by James Silke
Schraak’s wide mouth fell open, and his thin pink tongue lolled around inside like a frightened pet.
“Yes,” she said as nastily as possible, “you should be afraid. The girl not only got away, but now she knows we hunt her. She will hide now, and make it a thousand times more difficult to find her.”
Schraak dropped back facedown to the floor and shuddered.
“Acck! Stop that. It’s no use. No use at all.” She allowed herself to calm down a little, watching the shark suffer some more, then spoke in a low, husky register.
“I still must have the girl, Schraak. If she is not found, I will not have the power required to fashion a new altar for our Dark Lord… and he will be silenced forever.”
“Nooooo!”
She nodded. “Yes, and you are as responsible for that tragic possibility as Lord Baskt. Consequently you will receive equal punishment.”
Schraak screamed, jumped up and raced toward the entry passageway. But two guards snapped him up and brutally strapped his thrashing body into a tiny chair attached to a long heavy pole. Feeding the pole out over the boiling sea water like a giant ladle, they dipped him, screaming and squirming, down through the rising steam into the bubbling sea water.
Tiyy watched them do this nine times, then ordered the punishment ended. The giant ladle was removed, and Schraak’s unconscious body was unstrapped and laid out on the ledge. Then a huge net was thrown around the nearly lifeless shark, and he was hauled out of the water. His flesh, like Schraak’s, was cooked and peeling away, like boiled beef.
Tiyy looked at the pair with small satisfaction. This was only the beginning of the pain they would have to endure, and they were not the only ones who would have to suffer.
She shuddered at her thoughts and lifted both hands, running the fingers of her left hand over the little finger of her right. It was smooth and brown and flawless, with an orchid nail that was long and tapered elegantly, the perfect culmination of arm and hand.
She fondled the fatty pad of the fingertip for a moment, then brought the tiny appendage to her lips and kissed it goodbye.
Twenty-three
THE FINGER
Tiyy lay facedown on her bed, kicking her feet with petulant frustration. One arm covered her head, and the other was thrust forward with the hand resting on a pillow. She was naked except for the silver chain mail girdle that spanned the crest of her tight round buttocks, and her muscular curves were oiled. Bright torchlight, reflected by bronze mirrors inlaid in the rock ceiling, played across her glistening sheen, and the leopard-skin spread covering the bed. She smelled of midnight orchids, young men and fear.
She was in her private chambers, a stone-walled room within the castle hung and carpeted with animal hides. Balconies were built off it overlooking the Inland Sea, and daylight and the songs of birds flowed through the open doors. She had been here three days exploring the pleasures of her new body, but now it was time to work.
Her extended hand rested palm-down on a square of white cloth spread over a zebra-skin pillow. It shuddered like a condemned prisoner.
Her three elderly priests stood to the side of the room with their heads together, whispering. Bald and bare-chested, they wore white cotton skirts held in place with black ropes, and elbow-length gloves of a yellow-green fish membrane. Beside them, bottles and vials and bright steel cutting instruments were arranged on ceremonial platters set out on pedestals sculpted like erect male reproductive organs.
Schraak and Baskt, now in his almost human form, stood obediently beside the bed. Their flesh had had three days to heal since being boiled. Schraak’s was shriveled, dry and flaking, and he was smaller, a dwarf. The sharkman’s natural armor had lost all its subtle hues of blue and violet-pink, and was dark and crusted with thick gnarled scabs. His once huge dorsal fin was now a small hump, like a hunchback’s, and his body was thicker, stronger, without grace. The bones of his formerly handsome face were bulging and blunt, and his upper teeth protruded, giving him an overbite that the dwarf could have stood under.
Their expressions said lucidly that each of them had not only had their bodies altered by torture and magic, but their souls. Their pride and intelligence were intact, but their wills had been removed, and their eyes were cold with death and obedience.
A priest picked up a platter containing a row of bottles, and shuffled toward Tiyy. She looked up sharply, glancing over her bare shoulder at the approaching bottles,-and moaned like a girl being forced by her mother to wear a tunic that was out of fashion. She again covered her head, and kicked and twisted violently. When she lifted her head, her pyramid of spiked hair looked as if it had been restyled by a pitchfork. She glared hard at Baskt and Schraak as her voice lashed them.
“It’s all your fault! If you’d found her, none of this would be necessary.”
Schraak and Baskt bowed agreement.
She whimpered petulantly. “You’re useless.” She turned to the high priest as he stopped in front of her holding out the platter of vessels. She groaned, and shouted at the two boiled men, “You’re going to pay for this!”
The pair bowed again.
Fuming, Tiyy turned back to the platter of vessels. They were of translucent green bottle glass and corked. Inside each of them, a little finger severed from a human hand floated in thick liquid that churned of its own accord, as if alive.
“You pick one,” Tiyy said testily. “They all look ugly to me.” The high priest nodded, and her head snapped up. “But if I don’t like it, I’ll have you gelded.”
The priest, swallowing his wrinkled lips as if to stop himself from replying to her petty outburst, bowed obediently and rejoined the others.
Tiyy grumbled huffily after him, saying, “It better not hurt either.”
The high priest did not react. He and the others assembled bottles and cutting tools on a platter, then all three returned to the bed. Two held the platters while the high priest bowed, revealing the three red circles painted on his bald head, then kneeled alongside the pillow supporting the young queen’s hand. His assistants extended the platter to him, and he removed a thin steel knife, set it beside the hand.
The priests began to pray, and Tiyy again covered her head with her free arm, trying to block out the sounds. But she couldn’t, and looked up, shouting, “Stop it! I’ve said all the prayers that need to be said. Just do it. Finish it!”
She hid her head again, and the priests dipped their heads, went to work, moving quickly and in harmony.
Using wooden tweezers, the high priest removed a bright yellow Panka tarantula from a bottle and placed it on the vein in the crook of the elbow of Tiyy’s extended arm. He poked at it until it bit her, and she screamed sharply. But she held still. The high priest put the spider back in its bottle, then sat back on his heels watching the arm.
It swelled slightly around the bite, and a yellow-grey jaundiced rash quickly spread out from the bite, reaching for her wrist, then her fingertips.
When Tiyy looked up, her stomach convulsed at the ugly blight on her flesh, and her head teetered sickly. When the nausea passed, Tiyy tried to move her fingers, three times. She could not. “It’s ready. I can’t feel anything.”
The high priest bowed in acknowledgment. Then, in a high-pitched falsetto required of him when speaking to the high priestess, said, “Forgive me, Oh beloved breaker of hearts, for putting my worthless knife into your sacred flesh.”
“Aaughh!” she snarled. “Stop that intolerable squealing and talk like a man. There’s going to be no more of that nonsense around here. Now cut it! Just cut it, and get it over with.”
Instinctively he bowed again, picking up the knife, and one of the assisting priests slid a square of hard black-enameled wood under the white cloth. Holding her hand down with his free hand, the high priest, with a deft cut, made an incision above the knuckle connecting the finger to the hand. A thin red line showed where the cut had been made, and Tiyy’s lower lip thrust forward, her eyes filled with tears. She turned a
nd glared at Schraak and Baskt.
“You see what you’ve done? I’ll never be the same again. Never!”
Coolly and swiftly, and using practiced cuts, the high priest removed her little finger and set it on the white cloth, while holding the bloody stump high in the air. An assistant opened a bottle containing a floating finger and removed it. The liquid from the bottle was heavy and glutinous, and clung to the digit, which wiggled and squirmed with life. Using napkin after napkin, an assistant removed the sticky substance and then ran the finger between his own, wringing the fluid out of it. The third time he did this, the finger stopped wiggling. He then held the new finger in place against the stump. The high priest felt about the joints of hand and finger, fitting them as he did, then took a long vampire worm from the other assistant. It was no thicker than silk string. He threaded a needle with it and thrust the needle through the Nymph Queen’s smooth brown flesh, joining the knuckles of hand and finger with the living thread. The vampire worm promptly began to attach its body to the living bone and flesh around it. The high priest then sewed the flesh together with thin strands of monkey gut which had been treated with Tiyy’s own magic, so that it would eventually merge with her flesh.
Tiyy, who had watched the entire operation, was sweating profusely when it was over and shaking from forehead to toes. When she looked up, the high priest, who had gotten off of the bed, handed her a small vial of black wine which she had previously prepared for herself. She took it in her good left hand and downed it hurriedly, the black light glowing on her pouting face.
Immediately her normal healthy color began to return to her arm, and then spread into her hand. Before it reached her fingertips, the ugly stitching around her knuckle was already beginning to disappear.
She held her finger up, watched the last stitch fade away and laughed with giddy relief. She abruptly sat up on her knees, holding her hand to her face, and wiggled her finger, studying it with rapt attention.
Suddenly she frowned savagely, thrust her hand at the priests and shouted, “It’s ugly! It’s the worst choice you could have made. Look at it! Look what you’ve done to me. Just look!”
The priests looked.
“I hate it,” she screamed. “It’s fat and wrinkled! And the nail is square and thick. Arrrgghhh!” She sank back on her heels. “You’ve destroyed me.”
She looked at her finger one more time, then let herself fall on her back, and spread out on the leopard-skin holding her hand as far away from her as possible. Her quarrelsome breasts heaved angrily, and their nipples grew hard and red. Her face was turning the same color, and her eyes were thin and dark. Suddenly she sat up angrily and demanded, “Give it to me.”
The priests looked at her, not understanding.
“My finger,” she screamed.
The high priest moved toward the now bloody white cloth, and she shouted, “Never mind.” She scrambled to the cloth and snapped up her severed finger. She held it against her heaving breasts possessively for a moment, suddenly afraid. Then she raised it alongside the new one and groaned fractiously.
“It’s horrible!” She bent her new finger and straightened it several times. “And stiff! Heavy! And too small! It doesn’t match the others. Everybody’s going to notice! They’ll know it’s not mine as soon as I enter the throne room.” She glared at the priests. “It makes my flesh crawl. It’s… it’s like a stranger has invaded my body. Who did it belong to anyway?”
The high priest started to reply, but hesitated, his face turning pale.
“Tell me!” she demanded. “Was it some filthy savage? Is that what you’ve done to me?”
“No, no, my queen,” the high priest said quickly. “It… it was a… a slave girl.”
“I know that,” she snarled. “What was she before that?”
“A… a…” The priest drew himself up, gathering control. “She had no tribe. She… she was a mix of many tribes.”
“Aarrghh! A mongrel.”
“But she was young, your holiness. Only thirteen. That is why it is so small. But this was intentional, so that it can grow according to the dictates of your own body. By tomorrow, or the day after, it will be almost perfect.”
Tiyy frowned and sank back, looking from her original finger to the replacement. “Thirteen,” she mumbled. “Well, all right. I’ll wait, but if it doesn’t look any better by tomorrow, I’ll geld all three of you. Now get out!”
The priests bowed, backed up the nine steps required by ritual, then departed swiftly.
Tiyy drew her legs up under her, and sat looking at her new finger from all sides. After some of this, she looked up at Schraak and Baskt, and said, “You’ve put me to a lot of bother, do you know that? And pain!” She held up her new finger. “Not to mention this… this piece of filth! And at a time like this! When I am looking better than I have in over a hundred years, maybe even my best!”
They bowed agreement, and she said peevishly, “Oh, stop that! You haven’t the slightest idea of what I’m talking about. You don’t know how I feel. You couldn’t. You’re not capable of it.”
They bowed again, but she ignored them, and looked at her former finger for a moment, calming herself. Then she decided she didn’t want to be calm, and with scalding eyes and a churlish tone, spoke to the two brutes.
“You’ve tried to ruin everything, and almost have, but that is all over now! Now that I can show myself to my people again, I’m taking charge.”
Baskt started to protest, but she cut him off. “Don’t interrupt me, Lord Baskt! You’re the one who should have taken charge of the army when I grew weak, and strengthened it, rebuilt the castle fortifications, filled our coffers with silver and gold.”
“We have gold,” Baskt said.
“I know that,” she snapped, “but we won’t for long! You two are going to spend it. All of it, if that is what it takes.” She lay over on a hip and smiled at them with malicious amusement. “I’m sending both of you into the desert, to En Sakalda. The hottest and most miserable spot in the desert, even for lizards, I’m told. The flies and sand and heat there can turn a man into nothing but an itching, pus-filled lump of rash within weeks… to say nothing of what they can do to a shark and worm.”
Their eyes thinned with terror.
She smiled cruelly and continued, “I need an agent in En Sakalda. An agent of prestige and importance who is well known, like yourself, Lord Baskt. Because soon now, En Sakalda’s slave pens will again be teeming with life.” Her tone had begun to ring with an authority that was twenty times the age of her flesh. “I have sent out my slavemasters to buy young girls of high spirit and great beauty, as many as they can. With them, and the new formulas I have concocted, I can sustain myself for years just as you see me now… and have strength left over to manufacture all the black wine I will need to put my kingdom back in order.”
Their eyes doubted her, and she snapped, “Don’t argue with me. I am telling you a simple fact. As I told you, my powers are not completely or permanently restored, but there is now enough magic in my smallest finger,” she held up the severed finger, “for both of you to see the invisible aura of virtue that surrounds this girl called Robin Lakehair. Do you understand?”
They did not.
“Dolts,” she said irritably. “All you will have to do is eat it. Then, when you look upon her naked body, you will have the power to see her aura yourselves.” Baskt and Schraak stirred unnaturally, beginning to understand, and their grey cheeks grew hot.
She laughed and waggled the finger at them. “That’s right! You would like to chew on me, wouldn’t you?”
They did not reply, but their cold empty eyes said yes.
“Well, you’re going to get your chance,” she whispered crossly, “but you will pay for it dearly. I have instructed my slavemasters to send out word, to every corner of every land, that I will pay handsomely for every girl fitting this Lakehair’s description. I’m offering a reward of a thousand crogan to the man who brings her in. But it c
ould be months, even years, before she is found and brought to En Sakalda, months and years for you to sweat and blister in the sun. Eventually she will arrive, the greed and lust of Black Veshta will see to it, and when she does, you will place her little finger in one of those bottles,” she pointed at two corked jars on a table beside them, “and her blood in the other, and deliver them to me.”
Schraak stammered, “You… you cannot mean this, O breaker of hearts!”
“I mean it, worm. In addition to the girl, I want soldiers purchased, enough soldiers to bring the regiments and castle garrison up to strength. And I want that bitch, the Queen of Serpents, found and put in chains. She’s more to blame for my problems than any of you. And I want the one called Death Dealer who stole the helmet. I want them all, and you will stay in En Sakalda until the slave hunters you employ bring them to you.” She hesitated, then added, “Oh, yes, also have the slavers find and bring the Grillard bukko who picked the girls you stole. He sees something in young girls that I cannot, something which my Kaa hungers for.”
Baskt said flatly, “We will die in En Sakalda.”
“He’s right,” blurted Schraak. “Our flesh can’t stand heat for any length of time.”
“Do not lecture me on your pedigrees, dolt. My magic made you what you are, and it has now altered you so that you will survive the desert heat, painfully and torturously, but nevertheless survive.”
She spread out languorously and smiled temptingly, holding the severed finger lightly and running the tip over an erect nipple. Then she laughed and tossed her severed finger on the floor in front of them, saying, “Now eat!”
Baskt hesitated, then snapped up the finger and thrust it into his mouth, biting it in half. He swallowed his piece whole and tossed the remaining portion to Schraak. The dwarf stuffed it into his mouth and truculently began to chew. He had the portion with the fingernail, and it made a small clicking sound when his teeth dismembered it.