Song of the Beast

Chapter 2

His name was Goryx. My jailer. The one sworn to bring me to heel. The only face I saw for seventeen years. He was a burly, round-faced fellow with iron biceps, a cheerful disposition, and shining little eyes that crinkled into slits when he was pleased. He lived outside my cell and brought me enough pasty gruel and stale water that I would not die. His own rations were little better, and his room, though larger than my fetid, airless hole, was windowless and dim. He was a prisoner as much as I in many ways, only he had nowhere else he would rather be.

When my god would call me, there in the darkness of Mazadine, Goryx would listen while I made my answer, and when I was done, the exaltation of the holy mystery still nourishing my soul, the iron grating of my cell would open, and his smiling face would appear. With a long-suffering sigh he would hook a chain to my neck collar and haul me out, then drop the black canvas bag over my head. Once I was secured to a chair, he would spread my hands on his worktable, clucking over them like a mother hen, stroking my fingers and commenting on the efficacy of his last work. If the bones had begun to knit back together, I would hear the rasp of the metal jaws as they were laid out on the table, and I would feel the cold steel clamped onto the finger he’d decided would be first; then one by one he would break them all again. Only when he’d poked and prodded me enough that I was awake would he chain me to the wall and begin with the lash. He was an artist who took great pride in his work, able to make it last all day, able to take me to the edge of death, yet not quite beyond. That was forbidden. I was not to die. I would not be on my cousin’s conscience as long as I lived. And when he was satisfied, Goryx would put me back in the tiny cell where I could not stand up or stretch out, and he would leave me in the dark until Roelan called me to sing for him again and, like a fool, I would answer.

For ten years I endured. Roelan comforted me, whispering in my heart that my service was valued, though I could not understand why, since no one could hear me but my god and my jailer. But I clung to his voice, reveled in his glory, let his music soar in my soul while I willed the pain to pass by. Somewhere in that time, though, after so many years of faithfulness, the whispered call grew fainter, and the darkness grew deeper, and I sang the music of my heart but heard no answering refrain. Soon all that was left to me was the pain and the darkness and the shreds of my defiance, and it was not enough.

Goryx saw it. He nodded and smiled his gap-toothed smile when he peered through the grate, and said, even as he pulled me out to do it all again, “Not long now.”

He felt me tremble as he laid out his tools and stroked my knotted fingers, and he heard me whisper, “No more. Please, no more. Not again.”

“Yield. Obey. And there will come a day seven years from this one when you will see me no more,” he said, as he laid my bones bare yet again. “Nothing more is required of you. Seven years of obedience and you will be free to go on your way.”

As he expected, the day came when I broke. I’ve heard that there have lived those extraordinary men and women who cannot be defeated by such means, but I was not such a one. Goryx had broken all the fingers on my left hand and had clamped the jaws on my right thumb, ready to begin. “No more,” I begged. “By the Seven Gods, no more.”

“Do you yield?”

“Please ...”

“You will obey and be silent?”

Head fogged with pain, I did not answer quickly enough. So he finished my right hand, and when I begged for mercy and swore I would be silent until the end of time, he said he could not believe me. So he laid my back open again, and I thought I would go mad from it, for I had not even my pride to sustain me any longer. But his work was done. When next I heard the god’s faint call, I could not answer. I huddled in the darkness and clutched my ruined hands to my breast and begged Roelan’s mercy, but I could not sing for him again. The music in my heart had bled away, and I was left with only darkness and silence. And in the formless years that followed, there came a time when I no longer heard the call, and I knew that I was truly dead.