After what must have been a makh, Lenbis tired of his sport
and left the room. I slumped against the wall. My father’s clothes resembled a beggar’s rags. The whip had stripped most of the fabric off of his body. What tatters remained, were stained crimson, rising and falling in tune with his breathing. Orik lived.
I wondered how much the Wurm must have been augmented by
Lenbis’ torture.
Mark my words
, I have seldom had to heal and heal and heal without pause–save, I recall, during the plagues I attended. I felt as a washrag freshly squeezed out. The other end of my link with the Wurm must be an insatiable stomach, I decided, able to take and take without ceasing. How many-fold now did Jyla’s enchantment magnify my efforts? Surely mere flesh, even flesh strengthened by the power of magic, must at some point become unable to withstand the white-hot
lillia
that suffused it? Could the Wurm be infinitely filled?
Orik’s arms stirred against their chains.
“How are you, son?”
“Shattered.
Upset. So sorry that you have to endure this–”
“I told you.
I hear Mata calling.”
“But not this way, father.”
I looked up as one of Lenbis’ men appeared in the doorway, picking his fingernails with the point of his dagger. “Rest time is over,” growled the man.
This one amused himself by pricking and cutting the soles of Orik’s feet with his dagger. The next carved open his stomach to make some ‘examination’ of the contents. Perhaps he was a secret Ulitrist, one who partook of the demonic delights of Ulim’s very table. After that came a fool who took a couple of token blows at the old man’s torso before settling in a corner to drink himself into a stupor. Lenbis came in later to wake the man with the lash of his whip.
I begged Lenbis for my father’s life. He took the lash to me instead of my father, which I greatly preferred. I fell to taunting him. But he grew wise to this and turned again upon my father, this time with a vicious twist: he found himself a second whip and plied the two in tandem, driving me to the sweating, fainting brink of endurance. Then, as night was long fallen, the men brought us water and bade us slumber well.
I meant to speak to my father. I meant to think my way out of this predicament. Many times had I thought of summoning the Wurm–but that would be the end of Orik, in all likelihood, and the end of me too. Lest I could loose
n my chains. But my brain seemed stuffed full of old leaves. I fell asleep, and woke when the whip caressed my cheek.
This day, Lenbis did not even speak. He moved about his task
with the air of a man driving his cart into the white of death–he found no pleasure in it as before, nor did his eyes light with any perverse fire, nor indeed did he spare any words to torment me. Sweat from the day’s warmth rolled freely from his hairline and stained the armpits and chest of his rumik. I could smell his rank stench across the room. When his arm dropped to his side, I said:
“I see your heart is troubling you, Lenbis.”
“What say you?” he growled. “I’m as set on having my revenge–”
“You’re not a well man,” I said. “Your colour tells me you have heart trouble.”
Lenbis’ eyes rolled toward me, eyes framed in sagging bags of skin. His cast was not good. I knew it; perhaps he did too.
“Ulim’s calling you, Lenbis,” I called softly across the room. “Ulim’s icy talons are clutched around your heart, squeezing
… I can heal you if you want. Just say the word.”
“Never!” he shouted, cracking the whip across my father’s neck one more time. I reached out and closed the wound.
With a foul curse, Lenbis left us in silence.
Orik’s head turned in my direction. “Truly told?” he whispered.
“Heart trouble,” I said. “Too many anna of drinking, or the drugs–”
“Or supping with Ulim.”
“Ay.” I was silent for a time, before adding, “Father, I’ve little strength left. Pray you we can find a way out of this.”
“Summon the Wurm,” Orik chuckled dryly. “Kill us all and be done with it.”
“Kill you? And grant Jyla victory in one fell swoop?” I shook the chain one more time, the chain I had tested with my fullest strength over and over again. “I think not, father.”
Orik was looking along the length of his arm at me.
He deliberately formed his hand into a fist. “We could end this.”
“No!” I was at the end of my chain, reaching for him, caring not how the manacle bit into my wrist. “I will no
t let you die, father! Not now; not ever!”
“
Listen to yourself, boy!” Orik sighed a long, drawn-out soliloquy. “My life has run its course. A hundred and eleven anna come the second Joinday of Sowing. I’ve already lived longer than I ought. Is that because you healed me before? That eventide at Solk Inn–did you do more than you ought?”
Despite my intentions, my head nodded the affirmative. “I have long wondered, father. Perhaps I strengthened you beyond the ordinary.
I knew so little of the ways of healing back then.”
“I’m a
n Umarite, not a long-lived Eldrik like you, son. Had Alannah survived, she would have outlived me twice over. And yet she still loved me.” The gentle regard in Orik’s gaze held me more powerfully than any hot words could have. “I love you more than I can frame into words. But you need to let me pass on.”
“No!”
“Arlak.”
O
ur conversation was cut short by three of Lenbis’ drunken stooges staggering into the room. They laid about Orik, chopping and hacking at him with a horrible disregard for his humanity. I lunged at once to my chain’s end to touch my father, to pour into him what I had, wincing as I felt his body jerking and twitching beneath the blows. Blood seeped out of his mouth where he had bitten through his tongue.
A young man would have struggled to take this abuse, much less a
man of his advanced age. I pitied him. I loved him. I hated the pain he was in … but to let him die? I could not bear it. It cut across the grain of all I ever was, and all the man I ever wanted to be. Granted, I had sent many to Nethe’s clutches through my unthinking foolishness, but this was different. Here I could think and feel and know what was the right course … but could I know what was Mata’s will? Who was Arlak, or El Shashi, to be the judge of a man’s anna? To ascertain when one should pass on? To hold a man from the brink even when he wanted to cross over? Mata, what an evil pass!
Suddenly, I knew what I must do. Something
unselfish.
I shrivelled my left hand.
As I slipped loose of the chain, I crashed to my knees. Then I barrelled into the men attacking my father, careless of their blades swinging my way. I could not leave my father in this way, so I took a dagger in my stomach and a sword-cut upon my back as I tried to wrestle one of them to the ground and steal his weapon.
The men bawled for help. A great weight crashed upon my back. Wriggling my way free, sword in hand and forgetting any lesson Janos had ever drilled into my stubborn skull, I laid about me with the grace of the
farm boy I had once been. I caused some damage, ay, but not near enough afore the men buried me beneath a press of bodies and pummelled me into submission.
A handful of
makh later, for my trouble I had earned myself a collar worthy of any hound, and was chained once more to the wall. One man had been dragged out by his heels. Clearly the ruffians had little enough regard even for their dead.
However, they celebrated his death in quite a different way to what I expected.
“That was inventive,” said my father. “Shrinking your hand.”
I wondered how it was possible to have grown to love the gaze of a pair of eyes quite so suddenly. I had, of course, always prized romantic love, and the love of my children and especially my grandchildren was a thing still fresh
enough to thrill to my quoph. But the love of a son for his father … ay. Cut off early in my manhood by the Faloxx, and now renewed a few anna shy of seventy later; this was a thing strange and wondrous indeed.
“I can’t reach you with this thing on my neck.”
“Not only did you think of an unselfish path, but you thought also of my needs and refused to leave me.”
“Father
… father. Do not say it.”
Orik’s voice had grown weaker. I knew my father
was fading away in my very presence. I could keep healing him, but there was still a physical, mental, and emotional toll being exacted that without a great deal of time and effort, I could not hope to begin to redress.
“Very well,” he agreed, “I will not. But think upon this, Arlak. Is it selfish to deny me my time to die? And is that in accordance with or against Mata’s will?”
I hedged: “It is not selfish because the Wurm has not risen.”
“But is it cruel? Is love cruel?”
In the other room, a door banged. A puff of air entered with the ruffians, air that to my nostrils hinted at the tang of a storm. The Wurm? Was the Wurm soon to rise?
Against this, I weighed my father’s words.
I twisted upon them with the greatest discomfort. How was I to choose between these two great evils? Whichever I chose, I would have to live with the knowledge and guilt for the rest of my anna.
Not that my prospects of living until eventide
appeared bright.
The men gathered in the room, filling it with the reek of their body odour mouldered for seasons beneath leathern body armour, of lethola spirit and of salikweed, which
can turn a good man into a monster. They measured the compass of my chain once more. Lenbis brought in his chair and settled into it, looking greatly the worse for wear, a man who had spent the night wrestling with the ghost of his own quoph. His men laughed and joked coarsely. They lashed spears to the underside of the table, arranging them so that I would have to impale myself in order to reach my father to heal him.
Orik smiled at me. “Shame you can’t shrink your head.”
Now a joke? Was he prodding at my ego? Or was he afraid? After all he had said about being ready, was my father afraid of the afterlife? I would be.
I
considered trying to melt my flesh around the metal collar locked at my throat, causing it somehow to pass through my neck. But that would involve severing my own spinal cord. Could even I heal such damage? And cause metal to move through bone? I could hardly imagine such a feat, even given time and perfect resources–neither of which I enjoyed now.
“Do you have much
oil left in that barrel of yours?” he asked.
“
Plenty for us both.”
Orik sighed and closed his eyes.
I had lied; he knew it. If only I could have sucked back some of that
lillia
from the Wurm. Then I would have power beyond imagining. But I did not know how. Even Eliyan had been stumped by that question.
“Hurry up! I
grow impatient.”
Lenbis, I thought. Should I beg him one last time?
Another man brought in a steaming pot. At least, I thought it was steam, at first. With a pair of tongs, he pulled out a red-hot coal and, without warning, pushed it beneath my father’s back. Orik arched away as best he could. Another coal followed, and another, placed wherever his limbs touched the table. I smelled wood burning, mingled with the sweet stench of flesh. The last of my father’s clothes caught fire.
And I was staring
unmoving at this spectacle!
I jerked forward against the chain. I could not reach
him. Gritting my teeth, I pushed forward until two spear-points pierced my belly. They were the Lymarian kind with a leaf-shaped point, and none too sharp. Indeed, they might have been deliberately blunted by Lenbis’ men. I touched my father and dulled his pain before he suddenly writhed away from my touch. The man with the metal tongs was applying a coal to the soft skin of his armpit.
“Father! Reach out to me!”
The chains would allow me no further. I was strangling myself, truly told. With a start I realised that the spear-points had been poisoned; dipped in the juice of the deadly redbane berry. I recoiled, fighting the spread of contagion within myself.
Orik
screamed. He lay now on a bed of coals, unable to escape the scorching points beneath his body. Both of his hands balled into fists. I could not have reached him had I wanted to.
“Father!” I shouted. “Father! I won’t let you die!”
I had to fling myself against the spear-points once more. This time I caught the tip of his finger with mine, and the tune of Orik’s agony changed momentarily.
“Ah, the sweet music of torture,” crowed Lenbis, saluting me with a mocking flip of his hand.
“Now, let us see if you dance as well as you sing!”
I cursed him with every word I knew as his men approached me from either side, cudgels in hand. They struck at my feet to crush my toes. I shrieked, tried to kick out at one of them, groaned and almost collapsed as a spear-point scraped along my spine. I pulled back, but then I could not abide my father’s screams. So I flung myself once more upon the spears. I dulled my pain with a thought, careless of the damage, as I battled to reach my father. The men teased me by
cracking my outstretched fingers with their cudgels.