Kindling (Flame of Evil)

by Mick Farren

  Jesamine was scared but resigned. Pain loomed unpleasantly in her future, but pain was hardly an unknown, and neither was the dread and vulnerable feeling of exposure and the humiliating nakedness that preceded it. Such was the allotment of the slave. She had frequently, if privately, been whipped by Phaall, and long ago she had undergone ten lashes in the public stocks. This major humiliation had been back in the days when, taken by the Mamalukes in a routine raid, she had been shipped over the sea and put to labor as a common young house-available in a Cadiz knocking shop and then had been unwise enough to be caught red-handed clipping the purse of a Mamaluke underofficer. The ten lashes, and the other, more intimate chastisements that were administered, bent over a chair in the whorehouse parlor, had been the painful punctuation of her life after she had become the property of the Mosul empire and had also been her primary persuasions that the life of a concubine might be preferable to that of a come-one, come-all thief and harlot. At least she would be consolidating her pain and placing it in the hands of a single oppressor whose wrath might at least be predictable. This thinking had started her on the long road that had brought her to the carnal clutches of Colonel Helmut Phaall, the new world of the Americas, and the banks of the Potomac. With supreme irony, just a matter of hours after she had attempted her escape from both Phaall and the Mosul, she found herself facing what promised to be the worst pain of her life, plus some good odds that she would end that life in this grim cement box, with its pulleys, chains, and overhead steel pole.

  “You are fully aware that you gave yourself away, aren’t you?”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach had returned after the assistants had secured Jesamine and Cordelia. She had walked round them twice and then approached Jesamine from behind. She wore a musky perfume that Jesamine failed to recognize, and her touch had been gentle as she twisted her fingers in Jesamine’s straight, dark hair and raised her gaze to the vertical, whispering softly in her ear in a voice like some slight arctic wind that presaged a far worse gale to come. “You should not have done that, girl. To attempt to communicate with your companion in that way when I was so close was very stupid. In so doing, you not only revealed yourself but her also. Your inexperience is pitifully evident.”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach’s age was hard to assess. Superficially she seemed to be no older than her early forties, but if she was, as T’saya had insisted, the full sister of Quadaron-Ahrach, that was hardly possible. She had to be far older. The electrical lights in the subbasement of the Bunker were not kind, and immediately upon this second entrance, she had ordered them disconnected and replaced by the more flattering, and more traditionally sinister, flame-glow of torches. The lace veil that dropped from a gold chaplet of blood red enameled roses that banded her brow had to be the start of Jeakqual-Ahrach’s youthful illusion, but in the moments before the change in lighting, Jesamine had noticed a severe tightness in the skin of the woman’s face, more than just the physical manifestation of her malign power, that suggested how maybe the knives of skilled surgeons had played a part in the staving off of the ravages of mortality, perhaps along with the ministrations of apothecaries, necromancers, and other specialists at whose function Jesamine was not even prepared to guess. Jeakqual-Ahrach’s body was a little full, but nonetheless shapely, and moved with an energy and grace that could only indicate that more was being done to keep her young than mere adjustments of the cosmetic surface. As befitted this strange, secret sibling who was the only female in the high orders of the Zhaithan faith, she was dressed in a black robe, but, as if to assert her femininity, it was lavishly trimmed with red and gold. An embroidered representation of the sacred flame of Ignir and Aksura curled around the entire vertical length of the garment, and the robe was cinched at the waist by a gold, ruby-encrusted belt that displayed the curves of her breasts and hips beneath the soft fabric, curves of which Jeakqual-Ahrach seemed inordinately proud, to their maximum advantage. The belt alone, without even counting the rest of her jewelry, could have fed a large family in any occupied territory for a full span of their collective lives. And if the gold and ruby collar around her throat, the pendant earrings, plus the mass of bracelets and rings, the chaplet that held back her raven black hair, and all the other adornments, were added to the reckoning, their combined worth could probably have ransomed a small city under siege.

  Jeakqual-Ahrach released Jesamine’s hair and again walked around the two helpless women, this time stopping in front of Cordelia, but still talking to Jesamine. “Is our friend a little smarter? Did she know enough to keep her mind shut, or is she simply even more lacking in the skills of silent communication?”

  She moved closer to Cordelia and ran a thoughtful hand over the suspended flatness of Cordelia’s belly, as Cordelia bit her own lip. “I wonder which of you will break first, the concubine or the lady? This chamber is soundproofed, so you are free to scream all you want.”

  Only Jeakqual-Ahrach’s hands betrayed the rest of her otherwise youthful exterior. They were veined and wrinkled like those of a woman decades on the far side of forty. In fact, only one of them was exposed. The left hand was covered in a velvet glove, with rings on the outside. Her right hand also did not remain uncovered for very long after she had touched Cordelia. She snapped her fingers, and one of her assistants advanced with a gold tray on which another single and highly idiosyncratic glove was draped. As she slowly drew it on, Jesamine saw that the palm was like a short-bristled brush, except the bristles were short silver needles. Jeakqual-Ahrach seemed aware that Jesamine was watching her, because she turned and moved towards her, the gloved hand raised palm outward so Jesamine could see it more clearly. She lightly stroked the steel brush across Jesamine’s breast. “Can you image the damage this could do if used with a combination of force and creative malice?”

  “I know the pointlessness of begging.”

  “At least you understand something.”

  She moved the steel bristles slowly down the length of Jesamine’s body. “I would hazard a guess that you come from one of the tribes that sing, but whose homelands are too close to those of the Mamalukes.”

  “I sing for my master.”

  “And will you sing for me?”

  “If you want me to talk, I’m helpless. I can hardly tell you anything, because I hardly know anything.”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach slightly used the glove with more intimate aggression. “I’m not sure I even want you to talk. Confessions are remarkably unreliable. It is my brother’s belief that there are four of you.”

  “We are nothing.”

  Cordelia spoke with considerably more pluck that judgment. “She’s telling the truth. We are nothing more than spoils of war.”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach responded to Cordelia by gripping Jesamine’s inner thigh with the glove and slowly increasing the pressure, so some of the tiny spikes pierced the skin and caused pinpoints of bleeding. “I would not advise you to be speaking out of turn, child. You have no idea if it will be you or your friend who suffers as a result.”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach released her grip on Jesamine, stepped back, and, at the same time, moved so she was behind Cordelia. Jesamine let out her breath in a quick gasp. Jeakqual-Ahrach was clearly playing the two of them against each other, and Jesamine was guiltily relieved that, for the moment, Cordelia was the one being played, and she was merely left hanging in her silk bonds with an odd-looking graze on her thigh. The fingers of Jeakqual-Ahrach’s velvet glove ran through Cordelia’s red hair, while the leather and steel one cupped her left buttock. “You are the one from Albany. That’s correct, isn’t it? The intrepid young officer who dared the ride in the Norse airship?”

  Cordelia clenched her teeth and said nothing. Jeakqual-Ahrach pulled her head up and laughed. “Aren’t you afraid of me, Lady Blakeney?”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach seemed to know a great deal about them, and Jesamine began to feel decidedly queasy. If T’saya had been arrested after all, and that was why she had been missing from her shack and her goats, everything would have been
revealed already. Jesamine was under no illusion that anyone, even T’saya, would hold their silent secrets to the grave once the Zhaithan had gone to work on them.

  Cordelia took a deep breath and turned her head as far as she could to try and look Jeakqual-Ahrach in the eye. “Of course I’m afraid. I’m very afraid. I’d be a fool if I wasn’t afraid in my present situation.”

  “But still you retain that Albany aristocrat pride?”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach tightened her grip on Cordelia’s cheek, and Cordelia gasped. “Why don’t you tell me what you want of us?”

  Again Jeakqual-Ahrach laughed. “Perhaps what I require is simply your submission. You see how I suddenly hold out a last-second possibility of hope?”

  “I would have said you had our complete submission right now. We are captive, bound and naked, and you can do whatever you like with us. How could we be any more submissive than we are?”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach slapped Cordelia hard. “You seek to bandy words with me, girl?”

  Cordelia gasped and twisted against the ropes. Very deliberately, Jeakqual-Ahrach slapped her again, and again Cordelia’s body twisted.

  “Well?”

  Cordelia took a moment to compose herself. When she spoke, her voice sounded strained but still collected. “I was simply hoping that if we gave you what you wanted, it might save the two of us considerable pain. I was seeking to be practical.”

  “Seeking to be practical?”

  “And perhaps seeking to save our lives.”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach touched the marks on Cordelia’s flesh with her velvet hand. “My brother believes that you two, plus two more, collectively command a certain power.”

  Jesamine watched as a bead of sweat ran down Cordelia’s side from her armpit. Cordelia nodded as best she could with within her current confines of movement. “As far as we can tell, he may well be correct.”

  Jesamine could not believe what she was hearing. Was Cordelia giving in already? Or was she attempting to match wits with Jeakqual-Ahrach despite her seemingly complete disadvantage? Either way, her newfound companion was playing a very risky game. On the other hand, as Cordelia herself had pointed out, they were captive, bound and naked, and Jeakqual-Ahrach could do whatever she liked with them. How much more dangerous could it get?

  Jeakqual-Ahrach used Cordelia’s hair to twist her head around. “What do you mean, as far as you can tell?”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “What is the point of me telling you what I know if you continue to hurt me?”

  “You told me that you were nothing but spoils of war.”

  “We lied.”

  “And now?”

  “To avoid torture, I’m telling you what I know.”

  “Which is?”

  “That we have sensed a power within us. Jesamine and I have shared certain hallucinatory experiences, but we have a long way to go before we can either control or understand what is happening to us.”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach rested the spiked glove lightly on Cordelia’s breast. “And the other two?”

  Cordelia was trembling slightly. “We have never met the other two.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Lady Blakeney.”

  “I’m not. We have never seen them except in dreams and visions.”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach moved very close to Cordelia. “Only in dreams and visions?”

  “That’s all.”

  She turned and stared at Jesamine. “And you would confirm this?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  Jeakqual-Ahrach advanced on Jesamine, but then abruptly stopped. Something indefinable changed behind her eyes, and she made a small birdlike movement of her head that seemed completely at odds with her previously revealed personality. “My brother…”

  Quickly she righted herself and resumed being the former Jeakqual-Ahrach. “I have to briefly consult with the my brother. I shall be gone for a short while, and then I shall return. In the meantime, you will both learn a first lesson. What we are engaged in here is not the exchange of information in return for the mitigation of pain.” She faced Cordelia. “You, my dear, have made an error that is common to many prisoners who pass through my hands. You believed that you could buy your way out of the inevitable with small increments of confession. You failed to realize that this is neither a negotiation nor a transaction, and information and pain are not items of currency. You have no purchasing power in this room with which to escape what was inevitable from the moment you came before me. The pain that you are about to suffer is the pain of transformation. It is the pain that will break you and then recreate you anew as you are rebuilt under my authority and this alleged power of yours is brought under my command and control.”

  She gestured imperiously to her black Zhaithan assistants. “While I’m gone, I want you to subject the dark one, the one called Jesamine, to a First Stage Physical Infliction. Use the martinet and the new electrical device on her, and let the other one watch in the full foreknowledge that the same or worse will happen to her on my return.” Jeakqual-Ahrach smiled at Cordelia. “The army employs a similar psychology in its field punishments. When two men commit an offence, the sentence of the secondary accomplice is executed first, while the primary instigator waits and watches. I have always considered it a technique with considerable merit in that it adds a major measure of guilt on one part, and hatred on the other, to the routinely physical hurt. It severs the ties of loyalty and is the perfect breaker of friendships.”

  And with that, Jeakqual-Ahrach swept swiftly out of the torture chamber with her robe and perfume wafting behind her. On her way through the door, she snapped an order to the young Provincial Levy on guard in the outer corridor. “Let no one in or out of this room, you understand, boy?”

  The Provincial Levy nodded and bowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good.” Jeakqual-Ahrach was gone, but her voice floated back down the corridor. “One day, my damned brother will learn to wait at my convenience instead of issuing his cursed summonses.”

  Jesamine was seized by an irrational anger. Cordelia was a stupid, arrogant bitch who had attempted to play games with a creature as overpowering as Jeakqual-Ahrach, and now it was she, Jesamine, who was to be punished for Cordelia’s overweening audacity. Cordelia must have sensed her fury, because her apology was plaintive. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you are.”

  Then Jesamine braced herself as the assistants advanced on her, one swishing a cruelly traditional martinet while the other carried a somewhat phallic glass tube from which wires ran to a scientific-looking Bakelite box with a steel crank handle.

  “Just relax. This is going to hurt.”

  “Why should I relax before you hurt me?”

  “It may well be your last chance.”

  Then, to Jesamine’s complete surprise, the two Zhaithan halted with looks of amazement on their faces, and a voice, nervous but insistent, with a distinct Hispanian accent, spoke high and clear. “Touch either of them with any of those things, and I’ll shoot you dead.”

  RAPHAEL

  As Raphael followed the two women in the motorized tumbrel, he found that, the closer they came to the Zhaithan’s Bunker, the more the disarray was compounded and the confusion increased. The streets around the bunker were choked with trucks, gun carriages, and mule carts, and the tumbrel carrying the girls from his dreams was forced to halt a number of times as the traffic locked up solid. As he fully expected, the worst confusion was centered at the main entrance to the windowless cement block that housed the headquarters of the Ministry of Virtue. Prisoners were being dragged out of the building, clearly destined for the mass executions, while others were being dragged inside to some yet-to-be-specified hell. Some wept, some screamed, and others stumbled stone-faced to their fate, and, all the time, in the background, the madness on the parade ground howled on. Raphael quickly realized that matters had reached the point when much was being handled by simple visual impressions,
as in the assumption that a figure that wore a helmet and carried a weapon was a guard, while one that did not was a prisoner. When the girl’s tumbrel was finally unloaded, Raphael’s best and, in fact, only idea was to tag along with their escort as they were taken inside, and he was amazed to discover that this was all it really took. Once inside the echoing concrete booking area, he found that the place was thronged with more regular army Mosul guards than with Zhaithan. Soldiers just like Raphael stood around with muskets and fixed bayonets, looking bored, tired, or worried and waiting for someone to tell them what to do, while a scarlet Zhaithan superintendent tried to organize the milling crowds, the recently arrested, the already condemned, and the men needed to guard them into some manageable order by screaming incoherently and only breaking off to argue repeatedly with a Zhaithan records officer.

  Guards and their allocation, it appeared, were almost as much of a problem as the prisoners. At any given time there was either too many or them or too few. Units had long since been broken up as men shuttled between the bunker and the parade ground, and now escort squads were being formed on the spot by the simple process of Zhaithan officers pointing and yelling. This was exactly what happened to Raphael after he’d been inside the Bunker for only a matter of minutes. A blue Zhaithan had motioned impatiently to him and some Mosul regulars. “You men! Basement One. There’s some Category A detainees being sent down there, and you’re to watch them.”

  Raphael hesitated as though the order did not apply to him, but the Zhaithan obviously intended that it did. “You, boy! That means you!”