Carnifex

pain.

'You intended to give the Salafis nuclear weapons.' It was not a question. Besides the eleven captured at 'the Base,' a Scout ambush had taken the last nuke not far from this spot as it was being moved to Camp San Lorenzo by camel.

'No, no,' Robinson began. 'I was only . . . '

Masood kicked him, hard, in the kidney.

'We've captured enough evidence and documents in the cave complex to know better,' Carrera said. 'You were coming to use a nuke on my people at our camp.' This, too, was not a question.

'They made me,' Robinson tried to explain, with a begging, pleading quality to his voice.

'What did they threaten? Torture? You'll soon learn a lot about torture.'

Carrera looked at the cell phone-like device. It had a button on it that said, in tiny letters, 'Call.' He pushed it and was immediately rewarded with, 'UEPF Spirit of Peace. How can we help you, High Admiral?'

'Give me Marguerite,' Carrera said.

Carrera waited only moments before a familiar voice came back, 'Captain Wallenstein, High Admiral.' The voice sounded terribly fearful.

'It's not your High Admiral, Captain; it's me.'

'Duque Carrera!' One could hear the fear washing away. 'How grand to hear from you. May I infer you have been successful?'

'You may. I wondered if you might like to speak to your High Admiral.'

'Why that would be a great pleasure, Duque. Thank you.'

Carrera bent at the waist and held the communication device down to Robinson's ear.

'Marguerite, get us out of here,' Robinson ordered, though the panic, even terror, in his voice robbed the order of all authority. 'Offer them anything, give them anything, but don't leave us to die like this.'

Wallenstein laughed. 'Why would I do that, Admiral? After all, you're just an 'adequate officer, but no more than that.' You weren't much of a lay, either. And as for the marchioness . . . ' She let the words hang.

Carrera took the communicator back and held it to the side of his face. 'Nice chatting with you, Captain. Don't worry about your High Admiral. He'll be well taken care of. Perhaps we can do business again, sometime.'

'My pleasure, Duque.'

19/8/469 AC

His troops had built a series of great bonfires around the scene of execution. More wood stood by each to light this night and the next. Two of the great, roaring fires flanked Carrera closely, their radiance keeping away the chill of the evening and early morning. The fires lit well a scene from Hell, yet were far enough away that they lent none of their warmth to the denizens of that Hell.

A bottle of scotch sat on one arm of the thronelike chair his troops had also constructed for him. On the other was a glass, frequently consulted and frequently refilled. Despite the fatigue, such a tiredness as ordinary rest could never touch, Carrera refused to sleep.

Is this justice? he asked himself. Is it justice for my family, for my men? Left to me, I'd leave them alive to suffer for much longer. But my crucified men deserve justice no less than I do. This, one hundred for one, is justice to them. My justice will have to wait.

He glared out at the suffering men and thought, This is what you would inflict on the world. This is the law you claimed to want. Does it please you so much now, I wonder, now when you are its victims?

Was it justice to turn your women and girls over to my Pashtun as slaves? No matter, it was your law. 'Slavery is a part of jihad and jihad is a part of Islam; thus, slavery is a part of Islam.' Isn't that what one of your high clerics said? Well, we have both been in a jihad and you have lost. Thus, by your law, are your women and girls enslaved.

Of course, my Pashtun are good Moslems, most of them. They know it would have been adultery—expressly forbidden—to have screwed your wives while you yet lived. Except that those wives became slaves and a master has a right to his slaves even if they are married. More justice, I think.

For myself, I think those most deserving of slavery are those who want it for others.

Have I even paid you back? I have been suffering for four thousand days. You will all, collectively, suffer for about twelve hundred. It hardly seems fair. It hardly seems enough. Yet it is the best I can do. On the other hand, perhaps if I incinerate your holy city, Makkah al Jedidah, perhaps then we will be even.

And I can incinerate it, with as little warning as my dead wife and children had. If I kill a million for one, then, maybe then, we'll be even.

Carrera leaned forward on his rude wooden chair. He lifted his glass and sipped at it, then sipped again. He put it down to refill it from the amber bottle. The light of the bonfires reflected on the glass. Refilled glass in hand he sat back and simply watched the life leak away from his enemies like the runny shit that drained down their legs.

20/8/469 AC

The wind blew sere down the high mountain pass. It carried on it the sound and stench of four hundred men, each slowly dying in excruciating agony. That was, after all, the source of the word 'excruciating;' to suffer death on the cross.

This was only the second day after the crucifixions. For a few, it would be the last. Still others would last a day or two more. If they didn't already, the living would soon envy the dead.

To the low hill from which Carrera watched came a continuous sea of moans, cresting like waves and subsiding like the tides. One man in a corner would begin moaning, then three more wretches half out of their minds with pain would pick it up. The moans would then travel from one side of the cross-studded field, reach the other and begin to bounce back. Alternatively, a shriek might begin somewhere in the middle and be picked up and transmitted to the edges before coming back to center, not unlike the rippling of a pond when a stone is tossed to its center.

* * *

Abdul Aziz felt agony in the center of his chest. He felt it, too, in the wrists and hands and feet he knew were dead and blackening from lack of blood flow.

He was also tired beyond tired. Never in his life had he gone so long without sleep. Yet the art of the cross, a part of it, was that it permitted no sleep, no rest. He had tried to sleep, oh, many times. But each time he nodded off the inability to exhale sent him gasping for air, wide awake and pushing upward with his legs, in minutes. He was hungry, too, and thirsty. He'd begged a passing Pashtun Scout for water and been rewarded with spit on his face.

That was the key to crucifixion, the thing that made it the most horrible of deaths. Even a slow hanging choked off the windpipe so that, while the dying might dance a hornpipe beneath the gallows, trying desperately to find purchase for his feet and live, at least he was not able to beg. Crucifixion allowed begging, and pleading, and all manner of personal disgraces. Indeed, it required them. Worse than being slowly killed, for Abdul Aziz, was being quickly ashamed . . . and by his own words and deeds.

He tried to let his legs go, to make himself suffocate quickly. He could not. When the air in his lungs went foul he always pushed up to breathe, to live, if only to live in order to suffer. Others, he saw, also tried and also failed. They, like he, wept bitterly, their manhood stolen. Worse, in some ways, was that their illusions about being willing martyrs to the cause were stolen from them, as well. Believe as they might that a glorious future at the hand of God awaited them, still, in their weakness, they struggled to live. That theft of faith made them weep all the more.

* * *

Mustafa, of course, was not on a cross. Instead, he was 'privileged,' so some might say, to watch and listen as his followers died, to hear the cries coming from the Pashtun camp as his wives and daughters, and those of his followers, were forced to perform for their captors.

Shame, shame, all is shame, he mourned. All my honor is lost with my women turned to slaves and whores.

For Carrera had been cruel to Mustafa. He had had him brought and forced to watch the bidding as the Pashtun Scouts sold off the women and girls excess to their immediate needs to the whoremasters of Yamato and Doha. The bidding had been fierce at times as they were stripped and shown off on the rude auction block set up to one side of the mass of crosses.

Even the souls of my youngest children are forfeit as they will be converted into Nazrani. I've lost everything.

Mustafa glared his hate at Carrera,