14. N #3
“As someone who kept slaves, Triana, you should understand that is your state … in fact, if not in law. You are a slave. My slave. I’ve never had one before, and given how you’ve treated yours … how you bragged about treating yours to Nora … you should understand the rough justice.”
He departed, closing the heavy door after him. The lock snapped back into place.
She wasn’t sure how long he left her there, or whether she dozed, but the key turning in the lock roused her.
She looked up, saw the Overseer had the control wand.
She opened her mouth to beg him not to use it, but the lassitude overcame her.
Her eyes shut of their own accord, and she descended into hell.
When she awoke, she was facedown on the stone floor, with a knee pressed into her back. She tried to struggle.
“Enough of that, girl,” she heard Vaylan say. “You go along, we’ll get along. Otherwise, I have an elf with a truncheon and an attitude, who will be more than happy to beat you into the next eight-day. Understand? Hold still, now.”
Triana dipped her head, hoping the gesture showed.
She felt the sleeping-collar loosen and be removed, leaving the other intact around her next.
The elves quickly put the arm shackles on and raised her to her feet.
One slid a bag over her head. They did nothing to keep her from stumbling or knocking into corners and walls as they shoved her down corridors for an interminable length of time.
It got so bad that she was beginning to wonder if there was a single scrap of her skin that was unbruised.
They intervened only to keep her from falling, until they stopped descending, followed by the opening of a heavy door, and a clanging of barred doors.
One looped the truncheon around her upper arm, putting tension on it that kept her compliant, while the other removed the shackles.
A final shove sent her staggering into an open space, and she heard the heavy barred door slam behind her.
She waited for several heartbeats, hearing nothing in the room, but sensing a large, heat-radiating presence, before pulling the bag off her head to see just where she’d been put now.
She took a quick glance around, blinking against the brightness of the room.
She stood in some sort of cage or cell, perhaps twenty paces across, with bronze bars wider than her thumb.
The room seemed to be one of a series of these large metal cells, with a broad aisle down the center.
Some kind of stable? For dragons? She’d never seen one, but the size felt a bit right based on descriptions.
Her attention centered on something she at first took for a house-sized boulder.
It seemed less round than oblong, like a loaf of uncut bread (and that thought just made her stomach growl and protest), greenish-gray above and shifting to a light gray with striations and tiny seams that glittered.
The whole surface looked smooth and pearlescent, except where marred by five metal rods driven into it at intervals along the top, and set in a rough circle.
She could see the cracks in the outer surface where they had been driven in, and some kind of excrescence around the bases of the rods.
She looked at it for a long moment, trying to work out what it was, when it moved.
She jumped back, letting out a startled oath as it shifted a bit and turned.
She heard a harsh laugh behind her and turned.
The Overseer stood on the far side of the bars, well out of her reach, backed by a pair of nervous guards.
She looked from them, to the bars, and back.
They had those bars between them and it, and they were still nervous.
She swallowed involuntarily. Where had they put her?
The Overseer grinned then, a feral smile.
He held what looked like an oversized control rod dangling negligently from his left hand.
“Welcome to the Beast Cage. Your predecessor lasted three eight-days. We washed what was left of him down the drain yesterday morning because the Beast didn’t eat him.”
He pointed with his control rod to a metal drain set to one side of the cage.
She had seen similar arrangements for animal cages for the fighting beasts on her world.
Water under pressure, delivered through some kind of hose to wash down the floor and sluice the waste down a drain.
She glanced up, and saw a pipe with a simple pull tap and rope to pour water. An animal cage. With a rock.
“What do I do?” she asked, careful to not look at it.
He smiled broadly. “You shovel shit.” He made a gesture, and a guard came forward to slide a square, flat shovel into the cage, well out of her reach.
“Not many animals left in the city, but we get all the used straw and waste. It comes down that chute there … don’t worry about trying to climb up and out it … it’s been tried. Repeatedly. You get hung up in the spinning gears that keep the manure moving.
It’s not even worth trying to get the bodies out, so we just let them rot, and they wind up back here once they fall apart enough. There is still part of one up there from several eight-days or so ago. At some point what’s left will put in an appearance.”
The Overseer lifted his index finger and made a swirling gesture before he pointed to a wooden hopper under the chute.
“That’s where the manure falls. You take that shovel and spread it around near where It is. It eats it or something. We don’t know. When It’s moved on, you take the gray ash it leaves behind, and put it in this box here.”
He pointed to a square wooden box just wide enough for the shovel blade to fit in.
“Fill that box, get a ration. The more it moves the more manure you spread, the more ash you make, the more you eat. Simple enough that even you can understand it.”
“Where do I …?” she stopped, hating the uncertain tone in her voice. This Overseer, this minion, was not fit to clean her stables … and she sounded like a child wheedling sweets.
“Eat? Sleep?” He finished the question for her.
She nodded.
“A cot will be brought to you. One cot, one pallet, and one blanket. The Beast squashed the last cot and ate it and the blanket. Play nice, and perhaps a change of clothes. You wash under that sluice there. Pull the rope down, to start the flow, let go to stop. Water goes down the drain.
Wash your waste away the same way. Or spread it for the Beast. Your choice.”
“I … I sleep in here?” she asked.
“Until it squashes you. It doesn’t seem to like us much, and it takes it out on whomever is dumb enough, or criminal enough, to get put in here.”
She looked at him, appalled. He raised a hand before she could say anything else.
“Don’t even think about asking for mercy. By the time you land here, those doors are closed. You don’t leave this cage, except via the sluice.”
She exhaled. “I was going to ask how I am supposed to make it move.”
“Of course,” he replied skeptically. He held up the control rod, easily twice the size of the others she had seen, and a good more durable looking.
It looked to be made of bronze, was as wide as her thumb, and nearly two feet long, with one end discolored, as though it had been scorched or burned.
She had the metal image of plunging the discolored end into his eye.
The creature shifted behind her with a sound like a giant rock being dragged over gravel.
The Overseer must have seen something in her expression.
He stepped further back, his smile gone.
“You use that to make it move. There’s a different color on each of the rods. That corresponds to the colored button on the rod. Push that color and the Beast moves away from that direction. You need to use the rod to keep it moving to burn the waste on the floor and get fed,
but using the rod on it hurts it and makes it mad.”
He did smile, then, like a gladiator about to take out a helpless opponent.
“You’ll note there is a certain fine line you need to walk, which is why we tend to go through Beast-keepers at a pretty fair clip.”
He grinned broadly at something he saw in her expression.
“You also need to fully comprehend what I just said, because I’m not repeating myself.”
He spat on the floor inside the cage. “The cot will get here when it gets here. If it isn’t here when you want to sleep, then sleep on the floor. No ration until you fill the ash box. And don’t forget to shovel shit in front of it for it to eat.”
He slid the control rod across the floor and through the bars, also well out of her reach.
He laughed as she scrambled after it, then turned on his heel.
A door opened in the wall in front of him and at the end of the aisle between the two rows of large animal cages.
The Overseer and his helpers went through.
It closed behind them with a dull, heavy thud.
Rod dangling from her hand, she watched the Beast without moving.
She became acutely aware she was holding what the Overseer said hurt it …
and its likely response sooner or later would be to try and eliminate what hurt it.
She elected to go for “later.” She raised her palm towards it to show she was friendly, and slowly, very slowly kneeled down and placed the control rod on the floor.
She made a “no” gesture, spreading her palms and backed away from it.
After a moment of shifting in place, it settled, and she backed up until she felt the bars of the exit against her spine and shoulder. Much much too close together for her to squeeze through. Only then did she make a closer survey of the room.
It was round, completely round. I suppose that makes sense.
You wouldn’t want that thing to get stuck in a corner only to have it get enraged when you tried to guide it out.
Or provide a place for a person to try and squeeze where it can’t squash you.
The barred wall had a notch nearest the exit, one just big enough to hold a cot; the floor was raised about a step and a half there.
So … I guess that keeps the Beast from eating you while you sleep?
Or something. She really couldn’t see that the thing had a front or a back, but its shifting and moving suggested that right now that the thing was more or less pointing into a neat pile of straw mixed with manure, and that behind it was a longish trail of what looked like coarse ashes.
And it wasn’t moving towards the manure.