Retribution (22 page)

Stop it
, I told myself.
Just stop
it. You’d be glad to see a bug or a rat instead of what you have to
see tonight
.

The stairs had come to an end, although I had
not yet reached the dungeon. The shithead was still below me, lower
even than this, but I could see no way down. There was no help for
it. I would have to use my
crypta
.

I opened my mind again, heard the breathy
whispers, the sobbing cries, almost like two voices. Perhaps
Dominic was there too, as I wanted him to be. I wished more than
anything that Dominic had kept his promise, and that I was in my
bed, asleep.

Amalie,
Reynaldo said, sighing out my
name.
I’ve missed you, Amalie. So long it’s been, since I saw
you
.

The voice recalled me to my obligation. I
couldn’t live with this anymore. Not one minute more. If I had to
kill Reynaldo myself and cut off his head and throw the body on the
dung heap, I would try. But this had to end.

I tracked the misery in my mind, searching
for its physical location, but it was by smell that I found it, the
worst stench I have ever known. Sometimes I’m afraid it will stay
with me forever, a few molecules of corruption trapped in my flesh,
lodged in my nasal passages, never shed with my hair or my skin,
reminding me, with their faint stink, of the danger Dominic and I
brought on ourselves.

There was a trap door cut into the
foundation, with a rope and a pulley to lift it. It was open, the
first couple of steps visible to my inner flame that I used like a
candle on the tip of my left thumb. Moss grew on the moist steps,
lichen mottled the walls. For once I wished I had breeches or at
least my old Terran clothes, with the tight leggings and the short
skirts, instead of this voluminous garment. I untied the long
ribbon that held my hair in a ponytail for sleeping, hiked up the
skirt of my nightgown, and bound it around my waist.

I peered down into the hole, my body shaking
with fear. “Dominic?” I whispered into the blackness. “Dominic, are
you there?”

Amalie
. Reynaldo called to me.
My
prize. I lost my battle but I gained you
.

I sat down on the edge of the opening and
tried to find some courage. I was hungry and tired, I had to pee
from all the water I had drunk, and the whisky had sapped my
strength. The smell alone would render me helpless if I had to
breathe it much longer. My body felt hollow, as if all the organs
and the skeleton had been removed, the tissues animated by will
alone.

So was Reynaldo
, I thought. He was
more dead than alive. All he could do was think to me. Even if he
wasn’t behind bars or in chains, he had been hamstrung and
mutilated, left to bleed his life away, tortured and forced
repeatedly back into an existence that could consist of little
except the sense of constant pain. Whatever my limitations, I could
kill him. It was much, much more than he could do to me.

With my back to the noisome pit, I felt for
the first slippery stair behind me, clutching at the slimy wall and
steps with my hands. My fingernails scraped gunk from the stone but
I made it to the bottom without losing my balance. When my questing
foot behind me found only the same level, I turned around, took as
deep a breath as I could without gagging and tried to get my
bearings. I was at the head of a narrow, oppressively low-ceilinged
corridor. A couple of empty cells lined one side. At the end, a
figure squatted in front of another cell.

“Dominic!” I said. I could recognize the
shape of him, the slim hips and waist, the shoulders just a little
narrow in proportion to the great height. Even down here, with
minimal light, his back to me, hunched over in a kind of mourning
posture, I knew my husband. “Dominic,” I called again, relief at
seeing him obliterating all thoughts of the last words we had
exchanged. “Oh, Dominic, why didn’t you answer me?” I ran the last
few yards to the door of the cell.

Dominic didn’t move or speak.
Amalie,
you’ve come to me at last
. The creature in the cell, the thing
lying on the floor with shackles on its arms and crippled legs,
Reynaldo, spoke to me.

Yes
, I said.
To finish you off, you
piece of shit.

The figure didn’t move its head or strain
against its chains. If its eyes were open I couldn’t see the whites
or the silver of inner eyelids.
Should it be the prism or the
blade of the dagger?
Using my
crypta
was cleaner. I
wouldn’t have to touch him. But somehow I trusted the thin, sharp
blade.
Cold steel
. The phrase comforted me. Plunge it into
his heart, over and over, extinguish the voice that had plagued me
for so long. I reached into my boot top and drew the knife I had
retrieved from Jana. The dagger with the prism on its handle was
more a ceremonial object than a weapon, but this little blade had
cut Reynaldo once. Now it would give him the coup de grace.

I edged closer to the bent figure of my
strangely silent husband. “Dominic,” I said, sudden resolve
steadying my voice, “open the door. I’m going to end this now.”

Dominic didn’t turn his head. “No, Amalie,”
he said, with a giggling laugh unlike his own. “You can’t end it.
Even I can’t end it. But by all means take a look.”

He edged aside so I could peer through the
bars. There was a taper in a sconce in the wall, the light just
enough to illuminate the face of the prisoner. Reynaldo’s eyes were
wide open—at least the outer lids were open. The eyeballs had been
eaten away, by rats and by the gods know what else, things that
scurried back into the shadows when I scrunched forward to look.
The nose, of course, had been gone for some time, but now the hole
where it had been was alive with a squirming mass of maggots. The
jaws hung slack in a sneering yawn, the lips drawn back from the
teeth and gums in the way of corpses. Reynaldo was dead, dead and
rotting, filling the area with the reek of his decaying flesh, food
for worms, which I saw now, sliding inside an eye socket and
exiting from the gaping mouth.

I tried to scream and couldn’t. My throat
opened and contracted in spasms, attempting to make sounds and form
words. I was transfixed, rooted to the floor, unable even to back
away from this dead meat that had been a man. I looked to Dominic
for some help.

Dominic turned his head. “You see,” he said,
“you can’t end it.” His bright red hair gleamed pink in the blue
glow of the spent taper. The dark hole where his nose had been made
wet sucking sounds as he spoke. The bloody beard was tangled and
unkempt. He– it– Reynaldo– stood up, the height of Dominic with the
features and voice of the bandit. He towered over me, murmuring in
his nasal rasp, as I crouched helpless at his feet. “Yes, Amalie,
you’re mine forever, my own defiled whore of a wife.”

This time I screamed, over and over, gasping
in whooping breaths and shrieking out my terror. The
hyperventilation acted like a jolt of electricity, hot-wiring my
paralyzed limbs. I scrambled backward on hands and knees, away from
this abomination, until my booted feet hit the wall. All the while
I was screeching, fiery scorching sounds that tore at my throat and
my lungs, turning my head into a molten red sphere of noise.

The thing bent down, his hand outstretched.
“You’re mine, Amalie,” he said. “You admitted it yourself. Come
here and show me how much you love me.”

I tried to stand, planting my feet below my
hips, pushing up with my hands. Each time that my head rose higher
than my chest I began to black out, pinwheels of fireworks bursting
behind my eyes, my abused stomach sending acid and bile into my
throat, and I would have to sink down, hanging my head, my hair
dabbling in the muck of the floor, until blood flowed again to my
brain. My screaming grew softer as I ran out of strength, became
merely a howl, then a yell, lessening at last to a whimper.

The abomination stood over me, watching my
efforts. “Take your time, Amalie,” he said with false kindness.
“Delay increases the appetite, makes the consummation that much
sweeter.” He leaned closer, the tip of his tongue running along his
cracked dry lips that stretched in a cruel grimace. “Oh yes, it
will be very sweet, hearing your pleas for mercy as you struggle
beneath me. And we’ll have all the time in the world to come
together in love.” He touched a putrid hand to my face.

I remembered the dagger still clenched in my
fist and hacked at him, drawing blood. He snatched his hand away,
sucking his fingers, regarding me through narrowed eyes. The blood
from the hole in his face dribbled down the creases in his cheeks,
into his parted lips. “Better to use that on yourself,” he said. “A
‘Gravina Aranyi who was worthy of the title would have used it long
ago instead of returning defiled to contaminate the marriage
bed.”

I held the knife close to my chest, blade
out, my whimpers sounding suspiciously like agreement. The
abomination thought so, too. “That’s right,” he said. “Turn it
around, the blade to the throat, point beside the ear. Remember how
I taught you, with the hog. So much easier to cut your slender
little throat, slice through that delicate skin, make the blood
spurt. Do it, Amalie. Redeem your honor.”

The words pounded in my head.
I
taught you
, he had said. It was Dominic who had
shown me how to cut my throat. Not Reynaldo. Dominic had taught me,
not out of disgust at the mere thought of a defiled wife, but as an
act of love. It was the most unselfish gift he had given me. For
all his love, his need for me, the completion of his half-self, yet
he had made sure I could choose death. If I was confronted by rape
or torture, and lived, it would be by my choice, not the helpless
suffering of a captive animal.

I blinked through my tears, looking up at
this monstrosity. I do not believe in mysticism, in life after
death and possession by spirits and all the other mumbo jumbo of
religion and superstition. What I was seeing human beings had
created. Dominic and Reynaldo had caused this distortion. And the
person in there was Dominic. Not Reynaldo. Reynaldo was dead. I had
seen him, smelled him, breathed him in even now, choking me with
his rot.

Absurdly, sadly, the words to the song I had
sung two nights earlier came into my mind.
But hold me tight and
fear not, I am your baby’s father
. The line scans better in
Eclipsian. I knew suddenly that our lovemaking that night had
started something that, if I let it, might implant itself in my
womb, become a baby. I wouldn’t let it, not after this. But it was
proof of who this man was, what we were to each other.

The abomination taunted me with his evil
words, gesturing to show the knife slicing the artery in the neck.
It was the hardest thing I have ever done, crawling over to him
instead of away from him, but I did it. I dropped the dagger for
which I had no further use and I forced myself to touch him.
Resting a palm on the toe of his leather boot, grasping his calves,
I climbed his legs like a pair of tree trunks, hauling myself up
hand over hand, until I surprised him by clasping my hands around
his waist.
But hold me tight and fear not...

Dominic
, I thought to him,
my love,
Dominic-Leandro, my lord husband.

The thing knew something was wrong. He
twisted his sinewy body and kicked at me, unable to break my hold,
afraid to lose his balance by swinging one leg too wildly. I
squeezed my arms tighter around his body, pressing my face against
his shirt at the place where his belt made a slight fold in the
waistband of his breeches.
Dominic, my love, come back to
me
.

Reynaldo’s stubby fingers pried at mine that
were locked around him, wedged into the small of his back. Blood
and mucous dripped from his nasal passages onto my upturned face.
And she will change me in your arms, into a lion bold
... I
sang the words to myself. The abomination snorted and giggled.
“That’s right,” he said, “on your knees. Take me in your
mouth.”

But hold me tight and fear not...
I
couldn’t hold on much longer. My arms were shaking so much it was
only my clasped hands that held me up, neither kneeling nor
standing. My mind was numb. I felt nothing—not fear, not hate, not
love. My
crypta
, having emptied all emotions from me, sealed
itself tight against the invading horror. All I could do was to say
my husband’s name aloud. “Dominic! Please, Dominic, come back!
Dominic! Dominic! Dominic!”

There was an answering voice from above.
“Lady Amalie! Lady Amalie!” A woman’s voice. The woman made
telepathic contact, found a part of my mind she could reach.
Lady Amalie, let him go. Surely you realize you are the one who
has transformed him
.

My cramped fingers unclasped, my trembling
arms dropped from the man’s body. I sank down, fell flat on my back
in the stinking muck of the dungeon floor.

Naomi stood at the bottom of the stairs, a
blazing torch in one hand, prism-handled dagger in the other. Her
hair crackled with static, waving around her narrow, strong-boned
face. Looking at her upside-down, I saw her frowning mouth as a
fatuous smile that floated above green eyes glittering in the
torchlight like pond lilies in sunlight. “That’s right,” she said.
“Margrave Aranyi will find his own way back, if you let him.”

“No, Naomi. Don’t deny me help.” A deep,
resonant voice answered her. “Lady Amalie has done very well.”
Dominic’s voice.

Slowly, painfully, I turned my face to the
voice. Dominic was crouched over me, his silver eyes scrutinizing
me with a hawk’s unblinking stare. His hair was dark brown, not a
hint of red. He was clean-shaven, no beard, only a trace of morning
stubble. And his nose. His nose was intact, jutting out like that
same hawk’s hooked beak, a large triangle casting into shadow the
entire half of his face that was turned away from the light of
Naomi’s torch. I reached a shaky hand, ran a finger along the
magnificent curved arc of it. “Your beautiful nose,” I said.