The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (18 page)

       
He barely had time to
finish the job before his handlers were upon him. They took him from the cage
and soon brought him before the stone beehive. Out in the open air, the old men
of the community were sitting in state on ornately carved benches which must
have been brought out especially for the occasion.

       
Togura, naked, stood
facing the old men. He was aware that the rest of the community, perhaps three
hundred people in all, was gathered behind him, keeping at a cautious distance.
He was cold. The sun, withdrawing from the scene, consoled itself with its
celsitude. Togura coughed. He wondered if he was coming down with a chill. He
coughed again. The old men glared at him.

       
"I can't help
coughing," he mumbled.

       
Someone screamed at him.

       
He tried to hold himself
rigid, as if that would suppress his coughing. His fingers made small,
meaningless, involuntary movements. The old men sat like statues, saying nothing.
There was not a sound from the crowd gathered behind him. He felt unearthly,
unreal. Dizzy. The light staggered. He swayed. Then the light ebbed away
entirely, and he fainted.

       
When Togura came to, he
found himself lying in a crumpled heap on the ground. One of his elbows was
hurting badly, but, rising to a half-sitting position, he found the joint was
still functional. A long and entirely unintelligible speech was in progress. It
was being given by a wart-faced little man, an undershapen gnomish figure who
clapped his hands repeatedly to emphasise the points he was making. Somewhere,
a drum was beating.

       
Togura, sitting up
properly, tried to work out what was going on. He nursed his elbow, which made
it a little more comfortable, which in turn made him realise just how much of
the rest of his body was sore and aching. He felt a little bit feverish. The
dwarf, an old, old man whom Togura had never seen before, continued his speech,
assaulting the air with his high, harsh, glittering voice. On and one he went,
evidently tireless, incapable of being bored by his own words. In the
background, the monotonous thung-thung-thung of the drum continued
relentlessly.

       
"Shabana loy,
zerd-nek," muttered Togura, thus giving voice to the worst obscenities
available to him in his native patois.

       
A scream menaced him. He
doubted that anyone understood what he had just said - if they had, they would
have torn him to pieces - but they were giving clear warning that they were not
prepared to tolerate any noise from him at all.

       
"Well up
yours," said Togura, hauling himself to his feet. "You can't push me
about forever," he said. His voice, half anger, half anguish, rose to a shout.
"I am Togura Poulaan!" His voice hurt his throat. The rusty sound it
made was so strange that it almost frightened him to silence. But he kept
going. "You hear me? I! I am Togura Poulaan. I! I am the son of Baron Chan
Pouaan! I! I! I!"

       
The dwarf, enraged,
screamed at him. Togura continued regardless.

   
    
"You have brought
me here without my consent. You hold me here now against my will. I demand - I
demand! - to be returned to my own home immediately. Failing that - "

       
He was taken from behind
by two strong women. As the dwarf capered, dancing out his anger, gesticulating
wildly as he shrieked and shrilled in his high-pitched voice, Togura was
marched toward the beehive. He struggled all the way.

       
When they reached the
doorway, Togura's resistance intensified. The two women responded by lifting
him off the ground and ramming his head into the stone roof. Stunned, with
thick blood trickling down from a cut on his scalp, he stopped fighting. He
made himself a limp deadweight, pinning his hopes on passive resistance. It was
useless. They womanhandled him down the hallway without any trouble at all. His
feet, bumping him over the stone floor, were getting hurt. He had just decided
it would be better to cooperate when, without any warning, they let him go. He
fell face first to the stone floor.

       
He was in a hot, close
room which stank of rot, filth, slime and decay. A roaring fire was
cackling-clakling in the centre of the room. The old men came crowding into the
room; the women, as if dismissed, departed. A door was thrown open on the far
side of the room. A strange door, for it was small and circular. Half a dozen
of the old men grabbed burning brands from the fire and menaced Togura. Warily,
he eased himself round the room, forced toward the circular door by the
threatening flames. The old men shouted to each other in high, excited voices.
Their eyes gleamed with unhallowed joy.

       
Togura knew there was
something terrible beyond the circular door. It was the source of the stench
which filled the room. Reaching the door, he glanced inside. He saw a circular
room with a stone ledge running round the wall and -

       
With a shout, the old
men came hustling forward, jabbing at him with their burning brands. Togura
leapt through the door and almost went hurtling into the pit which lay beyond.
He scrabbled for balance on the narrow stone ledge, slipped, saved himself, was
jabbed by a burning brand, crawled along the stone ledge circling the room,
then, when out of reach of the old men, stopped to take stock of his situation.

       
Some of the old men came
crowding in through the circular door to watch. One or two of them threw their
burning brands into the pit; something in the pit creaked or groaned with a
noise half owl, half pig. Togura looked down.

       
On looking down, Togura
saw a stinking confusion of rubbish crowding the pit below. The reek was
appalling; it stormed his senses and laid siege to his sanity, slapping his
naked body in hot, putrid waves, cramming his nostrils with its intolerable
unclean insinuations, clambering into his lungs and making him want to vomit.
He screamed at the smell, but it it not go away.

       
The old men bellowed and
cheered. Another threw his burning brand into the pit, stirring up more noise
down there. Quite apart from the burning brands, the pit was lit, toward the
bottom, by its own clear, harsh, unwavering light; despite the illumination,
Togura could not make much sense of its jumbled contents.

       
Togura looked around,
examining the massive stone-block walls, which had been built without mortar.
The circular walls rose sheer toward the sky. Peering upwards, he saw that the
room was open to the sky. If he had to, he should be able to climb the wall, if
these old men would go away and leave him in peace.

       
As Togura was so thinking,
he looked down again, and saw what seemed to be a snake. It was in amongst the
rubbish. It was weaving slowly. But it was too hard and bright to be a snake.
And too long. It seemed to be some kind of tentacle. And it seemed to be made
of metal. A metal tentacle?

       
Yes.

       
Having made sense of
that detail, he slowly began to make sense of the others. And began to realise
what he was looking at.

       
Down in the pit, those
dark-stained filthy bubbling things, crusted with scabs and writhing with
degenerating fluids ... they were not random assemblages of rubbish. They were
bodies. Human bodies. Gleaming, convoluted metal penetrated their flesh. The
metal hummed softly.

       
As Togura watched, one
of the slowly-weaving metal tentacles kissed a body and tasted it. The body
flinched. Somewhere in the degenerating mass, an eye closed. Then opened.

       
"They're still
alive!" screamed Togura.

       
Hearing his scream, the
old men began to laugh. They cackled with unconcealed glee, jeered at him and
at their victims, who endured a slow, agonised death of endless torment,
decaying while still alive.

       
Then they left,
scrambling out through the circular door. They closed it behind them. Togura
crept along the stone ledge, reached the door, and hammered against its
unyielding timbers, crying for mercy.

       
It did no good.

       
Nobody answered.

       
Nobody came.

       
He was on his own.

       
Shuddering, he yielded
to urgent necessity and voided his bowels, adding marginally to the stench
which pervaded the room. He moved to a cleaner spot and sat down to think. One
last drop of blood fell from his bleeding scalp to the stones, which were
scalloped and sculpted in a most peculiar way.

       
What now? He decided he
should think, and rest, then try to escape. Rest! It was easy to say, but
almost impossible to do. His body was trembling uncontrollably. He could not
keep himself from looking down into the pit. Remembering how he had almost
fallen into it on first entering the room, he could not keep himself from
imagining his own body already pierced to a scream and beyond by hard metal
shafting into his armpit, his omphalos, his ... his ...

       
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.