Wichtig woke.
He lay sweating on cold stone, the pain in his foot dwarfed by the pain in his left hand. The room sounded strange and lopsided and he remembered Schnitter sawing his left ear off. Wichtig blinked and hot tears trickled from the corners of his eyes. He drew a deep, sobbing breath and was surprised to find his chest unconstrained. Testing his legs and arms, he found himself freed of bondage.
He sat up. Naked, he was unimaginably happy to see his best friend still nestled between his legs. Hearing the laboured wet intake of breath, he turned and saw Schnitter lying on the floor. Wichtig blinked, trying to fit the scattered pieces into something making sense.
Schnitter was everywhere. Her limbs—both arms, and what remained of her legs—were stacked neatly in a corner, blood pooling around them. Her wounds, where the limbs had been cut free, were expertly wrapped. The K?rperidentit?t’s throat had been opened and her vocal chords surgically removed. Some strange instrument held the wound in her throat open so she could breathe. It was strangely bloodless. He saw Schnitter’s jaw perched atop the table of knives and barbed hooks. Her tongue lay beside it.
He listened as she drew another wet breath through the yawning chasm of her opened throat. The wound looked somehow sexual, like a nightmare version of what lay between a woman’s legs. Wichtig shook the image away and stared into the gaping sockets where Schnitter’s beautiful brown eyes had been. Wrapped in bandages, she looked like a potato with a head.
“What the hells?” asked Wichtig.
Swinging his legs off the table, he stood with a whimper when the foot with the severed toe touched the floor. If he felt bad after his encounter with the albtraum, he felt a thousand times worse now. He felt dizzy from blood loss, hungrier than he could ever remember feeling.
Wichtig breathed deep and lifted his left hand to examine the damage.
No way around it, no changing reality no matter how much he wished he saw something different; the last two fingers were gone. The bandage wrapping his hand was soaked through with blood. The stain was a dark and evil looking brown.
I should change these bandages.
He couldn’t bear the thought of seeing his mutilated hand. And what if it started bleeding again and he lost consciousness? He already felt like he might collapse at any moment. If he passed out after removing the bandages, he might bleed to death.
No. This was not how Wichtig Lügner, the Greatest Swordsman in the World, died.
You’ve already died. Knifed in the gut by a little boy. Does it get any worse than that?
Summoning courage, Wichtig glanced down at his foot. It too was bandaged, the material stained through with brown blood.
You’re going to have to change these bandages eventually.
Sure, but not right now.
Wichtig reached up to scratch at an itch and caught himself lifting his damaged hand out of habit. None of this was real. It couldn’t be. How many Swordsmen had he killed without suffering a single scratch? When he and Bedeckt and Stehlen entered the Geborene church to steal Morgen, they battled the boy’s Mehrere bodyguard. Wichtig, surrounded on all sides by multiple copies of a single very skilled Swordswoman, walked away unscathed.
He stared at his hand, imagining the missing fingers were still there, willing them to be there.
You’re no Halluzin.
Again Schnitter’s optimized form drew his attention.
How?
She couldn’t have done that to herself, could she? Were her delusions so powerful? No. Someone must have bandaged her wounds to keep her alive. She would have bled to death otherwise. Now she’d take days to die. Maybe longer. Dehydration and starvation would be her end unless someone came along and either ended her suffering or found some way to feed her through her open throat.
He knew his preference.
Maybe I’ll stay here and feed her myself. I could keep her alive for years.
No, that wasn’t his style. Anyway, feeding a potato woman sounded terribly boring no matter how much she might be deserving of his vengeance. It wasn’t so bad. His manhood remained and his hair would cover the missing ear. He was still ruggedly handsome. The ear might even earn him some extra attention—and who couldn’t use more attention?—if he invented a good enough story. Perhaps he saved a princess—
“Wait.” I was thinking about something before the ear. What was it? He blinked down at Schnitter. “Who did that?”
Maybe rescuing a princess wasn’t the best story. Women hated competition and if Wichtig told a girl he rescued a princess, well of course he rutted her after. What if he lost the ear saving a family member? That was better. Women loved men who gave a shite about family.
Schnitter coughed a fine mist into the air above her.
“Damn it! Who did that to you?”
It was like trying to remember how much money he had when Stehlen was around. Damned Kleptic.