Overcome by his fear, by the stench, by the pitiless horror, he vomited. And felt better, as if he had purged his body of some kind of poison. He felt calmer. He could deliberate, analyse and plan. He wished he knew how all those people had got into the pit. Had they been thrown in? Or had they chosen to consign themselves to the pit rather than die of thirst and hunger? And, quite apart from all that, how had the pit come into existence in the first place?
Looking down into the pit with a cold, clinical eye, Togura decided it must be an ancient device for torture and punishment dating back to the ages before the Days of Wrath. As he studied it, one steel tentacle slowly reared upward and started questing in his direction. It searched toward him, slowly but surely. It knew he was here! And it wanted him!
He could not break the door down. The walls were solid, as far as he knew. There was only one way out: straight up to the open sky. But that was too easy. Too obvious. Peering upward, he caught a glimpse of something sharp. There were blades or knives embedded in the walls. That, then, was part of the torment: to see a way of escape, to climb with a growing sense of triumph, and then to be slashed, gouged and mutilated by the waiting blades, and finally to fall screaming to the waiting pit.
The metal tentacles drew nearer. He edged away. It tasted the blood which had spilt to the stone, then, with a corrosive thrust, it skewered its way into the rock, seeking the source of the blood. Finding nothing, it withdrew, leaving a fresh scar in the stone. It started hunting again. Out of the corner of his eye, Togura saw another tentacle rising from the pit.
They were hunting him, and him alone. If only there had been someone else! Some other source of hot blood! If the tentacles had been forced to hunt two people simultaneously, he might have had at least the shadow of a chance. But there was nobody else. No other source of blood. Just him.
Blood!that was it! The answer! As the tentacle swerved toward him, Togura skipped sideways and tore away the knife which was knotted in his hair. It came free, together with a hunk of hair. He slashed his arm.
A bright pulse of arterial blood pumped from Togura's wound. He let it splatter across the wall, directing it deep into the cracks between the mortar-free blocks of stone. Slowly, he walked along the wall, wounding the architecture with his blood. Then, feeling light-headed, he crushed the bleeding down to nothing with the heel of his hand.
By now, a dozen tentacles were in pursuit of him. They savaged their way into the cracks between the masonry, striving for the source of the blood. Huge blocks of stone shifted, grated and cracked. A trickle of rubble went clobber-sklabber-klop as it rattled down into the pit.
Then one massive block of solid rock, attacked by half a dozen tentacles at once, splintered, burst and collapsed. The whole wall shifted. It began to fall. With a roar, an avalanche of stone pounded down into the pit. Steel screamed in agony. A fine yellow spray hissed from ruptured tubing. The light from the pit blinked, wavered, then abruptly died.
Togura, trembling, realised he was still alive. A block of stone nudged him, hinting. He scampered away, gaining a position on the rubble-slide. The bit of wall he had been crouching by promptly collapsed; if he had stayed where he was, he would have been killed.
The air was heavy with rock dust. Togura coughed, then coughed again, then spat. He could hear confused shouting. High, over-excited voices squalled in fear and panic.
Something came questing up out of the rubble.
A metal tentacle!
Togura went scampering up the new-born scree slope, and found himself in the room with the fire burning in the center. A lot of rock had spilt into the room, crushing some of the old men; he could hear someone moaning under the rubble. All the survivors had fled, but for one – the speechmaking dwarf, who, incoherent with rage, grappled with him.
Togura smashed him.
Then picked him up and threw him in the fire.
The dwarf writhed and screamed, his agony rising to a frenzy as the brisk flames licked away his skin. Togura picked up chunks of rock and hurled them at his victim, shouting with unholy joy. Then, as the dwarf subsided, unconscious or dead, Togura snatched up a burning brand and strode down the corridor to the outer world.
Outside, to his astonishment, he found a revolution in progress. The sight of the old men panicking out of the wrecked beehive, many of them cut, bruised and bleeding, had been enough to trigger off an uprising. The balance of power had changed more swiftly than the weather.
Togura, who had no experience of revolutionary politics, was amazed at the transformation of the people. He knew them only as sullen but reliable servants of the ruling regime. Now they had gone beserk. Before his very eyes, the young women who had so diligently hunted him down in the swamps were mobbing the old men to death. Children of both sexes, giving vent to high, hysterical, manic laughter, were helping with the slaughter. The community's handful of young men, no longer sleep walking, had crippled one greybeard and were now kicking him to pulp.
'This is excessive,' said Togura. 'This is insane.'
He was rapidly becoming experienced in the more bloodthirsty aspects of revolution. Despite hunger, fatigue, shock and terror, his mind was still acute enough the realise that there might be a lot to said for the idea of getting out of town – and fast. The crowd would soon run out of old men to murder, but their bloodlust would still be running high and hot, and there was no telling what they might do then.
Togura padded through a mixture of blood and brains to the nearest doorway, which led to female quarters he had never entered. They were empty, as everyone had joined the slaughter. He bound up his self-inflicted wounds with a bit of bark and some cordage, found a set of clothes and clogs and dressed himself, then exited the building through a door on the far side, well away from the administration of revolutionary justice.
As the screams of hate and agony faded away behind him, he walked click-clock through deserted streets to the swamp. There he stole a punt and poled away.
As Togura poled through the swamp, his wound started bleeding again, despite his attempt to bandage it. He tore away his makeshift dressing, salvaged some spiderweb from some swamp vegetation, and used that on the wound. It stopped the bleeding. When he halted toward evening, he felt very weak, perhaps as a consequence of losing so much blood. But he knew he would live.
Chapter 14
It took Togura three days to get out of the swamp. He never once relaxed during those whole three days. He would sleep, but only lightly, waking for any unusual sound. Finally, he found himself on a stream, which became a creek, which he followed down to the sea.
By the sea was a tiny hamlet housing thirty-two fisherfolk. When they saw him approaching in his clothes of moss and bark and lichen, wearing his birds' nest headgear, they fled screaming; perhaps they were not entirely unaware of the abominations practised until so recently in the swamps of the hinterland.
Togura looted their houses shamelessly, dressing himself in sealskin clothes, and loading what food he could carry into baskets of woven flax. Then he left, hurrying off before they could gather their courage and come back to kill him.
He had not been able to steal any proper shoes, but the clogs he wore were hateful to him, contaminated as they were with bad dreams and claustrophobic memories. Two days along the coast, he tossed them into the sea. They bobbed up and down in the waves; he imagined he heard them over the thunder of the surf, walking the waters with a steady tromp-cho-tromp; he watched until they were out of sight, floating away, perhaps, to the smudged, hazy distances where the horizon was burdened with cloud, or by an island, or by, perhaps,the coast of the continent of Argan.
Then he marched on, barefoot.
Chapter 15
