Hugh Cook - The Wazir and the Witch

Strangely, the accumulation of so many prisoners did not hearten Tin Char. Rather, he began to worry. He began to suspect he had been rash in proposing to indulge himself in acts of extended torture. The politics of Injiltaprajura would remain unstable until Justina Thrug was quite dead.

It was the acolytes who were to blame.

If they had not dabbled in thievery, then the torture would already be well on its way to a terminal conclusion.

As Tin Char was so thinking, the acolytes at last returned with two centipedes in a wickerwork cage. Only two? A pair would suffice, for these were malevolent monsters of purple hue, each as long as a man’s forearm.

‘At last,’ said Tin Char. ‘Fetch me the centipede tongs, or have you perchance pawned them?’

‘Master,’ said the younger of the acolytes, ‘the centipede tongs will be with you instantly.’

A protracted delay followed, a delay in which Tin Char became so agitated he felt quite sick; but at last the tongs were produced. Tin Char took the tongs.

‘Out of my way!’ he said, giving one of the acolytes a push.

Both acolytes squeezed in beside Juliet Idaho. The Yudonic Knight looked sideways at them and whispered:

‘Cut me free.’

Unfortunately, the naos was far too small for private conspiracy. Tin Char heard the whisper and gave Idaho a dirty look; whereafter the helpless Yudonic Knight said no more.

Tin Char already had to hand the pry-levers which he planned to use to open a certain portion of the imperial anatomy so the scorpions could be inserted into a particularly sensitive part of the body.

But first, the preliminary sacrifice must necessarily be made. The rites of the Temple of Torture require the sacrificing priest to drink the blood of whatever animal is slaughtered in such a ceremony. Tin Char, however, was in no mood for drinking fresh hot blood, never a pleasant beverage on a humid day in Injiltaprajura. He wondered if he could inflict this duty on the quick-blinking Jean Froissart.

‘Friend Froissart,’ said Tin Char in his sweetest tones, ‘do I have your permission to invite you to take part in this ceremony of torture?’

Froissart hesitated. He had conceived a great terror of this cramped, hot, shadowy place, a bloodstone tomb ever infiltrated by screams from some agonized creature enduring great trials elsewhere in the Temple, a close-packed place crowded with the rank and hot-breathing bodies of prisoners, guards and terrified acolytes.

‘Of course we wish to participate,’ said Manthandros Trasilika, annoyed by Froissart’s hesitation. ‘What do you want us to do?’

‘I would be greatly honoured if your priest would consent to make an initial sacrifice for me,’ said Tin Char.

‘Of course he will,’ said Trasilika, before Froissart had a chance to protest.

Whereupon Tin Char lifted the lid from a copious covered dish. Within lay a vampire rat, its paws tied together with threads of gold and silver. Despite these cords of bondage, it had thrashed around inside the dish. And, as it had befouled its place of imprisonment, streaks of brown smeared its luxuriant orange fur.

The vampire rat screamed in agonies of intelligent anticipation. Froissart grabbed it. The rat twisted, snapped, bit. Blood streamed from Froissart’s hand. If this rat was rabid — and rabies was endemic amongst the vampire rats of Injiltaprajura — then Jean Froissart was going to endure a very unpleasant death.

‘Gath!’ said Froissart, swearing in his native Toxteth.

Then the child of Wen Endex smashed the rat with his fist, grabbed the knife and cut its throat. Blood streamed forth into the dish, mixing swiftly with urine and excrement.

‘There,’ said Froissart, smearing blood across his forehead as he wiped away a lathering of sweat. ‘It’s dead.’

At that point, a servant intruded. A low-browed young man who had but one eye, the other being covered with a black patch.

‘Master,’ said the servant.

‘Silence!’ said Tin Char. ‘You have the manners of a drummer.’

‘Master, I-’

‘Silence!’ roared Tin Char.

And resolved to have the man beaten as soon as the ceremony was finished. To thus intrude on holy ceremony was perilously close to blasphemy.

‘But master,’ said the servant desperately. ‘I must-’

‘You must be quiet!’ said Tin Char. ‘If he speaks again, gouge out his other eye!’

The servant did not speak again.

Instead, the man started to wring his hands in frustrated anguish.

Dui Tin Char waited for Froissart to proceed with the next step demanded by ritual. The drinking of the blood. But Froissart did no such thing.

‘That was well done,’ said Manthandros Trasilika, when nobody else seemed inclined to speak.

Trasilika’s ignorance was pardonable. But Froissart’s inaction was something else again. Perhaps Froissart had forgotten how to proceed. An unlikely event, for all priests of Zoz the Ancestral familiarized themselves with the rites of the closely associated Temple of Torture. Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. Or perhaps Froissart was in no condition to drink the blood. The child of Wen Endex was bleeding from a bite from a possibly rabid animal. His face had assumed an unnatural pallor; he looked shocked, exhausted, close to collapse.

One way or another, the ritual must be brought to its proper conclusion. Any other course would be blasphemy.

‘There is the matter of the blood,’ said Tin Char carefully, thinking that would suffice.

‘The blood?’ said Froissart.

‘Yes,’ said Tin Char. ‘The blood.’

‘Oh,’ said Froissart.

He picked up the big dish. He breathed the fumes of blood, excrement and urine. Sweat dropped from his chin and splashed in the unorthodox cocktail he now contemplated. The fluid trembled as Froissart’s hands shook. He opened his mouth as if to say something. Then, quite calmly, he vomited into the bowl. He stood looking at the vomit. The heavy dish started to slide in his sweat-greased hands. Froissart tried to put it down. But the dish was going, going, gone, a slosh of filth and vomit splurping over the side. Impact! The dish smashed down, spraying its contents across Trasilika’s feet.

‘Jean Froissart!’ said Tin Char in shocked surprise. ‘You disgrace yourself!’

Froissart grovelled in the mess of muck and vomit.

‘It blasphemes,’ said Dardanalti, affecting shock. ‘It sins against our faith with malice. What makes it priest? It has not the Skin.’

So spoke Justina’s lawyer, speaking of Jean Froissart with all the resources of racial hatred at his disposal. Then the lawyer dared a most unlawyerly thing. He kicked the cringing priest.

‘This is no priest,’ said Dardanalti, kicking the thing again. ‘This is a fraud.’

Dardanalti was making the greatest gamble of his life. He suspected — but was not certain — that Jean Froissart was a false priest. But he had no proof of that whatsoever. There was therefore every possibility that Dardanalti might shortly find himself entertaining five million red ants with a most extraordinary generosity, or, to detail just one of the many alternative fates which might befall him, taking his ease on a sharpened roasting spit.

Dardanalti, then, gambled with his life.

Froissart sat up.

‘I,’ he said, ‘I’m-’

Outside, someone screamed, as screams a man of nervous disposition when a dentist wrenches an ulcerated wisdom tooth from the living flesh of the gums and, gripping this trophy in a pair of rusty pliers, holds it aloft in all its gory glory.

Froissart opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Began to cry.

‘Pull yourself together,’ said Manthandros Trasilika roughly, as blubbering tears streamed down Froissart’s face, washed through his sweat then dropped to the disgraced flagstones.