I peered in through each cell window until I found an old man, with long, tangled grey hair. Thin and filthy, in white tattered vest and shorts. He had a tattoo of a cross on his left cheek. He was sitting, shackled to the right hand wall, muttering incoherently.
“Krada?” I demanded. “Tell me what you know.”
“I know that we’re all going to die,” he said in a nasal, weedy voice, without looking up. “Purifiers will see to that. If you’re lucky, they won’t interrogate you first.”
“I was told you have specialist knowledge of my people. Of what happened to them. Why they were . . . killed.”
“And who might your people be?” he sneered, looking up at last. The contempt on his face and the rhythm of his pulse, told me that this man didn’t just know about the genocide of my people—he’d been involved. I wanted to force the door open, tear the man to pieces. I slammed my hands against the door, against the silver crosses, gritted my teeth against the pain.
“The Chlethargan, damn you! They’re.. they were . . . a type of Baneful.”
He peered towards the door for a moment. “One kinda Baneless or ‘nother, all be the same to me.” He smirked, viciously. “Who might you be?”
“My name is Kyle Payton. My people were all killed but myself and my mother escaped. Why?”
“I remember you,” he said nostalgically. “You see, I was working for the Realm, I was an important Investigator, yer see, and, well, now, I knew yer mummy . . .” He leered.
I could feel the heat of the crosses on my chest, feel my skin cooking just from being close to the door. I pounded the door again, and pushed against it. The crosses scorched like flames, corroded like acid, seared like electricity, bit like dry ice. I screamed. “Aaargh fuck!”
I staggered away, against the opposite wall of the corridor, examined my hands. They were mutilated. The skin was blistered, swollen, mangled, weeping red meat under a layer of charcoal. There were massive welts, and areas were the cooked flesh was falling away, revealing my bones. I wailed in horror. Krada laughed.
I controlled my rage, assessed the situation, looked at my hands. Incredibly, they were already healing, though it would be several minutes before they were any use, before the agony passed.
The lock was inoperable, even with something covering my fingers. Why had they sent me here? For that matter, when I had come here as a mortal, without my enhanced Fallen hearing and intellect, I wouldn’t have been capable of figuring out the combination. So what had been the point?
This corridor was even more narrow than the others. No kind of battering ram could be swung against the door with any momentum.
I studied the wall. The masonry was crumbling and there were large cracks running through it, leading right up from the floor and across the ceiling. The wall wouldn’t be hard to break down, but doing so could possibly bring a thousand tons of mountain rock down on my head. Explosives were out of the question, for the same reason.
I went back to the window, to study the bars. There wasn’t enough room between the crosses to get any grip on them. I leant too close to the door and felt a large cross burn my belly.
“Tell me what you know about my people, or so help me . . .”
“I’ll listen to yer threats when I’m convinced you can follow through on ‘em.” He leaned back against the wall, peered at me sidelong. “Basically, I’ll answer yer questions only if you can get through that door.” He laughed again.
“Bastard!” Again, I put all my strength against the door, and this time it gave way. Just a little, but enough to urge me on.
The pain was no less than before. Overwhelming torture that seemed to spread to every muscle, joint, every nerve ending, every cell of my body. I wanted to shriek and cry, but I channelled the pain into a roar instead. As intense as the pain was, it was nothing compared to what I’d suffered through for the previous twenty years. I thought of my dead mother, of every wasted day spent wandering alone, of every friend I’d ever failed to make. I could have quashed the sorrow but it was allowing me to do what I wanted to do, what I needed to do.
The hinges began to groan, and the door lurched. I pushed my whole body against it, pressing one foot against the opposite wall to get better leverage. I was sure my hands and arms and chest were being brutally damaged, but that would fix itself. My body was now able to regenerate itself endlessly, it seemed. I pushed the pain away, focussed on the emotional pain instead—the tsunami that would engulf the lake.
Krada was screaming defiantly the whole time, but was shocked into silence when the door suddenly collapsed into his cell, splintering the floor. A fragment of tile shot off, nicked the side of Krada’s face, beside his left eye. Blood ran down his tattoo.
He clasped a hand to his wound, panting, eyes and mouth wide with disbelief and mounting dread.
“Stay away from me!” He held up one arm, pulled up his top with the other, jiggled his legs. His chains clattered. Tattoos like the one on his face were all over his body, down his arms and legs, across his torso. Where there weren’t tattoos, there were scars in the same shape. He had even scratched the symbol into the walls and floor around him, so certain that the Fallen were coming for him that he had eschewed a typical tally of days.
“The Exalted’s paltry symbols didn’t stop me getting through that door,” I growled. “They won’t stop me ripping your throat out.” I looked down at myself. The damage I had suffered was a fraction of what had been inflicted before. I hadn’t just blocked out the pain, I had resisted the actual burning.
I stepped towards Krada. “Tell me what happened.”
“I will, I will!” He waved his arms in front of himself blindly, palms towards me, to fend me off, then slowly lowered them. “I’ll tell you everything.”
He sat up, cross-legged. Coughed.
“I wasn’t lying, with what I said before. I did know you and yer mammy. Your people were good servants. Very obedient, very . . . accommodating. But you were all unclean.” He couldn’t keep the loathing out of his voice as he said this, but he trembled slightly, knowing how I might respond. “Some of the Realm officials caught a disease, and the Realm decided that you all had to be eradicated, for the sake of public health.” He had dropped his gaze to the floor, only occasionally stealing glances up at me.
“So why do I remember the Fallen coming for us?”
“You remember that?” he asked. “Well, it was the Fallen who finished the job, sure, sure.”
That didn’t sound true, now. He was seizing an opportunity to avoid blame. “Why would they do that?”
He shrugged, shook his head. “Beats me. They always been vicious cunts like that.”
I lunged at him, gripped him by the throat. He turned red. “I remember a hall full of my people. The Fallen broke in and killed everyone, but . . . but they let me and my mother go. Why?”
He shook, shifted his gaze back and forth, fearfully weighing his chances as he struggled to breath.
He tried to say something: “Oo er ine!” I released my grip and let him fall on the floor.
“What was that?”
“I said you were mine!” he rubbed at his throat with one hand, pushed himself up with the other. He looked up at me, snarling through his ragged beard, baring rotting, broken teeth. “The pair of you belonged to me. You were a secret I guarded closely, but not closely enough. When the Purifiers came for you, you ran. Fell in with a Chlethargan community that had sprung up in the south of Caldair. But some of your people, a gang of them, they thought maybe they would be spared if they gave you up. The Fallen . . . didn’t like that idea. But the gang went ahead and tried to make the exchange, because they knew you were valuable, because . . . you were mine. Your mother was mine, to do with as I pleased. And so . . . were . . . you.”
I was horrified. My world lurched around me. All the misery I’d suffered ever since childhood flared up, like a scabbed wound torn back open. Tears rolled down my face, welled up in my one enlarged eye. I couldn’t handle
it, didn’t want to feel that grief anymore.
So I didn’t.
In an instant, I made the decision not to allow those feelings to govern me. I had total control over my emotions. Anything I didn’t want to feel, I could push down, ignore.
I hit him, as hard as I could. He spun to one side, his body lifting fully off the ground, and his head smacked into the rear wall of the cell. He landed in a heap, tangled in his chains.
Then I looked down at the disgusting man, emaciated, twitching, and broken. I didn’t want to feel pity for him after what he’d done.
So I didn’t.
I was still trapped within my mind map, with all the traumas of my life that I had used to mark my way. Until I dealt with Krada I could not willingly forget them, or even put them out of my mind.
I stooped over Krada and, guessing my intent, he scrambled away, sobbing and pleading.
I grabbed him by the hands, clamped them in my fists, raised them up and squeezed. They cracked and crunched. I felt his bones split and break though his abusing fingers. He screamed.
The bones ground together until they were splinters, then powder, until the skin burst and the mulched flesh spurted out and delicious blood poured down my arms. I had released nearly every emotion connected to the pitiful solitary life that had been inflicted on me—all the self pity, remorse, regret, loneliness and despair. I had given up all nostalgia for my lost people, my mother and all my family, real and imagined. This petty need for vengeance was the one thing I clung to, the one thing that sustained me.
I dropped him to the floor and took out my shiv, which I’d had tucked in my waistband. I raised it. Krada, on his knees, bent and weeping, gaped at the darkness around me, aware that something more was coming. I stepped towards him, then saw a figure a few metres away, standing in the shattered doorway, scrutinising the scene. He was tall and thin. He wore layers of tattered brown fabric, and tanned, homemade leather. Unruly dark hair cascaded over his face, around eyes tinted red.
Andreas. He had followed me, or found an alternate route on his own, and had come to check on my conduct
“Cassie hoped your grief, your need for closure, would alter your abilities and allow you to overcome his protections. Such things happen sometimes, a Fallen’s state of mind alters their powers.”
I froze, poised to strike Krada down.
“We need him alive,” Andreas said, regretfully. “You gave your word.”
I looked at Krada twitching on the tiles, trying to cradle each mangled limb with the other, covered by protective scars, jumping at every sound. He had lived in fear his whole life, even more isolated than I had been. How could I allow Andreas to end such exquisite justice?
“Give me some time with him first.”
Andreas nodded slowly, processing this, then looked back at me. “That wouldn’t be long, unfortunately. The Purifiers will likely be here before dawn.”
“If they wanted to know his secrets so badly, they’d have them by now. They’ve had him for decades!”
“This isn’t their prison, you moron! This has been here centuries and runs right under the mountain. There’s another entrance on the other side, in Dezkary. The Dezkarians didn’t even build it, simply put it to use. The Purifiers discovered this place last week, searching for a way through the mountains, ready for an invasion. They’ve been interrogating the prisoners, then slaughtering them. You were our only chance of recovering Krada so we can discover what he knows.”
“He’s already told me what happened to my people.”
“He knows more than that. He knows about the disease your people contracted. Cassie needs that knowledge, to save other Baneful.”
The severity of the situation became clear to me, and so did the enormity of Andreas’ manipulations. All this time I had thought that I had found them, used them to get what I wanted. Instead they had found me, knowing my past, my pain, would make me useful to them.
My old people were gone, I couldn’t change that. I was one of the Fallen now.
I put the blade away and turned to leave. I stopped at the door, face to face with Andreas.
“His suffering is all that is left of my people. Why should he get to escape what happened when I never can?”
“Because it is what needs to be done. You should have been able to work through your grief by now.” Nothing but cold contempt in his voice.
“I have. All I found was rage. I could smash that aside too, but I don’t want to. I know we need his secrets, but I also need him to suffer.”
Andreas looked aside, cocked his head. His hard eyes flitted towards Krada, then he looked back at me and half smiled.
“I can assure you of that.”
“You’ll interrogate him?”
“Torture. Those who wish to acquire truth should not barter with euphemisms.”
At last I knew what was at the centre of the grief that I had spent my whole life exploring, trying to find my way through to the core of it: an ugly, angry, red smear of cruelty, nothing but rage and hatred. It was all I had left of me, and now I was supposed to let go of even that.
Andreas eyed me—slyly, I thought—taking the measure of my soul. “You could come with us. Help with his interrogation. It’s a privilege you deserve.”
Yes, perhaps. And perhaps I would find some new purpose. Maybe I would adopt Andreas’ purpose, and join his crusade, because then he would own me.
I looked back at him, taking the measure of his soul, and found that to be futile. This test of me, this redirection of my most sinister impulses, I suspected was the true purpose of his whole scheme. Krada was a trinket compared to the treasure of a new recruit, slaved to his intentions.
Wordlessly, I left Krada to Andreas. As I left, I came to another turning. I could turn right and leave the way I had come, back to Caldair, or I could turn left. At that junction I realised that I had not found my way out of my grief at all, I had merely found my way to the centre of it, to the meaningless destructive force at its core. The best way out of the maze, was through it. I marked my passage out of Krada’s cell with all a lifetimes worth of fury and resentment, pictured the room crumbling, crushing him alive, perhaps trapping Andreas with him.
I pressed on through the constrictive passages, following the fragrance and caress of the Dezkarian air that whispered in from unknown doors. Somewhere out there was a new life, out on the other side of the mountain, with the fetid depths of the maze far behind.
Read more about these characters in the forthcoming novel, ‘Heathen with Teeth’.
Jonathan Jones
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Facade of Evil and Other Tales from 'Heathen with Teeth' Page 12
