Joannes turned quickly to face Haraldr, elbows whirling rigidly as if he were the enormous toy top of some evil Titan. ‘You, Manglavite Haraldr, are privileged to apprentice yourself to this art.’ He whirled back to face his raw material, a man of about twenty-five – or perhaps thirty-five? – with short dark hair and a patchy black beard. It was impossible to tell who he might have been, what his character was, for Neorion had already taken the humanity away from him, as it did everyone, victim or victimizer, who entered its grim portals.
‘Like any artist, the interrogator must carefully consider where to begin. The novice tends to strokes that are too delicate or, conversely, too broad. I rather prefer to’ – Joannes nodded to the blue man, who seized the victim’s head in his huge, dark fingers – ‘begin with an unexpected flourish, a conundrum to delight the eye of irony.’ Joannes took a short knife resembling the instrument of a surgeon and held it to the man’s mouth; the dark eyes above the gleaming blade glared with a kind of noble defiance and Haraldr asked Odin to help this man die well, and quickly, for he deserved a good death.
‘When a man undergoes interrogation, the object of greatest concern to him is his manhood. He is least fearful for his oral cavity and the organs therein, for he knows that he must be left his tongue if he is expected to provide us with the verse we have so arduously prompted him to compose.’ With a deft, instant motion, Joannes began to carve around the man’s mouth, and in a mere moment he flung aside a small, bloody mass like a piece of rotten fruit. The Armenian scrambled after the discarded flesh and dropped it into a large wooden bucket.
Haraldr fought his swoon and surging gut. The poor victim jerked his head as much as he could, and his exposed, reddened teeth chattered while blood poured down his chin. He was in every other way intact, but he was already in countenance a cadaver, a fleshless skull.
‘But a man still speaks credibly without lips,’ said Joannes. He stepped back and appraised his work. ‘The interrogator, like the artist, knows when his work is finished, for that is when the object he has created praises the Pantocrator in the voice he has intended for it.’ Joannes reached down and grabbed the man’s penis. ‘This creation of mine can already praise the Pantocrator by informing us who is arming the rabble of the Studion.’ The man rolled his head with the great, gaping bloody smear where his mouth had been but said nothing. ‘If we take the testicles, as was my fate, we leave the means but not the desire. If we take the penis, we leave the desire but not the means.’ Joannes yanked on the penis and sliced it cleanly away. He turned and showed the bloody, limp member to Haraldr.
‘Perhaps I should perform this alteration on you Tauro-Scythians.’ Joannes grinned, an obscene, heavy-lipped smile more terrible than his scowl. ‘I am concerned that yours, and those of your henchmen, will trouble you more than this is troubling our friend here.’ He tossed the penis into the Armenian’s bucket, then wiped his hands on a towel offered by the blue man. ‘The slut Maria, with whom you are enjoying yourself, is a chronic malefactor, a delinquent whose immoral licence flaunts every standard and expectation of a Christian community. She is anathema to all who worship the True Light of the World.’
‘She is not anathema to our purple-born Mother,’ said Haraldr. When Mar and I destroy you, Haraldr vowed silently, her name will be one we shall invoke over your foul corpse.
Joannes could scarcely conceal his astonishment. Haraldr Nordbrikt was challenging him. Haraldr Nordbrikt and the Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson, fowl of the same feather. But to his face! Even the Hetairarch was not so carelessly impudent. But that was the difference between the two; the Hetairarch was much more clever, and more dangerous. And that was why Haraldr Nordbrikt’s tongue would not earn him lodging in the Neorion that very evening. ‘Someday,’ growled Joannes, ‘you may be asked to assist me with the whore Maria in this place. I enjoy working with women. I often ask them which set of lips they are most loath to part with. It becomes quite easy to distinguish between those who are vain and those who are lustful.’
Ice clotted Haraldr’s veins. She a hostage to him? He had not thought of that when he had so blithely taunted Joannes. Christ. Odin. The flame of rage collapsed into mocking embers.
Joannes turned back to his artwork, satisfied that he had made a useful point. Strange, he thought, how these huge Varangian brutes could be moved by tiny, chattering creatures like women. ‘Our talk has been most useful, Manglavite. It gives our creation an opportunity to reflect on his own reticence. Let him now praise the Pantocrator.’
But the Pantocrator was only praised in the dignity of the wretch, a man who, Haraldr reflected, was probably innocent, and if not, then guilty only of righteous outrage. Haraldr was exhausted, brutalized, pained by his own agony in watching Joannes’s methodical deft dismemberment of this once human being; he could not imagine the courage and strength of the simple man who was mutely accepting this terrible attrition of his mortality. Finally, after the Armenian had filled his bucket, Joannes pronounced his creation a disappointment, if only because the clay was of too poor a grade to be moulded into any object of value. He turned away from his failed creation for the last time. ‘Manglavite Haraldr Nordbrikt,’ he rumbled, ‘I have been musing, as I often do when I am at my ease in my workshop, and one of the subjects I have entertained while I have worked today is how to best employ your abilities. It comes to my mind that you are currently in complete disuse -in fact, one might claim, disutility – in your office of Manglavite. I have thought of a more useful vocation for you and your Varangian fellows until our Father resumes his customary protocol. Since our Christian community is increasingly plagued by this rabble in the Studion, an example of which we have before us, you and your men will be assigned to duty as cursores in that district until such time as I am convinced that these precautions are no longer necessary.’ Joannes walked to the forbidding steel double doors; he waited until his assistants had opened them and left the chamber with their bloody towels and buckets of viscera. Then he looked back at Haraldr with a grin like death. ‘I leave you today’s legacy of my art, perhaps flawed, but one you might yet learn from.’ Joannes slammed the huge doors shut behind him.
The stench of filth and viscera was suddenly overwhelming. Haraldr was alone with … it. It was a demonic, crimson mask of bloody, pulpy, flayed facial tissue, without nose, ears, scalp, or lips, only glaring, lidless eyes and clenched, exposed, blood-smeared teeth. Its crotch was a bloody gash, its belly a gaping, reeking, empty cavity where the bowels had been ripped out. Its legs, truncated at the ankles, twitched frantically, the veins gently pumping blood into pools on the floor. Most horrible of all, its spurting, handless wrists jerked up and down with conscious articulation, as if trying to recapture with phantom digits the life that had been carved away from it, piece by bloody piece. And then the rolling, blood-washed irises made contact, and Haraldr realized that there was still a man inside it, just as there had been that terrible night in the Studion. He unsheathed his sword and prepared a quick end to this long, ugly, yet noble death. He came close, forcing himself to look in the eyes, and he realized that this death, and the one in that fetid ally, stained him with blood far more deeply than the many lives he had taken in battle. Now there were two; how many more wretches could he slay out of compassion before he had to question the quality of his mercy? He could never give this man what he was owed, but he could give him what he could. He drew back his blade.