327 - The strongest enemy I would face

[AN: I don't usually do graphic warnings. I'm thinking maybe this time I should. Yes, on second reading; brace yourself.]

There is a sharp rap on my door, as if someone knocked with a stone. I would know it is a Mahid knuckle even if I did not weapon-sense four Mahid kits in a rock-still rectangle. The marble-like voice speaks. “Karas Raikas, you are required.”

“Don’t fight them,” Skorsas pleads in a whisper, from tight red-painted lips. “Please don’t fight them again, Jewel of the World, they’ll just dart you again, remember what they did to you last time…” I don’t know that I have fight in me, by what I feel. My legs and arms move like parts of a mechanism, as mindless and bereft of sensation as the parts of the Great Press, lifting me off the bed and opening the bolt and walking through the door.

Their grip hurting as usual, the Mahid cuff my wrists behind my back, and lead me out of the Fighter’s Quarters. The boys pretend not to see anything; even the other ringfighters’ eyes mostly slide away after a glance. The Mahid take me under the stands.

It is Second Amitzas Mahid commanding them. I hate how much I fear him; I hate my fear itself, weakening me as it does, letting them know as they are touching pulse-points and muscles that tremble that I am that weak; I hate myself for feeling fear at all, since it is so bitter a failing here. I tell myself that no one in my place, who has been through what I have been through, could help but feel it, but I cannot convince myself to forgive myself.

The faint sunlight from the cracks between the bleachers makes tiny slanting rays through the vast darkness. Same as before, the Mahid strip me by tearing off what I am wearing, then tell me I am going to throw up everything in me one way or another, easier if I don’t tighten up the muscles against their stomach-blows. Just knowing they are going to knife-gag me brings nausea, but they begin punching anyway, and keep going until I am making long dry heaves over the thick dust on the floor here, and my eyes are vomiting tears.

They take me a little further in. They put the rod in me hard and deep enough to hurt, then make me kneel and grab my hair to pull back my head. There is no point fighting it, I know, tears coming harder, so I open my mouth, and they put the blade into my mouth and fasten its strap around my head, and adjust it by its screws so that its tip rests on the back of my throat. I freeze where I am. I try swallowing, and find I can, barely, feeling the edges. It’s either that, or spittle trickles into your lungs, and a coughing-fit is death. I wonder if they know that the knife-gag is particularly horrific for someone with weapon-sense.

Amitzas, who is smiling as always, like anyone doing his work who loves it, flicks both my nipples with his fingers. I can’t help but twitch. He tenderly takes hold of my manhood, and anoints it lovingly all over with bed-oil. “You know you are going to feel the ecstasy, whatever your will,” he says, reading my mind. “You’ve learned it deeply, though not deeply enough, else you would not be here.” The other three Mahid laugh stiffly, as if he said something funny. Two of them take my shoulders, and the third grips my hair, unnecessarily; they just like to feel suffering.

“Set us free, will you, king of Yeola-e?” He begins stroking in earnest, making the streak of feeling in which ecstasy and agony are indistinguishable begin to kindle in me. They laugh their brittle marble laugh again. “Set us free from our Imperator, Whose Whim is The Will of the World? Set us free from His will, from all that is orderly, and right, and good, and divine?” He wraps his hand, trained to steely strength by years of practice squeezing balls of wax or dry clay, around my testicles, slowly tightening. I set myself not to cry out, easy after all the silence-in-excruciation training I have had, but he says, “No. It’s neither silence nor pain I want to hear out of you, Shefen-kas. It’s the moans of pleasure, else you will truly hurt. Feign it until it becomes real.”

I do. I am not being destroyed, I tell myself. If I will it hard enough, it will be true. I will save myself by sheer will. I am not being destroyed, he cannot destroy me unless I let him, I am not being destroyed, I intone within, as the destroying pleasure rises like a flame in me, and feigning becomes real. “Take it into your bones, king of Yeola-e,” he says, his lips brushing my ear. “Your only ecstasy is in submission to the will of the Imperator. Your only life is submission to the will of the Imperator. The feeling is etching it into your soul, however much you wish or imagine otherwise; you are learning it however much you inwardly try to resist. You will have no will but the will of the Imperator. You can set no one free, not even yourself. Feel, and learn, and accept.”

Inside, the option of total accedence, of catatonia, tempts easily, learned first from the drug, then from the oubliette. It winks at me like a whore, promises safety like a mother’s arms, whispers, “Fall away from the world and into me. Give up all will and all self, and all pain ceases; you always have that choice…”

Something hurts my ears, an unending scream like an unoiled cart-wheel, “Aaaaaaaah-baaaaaaaaahhhh! Aaaaaaaaaah-baaaaaaaahhhhh!” There are two layers of reality laid over each other like the pages of a book made of Arkan glass, Vriah is there All-Spirit, no! Keep her away from this! Her tiny hands grab my cheeks, bigger ones my shoulders, “Omores, omores, open your eyes, look at me!” Cold drops and the tang of calming essence in my mouth, the voice of Kaninjer, unearthly calm, “Chivinga. Tell me where you are.” I can’t speak, the knife-gag… Another herbally-sour drop of essence. “Chivinga, you are safe.” Niku’s hands wrench my wrists apart, then wrap around me. “He’s dreaming he’s being tortured. Vriah-riah, make the wall! Make the wall!” “No! NO! Aaaaaaaah-baaaaaahhhh!” I weapon-sense spears and drawn swords converging, hear Krero yell, “Cheng, Niku, what’s happening?” Still unearthly calm, Kan says, “He’s having a very bad dream. Chivinga, healer’s orders, open your eyes. You have to understand where you are. Get him up, get him on his feet.”

Krero and Niku hauled me up off the bed and walked me back and forth by the arms, speaking to me. “It’s verekina 1551, Cheng. The city we’re in isn’t Arko, it’s Thara-e. We’ve driven them out. Omores, you aren’t helpless, you are in power now, you aren’t alone, we are all with you, your army that calls you ‘Beloved’, remember your victories, Vae Arahi where you took Kallijas Itrean, Terera Lake, Asangal, Lisere, Tinga-e, Hirina, now here…” Whispered in my ear, “Remember learning to fly, pehali.” All-Spirit, what the Mahid are doing to me has thrown me into a dream, a delusion too good to be true… The cartwheel screeching eased; Vriah had made the wall, or else Ada had carried her elsewhere, I couldn’t tell. Sishana and Ilachesa were lighting more candles, on Kaninjer’s orders. This is too beautiful and good to be real.

“Chivinga, if you cannot speak, sign chalk or charcoal,” Kaninjer said. “Are you certain where you are?” I signed charcoal. “This is one of these delusional things, isn’t it?” said Krero. “On Haiu Menshir you kept thinking you were back in Arko, as if you belonged there, and Haiu Menshir was too good to be true. Haiu Menshir… we will conquer Arko and so set the Haians free, and you’ll be able to go back there and finish kyashin healing.”

They took Haiu Menshir. They killed Dinerer, and seized the seven main healers who healed me... as per Kurkas’s orders that I read after the battle of Haiu Menshir… Natural enough, that a real bitterness should bring me to reality. No fanciful escape-dream could have this in it. “You can set no one free, not even yourself…” Second Amitzas had said that because I had said in Assembly, “I would set them free.” It all fell together. I felt sick.

Kaninjer gave me more calming essence. “Chivinga, try to speak again,” he ordered. “Tell me where we are.”

“Th…thara-e… the city hall.” Just the calm of his voice and the gentle insistence on putting things into order helped.

“Good, what is the date?”

“Verekina 5, 1551.” These things were there, clear, when I thought about them.

“Good, tell me what the situation is now, with the war and so on.”

“We are waiting… for the people to vote… I’ve made alliance agreements… hypothetically… they made me tell them… whether I wanted…” I took a deep breath, hoping it would bring coherence. “All-Spirit… Saint Mother… I was in the Mezem, and the Mahid—” My tongue locked up before it would say more.

“For the love of All-Spirit, Cheng, you’ve got to keep it together,” Krero said. “Everything depends on you.”

I know! “That’s not what he needs to hear right now,” Kaninjer said with that half-human evenness, which in a Haian is better than insistence for commanding obedience.

“Tell me what he does need to hear then, healer, and I’ll say it a thousand times over.”

You are all with me. That’s what I need. To know you are all with me. I am not alone against this. “Krero…” I could not say more, so he must have seen it in my eyes. He still had his sword drawn; with his shield-arm he grabbed me so hard it hurt, the sword raised over my head, and then they all did, wrapping me in a nest of muscle, with steel above. “We are here… we have you… we’ll never let you go… if they want you again, they’ll have to get through me… through all of us, through your whole army!” I broke my silence with a gout of weeping. They clung tighter, stroking my cheeks and my hair, knowing the tears they were drawing from me would wash away the terror, like freeing the pus to run cleans away festering.

When I’d calmed enough that they let go, Kaninjer ordered, “Now, a bath.” Because the Arkans had built baths here, same as in Terera, it need not be poured so I could get in immediately. He was going to massage me again afterwards, but Niku said, “Leave him to me, Kaninjer.” For her there was no missing that my nightmare had been somehow sexual. Ecstasy given me in pure love would be healing, too.

But even after that, the dream still clung to my mind and body both, like the black vibration of a bell in Arkan Hayel. Even lax in every muscle from sex and with Niku snoring sweetly beside me, I did not sleep, too much of me unwilling to surrender myself to it. Krero had put his finger on it, however unwittingly: the strongest enemy I would face in the rest of the war might not be Kurkas’s rejins or assassins or Mahid. It might be what was within my own skin, and especially within my own skull. I had not planned for that, nor accounted for it in the calculation I’d made publicly in Assembly, on which all Yeola-e would shortly vote.

I cannot let it be a factor, I told myself. It is as simple as that.