//------------------------------// // 17. Hospitality // Story: Banishment Decree // by Neon Czolgosz //------------------------------// I don’t know how long I’ve been here. The cell is so small I can touch all four walls at once except I can’t because my neck is collared and bolted to the wall. The lights go on and off—blindingly bright, so bright that I can’t even see them, or pitch blackness. When the lights go out all I can feel is cold concrete and the straps around my neck and all I can smell is the stink of drying blood and old piss. It’s not a day and night cycle. Sometimes it will be two days and nights in an hour. Other times the night lasts for days. The fever lasts through days, though. Never the other way round. There’s a little vent up at the top of the back wall with a crack running through it. Sometimes, when it’s dark time, I see lights glowing through it. Usually a pale glow, sometimes a twinkle that might be the moon on a cloudless night. Once there was a sunbeam running through the crack, pushing a rod of shimmering dust into the wall opposite. It’s fake. They’re waiting until I’m used to the lights, until I convince myself that I can tell the time from that split in the darkness. That’s when they’ll play with me. The moon will rise three times in a single night, and then three days darkness until the sun comes again. I’ll twist in circles questioning myself, wondering if anything I know is real, or if I’ve truly cracked, past the point of rescue, so far gone that even if all the walls fell down around me and every enemy of mine choked on their own bile I would still be here, trapped in the prison of my own mind. Water drips on me from somewhere. It hits me on the shoulder once every few seconds or maybe a few times every hour except sometimes the drops are so big that they explode like grenades and hit my ear-tuft which makes my head shake from reflex and my neck strain to get away and stretches every muscle in my head and neck and back and shoulders that each drip feels like an icicle being slowly pushed through my eye. Today it’s icy water. Yesterday—maybe last week, or at least the last time they fed me—it was hot water. It heated up over time, the first drops warming through my coat and they just got hotter and hotter until they scalded me even through the fur and I screamed and screamed until I tasted copper on the back of my tongue and even the tiniest of squeaks threw me into coughing fits. I could see the steam rising off of it. That’s how I know I’m not crazy yet. Yet. Every once in a while they take me out of my cell. The lights flash on, so bright I can feel the heat through my eyelids, and then a bag goes over my head. I’m pushed face-down onto the ground until they have me trussed up good, then I’m hauled off to wherever. The first place they took me was to have my talons clipped. They got garden secateurs and took the tips off, then filed downwards until there was a millimeter of keratin between my nerves and the cold air. Every stray breeze is molten steel against my claws. Every day, maybe, they bring out their files and file my claws down again, keeping them thin and fragile. They filed too far one day, and by the time I saw the blood there was so much pain that it simply blocked everything else out. I didn’t have to worry, think, or even feel, really. It was nice. That was before the fever, anyway. I think I would feel myself boiling over even if every nerve in my talons was pulled loose and stroked with starched hessian. It’s Trotsky’s ponies. The Kurierzy. Whatever. It’s them, anyway. At first, when I only knew the guards dragging me from cell to elsewhere, hosing me down, clipping my talons, ‘feeding’ me, I thought they were trying to keep it secret. They never said a word, no shouting in clipped accents, no dzień dobry, przyjacielu. I thought I was clever when I figured it out from their smell, that russ smell that isn’t quite pony but isn’t really anything else. I met the interrogator after that. He told me straight off that he was working for Trotsky, what I was doing here, what he was going to do to me, and some other stuff I’d have been happier not knowing. He calls himself Doctor Kurtz, but I think that’s a joke. Today he bled me. No knives, no cutting, no spurting. Just stuck a needle in me, took a couple of pints out, and then poured it all down the drain. To make me weaker, and to show that he can. He doesn’t want information, he told me. That’ll come later, he said, when I can be trusted. He just wants me softened. Fragile. Easier to bend to his will. Or break in half. No ‘real’ torture, not yet. He works like a skilled chef, teasing the senses with little nibbles and appetisers, the scent and taste of things to come. He shows me tapes. His previous guests. Shivering. Delirious. Begging for the cane to avoid to lash. Each on a downward spiral. Each becoming utterly catatonic. Then he lifts them out. The last video he showed me was a pegasus, barely out of flight school. Doctor Kurtz had him lashed until he bled. When he was done, they untied the pegasus, and he licked his own blood up off the floor, without being asked. “I like you, Gilda,” Kurtz had said to me. “Most of my patients are already trying to bargain at this point. You have strength.” You probably say that to all the mares, I said to him. He laughed, and then injected me with an emetic. I spent the next—hours probably, felt longer—throwing up until every muscle in my stomach was in spasms and pink bile poured from my mouth. He sat in his chair, saying nothing, not even taking notes, just watching. When I stopped, he gave me another shot of the stuff. I begged him, then. I could barely speak, but Four Winds I begged. I didn’t last so long, that time. I think I blacked out, and when I woke up I was back in the cell, on a drip. They didn’t feed me for a day after that, at least. I don’t eat here, I’m fed. One of the guards pulls me from my cell, blindfolded. He asks me questions. Random shit. Who I went to school with. Mother’s maiden name. Number of judges on the Griffon High Court. What I did last Nightmare Night. How many toms I’ve fucked. Family doctor’s address. If I answer all the questions quickly and correctly, they bark something like ‘Position!’ at me. I then have to reply ‘Pretty please may I eat, sirs?’, sit forward on my haunches, open my beak wide, and stick my tongue out as far as it will go. They place a thick, plastic tube covered in personal lubricant on my tongue, and force it down my throat. Letting it down takes some getting used to, and my captors aren’t the patient types. They flick a switch, the whole thing rumbles and shudders, and you feel your stomach swell without the work of swallowing anything, much too fast until you’re sure it’ll split and rupture and you’ll die strapped into a feeding machine in a dark, stinking hole, and then it stops. When I’m lucky, they pull it out fast enough that I don’t have to taste it. Of course, that’s what happens when I do what they want. If I lie, or answer too slowly, or don’t sit forward far enough, or don’t call them ‘sirs,’ they lose it. They each take lengths of rubber hose and beat me over the face and neck until I can’t tell which way is up. They grab me by the neck, force my jaw open, shove the tube in sans lube, and start the pump as soon as it’s in my mouth. It fills my sinuses, my mouth, goes down my windpipe, all until I’m choking and spasming, but they keep on pushing until the ‘meal’ runs out. Then I get half a minute to recover and they start all over again, questions and all. I’m getting pretty good at not drowning on slop, and on the flip side, pretty bad at putting up any resistance at all. There’s drugs in the food, too. Sometimes I get a wonderful morphine haze. Other times I trip balls. Drugs that cloud my thoughts. Bad drugs. Nice drugs. Mostly bad drugs. The fever might be drugs. I feel like I’m cooking inside my own skin, boiling like a haggis, until the slightest breeze touches my sweat-drenched coat and I’ve been dropped on the tundra to die from the elements. The fever, the fever, fever fever oh fever the fever. I’ve had the fever forever and whatever I’m told or asked or ordered to think nothing will change that as this fever is my whole mind and I am the fever. I am the fever that warms and warps the cell around me, crushing it in at the corners until the walls press inwards and I can only breathe sweat and tears. I am the fever that is my thoughts and always has been and will stay with me forever. Even as I die, my body will stay warm. The fever will outlive me. Soon it will be harvest season in Griffhala. The cubs will laugh and run and play in the town square and split open imported pinatas and wipe pumpkin juice from their chins. They’ll pour cats into the Rat Building, couples waiting outside with nets, hooks, sticks and clubs, ready to catch the plumpest, juiciest, corn-fattened rat and sear it over the applewood grill with the barrow hog, the spiced marrows, the parsnips and potatoes. The old mollies will dig out the winter spirits, gallon jugs of the rawest, roughest potato vodka, filled with sage and rosemary and bay leaves and a few puff adders per jug for that extra kick. The old toms will take out the shisha pipes and mix their herbs and tobacco and clover and opium into a strange mixture called ‘cekh’ and pass the pipes around, every smoker trying to make the biggest smoke ring, and a pumpkin crown for any smoker who makes a ring big enough for a cub to fly through. Night will fall and the lean-tos and tents and yurts will shift and squirm under hundreds of claws, bulging and moving until they’re one gigantic celebration tent. The militia will tap the clouds and let the rains fall on the thick felt roof and the feasting will begin, drinking and singing songs until Adune sits at the table and cracks open another bottle. Tender pig will fall apart between claws like a ripe orange, dancing with pepper and cumin. Libations will be poured on the ground. Somber songs between celebrations. The fallen, remembered. Lost, never forgotten. Even the rankest outcasts were family once. The cubs fall drowsy. Jesters stop their dancing and fill their bellies. The old birds are asleep already. The rain pours and the fires dim. Whole families sleep under giant felt blankets, dotting the feasting tent in an archipelago of colorful fabrics. Bird by bird, they fall into safe harvest dreams. Mom, Nigel, Scratchy, Terrence, Gretchen, more than I can think to name. All with me. I’m trying. I’m trying to pull the blankets over us, over all of us, and they’re wrapped so tight tighter than I even knew possible. But the warmth won’t come.