The taper was almost nothing in this black place. Shadow was layered upon shadow. He could see the pale grime of the witch’s naked flesh, the oily sheen of long, snarled hair that tumbled down her shoulders. The light glinted on the chains that held her upright in a spread-eagle position. But the rest of the details were lost to the dark. He knew them though, intimately, for he had overseen the creation of the cell and her imprisonment—the reinforced chains with cuffs that did not encircle her wrists, but ringed each finger with prongs that were buried into the flesh to the bone. A collar around her neck, also pronged, was attached with a taut length of chain to the ceiling, restraining her from moving her head or upper body much. Spikes had been driven through each foot and bolted to the floor.
Once in a while all the restraints were removed and she was cared for until she healed. It was not out of compassion they did this, however. They did it so she would not become inured to the pain. When she healed and they chained her once more, the pain was renewed.
The wretched creature snuffled, could shift her head just enough so that it seemed she looked right at him. Webster’s polished shoe scuffed on the edge of sawdust bedding that was thrown on the floor to absorb her waste. He should not be so disturbed for she could not see. He knew this well—he’d been the one who had burned out her eyes with a red hot poker.
“I smell you, Silk,” she croaked in a broken voice. They’d had to damage her vocal chords, too, for the sweetness of her song had snared many an unwary man in the past. No more. “You smell pretty, Silk, very pretty.”
The witch had been tortured, abused, and imprisoned for over a century, but she remained unbroken. She carried some internal fire that retained a modicum of power. It infuriated Webster he’d been unable to break her entirely, and even more so that she aroused a primal fear in him.
“Pretty perfume,” she grated. “Have you come to romance me, Silk? Have you come to sate yourself in me with your feeble prick?”
Webster frowned, his gorge rising. In the early years he and the guards used her, enjoyed doing to her whatever they wished, for having one chained and helpless was very sweet, very seductive, very gratifying. Like a tree carved with the initials of lovers, her body was etched with a spider web of scarred initials sliced into her flesh by the guards who had pleasured themselves with her over the years.
Shadows upon shadows, scars upon scars.
The filth of her disgusted him now, the sockets of burned out eyes, and her ravaged lips. Ribs and hip bones protruded. There were rarely fresh initials carved on her body nowadays. Even so, he felt a rising pressure against the crotch of his trousers.
The witch laughed as if she knew. It was a dry, breathy rasp.
“You know why I’m here,” he said, thankful his voice remained steady.
She made smooching noises at him and laughed again.
She was not, he had concluded long ago, quite sane.
“You know why I am here,” he repeated through gritted teeth. “Are you toying with us, or is it true? Ten years have not yet passed.”
She stilled and every muscle in Webster’s body tensed.
“I do not toy.” Her tone no longer mocked but was cold and full of menace. “My beloved rises.”
Her pronouncement was like a thunderclap. Without another word, he turned to face the door, suddenly overwhelmed and claustrophobic, barely able to contain himself while he waited for the guards to open it. He could not escape her presence soon enough. When the door opened, he hastened out, not awaiting his escort, not pausing in the antechamber. He made straight for the corridor and the lift.
Before the great steel door could close behind him, however, her rasping voice reached him. “Webster Ezmund Silk! My beloved rises, and he will make you eat your own entrails!” The door slammed on her hysterical laughter.
Webster closed his eyes and clenched his fists at his side. No matter how many times he’d heard her repeat this threat, cold dread slid through his gut like a serpent.
He shook himself and entered the lift. He threw the appropriate levers and the car lurched upward, leaving behind the gloom and the constant drubbing of the turbines. Once he was above, he’d bathe and order the clothes he was wearing burned. He could not tolerate the stench of her that clung to him, so overpowering that it almost suffocated him in the small space of the lift. Afterward, he would meet with his fellow ministers and plan for the emperor’s awakening, whether it was time or not, for the witch had spoken.
No, he thought after some reflection, not just a witch, but a goddess. A goddess of a far more ancient and earthly pantheon than the ones the old realm had worshipped. As Aeryc and Aeryon and their cadre of fellow gods rose to primacy, the ancient goddess and her sisters fell and were denigrated to the level of mere witches, relics of a forgotten past. But to believe she was less than a goddess, and an insane one at that, was a fatal error that Webster did not intend to make. It was why he kept her so elaborately imprisoned. Not to mention that she was, unfortunately, inextricably linked to the emperor.
As the lift chugged upward, its mechanisms clacking and whining comfortingly, he recalled her name, somehow extracting it from the dusty regions of his mind among other discarded memories. Yolandhe. Yolandhe of the sea.
In the Present:
YOLANDHE’S ISLAND
“I remember when I first set foot upon your shore,” Amberhill told Yolandhe as they lay together beneath the furs in the cave. “The climes were colder. There was more of a sharpness in the air.”