm and raised some kind of ampule to her skin. She barely felt the needle penetrate—it faded to nothing against the background static of her bruised flesh. But the flood of blessed numbness that followed was something else, almost causing her to collapse with the relief of it. From far away, Shomoro felt the doctor steady her against the block. Sounds and smells faded behind a sheet of glass. Even the room’s blazing lights seemed to dim to warm amber. Her body felt strange and floaty, separate from her, like a distant appendage. A warming buzz began to creep through her.
“Now. Let’s begin again.” Berkyavik’s voice seemed to enfold her, warm and friendly. “Where were you born?”
She opened her mouth to answer.
After that, she didn’t remember much.
Shomoro’s sessions in the white room were scheduled for once every one hundred sixty-eight standard hours—a Terran week. Always the same day, as far as she could tell; possibly even beginning at the same hour. “Sessions” was Berkyavik’s term, a vicious understatement fitting to his character. The man had a talent for understatement and scheduling—even scheduling such a delicate process as the breaking of Shomoro’s spirit.
The sessions were the same every time. After almost a week spent in the dark and silence, listening to the awful monotony of dripping water and the rumbling of her stomach, two Urd would haul open her cell door. One of them was always Grelshk, eager for the chance to contribute to her degradation. Berkyavik did not attend these extractions, not after the first time. The structure of the first day was never repeated: he did not sit her down and demand information, then speak the order to inflict pain when it was not given. He was simply absent, and his absence sanctioned whatever was waiting for her in the white-tiled room to proceed.
Berkyavik always made his entrances later. Much later.
The sessions were different every time. She was never simply beaten again. The Urd might haul the door open on a vat of freezing water—or a horde of silent machines—or a steel operating table—or an Arrow tech preparing a rack of heated blades. The techniques ranged from primitive to state-of-the-art, but they all had one aspect in common: they were all designed to cause her as much pain and discomfort as possible, with a minimum of irreparable physical harm. Berkyavik had spoken the truth; the White Arrows had not brought Shomoro here to kill her. More than once she remembered begging for death, yet after several sessions the White Arrows had still not obliged her.
Pain was not the worst of it. As long as she was in pain, Shomoro was not talking—screaming, yes, sobbing, alternately cursing her torturers to Krenkyr and begging their forgiveness if they would only make it stop—but not talking. Not revealing information the White Arrows could use to hurt people she loved. As long as she was in pain, Shomoro knew who she was. It was her landmark, her one and only way to be sure where her own mind ended and the minds of her tormentors began.
Far worse was the stage in the proceedings when Berkyavik finally made his appearance, accompanied by the doctor who had administered the drugs at her first session. Shomoro grew to hate that silent doctor almost as much as she hated Berkyavik. When the familiar pain faded away, a sick dread always crept into its place at the sight of the drug ampule in the doctor’s hand. She had learned by bitter degrees that the physical torture was mere prelude—not meant to force secrets from her at all, but to disorient her, break down her defenses in preparation for the real interrogation to come. In those timeless moments when she was herself, before the doctor administered the dose for that session, Shomoro’s despair and self-loathing became absolute.
She knew she would talk for as long as the drugs lasted. Berkyavik would ask his questions, and she would answer them until she had no more secrets left, pathetic in her drug-induced desire to please. The fact that she couldn’t help it only made it all the worse, in the last seconds as she clung to something like normal consciousness . . .
Then the drugs would feed in, and Shomoro would stop being Shomoro.
It had been her task, hers and no one else’s, to keep her existence a secret. She had known it would also be her task, if she were ever captured, to maintain a silence toward the enemy no matter what they tried . . . and to make that silence permanent with her own blade as soon as she got the chance.
Death before capture. Blademaster’s voice, drifting up from long ago as she lay in the darkness between sessions. In the end, the last life a seph takes must be their own.
That had been her task. Shomoro had known that. And there was nothing the White Arrows could do to her that was as painful as knowing she had failed.
Then there were the strange times: days when the interrogations veered into areas that made no sense, when they stopped being interrogations at all. From a corner of herself, she would see Berkyavik make a certain signal to the doctor, and from a pocket in his bag he would withdraw a different ampule. There was an array of them in there, and after a few weeks she earned the dubious distinction of
having experienced them all.
The effects were like being squeezed into a different body, no matter the ampule’s contents. The onset was so rapid she could feel it building through her as the last of the liquid drained into her arm. New sensations, crashing against the heaviness in her limbs from the familiar dissociant the doctor administered for her interrogations. Wiping it away. Replacing it with something . . . other. Shomoro might feel her limbs disappear, leaving her bodiless in the white void of the tiled room, or stretch and alter in ways that would be screaming agony if they were more than hallucinations. Chemical illusions shot her up to Berkyavik’s height, standing impossibly on two legs, or left some of her limbs a numb blank while new ones seemed to grow in places limbs could not possibly be.
The effects of these secondary drugs made Shomoro almost long for the regular sessions in comparison. The hallucinogens were out of step with the rest of it, did not seem to serve any purpose of interrogation she could think of. Pain she could understand. Humiliation she could understand. But not this alteration. Not this steady remaking, this conversion into something she did not recognize.
At these times Berkyavik would turn solicitous; he would crouch close to where she sprawled and start asking questions of a different kind. She could feel him take up the phantom limbs and rub them with both hands, asking her if she felt it. Could see him smile when she said yes. Berkyavik reminded her of a doctor at these times: observing her from behind a sheet of glass, pale gray eyes watching her progress toward some unknowable measure of success in an experiment he didn’t expect her to understand—but an experiment which somehow, through all the distractions, she came to understand was being performed for her own good.
It was with that thought that she would always slip away from the room, from the questions, from her own distorted body, leaving everything behind except for Berkyavik’s questing eyes. Then these would turn into the eyes of another, and the well-worn memory would start again.
Absence of Blade Page 9
