The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART EIGHTEEN

The level of naked barbarity implicit in what he was looking at threatened to make Harqwenne violently ill.

It was wrong, no matter the cause demanding of such actions, no matter how it was justified. It was callously unjust. It had about it the taint of evil. It was wrong.

Abbot-Commander Qazeem Nei'Wrenh and his Honor Guard had led The Scribe and Forynnuhr past the Priory's circular Cloister and then the Sacristy and Vestry, further along a corkscrewing path that had taken them past the Parlor and Scriptorium, and finally in through a set of bolted, metal security doors to a book-littered antechamber presaging the medical pharmacy and surgical theater. The brief journey had been gloomy and mostly silent, with Qazeem occasionally stopping to answer brief questions from the few other Ashen Brood monks and warriors whom they encountered.

"This is the Bleeding Lodge," Qazeem had solemnly announced as they'd stepped past the threshold. "This is where we leave civility behind."

It was the smell that hit them first. It was sickly and feverish, an unsettling odor like that of old campfires, human sweat, slowly rotting meat and cold brine. Then their eyes slowly adapted to the dull, pallid light and as the room's details revealed themselves, the view set Harqwenne's teeth on edge.

The thing hanging suspended by chains, its arms in shackles from a central hook in the ceiling and its legs shackled spread apart, the chains emanating from a forked stirrup set into the floor, was startlingly nude and covered in purplish bruises, ragged and shallow rip-like cuts and a collection of still-wet lash welts. It had once been a man, if any clue to its identity was to be made from what remained of its abused sex organs, and that man was easily twice the size of any normal man The Scribe had yet encountered. The musculature was exaggerated and apish, the arms too long, the neck too bullish, the chest to deep and containing too many ribs, and the sloping shoulders set in a way indicating the skeleton was still evolving from simian ancestry. Yet, too, there was a reptilian leatheriness, a scaly toughness, to the thing's exposed orange and amber-hued flesh and in the way the long-fingered hands ended in bony, black talons. And its goblin-like face with its slanted eyes, short protruding muzzle and sharkish mouth, was set upon a skull that was a cross between the feline and the saurian. An unruly mane of wavy coppery hair, dirty and matted, cascaded from off the sloping scalp behind its low, thick brow.

It was only semi-conscious. Its head lolled, chin resting on its clavicle, and bloody drool dripped from its mouth. It was breathing in deep, shuddering draughts that hinted at the tremendous pain it had recently experienced.

A collection of multi-colored cable bundles were attached to his flesh via adhesive contact-pads at his neck, shoulders, abdomen and each thick, muscular thigh. The cable bundles ran across the floor to a series of ports in the chassis of a large computer CPU. A thin, sallow-skinned man with graying hair worked seated at a computer desk-console and keyboard where the display monitor showed graphical telemetry imagery of the prisoner's metabolic and bio-chemical vitals.

Propped up beside the computer desk-console was an elongated, three-pronged metal lance, a high-tech trident, with a rubberized handle-grip into which was set a series of lighted buttons. There was a trace of fresh blood glistening on the tapered points of the trident's prongs.

It didn't take much in the way of imagination to guess to what end that device was used.

Harqwenne's heart sank. How much of what he saw was he now expected to accept as normal? He suspected that turning a blind eye to circumstances such as these would leave him blind. He knew that the man he once was would not willingly have accepted any role in such a tableau. He grimaced as he heard a faint voice from the back of his mind, his own voice, speaking to him: