A near silence fell in the wake of her words. The brushing of robes and the breathing of the slaves and soldiers were gone now. There was only the crackle of the torches and the roar of the braziers.
“He worked hard. They say he never gave in to the temptations of sodomy like the rest of you sinners. They say he was a man who followed the truth of Ahuramazda. They say he was a man who would someday be baptized.”
She walked in front of Selena to stand directly between the twin infernos. “But others knew the truth. Others knew he was wishing to side with Ahriman. Others knew that he had found a way to escape this complex—leaving us all vulnerable to the devils—and that he was meeting with people. People who want you all dead. And do you know what? There are those amongst us which side with him. Vale was the man who reported him. Thank you, Vale.”
Julian looked about to see Vale in the masses, but not surprisingly, he could not.
They’ll probably baptize him at the next ritual.
“But we are full of forgiveness!” Mehlia shouted. “And we offered to let George live if he only told us who he was conspiring with! But do you think he listened then?”
She paused and waited for an answer, none came.
“He did not.”
The people around him were enraptured. Some even had grins on their faces. And why not? Perhaps this was better than working. If a man had no soul, why wouldn’t he mind if his moment of rest was bought by the misery of another?
Mehlia walked all the way up to the front of the stage and stopped at the edge. There was a prop there in a burlap sack. Julian did not know what horrible implement it contained, but he knew it was going to be used on him. Mehlia looked down across the masses, and for a moment, Julian knew that she was looking at him.
My time is coming. I will not fear it. I must be strong.
“They never break soon enough, my children,” she said sadly, her lilting voice echoing off the walls. “Never. So after we beat them, we threaten to take something from them. It’s a shame when they don’t give up early, because everyone breaks. The end result is always the same, it’s just that some of you keep more of what you have. So we told him we’d take a finger, and you know that when we take a finger, it stays taken. Hell won’t heal the wounds we give. But did he break then, children?”
Again, only silence.
“He did not. So we decided that any of his compatriots who we captured would face the same fate as he. You there, amongst the crowd, you who were his sympathizers, should know that the tortures he withstood are the exact tortures you shall receive before you die. Miserable, is it not? Miserable.”
Julian was not afraid. His body was shaking, but he was not afraid.
“So then we went to take another finger. But did he break?”
Still silence.
Julian held the fingers of his right hand with his left. He did not need them. They belonged to God. He’d just been borrowing them.
“So then we went to take his hand, and did he break? Did he, my children?”
This time there was a response. “No,” came the reply of a few scattered voices amongst the hundreds.
“So then we went to take his right nut. Let me ask you, my children, did he break then, do you think?”
Oh God.
“No,” the crowd replied, a few shouting.
Julian’s body was shaking violently now. His heart was pumping.
Be still! Be strong.
But the flesh was weak.
“And then we went for his left. Did he break then? I ask you? Did he? Did he?”
“No!” A few more were shouting this time.
“Oh, how he screeched in pain. Tears formed in George’s eyes when he became Georgette. And then we told him he would lose his pecker, and do you know what he said? He said ‘take it.’” She threw wide her arms and grinned like she had just told a joke. “So we did!”
Julian felt goose bumps forming on his flesh. He was shaking so badly he was worried that he might be going into a seizure.
“I had never seen anyone so pathetic as him then. He was all tears and snot, sniveling out his whines for mercy. So then we told him he would lose his entire arm, and did he break?”
“No!” the crowd shouted.
Julian felt his teeth chattering. All of this was going to happen to him. All this pain. But he could take it. He knew he could. He had his faith. That would be enough. It would have to be enough. It just seemed so horribly unfair that he was going to have to face this. Why him? Why not someone else? Why hadn’t George broken sooner?
“And then we went to take his leg, and did he break then children? Did he?”
George, you stupid bastard. Why did you hold out this long? You could have been free, and now this will happen to all of my people. Now this will happen to me.”
“And then we told him we would take his eye.” She paused and walked back and forth at the edge of the stage.
Julian felt his eye twitching in its socket.
Mehlia smiled and spread her arms wide. “You see, he’d thought he’d lost the worst of it. He thought with an arm and a pecker and a leg gone, there was little more we could do to him. But his face! Oh, we hadn’t even touched his face. But did . . . he . . . break?”
“No!” they cheered.
“So we dug a knife into his eye socket, only we missed and hit the eyeball a little. We had to dig around while he yelled and screamed and shouted until we could pop it out. The poor little fucker couldn’t even piss himself in fear, on account of him missing a few parts—so he shit himself instead. We whipped him for that. It’s a sin, you know, to shit in front of a priestess. When we were done whipping him, we had to finish with the eye. Oh, we had popped it out already, but it had just been hanging there on the end of its nerve. We severed it. Slowly.”
She grinned. “And then we told him we would take his tongue and sew his mouth shut. This would be his last chance to give himself to goodness. We explained to him the righteousness of our ways. He was a blubbering mess—vomiting too. Of course, we had to whip him for that. ‘Tis a sin to vomit in front of a priestess. No Kruk would fear the trembling thing that lay before us then. No person would say he could work hard. No one would baptize such a creature, this man with no arm. This man with no leg, with no dick—this man with only one eye. And he knew, oh yes at that moment, bless us Ahuramazda, he knew, that this was his last chance to stop the torture. He knew that if he didn’t stop us then, we would just keep on going. So let me ask you children, did he break?”
There was silence. No one knew what to answer.
Mehlia reached down to the canvas bag at her feet.
Julian stopped shaking. His eye stopped twitching. He let his hands fall to his sides.
Oh, God, George. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
She emptied the bag. George’s limbless and unclothed torso came rolling out. Two soldiers came upon the stage and picked it up. Two stubs writhed where legs should have been. Small bits of wrapped cloth, perhaps covering the remaining bone of his amputated arms, shook. George’s face had two sunken pits of flesh where the eyes had been. His nose and the right side of his face seemed to have been torn off by the bites of a hound. There was no sign of his genitals. Scratches and whip marks scored his abdomen, and though Julian could not see his back, he was sure that had been lacerated as well. George’s mouth had been sewn shut with stitches of dyitzu gut string.
George had not broken. On Earth, such torture would have killed a man.
Not so here.
“And do you know what the amazing thing is?” Mehlia asked them. “He thought that if he made it this far, we wouldn’t be able to torture him anymore. He thought that if he just managed to make it past all our amputations, that he would be fine. But I’ve got a secret I’m going to tell you now. A secret which George might be able to hear even without his ears. Do you know what that secret is?”
No one spoke. It became so quiet that Julian could hear the crackling of the braziers.<
br />
Mehlia smiled. “The secret is that, this time, we didn’t use any rustrock!”
There was a moment’s pause as her voice echoed around the room. Then, as people began to understand what she meant, a great cheer erupted from the crowd.
No rustrock meant that all of George’s missing limbs would grow back. It meant that they could take everything away from George again.
I was wrong. He didn’t break. He had no faith, and he didn’t break. He hates Jesus, but look at him, suffering on behalf of us all.
Thank you, George.
Arturus did not know how long they’d been walking, only that it had been longer than a day. Galen led them down into the depths of the labyrinth until they reached tunnels so choked with mist that Arturus could not see more than a few feet ahead. In those rare moments when he had enough energy to be nervous, he would fear that the mists hid the Minotaur. Usually he was too tired to care.
His muscles were sore in a way he had not remembered them being before. His sweat reeked of death and rot and had an oily consistency he wasn’t used to. As they began to travel along a purple hellstone vein, he noticed that his perspiration was darker than usual, murky as if his body was trying to expunge the corpseblood from itself.
Galen led them through rivers, perhaps to get rid of the smell of their fetid sweat, or perhaps because he knew no way around them. Arturus had never felt water so cold before in his life.
The moisture was everywhere, condensing on the wall and dripping from the ceiling, and he feared for the weapons of the Carrion soldiers.
Drip drip. Drip drip.
Calimay’s priestess was amenable enough, even after her verbal bout with Galen, to give them food. The devilwheat sat in his stomach and burned as if it had turned into acid. He felt at times like he needed to vomit, but that seemed like it might take too much energy.
At least the purple light on the mist was beautiful. He had to fight to appreciate the beauty since all he wanted was sleep, but he managed.
Drip drip. Drip drip.
When Galen called for a break, Arturus collapsed to the ground. The cold of the stone began seeping into his body. Avery knelt down beside him.
The hunter crossed his arms. “I need to say something to you.”
Arturus nodded. He needed water. Galen would probably bring him some.
“It’s important,” Avery said.
With his last bit of energy, Arturus sat up. “Go on.”
“I just needed to say . . . well you see—it’s just that I . . . well your girlfriend . . . she’s alright. You know? She’s a good girl. I . . .”
Arturus waited for him to continue, but he did not. There was so much more there for Avery to say—only there was nothing he could say. He could never justify what he’d done, and it wasn’t the sort of thing a person could live down—and he’d done it to Kelly—but for some reason, Arturus didn’t hate him. He felt he should, but he didn’t. Maybe it was because Avery had saved his life. Maybe it was because Avery had been wounded while raping Kelly. Maybe it was because, when compared to the evils of Maab, Avery seemed almost good by comparison.
But surely Avery knew all those things. And now that he knew he was in the wrong, he was going to suffer. But suffering wasn’t the point. Arturus didn’t want Avery to hurt. That wasn’t justice. Justice and pain, those were different. That was what he was trying to say to Kelly earlier about things not being fair. No one, no soul, no human and no beast, could ever do enough to warrant pain. If justice was to be served on Avery, it would be in the form of an action or punishment which would prevent him from causing pain in the future. Anything that fell short of that mark wasn’t justice, it was revenge.
Arturus didn’t feel guilty for not hating Avery. He felt guilty for ever having hated anyone. “Avery, there’s nothing you can say, but I think maybe I understand what you are trying to say.”
“Is that enough?” Avery asked.
Exhaustion weighed on Arturus. He felt his eyes trying to close themselves. He shook his head and looked at Avery’s half dead face. “It’s got to be. It’s all you’ve got. It’s all I’ve got.”
“I should be in jail.”
“There’s no time for that.”
“But I—”
“Avery,” Arturus said sadly, “I know you want to be punished, but it’s just not possible. Isn’t Hell enough?”
Suddenly Avery was angry. “Then why are you here?”
The hunter’s sudden passion caught Arturus off guard. “What?”
“Why are you here? You didn’t deserve this. You didn’t do anything to deserve damnation. You were just born here, in Hell. You had to walk through that field of dead with me, and you hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Why?”
“You don’t deserve it either, Avery,”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, a little too loudly. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he repeated, this time more softly. “I do deserve to be here. You don’t know what I did back in the old world.”
“No.” Arturus shook his head. “No, you really don’t deserve this. You’re going to be here forever.”
Avery’s mouth opened like he was going to say something, but then he stopped. He stopped as if he had never thought about what forever meant. As if he had never considered what it might be like to spend an eternity dying his way down an infinite ladder of torture.
“No matter how many times you die, Avery, you’ll still be in Hell. I don’t care what you did before you came here. You can’t deserve this.”
Avery’s eyes were wide, his mouth still hung open. “There’s no escaping it. I can’t even die. There’s nothing I can do.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” It seemed odd to Arturus that Avery was just now coming to this realization, but then again, Avery hadn’t been raised by Galen. “There is one thing you can do, and only one. You can fight.”
He watched that idea sink into Avery’s soul.
“Someday, Turi, someday, maybe after I’ve died enough, I’m going to find the Devil. And I’m going to hurt him. I’m going to make him understand what it means to be so hurt.”
Arturus nodded, because that’s what Avery needed—but what the Devil needed wasn’t pain. He needed justice.
And that’s if, under all these layers of Hell, there even is a Devil.
Galen stood suddenly. Arturus’ hand dropped to the hilt of his gladius. But Galen was smiling.
Grey panted, black shirted soldiers came out of the mist.
They were Calimay’s men.
They crawled down through the mist and into the secret tunnel which led into Calimay’s complex. It was as narrow and as difficult to navigate as Arturus remembered. He felt bad for his father because of his size and for the slaves who had to drag the rustrock filled canvas bags behind them.
As before, they rose through a floor plate into a dark room.
The last time we had to wait here, we thought they were going to kill us.
They waited in the darkness as everyone crawled through. Slaves stayed near the entrance to help drag up the bags of rustrock. The soldiers moved into the next room, perhaps just to get into the light, or perhaps to better scout the lay of the tunnels ahead of them. Arturus remembered that the area beyond was supposed to be self contained, but that the soldiers had found dyitzu there before.
After the slaves and rust rock had been lifted out of the tunnel, Calimay’s priestess led them onwards. The dark purple corridors spiraled in on themselves, leading them closer and closer to the true entrance of Calimay’s complex. The soldiers were still on their guard, but they seemed far more comfortable now than in the mist filled tunnels they’d traveled through earlier. Kelly came up beside him, putting her hand in his and giving him a sense of déjà vu.
“That future,” she whispered, “the one we imagined for ourselves in the Deadlands. We might get to have it.”
The power of that idea lit his mind on fire. The horrible walk through the Deadlands had d
one something for the two of them that Arturus had not thought possible. It had taught them to trust each other.
Hell, even Avery approves of her now.
As she strode beside him, he no longer felt the need to guard his feelings—or to protect himself against her future betrayal. Oh, that might have been a real danger before, Arturus knew that much, but now . . . now things were different.
They were going to return to Harpsborough. It wouldn’t be hard for her to win over the villagers, not with Avery standing up for her. The Citizens would distrust her, but they distrusted everybody. And then he and Kelly would settle in with Rick. Rick would cook them a welcome home meal. Arturus couldn’t wait until Kelly got a taste of that. Then she’d be happy that she’d left her cult behind.
And Rick would love her, as dearly as Arturus did. And with Arturus’ experience in the Carrion, the promise Galen had made to him so long ago about becoming a peer, that could come true. He could even help out the Harpsborough hunters. Now that he knew Aaron very well, they could even work together in times of need.
Then Kelly would want the child. Galen would train their baby, toughen it, make it the kind of person it would need to be to withstand Hell. And—Arturus felt dark thoughts creeping into his mind. He tried to shake them, to keep himself from thinking them. Those ideas were there, he knew what they were, but he couldn’t let them come bubbling up from the sea of his subconscious. The Infidel would never find him. The Infidel wouldn’t have the chance to give him an argument and an offer. The Carrion would never boil over. Maab would never send her people to raid Harpsborough for her war against the City of Blood and Stone. Saint Wretch would never find his way across the Erebus. And . . .
Arturus bit his lip.
How long has it been since I last bit my lip?
He stopped himself.
There will be no peace for us.
And even if there was the option, even if the Infidel truly didn’t come and all the evils of the Carrion stayed on their side of the barrier, Maab had Julian. At some point they were going to have to go and get him back.
March till Death (Hellsong Book 3) Page 24
