Alisiyad Chapter 27 ~ Key Blood (Part 2)

This just sucks, he thought.  So much for going down fighting.  They couldn’t even do him the favor of knocking him out or giving him a drug to put him to sleep completely.  He felt pain but it was delayed.  He saw himself knock up against the grate before he felt the cold metal dig into his skin.  Even then it wasn’t something he could get worked up about.  So on the upside . . . it won’t feel that bad when they start cutting me up.  I have become . . . comfortably numb.  He felt a laugh welling up at his bad pun, and a moment later a weak sound came from him, like a senile old man gibbering to himself.  Nice.

Once he was out of the pit, four of the Ricallyn picked him up, one holding onto each limb, and carried him out of the basement room, up the steps.  He stared unblinking at the strip of light on the wall as he went up.  I’m not giving up, he told himself.  Not giving up, not giving in.  Nope.  He pictured himself busting loose and kicking them all down the stairs, and liked the idea, and kept playing it over in his head.  He’d knock ’em down and kick ’em in the balls and watch them tumble down the stairs like Humpty Dumpty falling off his damn wall.  And then he’d run away.

They came out into the front hall and turned to the left.  His head was hanging loosely down toward the floor and he watched where they were going from an upside down angle.  There were three more Ricallyn waiting for him up ahead, dressed in robes of black and gray, but the robes had no hoods and their heads were shaved and glistened in the light.  The two in gray opened a pair of huge doors that had the crescent moon emblazoned on them.  The third, the one in the black robe, smiled and spoke a few words, motioning to the doorway.  The men carrying him put Russ down where Black-Robe indicated, right across the threshold, and then stepped back.  Russ rolled his head to the side and looked at the hem of the gray robe next to him.  Killed by men in dresses.  Yep.  Figured it’d end that way.  He didn’t know where this bitter sense of humor about the whole damn mess was coming from, maybe whatever tranquilizer they’d stuck in him made the body sleep and the mind snarky, but he didn’t really care.

More men in gray robes came out of the room beyond, and bent to pick him up.  He was surrounded by the material, as their long sleeves dangled above him and their skirts swished beside him.  They carried him into the pitch dark room, and he heard the doors closing behind him.  How do they fucking see in here? he thought, trying to pretend that he really wondered, that he really cared, that he wasn’t scared yet.

They lifted him up and placed him on a hard table.  It felt like stone.  His hands were unclamped, and they began to take his clothes off.  He was still wearing the travel garb Currun had assigned to him, his fishing-boy-from-the-Northern-villages disguise, and as they pulled off first the woolen jacket, then the cotton shirt, he felt like a fish being scaled.  Once his upper body was bare, they pulled his arms out away from him, flattening them against the table.  There was some kind of mount on the surface, some kind of . . . clamps.  Snick.  Now he was pinned down to the table by manacles again.  Like Frankenstein’s monster in the old movie, he thought.  He watched in dread as they began to remove his boots.  Next went the pants, to his increasing alarm and embarrassment.  They were pawing at him and moving him around like a baby getting his diaper changed, but he couldn’t even get out a good curse much less fight back.  He thought he should feel cold now that he was almost completely naked, but even that sense was dulled.  His body wasn’t his own anymore, he felt them moving his limbs and peeling off his clothes, baring his flesh for their twisted ritual, but he could only feel a detached shame, as if that body they were undressing wasn’t even his.  Not his anymore but still the body of an old friend he didn’t want to see humiliated.  Or killed.

They didn’t leave him one shred of dignity, removing every last garment.  He tried to look on the upside, again; at least he couldn’t really feel them touching him down there.  And it was dark, anyway, who could really see him?  Then he wondered if castration would be part of the ceremony.  Does it really matter?  Dead man, dead eunuch, dead dead dead.  Eunuch, now there was a word Liseli would probably be surprised he even knew.  It was uncommon, and hard to spell.  But it wasn’t the kind of word whose meaning you forget.

The Ricallyn, no doubt wearing their comfortable gray robes in the dark, moved his legs into restraints and snick those were shut too.  Now he lay spread out, patterning an X on the table, staring up into the impossible black of the chamber.

Not scared yet, he insisted.  Too drugged to be scared.  Won’t really feel a thing.  Won’t even know what they’re doing ’cause I can’t fucking feel it.  Hell they could be carving me up now I don’t even feel it ’cause my whole damn body’s gone dead already.  The thought made him want to vomit and scream at the same time, but all that came was a delayed little moan.

Light caught his eye, and he rolled his head to the right.  A spot of fuzzy yellowish light was moving toward him, seeping out around long black bars . . . fingers, he realized as he stared.  Someone was carrying some kind of light cupped in their hands.  A glowing ball?  No.  It wasn’t round, it was shaped like a cone, maybe.  He squinted, or thought about squinting anyway, and as it came closer he could see the soft glow illuminating the face of the man who carried it, another bald man in black robes.  The light moved and shifted inside the cone, swirling like liquid.  It was liquid.  The cone was a cup.

Oh fuck, he thought.  More drugs.

The man stopped next to the table and lifted the cup above his head.  He spoke and as he did so the light in the room intensified.  All through the room other Ricallyn had uncovered glowing cups of their own and held them up above their heads.  The man next to Russ spoke and the others chanted a response to him.  This continued for a moment or two more, then the man lowered his cup towards his lips.  Russ watched with disgust as he sipped from it reverently, light filling his eyes and making them dance like Alisiya’s.  The others mirrored his actions, drinking their light and opening their eyes to stare at their victim, light glowing on their faces and coating their lips.

The man only drank a very little from his cup, then he stepped forward and reached one hand out toward Russ’s head.  Russ cringed slowly, but the man took hold of his hair and lifted his head up, tilting it back and moving the cup toward his lips.  Russ tried to twist his face away but couldn’t.  He tried to clamp his mouth shut but couldn’t.  The man shoved the rim of the cup against his mouth and he felt icy cold liquid slosh down into his throat.  It tasted like milk frozen on fire.  He choked, coughing some of it out.  It ran down his chin and neck, prickling as it pooled in the hollow in his collarbone.  Drinking it was like drowning, but the man kept coming at him, swallow after swallow, till he’d forced all the liquid down.

He let go of Russ’s head and Russ fell back gasping, wanting to puke it all up but unable to even get a good breath.  The room suddenly seemed brighter, and the silent people with their lights clutched in their hands came into sharper focus.  The man with the now empty cup stepped back and another person came forward, holding out his liquid light, and Russ realized with sick dread that a line was forming.  His hair was seized again and another cup was poured down his throat.

They kept coming, men and women alike, all with their drink to drown him in.  He thought he would burst, explode spitting and choking the milky fire out over the whole room, but still they came and still there was room inside him for cupful after burning cold cupful.

His senses were no longer dull.  He felt abuzz with energy and light, he could hear the faintest rustle of robes and the thudding of footsteps, each intake and outtake of breath nearby him.  He felt his restraints digging into him and he could move again, as much as one could move clamped down to the table.  He felt strong like he never had before, not even the headiest surge of adrenaline or kick of anger had ever made him feel that ready to smash anything and anyone that came in his way.  If they didn’t have him clamped down, hell . . . oh hell could he kick their asses.  Each one that came to him had a harder and harder time getting him to drink.  He jerked his head away and spit the stuff back in their faces, adding curses and threats that they could understand without knowing English.

This seemed to satisfy them.  The procession stopped and the Ricallyn stayed back, watching him thrash at his restraints and yell at them.  After a little while, Russ wore some of the edge off of his anger, and fell back again.  He saw himself as he was, a blathering moron.  This is stupid.  He shook his head.  You’re being stupid.  They’re not gonna let you go.  You’re not gonna kick their asses.  You’re just gonna die, and it’s gonna hurt.  He winced, every nerve ending wide awake and tingling.  Oh boy, is it gonna hurt.

Think, Russ. He lay still, trying to calm the surges of panic and energy that told him to thrash and scream.  Think.  You can get out.  No I can’t, I’m not strong, not as a Key, I can’t just open anything on whim, and not these clamps.  I can’t do this.  Think.  You have to.  I can’t.  I can’t, not like this.

The Ricallyn began to chant again.  He watched them walk in patterns around the room, revving up for their next dirty trick, he thought darkly.  They lifted their arms to the dark, swaying as they echoed the words of their leader.  He stood next to the altar, one hand to the dark, the other gripping Russ’s hair.  Russ couldn’t shake him away without hurting his own neck, so he grudgingly endured having his hair pulled, even though it hurt his newly sensitive scalp like hell.

The chanting stopped and the man let go of his hair, dropping his head back down to hit the stone altar with a smack.  Russ tugged at his restraints but that did nothing other than rub his wrists and ankles a little rawer.  The Ricallyn moved silently around the room now, seeming to float in their robes as they brushed by each other.  Without the chanting it seemed even eerier, the swooshing of fabric the only noise besides Russ’s own panicked breathing.  He was trying not to, but could hear the panting and knew it came from him.

They all faced him again, now, watching him tremble on the altar like a half-dead fish giving its last pitiful flops.  Their leader turned, in a graceful ripple of black, and faced Russ with his back to the Ricallyn.  Russ could see every detail of him clearly even in the dark; he was an old man with bags under his eyes and thick tufts of wiry ear hair curling from each side of his otherwise bald head.  He had all the expression of a corpse as he looked down at Russ, the light in his unblinking eyes the only sign of life.

He finally moved after a long moment; his robes rustled, and Russ’s eyes skittered from his face to his hands.  Big hands with skin stretched thinly over the bones, knobby knuckles and long tendons, blue veins thick on the backs of them.  One moment they looked empty and the next they held a long pointed dagger, pointing downward toward Russ’s chest.  He lowered it slowly, not to plunge it in but gently slice an opening.  In his fever Russ didn’t know if he was imagining what was about to happen or watching it happen already; he saw the tip of the blade cutting a neat line down the middle of his chest and the blood beading out, popping free to slide down either ribcage.

Then the pain caught up and he knew it wasn’t imagination.  He heard screaming and knew it was him.  The man didn’t seem to notice, unflinching as he stopped just above Russ’s stomach and drew back his knife methodically, pausing a brief moment to hover over Russ’s right pec, contemplating his next cut.  He held the dagger as if it was a pen or a paintbrush, delicately, with the concentration of an artist.

Russ didn’t think, he was only aware.  Everything was at war in his heightened senses, the fear and pain screaming for attention while his eyes took in each movement of man and dagger with fascination.  He didn’t want any of it, he didn’t want to see or feel what was going on.  So he retreated again to pictures of what should be happening, what would be happening if only he could connect mind and body again; the manacles falling open, his fist striking up under the man’s jaw, shattering the old bones and driving the shards up into the brain.  Free now, clawing for the dagger as it falls from the lifeless hand.  Now rolling and tumbling off the altar to land painfully in a heap with the dead body on the ground.  The fall hurts but it doesn’t matter because he has the knife now and is plunging it into the chest; that is all it is, A Chest, not someone’s chest, not anymore.

The knife stuck and he pulled back forcefully, falling back and knocking his head on the side of the altar.  He clutched the knife possessively to his own chest, looking out at the Ricallyn and only then realizing that he wasn’t imagining a victory for himself, he was sitting on the ground between altar and dead man and for a moment he didn’t understand how he was free.  But then he remembered how he had pictured the manacles falling open, and they did, they opened just because he thought they already were.  Not just because he wanted them to be, but because he believed them to be.

The Ricallyn were as shocked as he was, backing away from him warily as the room suddenly buzzed with voices.  Russ’s chest heaved with frenzied breathing and he looked down to see blood coating him, not only his chest but his hands and arms and the fronts of his legs.  For a moment his coherent thoughts, slowly returning, wondered stupidly if it was all coming from the cut on his chest.  He put a hand to his chest gingerly.  It had only been a very shallow cut, not intended to rip him open, just draw a line down the skin.  No, all that blood was from the man, not him.  He saw the man again, as if for the first time, lying before him.

I just did that, that, I butchered that man, how did I do that?  His thoughts echoed in his head as he stared at the shattered face and pulverized chest.  His hands shook and he began to feel sick.  It wasn’t me, it’s the . . . the drugs, I can’t do that.  I, I don’t do that kind of thing.  He pushed himself against the altar, hugging the knife unconsciously as he tried to steady himself.  The smell of blood was so strong, so vivid, the most sickening thing he’d ever known, he could taste it on himself without opening his mouth.  He tried to wipe it away with the back of his hand, but the back of his hand was bloody, and it smeared across his face.  He choked, for a moment thinking he would barf.  He opened his mouth and air came in short gasps.  Breathe, Russ, breathe dammit.  He felt the tip of the dagger pricking him and pulled it away.  You fucking killed the bastard and he fucking deserved it so just shut the hell up!

The voices of the Ricallyn had been on the outside of his consciousness as he came to terms with the realization, but now as he looked up again he could hear Alisiya’s unmistakable voice among the tumult.  She stepped out from the crowd of skittish robes and he saw the anger burning in her eyes even as she fought to keep her face composed.  Alisiya didn’t need any glowing drink to set fire in her eyes, they sparked white.

“Stay back,” he growled, momentarily surprised by the vehemence in his voice.  He still didn’t feel like this body, or this person in this body, was his or him.  But he didn’t have time to mull it over.  He pointed the dagger at Alisiya.