Beasts of tabat, p.32
Beasts of Tabat, page 32
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
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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
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Cat Rambo, Beasts of Tabat
