The effects were enervating.
Cut adrift amongst my fractured thoughts, I sat unmoving in the darkness of my cell and in that moment I am not too proud to admit that, for the first time, I truly knew what it was to despair.
Suns rose and fell, stars were born and died again. The cosmos shifted around me, and after a while time ceased to have meaning. I was as a statue of onyx, my arms hanging by my sides, my forehead touching the ground. Arch-backed, too wounded to do anything but breathe, I felt the slow atrophy of my limbs and the hunger in my chest. Vigour was leaving me, as steam flees cooling metal, and I welcomed it.
To die would be a mercy.
A legionary can live for many days without sustenance. His physiology is enhanced to such a degree that he can be practically starved and still march, fight and kill. Our father made His sons even stronger still, but I knew, as a man who knows he is dying of cancer, that I was not myself. My humours were out of balance; the many woundings Curze had subjected me to, the mental tortures, were beginning to take their toll. At my lowest ebb, when even my will was fading, I slipped into blessed oblivion and let it take me in.
My peace was not to last.
A sound like a distant stream trickling next to my ear brought me to my senses. I realised as I opened my eyes that I was still in the deathly chamber, but that now it was filling with water. It chilled my face, lapping up against my cheek. Lips parched, tongue leathern, I tried to drink but found the water brackish and metallic tasting. My guts churned, hunger gnawing, threatening to devour me from within. Too weak to stand, to even lift my body, I could only watch, and see the open sluices at the base of the walls admitting this languid torrent.
I saw the spark of electricity a moment later and had only a few seconds of realisation before the shock hit and I was jerked off the ground in a bone-wrenching spasm. My wretched frame, emaciated from lack of food and water, groaned; my muscles, partially atrophied from lack of use, burned. My throat, dry as desert ash, could barely muster a scream.
‘Vulkan…’
As if I were trapped in a deep well, my saviour calling down to me from above, I heard my name.
‘Vulkan…’ it repeated, only this time the voice was clearer. I was reaching for the light, kicking hard to breach the surface and end my submergence.
‘Vulkan, you must eat.’
As my eyelids snapped open, I discovered that I must have passed out, and had regained consciousness in a different part of the ship.
I was sitting down; my hands and feet were bound.
Opposite me, sitting across a broad banquet table, my dead brother grimaced at me.
‘Take your fill,’ he said, hollow eye sockets gesturing to the feast arrayed before us. ‘You must eat.’
We were sitting in a long gallery. Ornate candelabras, steeped in dust, provided a flickering luminescence. Above us, silver chandeliers swayed lightly on a stagnant breeze. Gossamer-thin strands conjoined them like the webs of some ancient and long dead arachnid. Similarly, the feast itself was swathed in a fine and farinaceous veneer of grey-white.
I smelled meat, but here and there the scent was somehow wrong, as if some of it were spoiled or raw. There were fruits and bread that both bore the suggestion of mould despite their ostensible freshness. Carafes of wine littered the table in abundance but in some the grapes were bad, the vintage corked and unpalatable.
Despite the decaying feast, I salivated at the prospect and struggled impotently against my bonds to taste it.
‘Eat, Vulkan,’ Ferrus urged. ‘You are wasting away, brother.’
I tried to speak, but my throat was so raw I barely managed to croak.
‘Speak up,’ said Ferrus, his lipless mouth champing open and shut, the darkness of his tongueless mouth gaping and black but somehow still able to form words. With a skeletal hand, he made an expansive, sweeping gesture. ‘We all want to hear what you’ve got to say.’
Until that moment, I had not noticed the other guests.
Seventeen men and women sat around the banquet table. Like the other prisoners Curze had shown me, these humans were both Army and Imperial citizenry. I even saw some remembrancers amongst the host, and one who bore a resemblance to Verace. Of all the guests, he was the only one who seemed calm and unaffected by it all. It could not be the remembrancer, of course, for Verace was not a man in the strictest sense. He was merely a mantle, thrown about the shoulders of a being who wore it like a cloak.
Skin stretched across their bones like thin parchment, lips were drawn back over their gums, eyes hooded with dark rings of fatigue – the mortals were evidently being starved too.
Unlike me, though, they were not bound.
Instead, I noticed their hands had been removed at the wrist. Impaled in the cauterised stumps were long, jagged knives and trident-pronged forks. A few of the humans had managed to spear hunks of meat or carve into wedges of bread but could not bring these victuals to their mouths, the length of their concomitant utensils preventing them.
This great feast was laid out before them and they could only watch as it decayed and festered whilst they starved.
Ferrus got my attention by raising a goblet.
‘Should I toast, brother? It seems in order, before this greedy rabble devours everything.’
Again, I tried to speak, but my throat felt as if it had been scoured raw by razor blades and all I achieved was an aggravated rasp. I clenched and unclenched my fists, straining weakly against my bonds. I stamped my feet, feeling the bone bruise and crack.
‘To you, dear Vulkan,’ said Ferrus, raising the goblet to his lips and draining it. Dark red wine cascaded down his throat, through the ruin of his neck and out again via the cracks in his ribcage where his armour and flesh had begun to crumble away with the onset of decay.
As if bemused, Ferrus looked around at the other diners.
‘Perhaps they are waiting for you, brother?’ he suggested. ‘They have yet to consume a single morsel.’
The bindings around my wrists were beginning to bite into skin now. I ignored the pain, my jaw locked in anger and my entire body trembling.
‘F… e…’ I croaked. ‘F… e… e…’
Ferrus turned his head as if trying to listen, but his ears had shrunk into nubs of rotten flesh.
‘Speak up, Vulkan. Let’s all hear what you have to say.’
‘F… e… e… d. Feed. Feed! Feed each other!’
I roared and struggled but still couldn’t break free.
Slowly, certainly, Ferrus shook his head.
‘No, Vulkan. I’m sorry, but they cannot hear you.’ He pointed a bony digit at one thrashing individual, a dried rivulet of blood having crusted from his ear and down the side of his head.
Deaf.
As the poor man turned to face me, I noticed the milky consistency of his iris.
Blind too.
Only smell, touch and taste remained. So cruel to be so close to what the body craves and the mind imagines, only for it to be denied.
‘The greedy cannot listen, won’tlisten,’ said Ferrus. ‘Nor can you make them. Humankind’s greed will eventually destroy it, Vulkan. By aiding them you are only prolonging the inevitable.’
I stopped listening and ignored my dead brother’s babbling mouth. Instead, I roared. I cursed Curze’s name until I no longer had voice to speak it.
And then I sat there, a king at his dread feast as his guests slowly starved and died.
My constitution, however weak, kept me going. Curze knew I would survive longer than the humans and when the final one breathed his last, I was alone.
I wept as the candles bled down to nubs and the accumulated dust snuffed them out as well as the chandeliers above me, throwing the hall into darkness.
‘Curze…’ I sobbed.