Robert Adams - The Savage Mountains

Arrived in his cellar, Danos had gone through the joyless motions—stripping and gagging the half-conscious woman, then securing her ankles and wrists to a large rectangle of strong wooden construction. He had fabricated the rectangle many long months before, during the early days of the siege. With a victim’s hands and feet lashed to its corners, the tenderest and most sensitive portions of the body were easily accessible to whip or knife, fingers or teeth, pincers or licking flame.

That detail attended to, he had employed the whip, pulping first the back, then turning the rectangle and its moaning, fainting occupant to lay open the tender breasts with the blood-wet lash. By this time, he should have been used to an audience, but he still was somewhat inhibited in his reactions by those darkly mad eyes staring from the corner; consequently, even when white ribs were showing through the lacerated, bleeding flesh of the woman’s chest, he still felt no pleasant, stirring warmth in his loins. Not until he had leaned the rectangle against a wall and commenced to rain whistling blows on inner thighs and on the pudenda itself did he experience the tardy tumescence.

When he arose from the ravaged body, his loins now slack, he privately suspected the woman to be already dead or so near death as to make no difference, but warily he made no mention of the fact. After adjusting his clothing, the slick, black leather facings all wet and red-sticky, he drew his military dirk and expertly opened the upper abdomen. Leaving the dirk by the body, he stood up and stepped back.

“Dinner is served, my lord.” He addressed the lurker in the shadowy corner. “I’m going above to watch for the patrol, as usual. Please signal when you’ve done, sir.”

On his way up the littered stairs, Danos tried hard not to hear the slurping noises.

Ahlee had lost count of the numbers of small side tunnels his party had explored. Their original torches had already guttered out and, had the practical sergeant not thought to have the reinforcements carry extras, they would all now be fumbling about in utter darkness. The physician’s jaws ached from the effort of keeping them clamped against the chattering of his teeth, for he like the rest found the dank chill of these passages harder to bear than the icy weather aboveground.

They had slowly proceeded up the left-hand side of the large tunnel, come at length to a blank wall of rough-hewn granite which Vaskos had opined to be probably the foundation of part of the city walls. Now they were working back down the other side. As Ahlee, moving just behind Vaskos and the sergeant, came abreast of yet another side tunnel, he became unpleasantly conscious of a palpable emanation of purest evil radiating from the depths of that narrow passage, its uncleanness and power making him sick and dizzy.

“Vaskos!” he whispered, croakingly, pulling at the burly officer’s sleeve. “In there, I think. If not what we seek, at least something… something of terrible wrongness.”

All the still-unblocked side tunnels were very similar in construction—twenty to thirty feet long, about six feet high and three wide—but the differences in this one were quickly apparent. The shoring was all new, the upper areas of it stained with torch soot, and they trod not bare earth but paving tiles … splotched here and there with dark brownish stains which clearly were not soot. A small chamber always lay at the cellar end of these side tunnels. This one contained a pile of fresh torches and a heap of torn and gore-stiffened rags which, on closer examination, proved to all be various articles of women’s clothing.

Ahlee hoped that he would never again see such a look on his friend’s face as Vaskos dropped a ripped, crusty shift, drew his sword and motioned for two soldiers to open the wall section which led to the cellar.

Some of these sections had been completely immovable, some had yielded only after long and difficult labor, but this one swung easily and noiselessly open … laying before their eyes a scene of unrelieved ghastliness.

The cellar was brightly lit by a couple of torches and several lamps. Warmth was provided by a pair of large braziers. His back to the newcomers, a man’s figure crouched over the spread-eagled body of a gagged woman. Her wide-open eyes were death-glazed and set in a reflection of agony beyond endurance, horror beyond belief. What could be seen of her body and legs brought the sour bile bubbling up into Ahlee’s throat, for all that he had closely examined so many cadavers with identical savageries imprinted in their cold flesh.

A red-smeared dirk was held loosely in the crouching man’s right hand, while his left held what appeared to be a lump of fresh organ meat. While they watched-battle-hardened soldiers shocked into stillness and silence by the unnatural spectacle before them—the man drove the dirk into a timber of the blood-encrusted torture frame to which the dead woman’s stiffening limbs were still bound, laid the piece of meat upon the pulpy red ruin which had been her breasts, did something with his freed hands, then bent his neck and lowered his head. The terrible sound which then smote their ears was that of beast, not of mankind. Of beast busily lapping!

Vaskos, too, sounded then like a beast, growling deep in his throat. He stalked forward, cat-light, his swordblade at low guard, ready for stab or slash. The sergeant and other soldiers advanced behind him, filling the width of the cellar from wall to wall with an inexorably moving wall of armored, steel-tipped bodies.

But the feeding beast heard the growls and shufflings as they neared him and whirled about, his pallid face and graying beard a single nauseous mask of clotting blood, madness glinting its evil from out his bloodshot black eyes, his broken and rotting red-stained teeth bared in a bestial snarl of rage. Jerking the dirk from the timber, he hurled himself at Vaskos, the foremost of these intruders.

His own lips skinned back in a grimace of savage joy, the officer set himself for a thrust. With a habitual stamp and shout, the long blade swept up and the muscular arm extended, but the sharp steel met empty air and Vaskos almost fell on his face on the blood-slick floor, whereon lay the suddenly senseless hulk of Vahrohnos Myros Deskati of Morguhn, but bare feet from the ravaged corpse whose liver he had torn out, whose blood he had been drinking.

Some two hours after these events, with the madman once more securely manacled in his cell and guarded by grim Regulars, Vaskos again sat behind his desk, glowering at Captain Danos. The former rebel officer’s baldric draped loosely, the cased sword it had held now hand-carried by one of the husky guardsmen who flanked him. On a cloth on the desk lay the partially cleaned dirk which had been taken from the vahrohnos in that cellar of terrors.

They had had the captain’s story. Now Vaskos bluntly spake his mind. “Captain, you are either a careless, feckless fool or a cunning, glib-tongued monster. I confess that I know not which, at this point. I’d like to think you the latter, but that’s because I hate you for reasons that you well know.

“The fact that this dirk fits your empty case really proves nothing, since both are Confederation Army issue. Your charge lies comatose in his cell, so it will be days ere we can question him. Not that that exercise will prove anything either, for I’d not convict even such as you on the unsupported word of a madman.

“You were found sleeping in your room here at the Citadel, and were nowhere seen on the streets tonight, but neither fact absolves you, since I now am aware that there exists a true warren of tunnels connecting the Citadel and various quarters of the city.

“However, I have put my staff to checking the presumed dates of the recent series of murders and questioning your men as to which nights you took the watch over the vahrohnos. If the two lists coincide, captain, I will assume that you are guilty, if not of duplicity, at least of dereliction of your sworn duties. And that will make me very happy, captain. My father, Lord Hari, and I were denied our just vengeance on your flesh because you were an amnestied officer fulfilling what the High Lord felt to be a valuable function. You cannot be punished for the crimes done in Morguhn, but damn you, I can damned well court-martial you for those things you’ve done or not done whilst under my command.”