If he wasn't kept warm then he'd die. Shall we look at him?'

'By all means,' said Guest.

The Mutilator took Guest Gulkan by the elbow in a companionable manner and guided him forward till they both stood on the edge of the well, where they were able to look down upon the coffin and observe its contents.

Might there perhaps be snakes in the coffin?

No, there were no snakes.

Instead, there was a man.

A modest opening in the coffin allowed for an inspection of the man's face. The man's nose stuck through the gridwork bars, and the bridge of that nose had gone septic where the skin had been chafed away by the unprotected iron. The man's complexion was olive; his pores big; his eyebrows black; his lips full and sensual. Guest absorbed all these details as he looked down on the man. There seemed to be no hurry. Aldarch the Third seemed prepared to stand here all day. The more Guest stood there, the more… the more he was disturbed. Something… something was not quite right.

A fluid of dire darkness, a fluid filthy with bodyscum, a fluid hinting of oil and eels, bathed the man with the quiescent menace of a quicksand swamp, and bathed him so generously that it almost swallowed his face.

With a little more fluid…

If a little more fluid were to be poured into the coffin then the man would surely drown. Now Guest saw the nature of the torture. The man was kept here for many days, and each day a little more fluid was added. In the end, someone would pour in one last jar, and the victim would be helplessly choked. The horror would be to wait for day after day, trapped, helpless and immobile, knowing the nature of the death that was to come.

'How long has he been here?' said Guest.

The moment he asked, he knew the question was a mistake.

Because Aldarch smiled. The smile was thin but satisfied. Aldarch knew that Guest had begun to appreciate the horror of the victim's situation.

'He has been here for forty days,' said Aldarch. 'He has fed well. We have fed him upon figs and we have fed him upon almonds.

That is sufficient.'

'Figs, nuts… and… and water? Do you feed him water? Is he lying in his urine?'

'What makes you think that?'

'It would be a way to drown a man,' said Guest, making an incontinent confession of the workings of his mind. 'Trap him in a coffin like this, then… he has to piss, and in the end he drowns of it.'

Aldarch snorted with laughter.

'What a mind!' said the Mutilator. 'But, no. We do nothing so crude. From the first day, the coffin is filled to the level you see now. The bathroom attendants adjust the level as necessary.

The fluid, of course, is sesame oil.' As this was translated, the Mutilator watched his prisoner's face. When Guest did not react, the Mutilator said, softly: 'So. So you really don't know. You really don't understand. Very well.'

The Mutilator raised his hand and gave an order – an order which was not translated. Guest Gulkan listened in confusion to the slick-sliding vocables of Aldarch the Third's Janjuladoola. He could not even guess what was going to happen next. But obviously something was going to happen, and Guest feared that -Guest wished he was elsewhere.

While Guest was still wishing, a girl-slave with symbolic chains dangling from her wrists stepped forward to remove the brazier. Once she had exited with her burden, an executioner approached, bearing a sledgehammer. He looked at the Mutilator.

'Proceed,' said Aldarch Three.

The executioner tapped the coffin with his sledgehammer. The ceramic coffin cracked. The executioner hit it again. The coffin shattered. Down came the coffin in a bursting of fragments, a leapage of filth. In the middle of this downburst flopped the prisoner, who hit the marble, clawed at it spasmodically, then lay still in the accumulated slime of forty days of his own filth. Guest flinched, and slashed at his own face with the flat of his hand, abolishing a splash of filth which had landed there.

'Watch,' said the Mutilator. 'You will find this very interesting.'

At first it seemed that nothing was happening. Guest raised his eyes to the blue sky and the high mountains, to the impeccable white of the distant snow. He had a great yearning to be free from this place of self-important steel and degrading spectacle, to be free to walk in those mountains and to leave his footprints in those snows. He remembered the far-distant mountains of Ibsen-Iktus, remembered the blackrock razorblade of those uppermost heights, remembered the high-altitude winds which had stripped away the snows in pluming streams which -

'Watch,' said the Mutilator, with something of the corkscrew in his voice. Guest, called back to the filthy spectacle before him, forced himself to study the wretched thing which lay before him in the crippled eloquence of its squalor. It lay on its belly. He could see its ribs moving with the lizard-quick panting of its breathing. It was going nowhere, yet it was exhausted by the rigors of the journey. Guest caught a whiff of the stench from the slime-coated body, and he almost gagged.

He controlled himself.

He struggled to understand.

What was the true import of this spectacle? What was the significance of bathing a man in his own filth? Was this some insult to the pride of the Janjuladoola? Some insult based on the transgression of protocols and the breach of taboos? Was this the ultimate punishment of the Izdimir Empire? To be made to lie helplessly for day after day in the putrid stench of one's own dung and urine?

Aldarch the Third, who had been covertly watching the Weaponmaster, grunted with satisfaction. He gave an order. This time the translator rendered it into Toxteth for Guest's benefit:

'Wash the man.'

A bevy of slave girls approached, each bearing a wooden bucket brimming with water. Aldarch dipped his fingers into each bucket in turn, then signified his approval. The buckets were emptied over the man, were emptied one by one, and as the downpour washed away the slime it became possible to see, and as it became possible to see -

'Watch,' said Aldarch softly, as Guest Gulkan looked away.

'Watch. Look closely. Watch and learn.'

By an effort of great self-control, Guest forced himself to watch, forced himself to look closely, and forced himself to see, to learn, and to understand.

The forty days of immersion in sesame oil had caused the skin to be eaten away from the body, exposing the bare flesh and the blood vessels. Little remained of the face except those parts which had been free from the fluid. The rest was gone. As for the head, why, the sesame oil had eaten away the skin of the scalp. The bald bones of the skull were bare, their sutures clearly visible.

Across the bare bone there laced a webwork of arteries.

'Soon,' said the Mutilator. 'Soon it will begin. As the water dries, so it will begin. He is tender after his long confinement, and the air is painful.'

'The air?' said Guest, not quite understanding.

'As you see,' said Aldarch, indicating the specimen on the floor in front of them.

Even as Guest watched, the anatomical specimen before him began to tremble as if shivering. Then it began to move, warping in slow-motion agony. Guest was reminded of a spider crumpling in a flame. But this was a slow, slow fire. This fire did not quickly consume the flesh.

The man on the floor jerked in spasms. His wet slithering spasms reminded Guest obscenely of orgasms. Aldarch the Third watched with intense interest. Even for him, this was a special thing. He did not see this every day. The Mutilator's attendants were, one and all, frozen into a hieratic stillness.

'It hurts him,' said Aldarch, speaking with a softness which the interpreter translated in a bare whisper. 'He is burning. It hurts him to breathe. It hurts him to be.'

As if in response, the writhing man began to mutter, speaking in choked intakes, speaking in the language of drowning, speaking of pain, of strangulation, of the unutterable.

'Always,' said Aldarch, intently. 'Always. It always happens this way. He is speaking.'

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