Here's chapter six, pre-read by R565!
CHAPTER 6
As I watched Desiree walk out into the suddenly inhospitable night, I felt a weariness fill me. It had been a long, long day. I turned to Riga, and asked her to lock up for the night. She nodded, before giving me a coy smile. “Are you sure that my duties for tonight are over, eh?” She loomed over me, none too subtly forcing her breasts towards my face. A wave of desire passed over me, and I was on the cusp of accepting her desirable favors before an image of a grinning Riga grinding her boot onto the shattered hand of a writhing man danced through my mind. Like a startled deer, my libido fled from me, leaving only a sudden emptiness in my gut. “No, thanks Riga for your generous offer, but tonight’s not good. Perhaps maybe we can try tomorrow?” She slapped my shoulder in parting as she went out to close the gate. Hopefully this meant that she was not taking my lack of interest personally.
I went upstairs, and knocked on Caitriona’s door. The elf opened the door, giving me both a wary look, and a lovely opportunity to assess her merchandise. Tearing my eyes away from her lovely legs that were uncovered by her singlet, I flinched mildly in shame as I met her cold gaze, before I managed to remember why I’d come. “Caitriona, do you know any healing magic?” This was clearly not a question she’d been expecting, and she paused briefly before nodding. “Good. When Desiree comes back tomorrow, I want you to use it on her before you go out. I know that’s not quite fair to you, but I don’t want to make this any harder on her than it needs to be.” As I spoke, I held her gaze, trying to convey earnest concern. I needed loyalty from my subordinates, especially ones with elfin strength. This approach worked, and Caitriona relaxed slightly. “Yes, no need for the poor woman to be miserable.” She agreed, her light voice contrasting with her shorn hair and inhuman face. “I’ll do what I can for her.” “Thank you.” We stood on opposite sides of the room’s threshold for a few moments, before she nodded once more, and bade me goodnight. I left Caitriona, and heard her door close as I walked away, towards my own room.
I entered the last room on the right, the only room with a lock on the door. Closing and locking the door behind me, I dropped my clothes in a heap on the chair before dropping myself onto the bed. After the long day of recruitment and negotiation, I desperately needed sleep, and yet restfulness did not come. Instead, as I reflected on Caitriona’s helpless wrath before the laughing slavers, Desiree’s fearful trembling as I sent her out into the night, and Riga’s cruel laughter as she mutilated a random passerby, I could only feel a deep isolation, and a sense of emotional fatigue.
As I lay in my dark room for longer, Riga’s laughter and Franz’s blood spilling on the street left my mind, and I recalled my father’s first lessons to his son and heir. Not unlike other fathers showing their sons their trades, he began with a demonstration of the tools he used.
I remember my father, face already horridly scarred with burn tissue, taking me down into the dungeons, and showing me the single-tail, the cat o’nine tail, and the vurms. I remember how at first I toyed with the shackles and ropes, laughing and giggling, and how my father smiled as I wrapped myself in strands of hemp, his smile a rare event that I would have treasured, if it did not scare me so. I remember how, after introducing me to the tools of torture, he bade me watch a small demonstration. As I sat in the corner on top of a disused cage, a weeping girl of no more than fourteen was half dragged, half carried into the room by two of my father’s goons. The men ignored her pleas and sobs as they chained her to a wall, nearly dislocating her shoulders in the process, and continued to ignore her cries as they ripped the stained and ragged dress from her thin body. My father brought me close, and I remember innocently staring up at her skinny chest, as it heaved and struggled for breath, and how her tears turned grey as they trickled down her filthy face. My father reached out and cupped his hand around her jaw, before forcing her mouth closed with enough force to produce an audible click. “This piece of meat was freshly caught only hours ago, my son. She was found on the streets by my men, and brought here with offers of food and clothing. Let that be a lesson to you – never take charity, for it will always be poisoned!” He looked down at me to emphasize this point, before turning back to the girl.
“As is, she is now mine, a slave, and is no longer any more human than that table or the wall she hangs from.” The girl frantically shook her head, her desperation lending her the strength to temporarily overcome my father’s grasp. “No! No, that's not true! I’m human! My name is –“she was abruptly silenced by a hard backhand from my father, whose face had not moved or reacted to her outburst in any visible way. “As I was saying, she's not human anymore, and in fact belongs to me. As such, I am going to use her to demonstrate a few of these tools to you.” He waved his hand in a way to indicate the branding irons, the whips, the cudgels, and the thugs still standing near the door. “Now, the first step in the process is the branding.” With a nod from their master, the thugs brought the enchanted irons close to his hands. My father gazed down on me, with as much of an expression of paternal approval as his face was capable of making. “Hand me that square shaped brand, will you, Aliusha? Mutely, I handed him the enchanted iron. As it touched his hand, the iron instantly glowed red, as the enchantment drew its strength from his energy. Releasing her head, he held the iron in both hands. As she wept and begged, he rammed the iron into the chained girl’s outer right thigh, and ground it in as she screamed. After an eternity, he pulled the iron away from her flesh. In a moment that will always haunt me, a long string of melted skin came away with it, briefly connecting the iron to the girl’s flesh. The string detached from her thigh, and the iron’s glow faded away as my father replaced it on the table. Before my wondering eyes, the horrible scars on the newly minted slave’s thigh bubbled, before seeming to sink below her skin. Her thigh returned to its smooth state, leaving a sigil that resembled a birthmark shaped like the family name, traced across her skin. She hung limply from the chains and wept from the pain and the humiliation.
I reopened my eyes, and gazed around the bedroom. At some point during my reminiscence, I had drifted off to sleep. I stared up at the ceiling, and pondered the slave’s fate. After my father had branded her, he had demonstrated the proper way to use various whips, flails, animals, and canes on a slave. As he had done so, I had gradually adopted my father’s point of view – I stopped seeing her as a human, and saw her as a slave, to be used and broken. It was the only way my young mind could process the suffering before my eyes; by rationalizing that she was not really a human like my father and I, my life could continue without any need for examination. After my father finished his demonstration, he had locked the girl away in one of the cells. He told me that she would be my teaching tool, and that every day for the next week, he would accompany me down to the dungeon to demonstrate and teach. For me, this was a princely gift, this time my father spent with me. Usually, one of the many female servants in his employ looked after me, or one of his guards. After that first week, he handed the figurative and literal reigns over to me, as a gift on my ninth birthday. He encouraged me to continue my practices, and to improve my form. I used the girl, who had once been called Alisa, again and again – not as a sex toy, for nine-year old boys have a distinct inability to desire such actions, but as a way to spend more time with my father. I enlisted the help of several of the thugs who hung around the place, and who helped hold her down as I learned. I did not hurt her out of a sense of cruelty, but only out of a desire to make my father proud. Eventually, he decided that my skills were adequate in the area of torture, and moved me into the organization, where I’d follow employees of all types around, and learn what they did, what they required, and what levers Father used to control them.
I never did get the chance to apologize to Alisa. I only realized at what my father had done seven years later, when I first formed a meaningful connection with a slave. His name was Eric, and he was the only male slave of my age in the compound, and thus my only playmate. He was the son of one of the whores, and had been sold to meet her debts. My father, as a favor to one of his employees, bought him, and trained him as a bartender and waiter. As I talked with Eric, and occasionally fought with him, I realized that he was just as human as I am. This realization broke the programming my father had installed, and made me realize how universal the desire to live and to survive is.
This was the reason why I lay awake. Not this new-found fear Riga brings or my sympathy with Caitriona, but my self-hate in regards to Desiree. Despite this angst, I knew that I had acted right. To avenge my father, and rebuild the Vasa family, anything was allowed.
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