John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

So I just cried. After that, I lay there, thinking about how there was nothing to think about. I cried some more.

It was the counting, the saying I was sorry, over and over, that had been so humiliating. I could not pretend I was some proud, disdainful heroine of the French Resistance, silent and unflinching as she faces her sadistic Nazi captors; or a patrician of Rome, captured by marauding Huns or Vikings, willing to perish to preserve her family’s centuries-old tradition of stoic military virtue, but not willing to cower.

It is not the way I had imagined I would behave when captured by the enemy. We were not even talking about the rack, the thumbscrews, the Iron Maiden, the boot. It was just a man slapping my bottom. Picture Joan of Arc, taken by the perfidious English, before her trial even starts, “Oh, sure I’m a witch! Let me sign the confession! Just don’t swat my behind! I’m too frail!”

Or maybe I felt so bad because I thought, deep down, that I deserved it. I should not have tried to brain the Headmaster with a rock. I hadn’t even really wanted to do it.

It was the kind of thing a heroine in a story was supposed to do. Wasn’t it? If it had worked, if I had hit him slightly harder, I would not be here now. I could have been on the outside, with my powers still active, working to free the others.

Instead of here. Chained by the neck.

It had been Victor, hadn’t it? I had been trying to impress him. I had been trying to do the kind of cold-blooded, tough-as-nails, tough-guy kind of thing people are supposed to do when they are serious.

It was hard to be serious with Boggin. It was hard to think of him as the enemy.

And Victor, I am sure, would not have been impressed with that light little love-tap I gave him. On the other hand, the idea of a rock all covered with blood and brain-stuff… Bleh. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it, had I? I hadn’t tried hard enough.

I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do what I had to do to keep myself out of this place.

I twisted to look up at the gray stone ceiling. What kind of prison was this, anyway? The Germans would have had something modern; white, spotless, with sterilized dental instruments standing by the specially designed torture chairs, and technicians in crisp uniforms. The French would have had something cunning; an ordinary-looking room, covered by one-way mirrors, microwave beams, foods containing subtle doses of sodium pentathol. The Russians would have plied insidious psychological tricks; setting clocks to wrong hours and speeds, playing tapes of distant birdsong at midnight, bringing meals at irregular times, having false messages tapped on the walls in Morse code, as if from other prisoners. But this?

This looked like a cellar dating back to the time of Bloody Mary. It probably was. A typically British jail, then; inefficient and traditional.

The damn chain looked like an antique, too. Not some modern lightweight thing made of titanium alloy or stainless steel; it looked like the links were hand cast or cold hammered out of iron.

And the collar was the same way; heavy, dull metal, also an antique. I doubt many tool-and-die shops these days are turning out slave collars too small for anyone but girls. But England has a long and glorious tradition of torture, oppression, slavery, and cruelty. If you don’t believe me, ask the Irish. (Or the Welsh, or the Scotch, or, for that matter, the Tasmanians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans. Heck, ask anyone.) So I am sure that in Surrey or Whitehead or York there were stockpiles of witch-collars and stocks and leg-irons, eye-gougers, tongue-slicers, bone bores, dunking stools, and disemboweling spindles dating from the time of Cromwell, or Elizabeth, or William the Conqueror.

Boggin probably called up one of his friends in the special “Pain Through the Ages” office of the British Royal Museum. “Hallo, Harry (or whoever)! By the by, old chap, could you ship me a gross of those old iron collars we used back in the good old days? Not the heavy big ones, no, and not the grown-woman collars, either. We need something smaller. You know those specially designed sixteen-year-old-virgin collars, used for controlling Irish maidens caught stealing potato crusts to live on, or falsely accused when they refused to sleep with their manor lords, when the young beauties were chained up in gangs to be transported to Australia as mail-order brides? Hey, and send over a chastity belt or two. You see, I have this fellow named Glum… What? No, we won’t need any whips or hanging cages or branding irons to control this one! She already was apologizing at every slap while I spanked her, and crying like a girl! Well, of course, Harry (or whoever)! Of course she is a girl! Damned if I know why she ever thought she was anything else!”

Well, the fun of thinking about how I wasn’t actually being tortured or burned as a witch wore off after a while.

Why had he made me count, damn him?

For a while, I fortified myself with the knowledge that someone trying to humiliate you, to wound your pride, is no different than someone trying to wound you with a knife. Except that, unlike a knife wound, this one can’t cut unless you let it.

That made me feel better, for a time.

Then I remembered where I had heard that idea. Quentin had been told that, when he was being comforted after his ordeal. Quiet, gentle Quentin, who, despite his fear, had spit defiance into the face of his tormentress at the time when he seemed sure to die. Comforted by Boggin. It was Boggin’s idea I was repeating to myself.

That made me cry all over again. I am not sure why. But it did.

After I went through all these thoughts and recriminations, I stared up at the ceiling some more. And then, like a phonograph record, I went through all these thoughts and recriminations again.

When that was done, I did it again.

And again and again.

You see, it helped prevent me from thinking about the unthinkable nightmare thoughts, wondering helplessly what was happening, what was being done to Victor, Vanity, Colin, and Quentin.

You are wondering why I did not simply duck into hyperspace and slide out from there, or at least slide out from the collar?

After Boggin had reestablished the boundaries which Vanity had opened for me, while I could see a little way into hyper-space, I could not move that direction, not at all.

I could “see” that the collar was only “around” my neck in the way a flat circle of inch-high bricks on a floor in a plane might go “around” someone sitting on that floor. But if that someone cannot get up that inch, that flat line is just as good as a tall wall.

And there was nothing to look at in hyperspace. It’s dark and murky, and filled (at least, near the surface of the Earth-disk) with a heavy fluid medium. Whatever sunshine there might be falls off too rapidly to reach the Earth.

And my new senses did not give me much to look at, either. My utility detector was deaf; there was nothing useful to me in the room. The internal nature of the cold iron collar was that it was heavy, merciless, and powerfully antimagical. There were no lines or strands of moral obligation reaching out from me; iron was inert, unthinking, dull. Only creatures who are free to act, can do good or do bad.

And time seemed to go slower when I stared into the dimness of the four-space. No, I did not have much to look at. And the endless distances, the volume upon hypervolume of wide, curving voids out there, an inch out of reach, just mocked me. Staring into hyperspace made me feel like a crippled angel at the bottom of the well, able to see the distant stars of the infinitely high night sky.

Believe it or not, staring at the ceiling stones was more fun.