BLOOD ONTO THE CLOSET WALL
1560 4D
Tyll learned murder in his ninth year. He’d just completed a long stretch of indolence fulfilling the occupation of his breeding: bedding two women who ran one of the smaller corps. Tall, powerful, pale-orange in complexion, fine blond hair twisted into a skein, he caught the eyes of a detachment of lightning-quick Argazindari Coll fighters who were bored with andro women and looking for an edge of danger in their sexual assaults.
They obtained the women’s permission to bid for him. He stood naked in the inspection room alone.
“Walk back and forth,” a rasping voice directed.
He did.
“Can you walk without the limp?”
He shook his head.
“Can you sing polyphony?”
He gave them a tenor-and-baritone duet from an Archive play he remembered from the vat as Ayeedah.
“Not bad.”
A murmur of several harsh voices, then, “His body’s good, but we’ll want a discount for the leg.” They haggled with the women’s representative for a few minutes. “Get dressed and join us outside.”
He donned his coverall, stepped from the inspection room. Seven short men with rich brown skins and bulging scars twisting around their necks looked up at him. Curious, he studied the interlaced markings. The man in front growled, “Greetings, boy. Follow me. You’re going to learn the Argaz way.”
They took him through a deserted understreet to a stained metal door, and said, smiles on their wide faces, “Come on in.”
Wondering, he entered a large utility room, where water and light and power conduits ran through from floor to ceiling, sprouting branches that splayed off through wall openings. One wall was stained brown between a pair of vertical pipes; the closet stank of urine.
Andros were bred to lack significant aggressive responses to attack, especially attack by humans. The Argazindari stripped him naked, tied his wrists and ankles with threadwire to the two pipes, gagged him, and, while he struggled, climbed onto him and raped him twice each. “Sing!” they shouted. He clamped his jaw.
The wire sliced through his skin; he bled. Rage and fear boiled in him; a part of him examined the new feelings with wonder, while the walls closed tighter and tighter like a fist around him, and the world reddened with each raking jolt in his gut.
As the last man finished his second time, and the first returned for his third ride, Tyll found a crack in one of the pipes. As the Argaz fighter slung his legs around Tyll‘s thighs, Tyll broke the left pipe with one huge arm, twisted it free, and while water gushed into the closet, smashed the faces of the man on his back and three others who came to help him.
His legs and his other arm were still caught. He swung back and forth, bleeding, like a hinge on a door, above the bodies lying on the slippery stone.
“Arlen will feed your parts to the bugs,” one of the remaining men hissed, “after we’re finished making pieces of you.”
His only answer was a gasp for breath.
The three remaining Argazindari leaped at him in one coordinated lunge, knives aimed at his throat, his balls, and his heart. Moving at speed he didn’t know he had, he lofted his good leg free of the broken pipe’s remaining stump, kicked himself away from the wall in a semicircle, and erased two of the attackers with one swing of his improvised club.
He stopped the third man’s knife as its tip touched his skin, snatched it free, and chopped through the folds of the Argaz neck scars three times, before the attacker could raise either hand to stop him. The man’s carotid spurted blood onto the closet wall, to run down and color the flood of water spilling out into the understreet.
Tyll finally worked his way free. Limping, naked, bleeding violet-red from anus, wrists and ankles, he escaped into the City maze. An alarm went up, corpos and militia hunted him; he broke into one of the City‘s towering, stench-filled air shafts, to climb two thousand steps out to the surface. He collapsed in windswept grass under the shadow of the shaft‘s stone dome, under the open pre-dawn sky, and slept.
