degradation: the hacking off of the heads, the shoving and kicking and the
heaving of the twisted torsos into a tangled heap at the side of the road,
fodder for the birds and strange beasts, or perhaps worse, any human carrion
that might happen by.
That she had been spared offered no comfort. She knew precisely why she had not
been subjected to physical abuse and assault. She saw again, in her mind, the
mad eyes of the man the others called Scale as he stared at her in hideous
appreciation, literally licking his lips, one hand slowly and obscenely rubbing
his crotch. She had surrendered to an engulfing wave of blind panic that
threatened her sanity.
Yet even then she’d still had the psychic strength to pull herself away from the
black abyss on the edge of which, for a microsecond, she teetered. The mental
discipline that had been her mother’s strongest bequest came to her aid just
when she most needed it. She had divided off her terror and revulsion, forced an
almost alien calm to take their place. “Strive for life” her mother had dinned
into her at an age when she had not even known what the words meant, and Sonja
Wroth had never stopped repeating that blessed motto. It had become a part of
Krysty’s psyche.
As now, she thought. Uncle Tyas, old Peter and the rest of them were dead. The
fantastic dream they had been pursuing had died with them. Only she was left,
faced with a lingering horror—a weary death in life, here in this plague pit of
slavery and torment and monstrous pain.
Calm. She must become calm, must strive for a measure of tranquility. Only when
she was calm, even if only for a few seconds, was she fully in command, mistress
of herself. Of her body. Of, most important of all, her mind.
She knew, now that she was at last alone with a single opponent, that she had a
chance, slim as it might be. She could escape from her bonds; she could destroy
the man called Scale. And after that there was the means here, in this huge
storehouse converted into an armory, for her to explode out of the building,
guns blazing, if that was the way she wanted it. And on reflection, maybe it
was: maybe she should exact a devastating revenge upon these animals.
Krysty felt her blood weeping out of her, felt the warm flow of it between her
legs, and this heartened her. It signified an untapped energy of vast potency.
Slowly, warily, she swiveled her head to peer across the huge room. This part of
it had been transformed into crude living quarters. The wide double bed she was
lying on—in fact an old bed frame with a filthy, torn mattress covered by the
blanket—filled the angle of one corner. There was a table nearby littered with
candle stubs and loose rounds of ammunition. There were a few broken-backed
chairs. Opposite her was a grimy window through which nothing could be seen,
then a wide planked door, now closed, then another window as filthy as the
first. The ceiling was high, high above her. It was dark up there.
Arranged around the walls, jammed down over angled hooks, was a grisly
assortment of heads, male and female, hundreds of them, young and old, some
fairly fresh, others in the final stages of decay. Sightless eyes gazed vacantly
upward at nothing.
The heads of those slaughtered yesterday had not yet been trophied. Krysty did
not know where they had been stored, and did not want to know. Their spirits had
departed. In her mind she had said prayers for them to the Earth Mother,
although Uncle Tyas had not believed in any gods at all, only science. Gods,
he’d said, were capricious, whereas science was fixed and immutable. To the old
argument that it was science that had virtually wiped out the world a century
ago, he had testily pointed out that it was not science at all but people.
People misusing science, using it for their own ends, to further their own
greedy or stupid or insane ambitions. Krysty was with him in that, at least.