The Marion Zimmer Bradley Science Fiction MEGAPACK by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Author:Marion Zimmer Bradley [Bradley, Marion Zimmer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Darkover;science fiction;sci-fi;adventure;mists of avalon
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

I slept little that night.

There is a tale told in Daillon of a shegri where the challenger was left in a room alone, where he was blindfolded and told to await the beginning of the torment.

Somewhere in those dark hours of waiting, between the unknown and the unexpected, the hours of telling over to himself the horrors of past shegri, the torture of anticipation alone became the unbearable. A little past noon he collapsed in screams of horror and died raving, unmarred, untouched.

Daybreak came slowly, and with the first streamers of light came Dallisa and the white chak, maliciously uninvolved, sniffing his way through the shabby poverty of the great hall. They took me to a lower dungeon where the slant of the sunlight was less visible. Dallisa said, “The sun has risen.”

I said nothing. Any word may be interpreted as a confession of defeat. I resolved to give them no excuse. But my skin crawled and I had that peculiar prickling sensation where the hair on my forearms was bristling erect with tension and fear.

Dallisa said to the chak, “His gear was not searched. See that he has swallowed no anesthetic drugs.”

Briefly I gave her credit for thoroughness, even while I wondered in a split second why I had not thought of this. Drugs could blur consciousness, at least, or suspend reality. The white nonhuman sprang forward and pinioned my arms with one strong, spring-steel forearm. With his other hand he forced my jaws open. I felt the furred fingers at the back of my throat, gagged, struggled briefly and doubled up in uncontrollable retching.

Dallisa’s poison-berry-eyes regarded me levelly as I struggled upright, fighting off the dizzy sickness of disgust. Something about her impassive face stopped me cold. I had been, momentarily, raging with fury and humiliation. Now I realized that this had been a calculated, careful gesture to make me lose my temper and thus sap my resistance.

If she could set me to fighting, if she could make me spend my strength in rage, my own imagination would fight on her side to make me lose control before the end. Swimming in the glare of her eyes, I realized she had never thought for a moment that I had taken any drug. Acting on Kyral’s hint that I was a Terran, she was taking advantage of the well-known Terran revulsion for the nonhuman.

“Blindfold him,” Dallisa commanded, then instantly countermanded that: “No, strip him first.”

The chak ripped off shirtcloak, shirt, shoes, breeches, and I had my first triumph when the wealed clawmarks on my shoulders—worse, if possible, than those which disfigured my face—were laid bare. The chak screwed up his muzzle in fastidious horror, and Dallisa looked shaken. I could almost read her thoughts:

If he endured this, what hope have I to make him cry mercy?

Briefly I remembered the months I lay feverish and half dead, waiting for the wounds Rakhal had inflicted to heal, those months when I had believed that nothing would ever hurt me again, that I had known the worst of all suffering.

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