THE MECHANISMS OF RAPHAR

by Rab Foster
 

 

The Tree of Blades (1)
 
THE TRUNK I’M tied to was part of a real tree once. I’m on a tiny platform halfway up its timber pillar. But the branches are artificial. Made of iron, they move, creak, grind around me. So far, they haven’t approached. Their serrated edges, their gleaming rows of fangs, sashay around me in a mocking dance. The blood of their previous victims has been scrubbed from them.

They will approach. I know from the many clefts in the wood behind me, dug by their teeth.

From the higher regions of the tree, I hear the mechanism, and the branches, become more animated. Accompanying these noises are a woman’s screams. Someone’s been tied to a platform above me.

Trying to fend off despair, I close my eyes and repeat to myself the two facts that should console me. But the strategy doesn’t work. Not when a warm liquid dribbles over me and I realise the victim above has emptied her bladder in terror at the branches closing in.
 
A mist obscured the middle of the gorge. Only when the group of five was halfway across the footbridge could they make out the gigantic waterwheel responsible for the mist. Its vapour was produced by the wheel’s paddles, smashing endlessly into the river that raced along the gorge’s bottom. As well as the vapour, noise surrounded them—the roar of the torrent, the crash of the paddles, the groan of the mechanisms the wheel was cranking.

A building erected against the gorge’s far wall also came into view. The axle fixed to the hub of the wheel protruded from its base and the mechanisms were housed inside it. Had the building stood on the land above, it would have risen nine or ten storeys. Its sheer brick façade was unbroken by windows. The only opening in it was a doorway aligned with the bridge.

Spanning the bridge’s end, blocking access to the doorway, was a gate. Behind this stood a lectern and a figure with a tapering outline formed by the peaked red cowl and flowing red robes it wore. The group approached the figure. Before they communicated with it, they couldn’t help but gawp at the huge wheel plunging past just yards away. Its cascading paddles were the size of coffin-lids. Its flowing rim stretched high into the murk.

The red figure demanded, ‘Name?’

The man leading the group looked like he’d been chiselled out of the gorge-wall. He was big, his shoulders like slabs, his face craggy. His hands were sunk in the pockets of a greatcoat. ‘Karlac,’ he replied. ‘Heryn Karlac.’

A wax tablet lay on top of the lectern—a book would have been reduced to mush by the perennial water-vapour. The figure used a stylus to inscribe the name on it. ‘Punishment or extraction?’

‘Extraction.’ Heryn turned to another member of his group, a woman of medium height, with light brown skin, and black hair tied in a clump behind her head. Also tied were her hands, together, with rope. The group’s remaining three members had guided her along the bridge with drawn blades. ‘Believe me, bitch, extraction by the Brotherhood is punishment enough.’

The woman scowled, but said nothing.

The figure inscribed the word ‘extraction’. ‘In that case, one may accompany. Only one. You have an offering?’

Heryn’s right hand rose out of its pocket, bringing with it a pouch that bulged with coinage. From the other pocket he withdrew the prosthetic he had instead of a left hand, a mitten-shaped knob of wood fixed onto his wrist. He banged this against the pouch. ‘Oh yes. Your god will feel rich today.’

The figure turned and made a signal towards the doorway. Four more figures, similarly attired, lurked inside it. They came forward and opened the gate. Two of them took out poniards and pressed their points against either side of the woman’s throat. The other two searched Heryn and stripped him of his weapons.

One of his companions, an even bigger man whose long mane of hair was milk-white, asked dubiously, ‘You’re sure you want to enter alone?’

A hint of a smile appeared on Heryn’s rough face. ‘Absolutely, Marnon. I’m looking forward to it.’

The four members of the Brotherhood of Raphar escorted him and the woman through the gate to the doorway. Two steered the woman with their poniards. As he walked, Heryn addressed her again: ‘I hope you’re looking forward to it too, bitch.’

 
The Tree of Blades (2)
 
Mercifully, the mechanism above makes such noise I no longer hear the screams. I try to focus on my two sources of comfort.

Firstly, she escaped. When they loaded us in the wagons, all the unfortunates who for various reasons had lately earned Lambeyk’s displeasure, she wasn’t present. No, Lambeyk couldn’t have got his hands on her. If he had, he’d have instructed the Brothers to torture, mutilate, kill her in front of me before they put me here.

The second thing cheers me too, but less so, because Lambeyk doesn’t know about it—and never will know, now I have no way of sharing it with him. While the teeth of this mechanism rend me to pieces, he’ll be ignorant of my victory.

But something interrupts my reverie. More liquid rains on me. Not urine this time, but blood. And moments later, not only blood. Entrails flop down between the branches, pieces of them, onto me. Whoever was above was chewed apart, through the belly…

How I wish Lambeyk knew.
 
Keeshan sat on a bench with chains connecting her wrists and ankles to hoops on the floor. Censers hung on either side of her and disgorged cloying fumes, while in front of her was a representation of Raphar—the Pain-God.

The Pain-God’s likeness was set in a vertical beam of wood ascending the chamber’s wall. Its features were embedded in the beam’s bottom end, level with her. These were a screaming mouth ringed by six bulging eyes. From the eyes, red lines flowed up the grain of the wood to the ceiling. She could tell the features were flesh-and-blood ones, removed from a real person’s face, treated in preservative, planted in holes gouged from the wood. The central hole of the mouth had real lips around it and real teeth inserted inside. She wondered if the red lines rising off the eyes were arteries, plucked painstakingly from someone’s body.

Worse, Raphar’s jumbled features moved. The eyes goggled at her, the mouth contorted into lascivious shapes. She supposed she saw this because the substance burning in the censers beside her, inundating her with sweet fumes, was a hallucinogenic drug.

She heard a door open behind her. From either side, poniards tickled her throat again, warning her to keep still. Below, hands unlocked the shackles on her chains. Flashes of red at the edges of her vision indicated the quartet who’d brought her into the building had returned. She was made to stand, the steel points never leaving her throat, and led out.

They re-entered the passageway from the building’s entrance. It was lined with doors, presumably opening into rooms like the one she’d been in, where prisoners were prepared for their visit—forced to inhale the drug, gaze on Raphar’s chaotic face and marinate in their own dread.

The drug pummelled her as the Brothers took her along the passageway. Her steps on the flagstones reverberated through her body. The Brothers’ red robes rippled like great gushes of blood. An onslaught of hideous noise came from ahead. She steeled herself. In the main part of the building, the sensations would be worse.

They emerged onto a strip of floor beside a space that was cathedral-like in its size. It plunged to unseen depths below the floor’s edge and rose to a ceiling far above. Cylindrical braziers expelling tall ribbons of flame stood along the floor and in the fiery light she saw how the nearest walls were composed of bricks and mortar. But across the space, the walls were replaced by the sides of a colossal, natural cavern extending into the earth behind the gorge.

The space was filled with gigantic machinery. Keeshan tore her gaze away from it, knowing the drug would make the spectacle overwhelm her. Instead, she focused on the two figures waiting for her.

One was another member of the Brotherhood. Unlike his comrades, no cowl concealed his head, though she wished one did, for her drugged eyes didn’t appreciate it. The head was gaunt and bald and its skin was fissured by scars, some old and pale, others fresh, red and raw. These ran vertically, from the eyes, ears and corners of its mouth to the head’s crown, where they converged.

The second figure was Heryn. ‘Well, bitch. How do you feel?’

‘They’ve drugged me.’

The Brother with the scarred head explained. ‘We initiate our visitors by burning the leaves of the seer’s sage and making them inhale the smoke. It heightens the senses, including the sense of pain. That will make your experiences today more… intense.’

Heryn held up his wooden hand. Draped around it was the now-empty pouch. ‘While the sage was getting you high, I went to the main shrine of Raphar at the top of this building. Made my offering to the Pain-God. Needless to say, the Brotherhood’s services don’t come cheaply. But it’ll be worth it when they wring the location of my gold out of you.’

Keeshan tried to keep her voice free of the confusion assailing her eyes and ears. ‘You’ve more chance of finding that gold up your arse, Heryn, than getting it from me.’

Heryn shook his head. ‘Well, Father Bazran. She’s all yours.’

‘Let’s proceed, then.’ Father Bazran turned and led them—Keeshan’s escorts hustling her with the poniards still at her throat—towards a nearby staircase.

She couldn’t ignore her surroundings any longer. A vast structure of wheels, vertical and horizontal, rose past the floor, almost to the ceiling, held in place by a correspondingly vast frame of pillars and beams. Even the littlest wheels could have fitted on the foresters’ wagons she’d seen on the local highways, loaded with felled tree-trunks. All moved at different speeds, were connected by shafts, belts or processions of cogs, and received their power from the titanic wheel churning outside.

Around this, platforms stood at random levels against the walls and cavern-sides, held aloft by lattices of legs, struts and braces. Staircases and catwalks threaded through the lattices and connected them. Meanwhile, out of the machine-structure in the centre, smaller structures—mechanisms of smaller wheels, shafts and belts enclosed in limb-like frames—extended to each platform.

Keeshan fought to control herself. She felt her sanity was in danger of being ground to nothing between those multiple wheels, or crumbling to nothing before their immense noise.

Screams came from the platforms. Halfway up the staircase, a particularly shrill one sounded. She saw a platform level with her position, further along the wall, where five red-clad figures, one bare-headed, the others cowled, stood contemplating a large timber pyramid. A naked man straddled the top of the pyramid, its point entering him between his buttocks. A pair of chains held his arms above his head. Two more were attached to his ankles and were being pulled down the pyramid’s sides, to wheels at its base. There, the chains partly looped around the wheels and then stretched to the mechanism serving the platform. As the man’s legs descended, the point and the widening mass of the pyramid below it penetrated him further. The arm-chains went down in accordance with the leg ones.

Keeshan’s group paused on the staircase to observe. Threads of blood running down the pyramid thickened into rivulets. The man’s torso started tearing, first at his crotch, then his lower body. Strands of skin and tissue holding his genitals in place stretched and ripped, until his cock and balls slid down the pyramid tenuously attached to his left thigh. Glistening viscera appeared… To Keeshan, his screams came like physical blows. Only the poniards at her throat stopped her recoiling in horror.

‘Punishment?’ inquired Heryn.

‘Yes,’ Bazran said. ‘The Holy Karthanian Temple found him guilty of heresy. The Temple’s monks are forbidden to kill. That would forever sully the purity of their souls. So, their heretics are passed onto us.’

‘And the Temple makes your god an offering?’

‘Of course.’

 

They emerged from the staircase onto another platform. It had a brazier too, belching out fire. Four more Brothers, cowled, stood motionless at its end—a quartet of them was apparently assigned to every prisoner. Also present was a menial, swishing a shaggy-headed mop through a pool of red-tinged water. The menial wore over his eyes a contraption consisting of two short tubes, limiting his vision to what was immediately before him. Pieces of cloth plugged his ears.

Finally, two more men—a Brother whose head was exposed and scarred like Bazran’s, and a small, wizened man clad in furs—stood by a device at the platform’s side. Two vertical poles rose a dozen feet high. One pole was turning thanks to a wheel on its top end, powered by a belt extending to the adjacent mechanism. The second pole lacked a wheel, but turned too. This was because a mass of wire was wrapped around it and, as the first pole rotated, the wire was gradually peeled from the mass and wrapped instead around something attached to the first pole—another naked man.

So far, the wire had wound around him repeatedly from his ankles to waist. It was tight, thin and sharp and cut deeply where it touched him. The ribbons of skin between the spiralling wire were drenched in blood and the menial swabbed more of it off the floor below. Keeshan saw how the wire had sliced through the man’s cock and it dangled pitifully on a final thread of foreskin.

The tortured man whispered a few words and the small one in furs scribbled on a scroll of paper.

Heryn: ‘Extraction?’

‘Yes,’ said Bazran. ‘He was a priest in the Church of Empyrean Shadows. He broke his vow of celibacy. Now the Church wants the names of the whores he consorted with, so they can be tracked down and extirpated.’

‘You extend your services to other religions. How broad-minded.’

‘We feel kinship with every religion. All faiths involve pain directly or indirectly, so we believe an element of our god Raphar exists in every one of them.’

Keeshan noticed another beam of wood secured to the wall behind the poles, with eyes, lips and teeth embedded in it and red lines streaking up from them. Raphar was present, perhaps not just drinking in the victim’s pain, but channelling it to his shrine above.

Bazran asked, ‘Would you prefer the Spindles as a method of extraction?’

Heryn pondered it. ‘Let me see some other options first.’

From the wood, Raphar leered mockingly at Keeshan, eyes winking, mouth pouting.
 

The Tree of Blades (3)
 
The branches at my level cavort with increasing speed. Their teeth come close, then stall and recede. That’s how the tree works. The branches churn madly at the top, get their business done, then the frenzy descends and each prisoner at each lower level meets his or her fate in turn.

Gore keeps falling on me. Part of a scalp, with hair attached, plummets past and gets caught in the fangs of a branch. That’s how thoroughly the person up there was pulverized. Despite the blood, I see the hair is auburn-coloured with streaks of dyed turquoise. It belonged to Dalva the Soothsayer, who was among the advisors, secretaries, guards and concubines in the wagons yesterday, victims of his purge. So, she perished above. It says little for her soothsaying that she didn’t see this horror coming.

Now, I’m next for the branches.

But at least—I keep repeating to myself—my love escaped!
 
Keeshan’s chaperones steered her up and down staircases, along catwalks, onto more platforms. Sometimes the staircases and catwalks veered away from the walls and led above or even through the giant machinery grinding in the building’s centre. The drug made her quail before the rumble and motion of the huge wheels. But the horrors she witnessed, on platforms she visited and on ones she saw from a distance, were far worse.

Victims were stretched with chains, impaled on spikes, sliced with wires, crushed under weights, cut, slashed and chopped with blades. They shrieked while the devices gouged, flayed, flattened, skewered, dismembered, disembowelled them—until their shrieks choked off, either into gibbered ravings or into moans and gurgles, depending on what overwhelmed them first, witlessness or agony. Though Keeshan had fought in brutal battles, she’d have found this place a test of endurance if her mind was functioning properly. In her condition now, she felt she was being forced along a corridor in hell.

They stepped from a catwalk onto a platform not attached to a wall, but suspended from the ceiling. Thick chains hung and held onto its corners. It was a short way below the ceiling and the main machinery cranked and creaked directly under them. The obligatory beam of wood bearing Raphar’s features stuck down on its own, its end hovering a few feet above the platform’s floor.

The device here consisted of another pole being turned by wheels and belts, but it was horizontal. Bound to it was another naked man, rotating like a hog-carcass on a spit. A giant pendulum swung back and forth above the pole and its cargo. It moved not of its own momentum but because a piston, connected to a wheel, was at the top of the rod, pushing and pulling it. The mass at the rod’s bottom was shaped like a brush and had points of steel bristling along its bottom.

Occasionally the brush swooped across the pole while the body was twisted onto its upper side, and the points scoured off skin and tissue and left tracts of ragged, blood-oozing flesh. Passing over the man’s lower face, it’d scraped away the nose and shredded the lips. Keeshan glimpsed the face’s gory ruins as the pole went around. For a moment it seemed only inches from her eyes, screaming at her through a maw of bloody teeth.

As before, the man supervising this atrocity was bare-headed and heavily scarred. Four others stood in attendance, eyes watchful within the slits of their cowls. And a menial with restricted vision and plugged ears dutifully mopped up the blood leaking from the victim on the pole. The Brotherhood of Raphar were assiduous about keeping their platforms clean.

‘Another heretic,’ inquired Heryn, ‘or another wayward priest?’

‘Neither,’ said Bazran. ‘He displeased his employer. That employer is a regular client of ours. He placed several people in our custody yesterday, including this one.’

‘For extraction?’

‘Punishment. Always punishment.’

Again, the man’s face cranked past on the pole. His eyes, unscathed above the pulp of his nose and mouth, had been dulled by pain. Now they brightened as their gaze alighted on something. From the torn mouth came a cry: ‘Keeshan!’

A note of puzzlement entered Father Bazran’s voice. ‘He knows our prisoner. How could that be?’ He turned to the colleague in charge. ‘He did come from Lord Lambeyk’s court?’

The other Father confirmed, ‘This is Rayn Halstrak, until yesterday an official in Lord Lambeyk’s treasury. He displeased the Lord by making errors while calculating the value of his assets. For that reason, he was delivered to us.’

Then Bazran turned to Heryn. ‘Yet this man recognizes her. Knows her name. You’d told us she was a simple thief who’d stolen gold from you.’

She watched the mutilated face go by again. She’d paid Halstrak little heed during their time together in the court, and no doubt he’d thought little about her. Yet his eyes glistened with tears now. In the midst of his agony, he was overcome by seeing someone familiar—a reminder of a time before this horror had engulfed him.

The drug made it feel like the platform was rotating with Halstrak’s pole, flipping over, swinging upside-down and back. One instant she stood on it upright, the next the platform was above her and she hung from it like a sleeping bat. If her legs gave way, she wondered, which direction would she fall, upwards or downwards? She wasn’t sure.

Heryn replied, ‘A coincidence. Their paths must have crossed outside the court. Indeed, they could have been in collusion. Him embezzling money from Lord Lambeyk’s treasury, bitch here stashing it away for him.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Bazran told him, ‘this connection must be investigated before we proceed. Over the years, Lord Lambeyk has been most generous in his offerings to Raphar.’

Heryn sighed, then smashed his wooden left hand against Bazran’s head.

It struck him so hard it broke off from Heryn’s wrist. Bazran keeled over. The prosthetic landed on the floor too, bounced and disappeared over the platform-edge.

Jutting from the stump on Heryn’s left arm—hitherto concealed by the wooden hand—was a blade four inches long. The other Father lurched forward, possibly wishing only to aid Bazran. But Heryn took no chances. He lunged, planted the blade in the man’s right eye and drove it into his skull. Blood and vitreous humour spurted from the socket onto his wrist.

By the time Heryn freed the blade from the corpse, the two Brothers who’d held poniards against Keeshan were rushing at him. One got the wrist-blade rammed into his crotch. He dropped the poniard as he folded over and it skidded across the platform, not quite following the wooden hand over the edge. Heryn pounced after it and grasped at it with his flesh-and-blood hand, but on the way he crashed into the second man, who swung his poniard at him. The blade overshot its target and slashed down past Heryn’s far side. They both fell, bodies tangling. Heryn wrestled free of the man and kicked over the floor at him, propelling him to the edge. His body teetered momentarily, then rolled over it. With a scream, he plummeted into the machinery below.

Heryn scrambled up, the blade still fixed to his left wrist, a poniard clutched in his right hand. Half-a-dozen Brothers remained on the platform, the four who’d attended Rayn Halstrak and the surviving two who’d come with Keeshan. By now all six had produced additional poniards from under their robes.

Heryn bellowed, ‘Keeshan, help me!’

His voice cut through the turmoil afflicting Keeshan’s senses and she recovered at least some of her wits. She realised red-robed figures were running by her, towards Heryn. The Brothers were armed but their training had been poor, for they’d taken their eyes off the prisoner—her.

She sprang at the last two as they passed, ploughed into the legs of one of them and tripped him. He crashed against the side of the other, who was close to the platform-edge. Keeshan clawed at a red sleeve and tried to pull the poniard in the hand there within reach. But the man, once he was down, got the palm of his other hand against her chest. He flung her back. Meanwhile, his comrade had managed to grab hold of something before he careered over the edge—a support holding up one end of the pole on which the luckless Halstrak was turning.

Keeshan struggled to her feet just as the man she’d tackled got up too. He came at her, slicing the poniard through the air in front of him. She juked backwards, afraid to lunge and grapple with him, not trusting her sense of distance or direction because of the drug. As she retreated, she felt heat sear against her back…

A cry came from the Brother who’d grabbed the end of the device. His robes had got caught in the wheel that cranked the pole around. The cloth tightened about him as the mechanism dragged in more of it. His cry turned into a scream. He was pulled back—into the path of the mass swinging at the pendulum’s end. The mass slammed against the cowl containing his head and flattened it, blood and brains spewing through the slit in its front.
Briefly, this distracted the man confronting Keeshan. She turned and ran back behind the brazier whose heat she’d felt. She raised a foot and hammered it against the fire-bars forming the brazier’s cylindrical body. It shook, then toppled over, and the coals burning inside it were ejected across the platform’s floor. The man facing Keeshan found himself ankle-deep in fire. Coals scurried past him, drawing long fiery lines on the floor behind them. They reached the spot where Heryn, with his wrist-blade and poniard, exchanged desperate thrusts and parries with the other Brothers. Amid their feet, the coals transferred their flames onto the swishing hems of the robes.

Spectacularly, the robes of the nearest man ignited. He became a staggering, screaming conflagration. Keeshan dodged by him, scanning the floor for a dropped weapon. She saw only the menial’s abandoned mop. She snatched it up and drove the mop-head into another Brother, whose hands were slapping against burrs of flame that’d materialized on his side. He reeled back. She kept thumping it against him until his stumbling feet went over the platform-edge and he plunged. Keeshan nearly followed him, only just managing to check herself when she reached the edge too. Below, the burning man landed on a giant wheel-rim. Tatters of flame darted upwards when the rim met that of a similar-sized wheel and he was crushed between them.

More flames whooshed past Keeshan as a Brother with robes alight ran onto the catwalk that’d brought them here. He hurtled along it, the fire on him growing bigger as his receding figure grew smaller. Then she looked towards Heryn. Another Brother sank to the floor, robes burning too, a poniard-hilt sticking out of his chest. But now Heryn had only his wrist-blade as a weapon and he was still fighting off one opponent. Somehow, this man’s robes had avoided the fires on the floor.

Keeshan charged and diverted the man’s attention by clouting him with the mop. Heryn got his right hand to the man’s cowl, swung him to the centre of the platform and smashed his head against the vertical wooden beam adorned with Raphar’s features. The cowl came off, revealing another bald head, scarred, but not to the gruesome extreme that Bazran’s was.

‘Bastard,’ Heryn seethed, ‘bastard!’ He pounded the head until it split and brains covered the beam in a bloody mush. By this time, most of Raphar’s eyes, lips and teeth had been dislodged from the wood and fallen to the floor. Heryn let the broken-headed corpse drop, then kicked the pieces of Raphar’s face into the nearest flames. ‘And damn your bastard stinking god too!’

Sensing another presence on the platform, he swung around with a roar. He found himself glowering at the menial, who’d managed to avoid both the fray and the burning coals. To protect his feet from the latter, he’d hopped into his bucket of water.

‘You,’ Heryn bawled, ‘get out of here!’

The menial didn’t respond.

Heryn stormed over and ripped the cloth plugs from the menial’s ears. Then he grabbed the ears and angled the menial’s head so he could see him through the tubes on his eyes. Down those tubes, Heryn yelled, ‘I SAID, GET OUT OF HERE!’

The menial leapt out of the bucket and pelted off along the catwalk.

Keeshan crouched and held the palm of her less-preferred left hand over a coal. Heryn watched her while he stripped off and cast aside his greatcoat. His garments underneath were sodden with sweat. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

‘Trying to free myself from the drug’s spell.’

‘Is it working?’

The pain became too much and she snatched her hand back. ‘I’ll know when I have to fight. Which will probably be soon.’

For the first time Heryn sounded worried. ‘It’s impossible to keep track of time in this hellhole. But it should have happened by now. Where’s Marnon and the others?’

Keeshan wrapped one of the menial’s wet cleaning rags around her left hand. ‘What matters is we’ve got in. We concentrate on finding her.’ With her uninjured hand, she yanked a poniard out of a corpse. ‘And you’re helping me. At least if you want that information.’

‘But how do we find her? This place is a labyrinth. We’d only had half the grand tour of it when they saw through our disguises.’

As if in answer to his question, Father Bazran groaned on the floor. He’d been lucky. The other Father had fallen beside him and shielded him from the coals, whose flames were now devouring the second Father’s robes. Keeshan bent over Bazran and poked the poniard against the underside of his jaw. ‘The people Lambeyk sent here yesterday. They included his wife, Myla. Where is she?’ She thought it wise to interrogate him while he was semi-conscious. Bazran looked like a fanatic who, fully awake, would surrender nothing.

Not opening his eyes, he croaked, ‘The Tree… The Tree of Blades.’

‘You’re taking us there.’ She observed another quartet of red-robed figures on the catwalk, hastening towards them from a neighbouring platform, and told Heryn, ‘We need to move. Get him onto his feet.’

Heryn scooped Bazran up and dragged him towards the platform’s other end, from which a staircase descended. Keeshan was about to follow when she heard a cry.

‘Keeshan!’

Halstrak still rotated on the pole and the pendulum still raked over him pitilessly. While his ravaged face went past again, she hurried to the device, put two fingers against his eyes, closed them and pierced his forehead with the poniard.
 


Since the arrival of Heryn, his three men and his prisoner, one more group had crossed the bridge. This consisted of a plump brothel-owner, a bodyguard and a blonde woman with a gag in her mouth who hobbled in chains. The Brothers led her and the bodyguard, carrying a bag of coins, through the gate and into the building. The brothel-owner waited behind and tried to engage Heryn’s companions in conversation. He got no response but wouldn’t stop talking.

‘I couldn’t go in myself. I admit it, I’m squeamish. My trade is selling flesh, not destroying it. But that girl… She was a bad ’un. Always stirring up trouble among the other girls, getting them to defy me… So, reluctantly, I’ve given her to the Brotherhood. And after they deal with her, I’ll bring back her head, what’s left of it, and put it up someplace where all my girls can see it. To show them I won’t tolerate disobedience. You need to be firm with your workers. Don’t you agree?’

He was addressing Marnon, the huge man with long white hair. Marnon leant against a wall of the bridge, hands resting on two of its top-stones, gaze fixed on the upper regions of the gorge, out of which the river came raging. It was as though he expected to see something there, past the tendrilous vapour.

The brothel-owner looked that way too and noticed something above the gorge-wall to the right, the side the Brotherhood had erected their building against. Several times, a point of light flashed. Then, as if in reply, another light blinked above the opposite wall.

‘Did you see that?’ the brothel-owner exclaimed. ‘People are up on either edge of the gorge, signalling each other.’ Marnon greeted this with the same, taciturn silence. The brothel-owner turned and called to the Brother manning the gate, ‘Come and see this. Someone’s sending signals at the top of the gorge!’

The Brother passed the gate, his robes hiding the movements of his legs so completely he seemed to glide. When he reached the brothel-owner, the plump man pointed through the vapour. ‘Up there. Signals, I tell you.’

A number of things happened, almost simultaneously.

Firstly, from the edge above the gorge’s right-hand side, multiple long shapes cascaded down into the torrent. The noise they made striking the water was explosive. A fleeting gap in the vapour allowed the observers on the bridge to glimpse, lined along the edge, three or four of the enormous wagons the foresters used for transporting tree-trunks.

Secondly, a roar came from the vapour that hid the other end of the bridge. This was the end connected to the gorge’s left-hand side, where the Brotherhood’s visitors approached from. Moments later, the first members of a mob—men mostly, but women too—charged out of the murk towards them, brandishing blades, clubs and axes.

Thirdly, Marnon sprang back from the wall and cried, ‘We’re under attack! Quick, into the building!’ He grabbed the brothel-owner and bundled him along the bridge. ‘Quick, inside if you know what’s good for you!’ Confused and panicked, the brothel-owner obeyed without question. They dashed through the gate to the building.

Fourthly, the other two men who’d come with Heryn rushed at the Brother, seized hold of his robes, and heeled him over the wall. He flew down the bridge’s side, into the tumultuous water.

As always, a team of four Brothers lurked inside the building’s entrance. By now they’d realised an armed rabble was tearing across the bridge and they’d started swinging together two thick doors from the doorposts.

‘Run!’ Marnon hollered one last time and propelled the brothel-owner ahead of him. Then, at the entrance, he tripped the man and sent him crashing down on its threshold. The ends of the two doors sank into his flabby sides, and halted, his body suddenly blocking their way.

Marnon had produced a blade too. He ran through the gap between the doors, over the top of the brothel-owner, and started killing the men inside.

The Brother who’d ended up in the river was washed below the bridge and past its other side, where he was immediately pulverized as one of the wheel’s massive paddles crashed down on him. The wheel dealt less emphatically with what the river delivered next. One after another, like a barrage of horizontal missiles, tree-trunks sailed out from under the bridge and ploughed into it. Some were dragged down by its paddles and got stuck between them and the riverbed. As the paddles became ensnarled, the wheel’s revolutions slowed and it emitted pained, deafening noises like a monstrous animal being slowly speared to death.

The bridge spat out more of the missiles, battering it mercilessly. Finally, the wheel stopped altogether.

 
The Tree of Blades (4)
 
The Brothers made me inhale a drug intended to make me spend my last moments in absolute fear and horror. Yet I don’t feel those things now. Rather, I experience a dumb fascination. Somehow, the motion of the branches bewitches me. The way they writhe around me, gyrating forward, gyrating back, gyrating forward again… Though each time coming a little closer. Perhaps this is how a small animal dies. Hypnotized by the movements of the owl or snake swooping or lunging towards it...

Each time closer. Until what is surely the last time…

Suddenly, the mechanism’s creaking, grinding music changes tempo. Its rhythm slows. Also, it’s gradually swallowed by a new sound, a shrill whine that suggests huge tension between forces trying to keep things moving and things trying to stop them. The whine becomes hideous and the branches freeze, their fangs hovering inches from me.

For a time, I assume this is the mechanism being cruel. It’ll whirr into life again and finish ripping me asunder. But nothing happens.

Eventually, I can’t help opening my mouth and expelling a sob of relief. It’s not a sob that comes out, however. It’s a mouthful of blood.

My head droops and I see the blood from my mouth splatter on the back edge of the closest branch. This managed to cleave into my waist just before the mechanism stopped.
 
Keeshan had feared she and Heryn would be fighting off Brothers every yard of the way to the Tree of Blades. But suddenly the Brothers had other things to worry about.

Everything had stalled—the giant wheels in the centre, the more intricate workings that extended to the platforms, the devices of torture and execution on the platforms themselves. And not only that. Tension was building in parts of the stilled machinery and components were buckling and breaking.

Keeshan, Heryn and Bazran—whom Heryn steered with an arm twisted up his back and the wrist-blade scraping his throat—had traversed half of another catwalk when there was a thunderous noise above them. Then a mammoth wheel plunged and struck a platform level with their catwalk, a stone’s throw away on their right. The platform upended and, like a tumbling tray strewing cups and dishes, scattered the things on it. Brothers in their red robes, pieces of a disintegrating device, a flaming brazier, all rose in the air and then dropped to the building’s floor. Something swung towards their catwalk, spinning on the end of a wire—the upper half of a victim, severed when the device containing him broke apart. Loops of viscera fell like giant worms from the stump where his torso ended. The wire unspooled and the truncated body dropped too.

They heard more noise overhead. ‘Faster,’ Keeshan shouted. ‘Move faster!’

They’d only just got from the catwalk onto another platform when a huge section of machinery—wheels, shafts, belts—toppled out of the regions above. This swept the catwalk away like a hand swatting a cobweb.

The device on this platform hadn’t been in use and no Brothers were present. Keeshan ran to its far end and looked down. Below was a flat rock surface, the floor of the cavern behind the building. A structure that was surely the Tree of Blades stood on it.

‘I see it!’ She started down a staircase.

As Heryn forced Bazran onto the staircase too, the Father, lucid again, began speaking. ‘So, you’re not really Heryn Karlac?’

‘No. The name’s Heryn Thalgar.’

‘Ah. I’ve heard of you. The notorious rebel leader.’

‘The esteemed general. Long ago, I served as Lambeyk’s most trusted military commander. Until I got sick of his cruelty and depravity and we parted company.’

‘I remember that parting,’ Bazran mused as they clattered down the stairs. The tip of Heryn’s blade had bloodied the side of his throat, crisscrossing it with shallow cuts. ‘You escaped Lord Lambeyk, but your family didn’t. He captured your wife and children. Of course, he brought them here…’

By now Keeshan was on the cavern floor which, during their renovations, the Brothers had cleared of boulders, stalagmites and other obstacles and made relatively level. Red-clad figures ran past, not noticing her in their panic about the halted mechanisms. They also seemed panicked by a commotion that, behind her, Keeshan could hear in the building-part of the complex. But she paid attention only to the structure before her. Countless lengths of iron, edged with jagged teeth, twisted around a tall central pillar. Hinges attached the branches to rods, like flails on handles, which bristled out of a neighbouring mechanism, high as the tree itself.

It was still now, save for a steady procession of red drops falling down its front. These dripped past prisoners bound to the pillar, on platforms, near its base. They wailed within the mesh of branches but seemed unharmed.

Keeshan recognized one or two of Lambeyk’s courtiers making those wails, but she ignored them. Looking above them, she identified something at the midpoint of the pillar—the macabre tree’s trunk—and cried, ‘Myla!’

Heryn and Bazran reached the floor, the latter still talking. ‘I remember your family, Heryn Thalgar. I remember their sufferings.’

‘Shut up, Bazran.’

‘Your youngest daughter, for example. How old was she? Seven, eight years old? Oh, I recall her torments so well…’

‘Shut up.’ Heryn released Bazran, then knocked him over with a punch. But, sprawled on the rock floor, Bazran raised his head and continued: ‘I believe we have her skin stored somewhere. Would you like that, Heryn Thalgar? As a memento of your daughter?’

Heryn’s boot crunched onto Bazran’s face. ‘I said, shut up!’

Though his nose was a smear of broken cartilage, Bazran smiled. A beatific light appeared in his eyes. ‘Raphar!’ he cried ecstatically. ‘My beloved god, Raphar!’

Still screaming, ‘Shut up!’, Heryn rammed his boot down again and again on Bazran’s head. He stove the face into the skull, then stamped on the skull itself until it burst and spread blood, teeth, fragments of bone, globs of brain over the surrounding floor. The head ended up a gory puddle.

While Heryn wiped the sweat and tears from his face with his single hand, he remembered Keeshan. She’d run to the Tree of Blades and found a series of rungs carved up the side of its trunk. Now she was climbing these to a figure halfway-up, who was slumped against one of the iron branches.

Near to Heryn, a body thudded against the floor—a Brother who’d fallen from a platform or catwalk with an axe embedded in his back. Another Brother staggered by and collapsed, the blood welling from a sword-wound adding a new shade of red to his robes. Remembering a battle was in progress, Heryn discarded the poniard and wrenched the axe from the corpse. He swung towards the battle and found himself facing Marnon.

‘You’re still alive,’ said the huge man. His white hair was matted with crimson. ‘Thank the gods.’

‘No thanks to the god here,’ Heryn muttered.

‘Didn’t the woman make it?’

‘Oh, she made it…’ He turned back to the tree. Keeshan had reached the figure and was struggling to free it from the serrated iron. Heryn felt unexpected pity. ‘Help her,’ he told Marnon.

‘What?’

‘You heard me, you oaf. Get up there and help her!’

Marnon was unexpectedly agile for his size. Within minutes, he’d scaled the tree and prized the body off the branch. Then, with it resting over one of his shoulders, and Keeshan following, he descended. By this time, no more Brothers ran past. Instead, a growing number of men and women were entering the cavern and assembling around Heryn. The blades they carried gleamed redly.

The body was naked and belonged to a woman. Marnon placed her on the ground beneath Heryn. Though he tried to do this gently, a long cleft across her stomach yawned and revealed the viscera within.

It shocked Heryn when the eyes opened on the bloodstained face. He knelt beside her and said softly, ‘Lady Myla, I’m Heryn Thalgar. Your husband may have spoken of me…’ He faltered, sensing he sounded foolish. Instead, he blurted, ‘I’m sorry.’

She shocked him even more by managing to speak. A trickle of blood accompanied the words from her mouth. ‘It was because of my foolishness.’

‘No, Lady Myla.’ He noticed Keeshan racing from the tree. ‘It wouldn’t have mattered what, er… indiscretions you committed. Your predecessors all arrived here too. He’s sterile, but refuses to admit it. When his wives fail to conceive, he blames them and punishes them…’

Keeshan interrupted him. ‘Myla!’ She threw herself down at the woman’s other side and seized one of her hands. ‘Damn it, I was too late. I got here too late!’

A tender smile formed on the woman’s face. Then the life left her expression and she became another corpse, one of the multitude littering the floor.

As Keeshan sobbed, all Heryn could say was, ‘You have my sympathy.’

The crowd around them had mostly fallen silent. Marnon overheard one man ask another, ‘Were they a pair of rubsters?’ He clouted the speaker with such force he almost fell over.
After letting her grieve for a minute, Heryn said bluntly, ‘I’ve honoured my side of the bargain, Keeshan. I got you in here, gave you a chance to find her before we launched our assault. Now I need the knowledge you had as one of Lambeyk’s bodyguards. The secret passageways in his fortress, the escape route he’d use in the event of an attack—the route we’ll use to infiltrate his stronghold.’

Keeshan glared up at him, eyes glittering with rage as well as tears. ‘You don’t need to know anything. I’ll come with you. I’ll lead you into that fortress myself.’

The idea worried Heryn. ‘In that case, Keeshan, you have to promise me… You won’t kill Lambeyk. That’s my privilege.’

Keeshan thrust her hands into the wound that’d almost cut her lover in half. They made sucking noises as they probed inside. ‘Oh, you can kill him, Heryn. All I want to do…’

She tore something small out of the corpse.

‘…is thrust this into his face before you kill him. The child he’d tried for so long to conceive. That he didn’t know he had conceived.’


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