The Veil Page 35

  I gritted my teeth and then yanked as hard as I could on the chain. The guard stumbled back a few steps and turned, his copper face narrowing in irritation. Merda, I’m still far too weak. He walked over to me and excruciating pain flared along my jaw, as his metal sabaton struck against my chin.

  “I would advise against doing that again.”

  My head lolled to the side as I skated close to unconsciousness. Through blurry vision, I saw that I was being dragged towards a set of narrow, winding stone stairs. I was vaguely aware of pain in my head and ribs as I was pulled up the steps like some kind of toy on a string. They unlocked a door at the top and then hauled me onto a stone bridge with another iron door at the end and a sheer drop at either side. The guard who had been dragging me along let go of the chain and then knelt down close to me. It was then I saw that his ear had a long bloody wound running along it, where it had been surgically reattached.

  “Time to clean you up, whore,” he said between gritted teeth.

  His boot smashed into my side and I winced with pain as he flipped me right over the edge of the bridge. I flailed about in the darkness, producing a weak scream as gravity snatched me down hundreds of feet. My body slammed into ice-cold water and I gasped, taking foul-tasting liquid into my mouth and nose. I tumbled through the coldness, over and over, until my back bumped against the bottom. Above me, I could hear the heavy grinding sound of stone on stone.

  It took my weakened body a few seconds to get its bearings and then my instincts kicked in. I coiled my legs against the ground and pushed up with my bare feet, knifing through the water towards the surface. Except when I got to the top, I realised with horror that there was no surface to be found. I felt around for an opening, pressing upwards with my palms, but all I felt was hard stone. They’ve sealed me in!

  I tried not to panic as I spun around in the freezing water, searching. It was dark as night, but I could just about make out a pane of glass fifty yards or so yards away. I kicked out, moving as fast as my poisoned, broken body would allow. I tore through the water until I reached the window, and on the other side I saw three more of the guards, watching me with their arms folded across their chests. I shoved my hands against the glass as hard as I could. The window didn’t even budge. Coiling my hands into fists, I slammed them against the pane, over and over and over again, until the glass was smeared with my own blood. But still it didn’t budge.

  Not like this! Not like this!

  I screamed at the guards, the muffled sound escaping in a stream of bubbles. The evil spectators did nothing except allow smiles to appear on their hideous faces. My diaphragm started to spasm as I reached the last sliver of breath. My vision wavered and the punches weakened as the last of my fight went out of me. My head fell forward and I pressed my hand against the glass one last time as the darkness seeped in.

  Something sucked me forward and I hit solid ground hard, feeling a torrent of water pour over me. I gasped like a goldfish outside a broken bowl, my abused body shivering furiously as the fingers of one hand touched damp tiles. The water level came up to my cheeks, but receded fast as it drained away. My body heaved and I turned over onto my front, vomiting a stream of dark water that splashed against the floor. A deep sob escaped my throat.

  It was then that a comforting hand stroked the back of my shaved head. It was so tender and caring, it made me cry even harder. I could feel a face come close to mine – hovering just out of view – and smelled sulfur.

  “Don’t give up yet, sweetheart. I hold out such hope for you.”

  The coarse female voice was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. The hand gave my head one final stroke and then I felt the figure move away from me. When she spoke again, it was in Th’ail and to the guards. “She is a survivor after all. Pitguards, prepare her for this evening’s event, along with the other two.”

  “Akhur drek er aghul,” said one of them. We live to serve.

  Three sets of gauntleted hands scooped me off the wet floor and dragged me dripping and heaving out of the room. Before consciousness left me, I saw a flaming figure depart through an adjacent archway, their body flickering and glowing as if they were the embodiment of fire.

  *

  For the next few hours I endured the preparation for whatever I was going to be forced to do in the evening. First the three guards carried my drenched body to an adjacent room, and dumped me on a metal table filled with drainage holes. Several naked Succubi entered the room a moment later – their bodies starved from energy enough that they had reverted to leather skin and hollow eyes. Under the watchful gaze of the Pitguards, they removed my sodden clothes – which I was too defeated to care about – and scrubbed my body with harsh sponges that irritated my wounds and then threw buckets of – mercifully – warm water over me, to wash away the remaining blood.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered one of them as she knelt down to scrub my arm.

  I didn’t have the energy to reply.

  Still barely conscious, I was dumped onto a stretcher and wheeled by the Pitguards through a hallway lined with yellowing brickwork and small patches of rust coloured sand – the wheels of the stretcher grinding as it stuck to their uneven surfaces. As we moved down the hallway, we approached another cot being wheeled in the opposite direction. I turned my head as we passed and my stomach twisted as I saw the familiar face, almost unrecognizable from the swollen bruises and map of cuts that marred it. The hair was what confirmed the person to me – a shock of silver, marked with red patches from a number of terrible wounds.

  “Grey!” I screamed – my voice actually connecting for the first time – and tried to reach out to him. The Pitguard moving my unconscious friend gave a smirk and then pushed the stretcher faster, until they were both out of sight. A second later a fist slammed into my mouth and I felt blood seep over my lips.

  “Taken are not permitted to speak with one another unless we allow it. Do you hear me, bitch?”

  I said something quietly, my words garbled by the mouthful of blood. The guard moved to the side of the stretcher and stooped down slightly.

  “Careful, she’s a biter. She took Garamore’s ear.”

  “Garamore is an idiot.” The guard looked down at me. “Now then, what did you say?”

  I opened my mouth – no doubt revealing bloodstained teeth – and gave a smile. I waited until the guard stooped a little closer and then spat the blood all over his face.

  “I said I am going to kill you all.”

  The punch that knocked me into unconsciousness was as hard and painful as I expected, but most of all, it was worth it.

  I woke up strapped to a dentist-style chair in the corner of the sinister operating theatre. Once again the creepy surgeon was looming over me, his bottle cap glasses exaggerating his seeping eyes. I tried to flinch away from him, but the straps kept me fixed in place. He was moving around me, carefully injecting small quantities of a blue substance into various points on my hands and neck, each prick stinging like a wasp. The surgeon glanced up and saw that I was awake. He withdrew the needle, pushing up his glasses and rubbing at the bridge of his nose with the back of a hand.

  “Welcome back,” he said with a tooth-filled grin. He leaned in close and pressed his thumbs against my cheeks as he used his index fingers to widen my eyelids and check my eyes. His foul breath poured into my mouth and it was hard not to retch. “It looks like you’re recovering well from the poison,” he said. “I am quite surprised and impressed, I must say. When you were brought to me, you were very close to death.” He removed his hands from my face and stood back upright. “You still have a fever of course, but that is a small price to pay considering your injuries. You also have a nasty haemorrhage in your left eye, but nothing serious.”

  “What are you injecting me with?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.

  He raised the needle up. “This? Only what you have already taken a thousand times. I believe the informal term for them is ‘boosters’.” He gave another sinister
smile. “Well they aren’t quite the same, and the Fae subjects are not as willing to be blood donors, but it’s as close as we can get in a place like this. What I have given you should help your body clear up that fever over the next few hours, so we can get you ready.”

  “Ready for what? Where am I?”

  It was then that I noticed the five Pitguards standing at the edges of the operating room, watching me with their white-veined, black eyes. One of them had removed some kind of baton from his belt and was walking towards us. Without turning, the surgeon raised a hand. “That won’t be necessary, thank you.” The guard stopped, giving me a final glare, and then retreated back to the edge of the room. “They don’t appreciate the Taken talking without permission, so it would be best if you kept your mouth closed from now on.”

  Taken. That’s the second time I’ve been called that. Is that what the Umbra call those they have kidnapped? Is that what I am now, a prisoner of war? A Taken? For some reason the thought of becoming a statistic, one of the millions that fell through the cracks and disappeared into the hands of the enemy – never to be heard of again – was almost as scary to me as the Sorrow itself had been. I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself.

  The surgeon leaned in and continued his work, pressing down imposingly on my body and injecting me, and I was thankful that at some point during my time spent out cold, my naked body had been dried and covered with a dark sheet. “There,” he said, standing back. “That should handle the recovery side of things.” He raised a finger. “However, there is still the question of your heritage. You aren’t simply a Chosen that is for sure. So I just need to take a few extra samples…for my research.”

  My eyes went wide as he picked up his scalpel and came close. I shook my head as much as the binds would allow. “No…no, please. No more.”

  “Hush now, girl. Hush.” He reached out to a metal trolley at the side with him, filled with all manner of terrifying implements. The leather strap he picked up had a metal ringed hole in the centre. “Open your mouth wide please.”

  I clamped my mouth shut tight.

  The surgeon gave an irritated sigh. “Now, either you can make this easier and allow me to place this jaw positioner in your mouth,” he turned in his seat and gestured out at the silent guards. “Or I can allow one of the Pitguards to open it for me. I can’t say that you’ll be able to close it again afterwards.” He shrugged. “Up to you, dear.”

  My chest rose and fell rapidly as fear coiled through my chest. Fighting back the tears, I opened my mouth gently and the surgeon placed his fingers on my bottom teeth and pulled down hard enough to make my jaw click. He forced the metal ring of the positioner into my mouth and then tied the straps around the back of my head. The ring sat underneath both sets of teeth, preventing me from bringing them together, no matter how hard I tried to bite down. The surgeon leaned forward and put his fingers on the metal ring, pressing outwards until the hole expanded, winching my jaw open wide. As he got the positioner to where he wanted it, he brought his mouth close to my ear.

  “I need you not to draw the Pitguard’s attention, or we are both in trouble. What I am about to do is going to hurt, but it is also to help you.”

  He pulled back and I frowned back at him, as he picked up the scalpel once more. As he leaned close to me once again, I closed my eyes, tears streaming from between them. My teeth bit down so hard against the metal hole of the jaw positioner that had it been anything other than adamantine, I would have ground it to filaments. In my mind, all I could imagine was the surgeon using the blade to carve out my tongue, so that he could display it among all of his other psychotic trophies. So when I felt him slice a long grove on the inside of my cheek, the pain was nowhere near as overwhelming as the relief.

  He took a swab from a box on the trolley and dabbed it in the blood, before placing the sample into a bowl. I watched as he lowered his hand again into the swab box, but instead of picking up another swab, closed his hand around a small and dark object he’d hidden inside the box. He leaned forward, and as his gaze caught with mine, I saw that his eyes were flecked with nervousness. He’s taking a risk. What is he doing?

  Excruciating agony flared up in the side of my face as the surgeon slid whatever was in his hand into the hole he had carved in my cheek. Remembering what he’d said, I didn’t make a sound, but I couldn’t stop my body from convulsing from the pain, my bare feet jigging up and down on the cold floor.

  “What are you doing, Physicker Agorias?” demanded the Pitguard who had been up for giving me a beating.

  The Physicker gave a nervous chuckle. “I am afraid I was a bit enthusiastic with my sample taking. I will need to stitch her cheek. I shan’t be a moment.”

  “Hurry. We have orders to prepare her.”

  The Physicker waved a dismissive hand. “I know, I know, but don’t rush me. Do you wish to find her dead in her catacomb cell from blood loss?

  The Pitguard frowned, but didn’t say any more. Physicker Agorias picked up a small needle attached to a spool of dark thread and then leaned close once more. I closed my eyes as he started to stich the wound together, feeling the sharp stab of the foreign object as it pressed against the wall of my cheek.

  Once he was finished he set the thread back down and unstrapped the jaw positioner. I opened and closed my mouth, feeling a dull ache in my jaw.

  “Listen to me,” he whispered so quietly it was barely audible. “Once you get out of your cell, go up the catacomb steps and through two doors. Go left twice and then forward. You will no doubt hear crowds and see a set of large doors, but do not go through them. Take the small door right next to it. That is the one you need. You won’t have time to save anyone else. Just go.”

  “Why are you helping me?” I whispered.

  “Don’t think for a moment you are in some way special. You are simply one of the lucky ones. Some of us Umbra do what we can, when we can.” He turned to face the Pitguards. “There, all done. You can take her now.”

  “About time,” growled one of the other Pitguards.

  A moment later I was seized by hands and shackled with chains once more. Then I was dragged, stumbling from the room by the guards. I turned to look back at Physicker Agorias, but he was staring down at his tools, slowly nodding to himself.

  *

  My legs were weak and I kept collapsing to my knees as I was shoved down dozens of dank corridors, which earned me harsh cuffs to the side of my head from my captors. Eventually the Pitguards realised that beating me senseless wasn’t going to help me stay upright, so two off them hooked their arms under mine and dragged me instead. I could feel the sharp digging of the lock pick inside my cheek, but I didn’t dare try and reposition it with my tongue, for fear of being spotted.

  The final stop on the horrible journey through the godforsaken place I’d been taken to was reached by taking an elevator – decorated with iron flourishes and operated by a crank, taking us down into the depths of the prison. After what felt like an eternity, I was hoisted out into a room lit dimly by candles fixed to freestanding candelabras. It took me a moment to wrap my head around the place, but when I did, I realised we were in some kind of circular, tailoring room. Reams of multi-coloured material hung from spools fixed to the ceiling, pots of dye released nauseating aromas from their positions on an old table, and flat irons and shears stood on boards in front of a large fireplace. The most unique aspect of the room were the countless clothes that hung from retractable poles, that protruded from dozens of tall, rectangle holes formed in the curved walls.

  In the middle of all the madness was a Bloodseeker. He was dressed like a Victorian gentleman - complete with a three-piece suit and a cravat – his dark hair cropped short and oiled back across his narrow head. He nodded at the Pitguards when we emerged from the elevator and slowly unwound from the stool he’d been sitting on.

  “I have everything ready, per specifications.”

  The Bloodseeker walked over to the rightmost part of the room
and pulled a chain hanging from the ceiling. Instantly the walls began to revolve, making cranking sounds as they moved. He pulled the chain again, bringing the walls to a grinding halt, and pulling out the pole-arm of the nearest recess. Hanging from it was what looked like a Hasea Uniform. The Vampire draped it over his arm and then walked over to the Pitguards, handing it over to the nearest.

  “Here it is.”

  The Pitguard nodded his thanks and I flinched as the other guards pulled sharp scimitar style weapons as dark as night from their belts. They formed a cross shape around me and pointed them out, the glinting tips only a few inches from my neck.

  The Pitguard with the clothes produced a small key. “I am going to unlock your chains now, Taken. If you so much as think about trying to escape, we will cut you to pieces and throw your remains into Solomon’s fire.” He nodded first to the Bloodseeker and then his roaring fireplace. “Do you understand me?”

  I could see from his expression that the Pitguard was far from joking, and I wasn’t in any state to be trying to run for my life…yet.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good.”

  The Pitguard crouched down and undid my feet shackles, followed by the ones binding my wrists. I was rubbing at the sore patches of skin when he dumped the clothes into my hands. “Put these on,” he grunted.

  With five pairs of eyes watching me intently –and another pair from afar, with the disinterest of someone used to the spectacle – I had to strip off the sheet and allow my self to be completely exposed once more. I tried to cover myself with my arms and received a harsh blow to the side of my head as a result.

  “We aren’t interested in your human body, whore. Now hurry up.”

  Trembling, I put on the clothes. As I changed, I realised that they weren’t a Hasea uniform, but rather a bastardisation of it. The Alliance emblem had been replicated, but turned upside down and the Latin words underneath translated to Chosen we fall, united we crumble. On the back, the word Huntmaster had been written and then slashed out with a red line, and replaced below with the word Taken. And when I put on the jacket, the course lining scraped against my skin, similar to how I imagined a hairshirt would feel. It didn’t cause serious pain, but enough discomfort to remind me where and what I was. The clothes weren’t a uniform so much as they were a display of humiliation.