by Adam Burch
Greelo and Sookah open a heavy metallic door and toss me inside a small stone room. I fall to the slick wet floor. “Enjoy your time in the black, worm,” Greelo says, guffawing. “Goth will be by for dinners. See you in a year.” The iron slams behind them, and the light of the torch fades down the hallway.
Cold. Freezing. Left in the pitch. Somehow there’s at least a little heat pumping through a vent in the ceiling to warm me. I huddle close to its airstream. They need to keep us thawed just enough to live. The Citadel isn’t about sending prisoners to die; it’s about breaking us. Time spent in such sensory deprivation would turn anyone mad. Almost anyone.
My first hour passes. Then another. I crawl on all fours, circumnavigating the confines of the cell. I feel the edges, trying to discern my surroundings. Two meters or so up the wall, there’s some kind of a portal, smaller than the size of my head, that looks upon the open Nightside. I stand on tiptoes to peer at utter blackness, but for sapphire pinpricks in the velvet sky. So many stars, so little light. It makes me feel more alone.
Terror creeps in. There are moments of unspeakable fear that every man feels in silence—a moment before slumber that confronts him with who he truly is in the heart; a lucid moment when he separates from his body and looks at himself from the outside. That is when he is faced with the true, pathetic ugliness of who he is, what he has become. That’s the fear I feel now, the fear that stares me in the face. It is inescapable, like the monster of the sea. It is the eel that burrows into my skull with razor teeth and a malevolent laugh. I cry out in panic.
“Don’t worry,” the darkness whispers back. I spin, searching for the source, but see nothing. “When the light of the moons of Chang and Hou pass overhead in six months’ time, you will see for a full diurnal cycle.”
“Who are you?” I hiss.
I hear the scraping of metal above me. The heating grate, I realize. There is a sharp bang. The grate pops loose, and someone drops from above, landing softly on the dungeon floor. Startled, I fall backward onto my rear. I yelp as I still feel the sting of the caning I’ve recently received.
“Quiet,” the man hisses. “Goth will not be on this level for a while, but I don’t want to risk it.”
I know that voice!
“Master?”
I can almost hear the dark man nod. Then he’s beside me. His strong and gentle hands peel the rags away to examine my oozing back. “It’s fortunate that I’m used to doing my work without the benefit of sight.” He strikes my neck with his fingertips. I’m numbed from the neck down. He gently places me on the icy stone floor while he probes the wounds. “Not good, but not as bad as the first time,” he says, clucking. “Still, with some rest and care, you’ll survive. You always do.”
“Faria? How did you—?”
“Part of the plan, Edmon,” he reassures me. “When The Warden punished you, I was also partly responsible for your crime. The Warden needs my services to keep the camp running, but with some well-placed anger on my part, I convinced him that I’d broken the agreement to keep you out of trouble. He was unwilling to part with me for longer than a six-month stint, however, so we won’t have as much time as I would’ve liked.”
“But why do this?” At least I’m thinking a little more clearly now that my nerves are cut off from the pain streaking my back. “I failed you.”
Faria laces my skin together with spider-silk sutures. “You followed my lessons. You stayed invisible, as much as you could, but I knew you’d be forced into conflict eventually. When you were, you didn’t hesitate. You exploited your enemies’ weaknesses. You remembered each man’s injuries, their vulnerabilities. You used them in order to defend yourself. Your fighting skills are already high caliber. Now I’ll teach you to be a master. No one will ever be able to harm you again. You’ll need that in order to face what is coming.”
“What’s coming?” I ask.
The old man gives no answer.
“You were watching the whole time?” I’m not entirely surprised. Everything, from the moment I stepped into the Wendigo, has felt like some sort of test. “Bruul and the Haulers hadn’t attacked me for over a year. Why did I warrant their attention again all of a sudden?”
“You already know the answer,” Faria says simply.
“You put them up to it.” If I had control over my body, I’d throttle him. As it is, I can only turn my head to the side. “Why?”
“We need to work out of the sights of the gangs, The Warden, and your father. I suggested to the man with the broken nose that I’d be willing to sell your services to the Haulers. He returned to Vaarkson with the offer. Vaarkson, as expected, thought he could circumvent recompense. You had been successful being invisible long enough. It was time for the next step.”
“You’ve trapped me in darkness for a year of my life! For what?” I fume.
“You’re angry?” he asks with amusement. “Good. You’re going to need that, too. But first, your real training.”
CHAPTER 20
TOCCATA
One, two, again and again. Rhythm and numbers drive my days and nights. The pulse of Gorham’s drum, the tap of The Maestro’s baton, now the relentless beat of the metal rod Faria stole from an air heating unit and now uses as a makeshift sword. In the pit of blackness, he trains me. One, two, ten, a hundred. Push-ups, sit-ups, squats, jumps. Seconds, minutes, hours, days. My muscles quiver; my brain is numb. Punch, kick.
Ho-ho! Ho-ho! Ho-hey! I am being forged.
“Feel my pressure, Edmon,” he whispers. “Don’t resist. Deflect. Keep contact. Control my center line. Use your hands. Control with your legs. A man without sight is not a man entombed. Sense with your ears. Smell changes in the air. Let your skin feel the temperature shift.”
We spar. I lose again and again. I can’t see, but my other senses become more attuned. My hands, feet, fingers, and toes grow strong. I spend hours punching and kicking the black obsidian of the cell. Faria calls this “iron hand.” Bone is damaged, then recalcifies stronger. My cells learn to expend energy more efficiently, inuring me to cold. I balance on my hands for minutes, then hours. I take a hand away; soon I’m on two fingers. Now one. Muscles tear. I’m broken down, but the master builds me back up, stoking my rage.
“Remember your mother. Remember Nadia. Remember your father and what he did to you. Remember Vaarkson and The Warden.”
Ho-ho! Ho-ho! Ho-hey!
My mother said I should forget. She was trying to protect me. I turn her words into strength. When I’m exhausted, the master teaches me to meditate inward, to visualize my cells dividing, rushing to places of need, and with conscious effort, I will myself to heal.
“This is a deeper level of awareness,” he says. “Since Ancient Earth, science has sought to transform the human. On other worlds, you will see cybernetics, narcotics like tag, or bio-mods, but evolution can occur through sheer will. Our habits determine the expression of our genes. The darkness of our surroundings will be your blindfold to heighten your other faculties. You can see them, can’t you?” he asks. “See the organisms circulating through the biosphere that is you?”
At first his words mean nothing, then I catch a glimmer of something in my inner eye. I see them just out of reach, like a dream beyond my grasp.
“You’re becoming aware for the first time,” the shaman tells me. “It takes a lifetime to achieve full control. When you’re ready, you’ll be able to do things you never thought possible.”
“Such as?” I ask.
“Run for hundreds of kilometers without stopping. Stay awake without sleep for weeks on end. Lift weight that many would deem inhuman. Appear dead to all but the most sensitive of instruments. Some claim that you can even stop yourself from dying.”
“Are you saying I could become immortal?” I ask.
I feel him smile enigmatically in the darkness. “The body’s energy is a symphony, but it is not infinite. Take a resource from your wind section, give it to percussion, and you change the sound of the orchestr
ation. Turn the volume up on one vibration at the expense of another.”
“If I divert my focus from one thing, I won’t be able to do another?” I ask.
“Everything has a cost.” He puts it bluntly. “Sometimes the cost is too great and where you least expect it.”
Ho-ho! Ho-ho! Ho-hey!
We take respite when Goth, the lumbering, slothlike monster of the Citadel, makes his rounds to bring food. The rattle of his shackles lets us know that he’s near. There are no days or evenings. It’s a black abyss of an existence. I usually take rest after the meal, so I tend to think of the meal as supper. Faria returns to his own cell through the ventilation system. Otherwise time flows on unmarked and without end. Minutes, hours, days, weeks. Tick. Tick. Tick. It becomes interminable and undeterminable.
Through our meditations, I’m able to fully recover from intense training more quickly than ever. I push my muscles to perform greater and greater physical feats. I jump higher and move faster, but I’m forced to sleep for long stretches. I wake only to consume food.
Then Faria trains me to stay up without sleep. I feel like a zombie and cannot train with any exertion. This is how he teaches me the delicate balance of the body. I break past barriers but also learn limitations. We are hardware, and improvements are incremental but still bounded.
I learn to divert cells in my body, manipulate meridians, but I can’t grow stronger without external force. Faria provides it. Evolution bred this intuition into every organic cell long ago—adapt or die. I harness this instinct through sheer will, but like so many things in nature, when the human brain interferes, there can be deadly consequences.
One day, Faria forces me into a series of agility maneuvers using his metal rods. He swings them like an expert sword dancer. I summon newfound speed to avoid the attacks, pushing beyond the point of exhaustion. Jump over this swing. Dive under the next. Faria is so unpredictable, so attuned to my rhythms and expert at challenging them that I am at my limits far more than I ever was with an automaton. It’s exhilarating, stretching my body in ways I never thought possible.
This is what I’m capable of. It must be what Phaestion feels every day of his life.
Hours without a single misstep and without warning, I collapse.
Faria is by my side when I wake. I was out for almost three days, he warns me, suffering from severe breakdown of muscle tissue. Without apology or tenderness, he tells me that knowing my limits is more important than pushing them. When I’m healed, we continue.
We explore the Citadel, climbing through the ventilation system that snakes through the black tower. We hover over the cells of other inmates and listen for hours. Faria teaches me to develop true hearing and quizzes me when we return to the confines of my cell.
“Tell me,” he says.
“His heartbeat was slow and weak. An older man. Perhaps seventy,” I reply.
“What else?”
“A Daysider, from one of the isles. The Isle of Shell or Bird.”
“How do you know?”
“His accent when he muttered.”
I can hear Faria nod in the darkness.
“An islander, so dark-skinned and old. He had lost a daughter. An only child perhaps?” I make the deduction from only a single word picked up among the random groans and breaths whispered in darkness—Lysha. It’s hard to make a more concrete conclusion.
“You heard the name, too,” Faria muses. “Are you sure it was a daughter’s name? Why not a boat he prized or maybe a lover from long ago.”
“Lysha is a girl’s name in the isles,” I say, thinking out loud. “Not a name generally used over a generation ago. Islanders of Tao do not name possessions after women like other maritime cultures. The pitch of his voice was a lamentation. He said the name as he would say a child’s. I know that feeling.”
My words hang in the air, and Faria says nothing. Then—
“What else?” he probes.
“He had lost a leg. I could tell from the way he moved. There was also some sort of infection or sores on his skin he kept scratching,” I offer.
“Where?” Faria grows intense.
“Left hand?” A guess.
“Upper forearm. The inner elbow. The vibration tells you,” he says, demonstrating the subtle difference between the scratching noises. “How would you treat such sores?”
“Antibacterial and fungal ointments, mussel glue to seal any open sores, a skin graft cultured from a healthy area of his body to complete the process.”
“That’s how you would treat his sores. How would you treat your sores?” he asks again.
“Divert white corpuscles to the area. Stimulate the division of new red blood cells. Increase mitosis of skin and collagen to seal the wound. Total recovery time . . . two days.”
“Too long for a few bedsores.”
“Open wounds can lead to complications,” I offer. “The extra time might be worth it.”
“You should be able to heal everything in a few hours and be ready to move.”
“If I wanted to be exhausted,” I respond. “I was assuming ideal conditions—”
“Never assume ideal conditions.” He turns to leave for the evening.
“Wait,” I call, “what was the man’s crime? Why was he here in the Citadel?”
Surely that was the most important question to ask me about the prisoner, wasn’t it?
“Think. You already know,” he says calmly.
An islander, with his leg gone, whispering a woman’s name? A fishing accident could account for the missing leg or the girl’s death, but that does not equal a crime punishable by exile in the Citadel. He sounded like he had a strong bone structure, physically imposing. A fighter. The Combat. Champions are made Electors, not prisoners. He was a combatant who lost his leg and survived . . .
“He asked for mercy,” I whisper.
I know I am right. Alberich also asked for mercy and was spared, but was punished with a life of indentured servitude and the loss of his reproductive organs so he could never pass on his name or cowardice to future generations. My father pitied him or thought he’d still be of use to his new house. His fate was unusual. This man’s existence was more likely.
“Combat is kill or be killed,” agrees Faria. “There’s no other choice. Especially for an islander. Anything short of death or victory is shame. So says the Pantheon.” The dark man’s words are bitter on his lips. His tone, personal.
Why is Faria here in the Wendigo?
“Enough.” His deep basso resonates. “It’s time for rest.”
“Yes, Master,” I say as I do before every slumber.
We climb through the cramped vents and tunnels. Today, our journey isn’t to visit cells of the other inmates, but for another purpose. The vent slopes downward and ends in empty space. Faria deftly leaps into the darkness.
“Quickly, Edmon!” he whispers from below.
I take a deep breath and let myself fall through the blackness. My stomach lurches for a beat longer than I would like. Then the hard stone of the floor touches the pads of my feet, and I roll to dissipate the force of the fall. I pop up into a ready position, my senses tuned to pick up any change in the vibration of my new surroundings.
“Sloppy,” Faria admonishes.
“A falling feather wouldn’t have made more sound,” I counter, confident in my newfound skills.
“If you made the sound of a feather, then that is too loud,” he chides.
“As if your jabbering weren’t noisy enough.” I grin and follow him down a hallway. My hands and feet glide along the slick, cold brick of the passageway.
“If you’re satisfied with fulfilling less than the maximum of your potential, life will be very easy for you, Leontes.”
“Where are we, old man?” I growl back.
“A main hallway,” he replies.
I stop in my tracks. “You always told me it was too dangerous for the main routes. What about Goth?”
The rumor, as Faria has told me,
is that Goth is a genetic experiment. A mad scientist from decades past created him in order to show the world of Tao the benefits of genetic engineering, a technology they had outlawed. Rather than becoming a god of the Combat, however, the child was born deformed. Both scientist and his creation were exiled to the Citadel.
The true heresy, Faria had related, was that the experiment didn’t work. If Goth had turned out as planned, if he had been physically perfect, stronger, faster, and more handsome, his fate might have been much different. It makes me pity the creature.
Now the creature’s forlorn howls and rattling of his bonds reverberate as he stalks the corridors. His sense of hearing as acute as any who has lived in darkness all his life. He has a taste for flesh, feasting on the corpses of dead inmates and the occasional living, escaped prisoner.
Rumors, I think, trying to shrug off the sense of terror I feel now that I’m exposed.
“Don’t worry,” Faria whispers, snapping my attention back to the present. “I’ve timed our trip so Goth will be too far to catch us even if he does suspect something.”
“You think if he was a hundred flights up he would still know something was out of place here?” I ask skeptically.
“Would you?”
Not even with my newly acquired skills of perception. Goth, however, has lived an entire life in this place. “I’d rather not take the risk,” I respond.
“Blind risk is stupid, but calculated risks are worth taking.”
We move quietly down the hall, careful not to alert any other occupants to our presence. The last thing we need would be the screaming of a raving lunatic calling attention to our activities. We journey down a spiraling staircase to a hallway full of more doors. Behind the seventh door on the right is a small chamber, a cell not unlike my own, only empty. Faria walks to the center and crouches. He lifts a heavy obsidian floor tile, putting it aside to reveal a secret compartment.
