Authors: Cat Rambo
Chapter Thirty
Bella in Jail
After several hours—I do not know how many—two guards came and hauled me along to a hearing chamber. The magister sits on the other side of a desk, dressed in buff and blue. I recognize him as Grey Rosen, a veteran of the Piskie Wars who frequently comes to arena matches. The satchel sits on the desk in front of him, its catches undone.
Rosen glares at me, white hair a frizzy corona around his balding head. He wears a simple, undyed tunic and trousers, a linen cloak over them. It occurs to me that these are his nightclothes, and I smile.
“What are you smirking at?” he shouts. The question goes off in the chamber, too loud and sudden, like a firecracker that he has lit moments ago and has been waiting to throw.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “to have you brought out for this misunderstanding.”
“Where did you obtain this package?”
“From the Captain of the ship I had just come from. I don’t know his name.”
“Captain and crew are all vanished,” he says. “The ship’s cargo had been off-loaded as well, aside from a few left-overs of cloth and rum. No one is anywhere to be found. Except you.”
He points at the satchel. “Do you know what lies inside there?”
“No.”
“You claim you don’t know what you were carrying?”
I gape, speechless as a fish taken from water. How can he think me complicit in something like this? I am the Champion of Tabat.
He stares at me and then speaks, slowly and clearly as though to a child. His tone is not unkindly. “You claim you don’t know what you carried?”
My mind seizes on the question, and I realize how ridiculous this all is, that I’ve been caught somehow through circumstance and cantrip. “I know it sounds absurd,” I stammer. “But you know how these things happen in a disturbance. Someone shoves a package at you and you hold onto it, not realizing what you are doing.”
“I find it hard to believe,” he says. “That anyone could carry … something like that and not sense its malignant nature.”
“I had held it for but a handful of minutes, Magister.”
“Do not presume on earlier acquaintance, Kanto!” he snarls. I fall back in the face of that nigh-lethal hostility.
The magistrate fumbles with the satchel. “You’ll want to look away,” he says to the guards.
They do, but I cannot. My stomach cramps with horror. Half a dozen baby heads, each preserved in a pint sized glass jar. They are still alive—their eyes move, their mouths work. Darkest sorcery, to be used in even darker spells. It’s a wonder my soul hasn’t been blighted in the exchange. The closest one catches my gaze, its mouth working. What is it trying to say? I can’t begin to imagine. Dread encases my body like a cocoon.
“A character witness has come forth, but not one that will help you,” the magistrate says. “She tells us you have hidden away a boy that belongs to the Moon Temples.”
Marta stands there. She looks at me with a smile, a cruel, happy smile.
“Your title and all your holdings are forfeit to the Crown,” the magister says with relish. “What you have on your back, you may keep. And you will wait for the Duke’s pleasure in your cell. He is usually busy in the mornings, but perhaps he will have time for you in a day or two.”
He shouts and waves despite my questions. They drag me out and put me back in the holding cell. They give me neither food nor water, and my spine is swiftly ablaze again, an odd multi-starred pain spreading out from the small of my back.
I think about the heads. I think about dead Skye. The heads and the girl become mixed in my mind, as though the heads had caused the murder. I imagine the heads committing the murder, somewhere creeping bodiless towards the oblivious girl. I think of the smell of Skye’s flesh burning. I beat my forearms against the wall.
I sit there for hours, stretching when I remember, or when the pain grows too much. Arena pain is worse, but it is swift and masked at first by shock and adrenaline, then by the physician’s medicines. This is as though I have been transported back to my days with Jolietta, icy hours of ache and desperation and unhappiness.
I hold myself until I can bear it no longer, then give in to tears of despair.
* * *
Everything hurts. Not a minor hurt or the hurt of overworked muscles, I’m used to the latter. When you’re the foremost Gladiator in Tabat, when you spend your days laboring on the instrument of your profession, your body, you know it well.
Not even the heat of arena injuries, the set of bruises laddered down a leg or a swollen wrist or even the saw grate of a broken rib matched this.
No. Worse than that: pain inflicted after pain, hot layers of it till even the breeze on my cheek is painful. Pieces that have never hurt in all my years of life were now outraged and burning. I think the fingers of my left hand might not recover; the two smallest stick out at awkward, quarreling angles, and the nails are all gone, candle flames of agony, a stiff hand of glory, no matter where they rest.
One ear gone, too. The skin of a forearm. I won’t think about her feet, or hair, or other places.
They’d wanted names—real names—names of people who would be dragged in for their own sessions with Pain. Pain, like an evil sister, beside me to wipe sweat from my shorn head with fingers that tug at me, won’t let her sleep, won’t let me escape. Pain with eyes like knife-glitter that precedes blazing white torment, or subtle graduations of existing hurt, amplification and elaborations building on themselves, until I was housed in an engine of agony, heavy armor plate spike-lined with radiant heat.
Across my forehead a band of agony still gathers, as palpable as a band of iron. I’d thought my skull would break; I’d heard the internal creak that presaged it.
My blood throbs against tender skin from the inside, filling my ears with its pulse.
I’m not Bella anymore.
Nothing like this would happen to Bella Kanto.
I’m a cardboard shape, Bella Kanto for some stage play, a prop. A thing made of meat, to be dragged here and there, from machine to machine, for amusement.
Blood and urine sting my inner thighs. Tabat’s Torturers have the latest equipment, techniques, ichors and ingredients they are eager to test out on something other than animals and Beasts.
The last thing they tried, the main Torturer (surely Pain’s younger brother) whispered in my ear, was a substance that came from the Southern Isles’ shallowest waters, spiny fish found only in the warm, warm waters there. Long spines, each coated with something that consumed, ate away at me from the inside wherever the tip was inserted, creating hollow pockets inflated to the bursting point with fire.
Two of Pain’s siblings stood taking notes. One recorded the endless murmur of the voice that directed them to note the reddening of skin, the twitch of particular muscles, the acceleration of the heartbeat.
The other wrote down my answers to the questions asked over and over by the second voice. Who told me to go to the ship? Who was to pick up the package? Who had been aboard the ship, and what did they look like? What had been the coloring of the Water Human? What had I been paid to betray the city? How many sorcerers were plotting to destroy it?
The story as I told it did not satisfy them. They went through it again and again. I gave them every detail I could scrape from the aching, cracked bowl of my skull, and it was not enough.
Names. Real names. I could have pulled them from her memory at random, but how could I bring someone else here? Betrayer Miche, to be certain, and the Captain and crew that had carried such cargo. But surely Abernia was no part of this treachery. I will implicate no innocents and especially not Leonoa, who the second voice returned to again and again. Was she not an Abolitionist, willing to treat with Sorcerers to raise Beasts to unnatural power over Humans? Perhaps she was a Sorceress herself and her body manifested the rigors of her magic?
My throat is a raw tube from screaming.
The door swings open with a crash that I am too weary to flinch from.
Alberic, smiling.
I cannot read what lies behind that smile.
***
Chapter Thirty-One
Coda
In the little nest, which is all that Berto managed to salvage from the remnants of his shop, the eggs begin to hatch.
Bella Kanto is defeated. Spring has come early to Tabat.
To be continued in HEARTS OF TABAT
***
About the Author
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction publications include stories in
Asimov’s
,
Clarkesworld Magazine
, and Tor.com. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her story collection
Near + Far
(Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of
Fantasy Magazine
earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. For more about her, as well as links to other stories set in the world of Tabat, see
http://www.kittywumpus.net
***