by Dylan Doose
It was the seventeenth lash that finally had Kendrick give a gasp.
“Ah, there it is,” the torturer said, then he gave a giggle.
“You’re the worst kind of scum, you know that,” said the blond man. “How can you stomach that, you fucking coward? Striking a man suspended from the ceiling, unable to defend himself. You are everything disgusting about humanity.”
“You know who I’m whipping here? This is a fuckin’ kindness compared to the shite he’s done. When I sledge all his limbs it will still be a kindness. This man here is Kendrick the fuckin’ Cold. He is going to be whipped, beaten, and flayed until he admits to the last of his crimes, from killing a king’s officer to butchering his own wife.”
The blond man’s eyes went wide, and he fell silent. The kid with black hair didn’t seem to know or care who Kendrick was. He just looked at the torturer’s table and the tools of his trade, fully horrified, certain of the suffering to come. Kendrick knew the face well.
“That’s right, pretty boy,” the torturer said. “Just keep your mouth shut until it’s your turn. You can say whatever you like when it’s your turn.” Then, lifting the cat once more, he continued, “Back to our conversation, Ken, before we were rudely interrupted by our new guests.”
* * *
There was a moment back in the cell when Aldous had believed Theron was actually going to get them out of this. That moment was gone. It took everything Aldous had in his being to stop from shitting himself then passing out as he watched the suspended man take the whip.
The tortured man was a few inches shorter than Theron, but what he didn’t have in height he had in muscle. If Theron was a sculpture, this man, this Kendrick the Cold was a raw slab of stone. He must have had a good three stone on Theron, three stone of menacing meat. He had a jaw on him like an anvil and fists like two smithies’ hammers. His matted, wild hair was thin, and a lifetime of fighting and pain was visible on the man’s face. His nose was crooked and flattened, and a hundred small scars ripped in every which way across his features, one long one from ear to ear just under his eyes.
He took another hard lash to the back, his entire body tensing as it twisted a half circle.
“Silent again, eh?” asked the torturer. “As I was saying earlier. They told me to tell you she’s dead.”
“Yeah,” said Kendrick, calm and low; his voice cooled the room. The sound of it caused gooseflesh to rise on Aldous’ arms.
“Two went back after they got you. They said to tell old Ken that. Yeah, two went back and they raped and killed your whore. Then they raped her again.”
Aldous was afraid of the torturer, he was horribly, horribly afraid of the torturer, but as he saw the sick grin split the face of Kendrick the Cold, Aldous began to wonder whom he should truly fear.
“That is not a man to enrage,” whispered Theron from beside Aldous.
“I’m going to pull out your tongue,” Kendrick said, in a voice as calm as his expression. “Then I’m going to wrap it around your throat and choke you right to death.” He did not yell the words, just said them low and calm, the way a man might state his daily affairs to a man that he was breaking his fast with.
Aldous could not see the torturer, for Kendrick’s massive body was suspended before him. Yet Aldous was certain that the bastard with the whip was afraid. Afraid of a man who was bound and bloody. For who would not be afraid in the face of that grin.
The pause didn’t last for long.
There came a screaming from the hall beyond the door of the torture chamber, the surreal sound of someone else’s living nightmare adding to his own.
The blue symbols of the seekers on the walls began to glow.
There was another scream, not the scream of pain at the hand of a torturer, but the scream of death. Swords were drawn outside and there was a great deal of yelling, then more screaming, and at last came the sound of the squeals, the sound that nearly caused the blood in Aldous’ veins to curdle and his spine to fully stiffen. Theron must have felt the same thing, for he stood and began to tug at the chain attached to the rusty ring at the bottom of the wall. The floor beneath began to shift. Right beneath them. As if something were pushing up from below.
“Theron?” Aldous asked. Again bile rose in his throat, that hotness in the back of the throat with the singular chill in the belly that was the very physical sensation of fear. “This keeps getting worse and fucking worse.” He was yelling by the end, his voice cracking like a schoolboy’s.
“Not worse. We are in luck. There are things in the dungeon,” Theron said.
“What things? What are you talking about?” yelled the torturer as he stepped out from behind Kendrick, eyes shifting side to side, fat jowls swaying.
“Chaos,” muttered Kendrick, the way Father Riker used to mutter small prayers.
Again came a squealing from outside, and more screams, and Ken smiled at the sound.
The reinforced door to the chamber gave a loud thud. They all turned to look at it.
Again it gave a thud, followed by a sharp crack, a few splinters flying across the room.
“I suggest you unchain me,” Theron said to the torturer. “For I am Theron Ward, the slayer of monsters, and those are monsters knocking at your door.”
* * *
The door gave another heavy thud as a dark pool of blood seeped beneath, a slow-moving tide of deep crimson, shining back the reflection of the torches. Again, the ground beneath Theron quaked. A fact for which he was grateful, as it concealed the quaking of his knees.
“When they are done devouring the guards outside, the guards whose blood is now finding its way into your place of work,” he said to the torturer, who now stood backed into a corner, trembling. “They are going to take down that door. There is no way out for you. No one is coming to your aid. Undo my chains.”
Aldous was not able to pull off the same façade. He sat on the ground hugging his knees to his chest as he rocked back and forth, eyes closed.
“Do something, Theron, do something,” the boy repeated in a hushed voice over and over. Theron did not blame Aldous for his fear; a part of him would have liked to do the same—curl in a ball and beg a stranger for help—but a bigger part of him wanted to fight or die killing whatever came through that door. At least if he fought, he had a chance to win.
“I made a vow, Aldous. I’ll get you out of this. Have faith, my boy.” In truth, Theron was not as sure now, as he had been when he swore to protect Aldous earlier in the upper cell. By the sounds of it, there were a lot of rats out there.
The chamber walls covered in the blue sigils of the seekers were glowing madly. Madly blue, but there is a haze of green. Not like a forest.
The door splintered through in the center, leaving a jagged hole, and a gray-clawed arm, covered in black boils and dripping with blood, reached through. The boils pulsed and throbbed, and they seemed to drink up the blood and grow before Theron’s eyes.
The torturer dropped his whip as he stared at the door. Kendrick the Cold began sawing the thick ropes that bound his hands side to side, then he swung up his dangling legs—blood dripping down his back—and planted his feet on the ceiling. With all his might and all his limbs, he pulled and pushed at the ropes.
“Rata Plaga,” the torturer said, sinking to the ground in his corner, knees to his chest, a hum of terror surrounding him.
“Chaos,” said Ken, his voice straining along with his muscles as he pulled madly at his bonds, his hands turning purple as they tried to squeeze free from the tight ropes.
Aldous just kept rocking, back and forth, as if he were rocking to the sound of the hellish orchestra just outside the door.
“Kendrick, your bonds are too tight. Kick the table, man. The key ring to my chains… kick it to me.” Theron’s whole body shook, but his voice kept steady. I won’t die here, not here in Norburg. Not to the fucking rats.
Kendrick swung his legs back down and looked at the table.
“Too far. Think of so
mething else,” he said.
Again the ground shook, and the arm breaching the door expanded the hole, and became an arm and a snout.
“Just try, try. Fucking try to kick it,” Aldous wailed.
“Hurry now,” Theron said as he looked from Ken to the door then back to Ken, then at the fanatical Aldous then finally back to Ken, all the while stepping up and down on the tips of his toes.
“Be still,” Ken ordered. “You are like a child who has to take a piss.”
“Just fucking kick it,” Theron said, the iron shackles cutting into his wrists as he did his anxious dance.
Ken began to swing. He was now the pendulum that ticked and tocked away the precious seconds that would decide whether they lived or died. His toe almost reached the table. Almost.
Then he swung back.
The full head of the rat became visible now, its buckteeth gnashing and covered in gore.
“Anytime now, good sir,” Theron said.
Again Ken swung to the table, his left toes getting well under it. The large man gave a grunt and flipped the table. The keys could have fallen in any direction, but luck would have it that they flung toward Theron.
“There you go,” said Kendrick with a glance at the door and the rat that was nearly fully through. “Now be quick. Be good and quick.” Even Ken’s voice had the sound of anxiety as he too gazed at the thing tunneling through the center of the door, the pool of blood from the hall outside running closer and closer to his dangling feet.
“Theron!” Aldous was all mad screams now.
Theron reached his toe to the ring of keys and slid it to himself. He crouched to grab it, but the most violent shake in the ground yet dropped him to his knees. He regained his composure and grabbed the ring.
Key into the hole.
The rat’s head and both arms were now through the door, the hand of a second working its way in.
Wrong key.
The first one’s torso came squeezing through, the creature so mad in its hunger that it gave no reaction as the splintered wood lacerated its befouled flesh. Black blood and pus squished from its open gut and ran down the door, slow and viscous, but the plague spawn kept wriggling through, its human eyes straining in the sockets of the grotesque skull.
Key in the hole. Right key.
“I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be dinner to that thing. Please, I don’t want to die,” whispered Aldous. He was corpse pale, and his words were slurred, as if he were soon to pass out from fear alone.
“You are not going to die, not here,” Theron yelled, twisting the key in the lock. “Get a grip on your faculties, boy. You will not die here, but it is going to be some time yet before this is over. Find your guts.”
Click.
Theron dropped the shackles and sprang back, away from the wall, just as the shaking floor beneath him gave way and caved into the earth. There was a black hole for a single moment then a plague rat appeared in the space. This one was long and lanky, crusty, matted doglike hair covering its body. Theron turned around and sprang to a mallet that had fallen off the torturer’s table, then turned back and went for the tall, shaggy rat fiend.
The thing went for Aldous. The boy was too rattled to even scream; he simply closed his eyes and waited for the gaping maw to rip apart his flesh.
I’m not going to let you die. I won’t fail you.
Theron fed the creature stone; he swung the mallet in an upward arc right into the thing’s open mouth, smashing through rotted teeth and unhinging the beast’s jaw. The blow caused it to stumble forward into Theron, and he turned a shoulder to brace it as he delivered a mighty blow into the plague rat’s knee. The bone shattered and the vile thing went down.
Still it dragged itself toward Aldous, hoping to get one bite before it died. Aldous slid back as far as he could, as far as his chains would allow. The rat reached out with a long, grotesque claw, and kept reaching. It raked the boy’s lower leg, and a single nail sank into the flesh. The boy screamed and kicked the fiend in its shaggy face.
Theron brought the mallet down again, and again.
“I. Made. A. Vow.” Each word brought another strike, blood spraying from the pounded meat up over Theron and the boy.
* * *
“I don’t want to, Father, it is not fair. I have done nothing to deserve this punishment,” the golden-haired boy protested as his father handed him the knife.
“This is no punishment, my son. And fair has not a bit to do with it. It is a lesson and a test wrapped into one.”
“This is the job of a servant, not a job for me, a boy who will one day be lord.”
His father laughed. “A lord should never have a servant, or any other under his employ, do a thing that he himself would not be willing to do. That is what makes a man a tyrant.”
“I am no tyrant, Father!”
“Then understand the lesson, and finish the test. I am with you. We are in this together.”
The boy gripped the knife until his knuckles turned white, and he steadied the blade as he put it to the throat of the goat that his father held in place. “It is not like hunting,” said the boy.
“A different thing entirely,” agreed his father.
“He is not even afraid,” said the boy, on the verge of tears, the blade against the goat’s neck. “I see no lesson here.”
“Your life comes at a price, son. So does the life of everyone else. That is the lesson. The test is finding out whether or not you will pay it.”
The boy took a breath, and, with his eyes locked on his father’s, he slit the goat’s throat. It was the only thing he remembered about his ninth birthday.
* * *
Chapter Seven
A Test
Aldous stared at the thing on the ground before him. It was grotesque, horror incarnate; it was the evil of the world manifested into a breathing, writhing, dying thing. Its matted fur was soaked with blood, and woeful human eyes peered out from a pulverized face. The thing was not yet dead, although it was clear it would never rise again. The hunter had made sure of that.
Theron stood above it; he no longer looked the gold prince. He looked the bloody savage. His muscles swelled in the combat, veins bulged in his arms and his neck, and his hair was wild and sprayed with the black blood of the thing most sinister writhing on the ground.
Theron threw Aldous a ring of keys, then turned and charged the rat that had gotten itself impaled as it wrenched its way through the shattered door. It retched, the wounds in its belly gaping and leaking as it did, then received a massive blow from a mallet-wielding Theron. The impact made an echoing thunderclap in the dungeon and blood shot out from its eyes. Two more blows had its skull was completely smashed, bits of bone and brain spraying across the room.
Aldous fumbled with the keys, the wound the rat had inflicted on him burning in his calf. He winced, and tensed his entire body to fight off his violent shaking so that he could get the key in the hole and free himself.
The shackles released, and Aldous struggled to his feet.
“Boy.”
Aldous turned and looked at Kendrick.
“See that knife there?” Kendrick nodded at the knife on the floor with the other things sprawled out from the tipped-over table. “Take it, and cut me down.”
Aldous was not sure what it was about the command Kendrick had just given him, but for the first time since this had all begun he felt his heart ease.
Theron was still at the door swinging at the limbs and snouts that were poking past the impaled rat.
Aldous reached down and grabbed the knife.
“Cut me down,” said Ken calmly.
“Do it. We need him, Aldous.” Theron grabbed a flailing rat arm by the wrist and bludgeoned it at the elbow. A squealing scream sounded from the other side of the blockade, the remains of the door creaking under the assault. “And be quick. They’re coming through.”
“Don’t do it, boy,” came the quivering voice of the torturer who was, as Aldous had b
een moments ago, huddled in a corner, avoiding the fray. “Ward, tell him not to release that man. Assist me and get me to the count. I will tell him of your heroics and you will be pardoned. But do not release that demon. Do not release Kendrick the Cold. He is as likely to kill you as the rats.”
The impaled, bludgeoned rat in the door that had thus far involuntarily helped in barricading the other creatures out of the chamber began shaking violently, and through the hole, Aldous could see the rats behind it feasting on its flesh.
“Cut down Kendrick,” Theron said, his voice stern now. It was an order and it was final. There was no more time to think over choices. Aldous took a step forward.
“Don’t! Even if you escape, the count will hunt you. His men will chase you to the end of the earth. Release that man and you will hang. No matter what, you will hang.” The torturer had no force in his words; he had crawled to Aldous and was begging. He did not even have the grapes to try and take the knife.
Aldous jerked his hand from the groping, whimpering man on the floor and righted the table, then climbed up so he was face to face with Kendrick.
“Good choice,” Kendrick said. Cold and calm. As if the terrors of the world were not knocking at their door.
Aldous looked deep into the man’s eyes. There was more emotion in the eyes of the rats than there was in his, and Aldous had a foreboding feeling that he may one day regret what he was about to do.
Theron yelled.
Aldous turned.
The rat corpse tore free, and the door was completely smashed through. The flood was coming, and, foreboding feeling or not, Aldous set to cutting.
* * *
The black-haired boy cut at Kendrick’s bonds, using all his efforts. So fierce was he that Ken got a cut in the process. Nothing major, just a nick, really. The ropes sawed through, and he fell to the ground. He clenched and unclenched his fists, nice and tight, forcing the blood into his arms. The boy came down from the table and handed Ken the curved knife. It was a pretty thing, long and capable, looked like it could get right to the guts, no problem.