‘Renar,’ I said. The numbness started to fade from my limbs, my strength making a slower return.
A woman came out of one of the shacks, a crone with sparse grey hair and a long nose. She unrolled a hide across the ground, displaying an assortment of knives, hooks, drills, and clamps. Sunny set to struggling. ‘You can’t do this, you bastards.’
Only they could.
I knew it wouldn’t be long before he was begging me to get him out of this, then cursing me for getting him into it. At least I didn’t have Lesha doing the same on the other side of me. I knew what would happen because I’d seen it before. I also knew that the quiet ones, the ones biding their time like me, would scream just as loud and beg just as uselessly in the end. I watched the men as they gathered, catching what names I could, Rael, tall and thin with a scar across his throat, Billan, pot-bellied, a salt-and-pepper beard, pig eyes. I muttered the names to myself. I would hunt them down in hell.
14
Five years earlier
While the old woman worked to expose Sunny’s ribs, the girl brought me her latest find. She held the scorpion’s claws together in one tight fist and kept the stinger stretched out with the other hand. Eight legs writhed in a fury of motion. The thing had to be a good twelve inches from claw tip to sting. I could see the strain of holding it in the small knots of muscle along her arm bones.
‘What?’
‘It’s not right!’ She had to shout to be heard amid Sunny’s screaming.
‘Mutant?’ It looked fine to me, just much bigger than I like my scorpions.
The old woman tossed down another strip of skin and two scrawny chickens chased after it. The men, crowded before the posts, cheered. Most of them sat cross-legged with some kind of liquor to hand in waxed leather tubes from which they sipped. All of them seemed content to let the crone ply her trade. Some chatted between themselves, but most showed an interest and would applaud the deft knife-work at the completion of each stage. I noted that one man had found Lesha’s head and held it in his lap, angled toward the posts. There were few among the Bad Dogs who matched the intensity with which she watched us.
‘Not mutant. Wrong.’ She strained to crack the creature’s back but couldn’t. The legs kept up the frenzy of writhing. ‘Can’t you hear it?’
I could barely hear her over Sunny’s screaming, let alone her new pet. In truth I think he screamed to take his mind off what was being done, the real hurting had yet to start. Torture is more than pain and the Perros Viciosos knew it. Certainly the old woman knew it. She hadn’t really begun on him yet, but the mutilation hurt worse than agony that leaves no mark. When the torturer does damage that obviously won’t heal they underscore the irreversibility of it all. This won’t get better. This won’t go away. It lets the man know he is just meat and veins and sinew. Flesh for the butcher.
The girl, Gretcha, held the scorpion to my face. I craned away, rewarded by a full view of Sunny’s chest, the white of rib bones showing through the narrow slots cut to reveal them. Veins stood out in sharp relief across his neck, eyes screwed shut.
I heard it then, the strange whir, click, and tick behind the dry thrashing of legs. It set me in mind of the noise when I put the Builders’ watch to my ear, the sound of cogs, of metal teeth meshing with impossible precision. I turned and stared at the thing and for one fragment of a second its black eyes blinked crimson.
Gretcha threw the scorpion down and started to chase it, beating at it with a heavy stick. One blow broke most of the legs along the left side. She vanished from the corner of my eye still chasing the crippled arachnid. I could turn my head no further. The red flash echoed behind my eyelids and for some reason I saw Fexler’s red star once more, blinking over the Iberico.
It took the better part of an hour for the old woman to finish her work and in that time she used most of the tools from the wrap she had rolled out at the start. She made an artwork of Sunny’s chest and arms, cutting, searing, tearing pieces away, unpeeling layers, pinning them back. He howled at her of course, and at me, demanding release, that I do something, begging me, and before long he swore terrible revenge, not on his tormentors but on Jorg Ancrath who had brought him to this fate.
Fear ran in me – how would it not? Terror ran through me in a hot rush, then as ice along veins, making my fingers and face prickle with pins and needles. But I tried to fool myself that I sat in the audience, watching with the casual cruelty of road-brothers at rest. And to some degree I succeeded for I have sat and watched, on too many occasions, from the times before I really understood such suffering to the times where I understood it and didn’t care. The strong will hurt the weak, it’s the natural order. But strapped there in the hot sun, waiting my turn to scream and break, I knew the horror of it and despaired.
At last the crone stepped back, red to the elbows, but with scarcely a drop on her clothes or face. She turned to her audience, mocked a curtsey, and went back to her shack with her tools in their roll beneath one arm.
Cheers from the crowd, some quite drunk now. Harsh rasping breaths from Sunny, his head hanging low, one eye wide and staring, the other tight shut. The tall man, Rael, stood and advanced to secure Sunny’s head
