Burn Bright

The air grew cooler, and still. Above her, carved wood ceiling struts rose into peaks. The Ripers carried her along the corridor and finally, after many turns, into another chamber similar to the Circle room. In this one the marble-arched recesses in the rock contained stacked iron beds, not altars. Grotesques and crude crosses decorated the front edges of each arch and a mural of entwined, naked bodies ran in a fringe above them.

She shut her eyes from them but thick, smoking incense assaulted her senses.

When they laid her on a hard slab, she opened her eyes again to a dome-shaped ceiling lit by wall candles and depicting an old mural of a lamb in bloody sacrifice. Her heat beat painfully in her chest. The walls were bare rock, which seemed to press inward on her. The air was so cold she was sure she was deep inside the mountain.

Brand released her grip and began to feel her way over Retra’s body.

Retra tried to wrestle free but several sets of hands held her fast.

‘Brand? Should you?’

Retra couldn’t see which of the Ripers questioned Brand’s actions.

‘Hush,’ Brand hissed. ‘I sensed something wrong with this one when I saw her at the re-birthing.’

‘Is she a Peak?’

‘No. She is young enough,’ Brand replied. ‘Look at the freshness of her skin, the soft pout of her lips. No … it’s something else.’

‘Lenoir won’t like what you’re doing.’

‘Lenoir does not rule. We all rule,’ Brand insisted.

‘But Lenoir leads,’ objected the other.

Brand ignored them, reaching beneath Retra’s skirt, feeling the soft flesh of her stomach and thighs.

Retra’s mind flooded with panic to be touched in the way the warden had done when he came with his spying devices. Auditing, he’d called it.

Then Brand’s hand stopped. The Riper keened in a dreadful, high-pitched sound of triumph. She lifted Retra’s skirt above her waist.

The Ripers crowded around her naked limbs.

‘Brand?’

‘Brand, what ails?’

Their voices rained on Retra. She wanted to scream loudly enough to drown them out, but her Seal-disciplined vocal chords would not oblige her. Seals did not shout for help for themselves. Seals did not scream. Seals did not …

She heard a gargle and knew it to be her own weak protest. Tears stung the corners of her eyes, more for her own choking impotence than anything else.

‘I thought so,’ the scarred Riper-woman gasped. She fingered the obedience strip on Retra’s thigh. ‘She’s been hobbled.’

The Ripers stared down at it. She read shock on one face, disbelief on another, while another showed sly amusement as if party to something dirty and secretive.

Retra wanted to shrivel and die under their crass inspection of her body.

Then Brand’s face came closest of all to her, blotting the others from her vision. ‘That is why the Register does not trust you. You are hobbled.’

Retra wet her lips. ‘No.’ Her hoarse whisper echoed about the cavern.

They laughed at that, all of them; hissing noises that bounced off the walls, like excited catlings.

Brand silenced them with a turn of her head. ‘This one is mine,’ she said.

She drew an ivory-handled blade from inside her coat. ‘Hold her still,’ she hissed.

Strong, pitiless hands forced Retra’s shoulders down and twisted her arms wide. More of them held her feet.

Brand climbed onto the slab and sat astride Retra, her black eyes unemotional now as she lowered the blade.

The knife’s first sting on her tender skin dislodged something inside Retra’s mind. She grappled to put it back in its place but it crumbled away.

‘NO!’ This time she shouted and thrashed, railing against them with all her strength. Desperate.

But the Ripers’ weight held her fast.

No one cared for her protests, intent as they all were on the play of the knife.

It sliced into her. Two strokes, three … and then it stopped. Brand’s fingers probed the wound she’d made and tugged.

The obedience strip tore from her thigh in a spray of warm liquid.

Brand held the bloody sight aloft and gave a hoarse crow.

Faintness crept upon Retra. It called her towards a numb, white oblivion. But a voice snatched her from its release.

‘Brand! What barbaric thing is this?’

The Ripers melted away, leaving the scarred woman alone astride her.

‘Look, Lenoir. I am freeing her. She was monitored. Hobbled.’

‘You’ve cut her to do that? Hurt her. What about Enlightenment, Brand? Would that not have been a better way?’

‘Why would she deserve that?’ Brand traced bloody fingers along her face scars, leaving clotted trails.

‘Why wouldn’t she? She’s an innocent.’

Brand thrust the grisly strip at Lenoir. ‘Innocence is but another constraint. Ixion is not a place for innocence.’

‘Fool. You have torn her artery! Wounds like this need deep sleep to heal and she can no longer do this. Petite nuit is not enough. You risk her premature death. Ixion is not a place for that. You will be disciplined for your actions!’ The voice that projected so easily across distance now filled the chamber like a pouring of foundry lead, crushing whatever it fell upon.

Lenoir struck Brand with a gloved blow that sent the Guardian crashing to the floor.

His gaze fell to Retra and the searing heat of it seemed to cleanse her. ‘Graselle, take the girl and prepare her,’ he said.

Retra sensed another person at her side but her eyes remained with Lenoir. Beautiful, so beautiful … to see him this close almost took away her pain.

Or maybe the woman carrying the burning candle, who’d crept close to her at Lenoir’s bidding and put her hand hard on the wound, had done that …