“I don’t think I need to practice,” the boy said and raised an eyebrow at his mentor. “I’ve been killing since I was ten.”
“No. You have not.” Roy Kim came around behind the boy and set a thick cloak about his shoulders.
“Yes, I have.”
"No, what you did in the arena was fighting. It was surviving. Today, however, you will be killing.”
With a groan, the boy wrapped himself up in the cloak insulating himself from the bitter chill he knew awaited them outside in the night. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and muttered, “I don’t see the difference.”
“It’s not something you can see. But you’ll feel it.” Roy Kim opened the door and gestured for his pupil to go first but the boy stepped back. Something about the dark still unsettled him. His mentor frowned, opened his mouth but closed it without saying anything. There was nothing to say. Roy pulled his own cloak tight about his chest and took off without looking back. The boy, of course, charged after him.
Their feet crunched the freshly fallen snow as they marched to the dungeons. The boy sniffled and wiped his nose again. Every little noise seemed enlarged, even the sound of his breath. The whistle of his nostrils screamed his existence into the darkness with more effrontery than even his footfalls. He shivered, not from cold. He didn’t want the dark to know he was there. Opening his mouth wide, he breathed silently, puffing out little wisps of fog from lungs that felt half their regular size. When they reached the dungeon, the boy resisted an impulse to reach forward and grab hold of Roy Kim’s cloak. Somewhere above them a cloud shifted and let out the moon. In the silver glow, they descended together, and yet alone, down the stone and mortar steps, polished by decades of heavy and constant tread.
At ground level, North City was modern and convenient – civilized – and hummed with the pulse of electricity, mildly in some places and fiercely in others. Down below, however, in this pit, there was nothing to speak of civilization, no lights flickering, no sweet smells that came from bottles or ovens, no hum of electricity. But sometimes there were moans. And screams.
Though the boy had never witnessed the Keeper at work, he knew the vibration of pain and had felt it coming from this place many times. It was quiet now and still, but echoes were often quiet and still, repeating infinitely into nothing and yet never really disappearing. All the echoes of his life seemed to converge in this place and sweat formed on his cold brow.
The dungeon was as primal as it was familiar. It was the arena sans hope. Blood and straw for a carpet, unyielding steel bars and rusted hinges, the blemish of slipshod construction and perfume of human waste, blood, decomposition. Along the wall was a table smeared with gore, a torture altar, which the Keeper had yet to clean. The boy squinted to see but there was not enough light. Large square grates situated within the earthen ceiling let in just enough moonlight to soften the darkness, but not enough to discern detail. Roy Kim lit a fire lantern and, as the room came into greater focus, the boy took note of the slender icicles dangling from the crisscrossing metal of the grates above them. Like teeth aching to bite down, they all pointed at the cells, all thirsted for the blood of the condemned. And they were stained red in the firelight.
“Do you want to choose, or should I?” Roy Kim asked and hung the lantern from a hook that had been stuck into the wall. Whether the hook had been placed there for this purpose or for something much worse, the boy did not know.
“It’s too cold for this,” the boy said.
“Then choose quickly.”
The boy let out a long sigh and stepped closer to the cells. At first he couldn’t see anything beyond a smattering of rags that somehow formed a quilt, but then he perceived the faint outlines of a body – slender, all but sexless – and the wiry tell-tale tresses of a female’s hair. White, trembling fingers tugged at the tattered blanket, higher and higher until she’d covered her face. A weird warmth surged through him and pricked his ears like needles. She was just a little girl. Or the lantern was playing a trick on him.
“Choose.”
“I will,” he whispered and looked down the long line of cells. The prisoners had been allotted blankets but the thin shreds did not make them any less naked in his eyes. His pupils dilated with fire and he saw arms, legs, hips, and breasts, everything alluring and frightening. For a moment he forgot Roy Kim. Forgot the icicles. Forgot to breathe. So many women, all of them laying, curling in on themselves, shivering and seeming to deteriorate under his gaze. A few were asleep, but they might have been dead for all the boy knew. In one cell there were two women and they held each other, one sobbing silently onto the other’s chest until their shared blanket shuddered and slid down her back. He stiffened. Did women bleed the same color as men? Her skin was so pale, even under the glow of the lantern, that it didn’t seem possible for red to lie beneath.
“Don’t get too excited. They’ll all be naked when they come to you.” Roy Kim touched the boy’s shoulder and squeezed hard. It was not enough to bring him back from the shadowy clefts of the woman’s shoulder blades.
“So you’ve made your decision,” Roy Kim said and the boy’s guts churned.
“No.” He shrugged away from his mentor and went further down the corridor until the lantern light became an echo and darkness returned to obscure the outlines of breasts and devour provocative shadows. Later he would wonder why so many of the prisoners of North City were women and he would punish himself for the things he had felt while looking at them.
Where were all the boys? Still in the arena and dying without any help from him. There were a few men in the dungeon, but they were old and beaten down, upsetting to look at and unthinkable to kill. Finally he came upon a male prisoner who possessed an air of life about him. Finally here was something the boy could snuff out. The man sat cross-legged at the back of his cell with his blanket draped over him like a cloak. As the boy drew nearer, the man rolled his muscle swollen shoulders, dropping the blanket, revealing a powerful thickness that the dungeon’s atmosphere had yet to extinguish. Cloaked in shadow now, the man seemed gigantic, his neck like a bundle of sticks all knotted and firm, his body like an animal’s covered in thick patches of hair which shone golden even in the darkness. He watched the boy and bristled. Pick me, he said with his eyes. Pick me and I’ll make you bleed before the end. It was exactly what the boy wanted. He stood before the cell and gripped the freezing bars.
“This one.”
“Not him,” Roy Kim said.
The boy’s warm flesh made an awful sound when he ripped his fingers from the steel and turned to face his mentor. “But you told me to pick someone.”
“Yes. Someone to kill. Not to fight. You’re going about this all wrong.” He frowned and looked away a moment, a single calloused fingertip stroking at an eyebrow, grooming it compulsively. He probably didn’t even realize he was doing it. There were volumes of wisdom within Roy Kim’s black irises and, as he looked upon his pupil once more, they swallowed the boy entirely and left no room for understanding. The boy was used to it. This world was too dark for some kinds of knowledge.
“This was you’re idea in the first place,” the boy said and pressed his hands together, rubbing them, warming them. He glanced in at the prisoner and read disappointment in his ruffled golden fur. There had been a silent promise made between them and now it lay broken for reasons neither of them understood. Stalking along the cells, now, the boy searched for a sacrifice to appease the Lord, but he was Cain and the only thing he had to offer was rotting fruit.
“Him,” he said at last and pointed to a male not much older than himself. At first glance it had been difficult to tell the sex of the shivering thing in the corner, but the hair was short and the limbs were long. It was too gangly to be a girl. And too sickly to put up a challenge. Filthy bangs hid the thing’s pale face. A single red rimmed eye looked out from the matted locks, and it held no resistance. Just fear. Surely Roy Kim could see that. Or not.
“You really don’t get the point of this,” his mentor sighed.
“Why? What’s wrong with this one?”
“Look at him.” Roy Kim gripped his pupil’s arm and pressed him close to the bars. “Look at his hands.”
“I’ve killed lots of boys who were missing fingers,” he said, “the arena was full them.” Counting on impulse, he saw that this particular boy was down to five digits between both hands and none of these were thumbs. He eased Roy Kim’s fingers from about his arm and then took a step back to regard his mentor. “You told me to pick and I did. I’m done playing this game.”
“This boy is a shell,” Roy Kim said, “He wants to die.”
“Then I’ll help him along.”
“No,” he said, “that would be mercy and it’s not your place to show mercy. You are not God. You’re not the Luminary. Mercy is for them to decide. You are just a tool through which their mercy might be carried out. You kill. Do you understand? You don’t pick fights. You don’t sympathize. You don’t give them what they want. You just kill. And that’s what I want you to do tonight. But if it’s that too difficult a task for you, I can always find another arena boy to train. ”
The boy swallowed hard and stared at his feet. His throat filled with fire and his fingers twitched until they’d curled like dead spider legs retracting toward the palm with each jerk until he’d made two fists. Useless fists. When he’d been a fledgling in the arena, his mentors had told him that humiliation was a greater teacher than failure and this became the basis of their curriculum. He had survived in the end and he supposed they were right. Roy Kim, however, rarely resorted to such tactics and the infrequency with which they had been employed acted like a whetstone, sharpening the words so that they could peel the boy’s flesh in just a few short stabs. For a moment he was naked, an equal to the condemned in their cells. In that moment, he hated his mentor. Everything was a lesson. Everything was a test. The boy couldn’t even cut his meat without black eyes on him, watching and sizing up the motion of his wrist. Lesson, lesson, lesson was exhausting on the best of days and just then, in the dungeon, it was excruciating.
And what was the lesson? This wasn’t the first time Roy Kim had spoken harshly to him, but it was the first time he’d been so blatantly spiteful, and the first time there had been an audience. Perhaps that was the lesson. A reminder that from now on there would be no privacy. There would be eyes looming over every failure and reprimand. It was the arena all over again, but worse, because now there were rules.
“There won’t be any other boys,” he said and met his mentor’s gaze. “I’m the only one. It has to be me.”
Roy Kim’s brow pursed a moment and he nodded. “Pick someone.” It was a quiet command, almost a plea.
The boy walked back to the cell with two women inside. He kept his face, working his jaw, as he pointed to the crying girl. No one spoke and yet the echoes of the dungeon, the trapped screams now part of the shoddy mortar walls, deafened him. Roy Kim produced a master key from his pocket and entered the cell. He grabbed the girl’s arms and pulled her from her cellmate’s clinging arms, pulled her from the threadbare blanket. She screamed and writhed, dropping down to her knees, going limp.
“I’m pregnant!” She cried. Roy Kim didn’t seem to hear. He gripped her wrists and dragged her free of the cell, laid her at the boy’s feet, then went back and locked the door. The boy stood there, head throbbing under the uneven rhythm of her terror, a sort of horrid mixture of panting, wheezing, gulping, and choking.
“Please,” she said, “please. It was a small crime. A small fee. My husband is going to pay it.” Her arms wrapped lovingly about his ankles and she buried her face to his boots, crying on them, wetting the leather. “He’s coming tomorrow. I’ll be a free woman tomorrow. Please.”
“Is that true?” The boy looked to his mentor.
“It is! I swear it,” the woman bawled.
“People will say anything. You can never allow yourself to believe it.”
My first packet for this semester was due yesterday. So far I've read six novels and am working on two more at the moment. Writing has come slowly lately and this segment was hard fought for! For an example of my critical writing check out the
Detangled Writers entry.
