My days within the Stone Room (or so I had named it for myself) seemed unending. There was little indication of when the sun rose, or when it again sank beyond the western edge of the world. When I happened to glimpse my reflection in one of the black basins, I fancied myself a shade, a whitened ghost, so long had I gone without stepping outside into the light of day.
My existence became a steady stream of ailing and wounded bodies, and the murmured voice in my ear instructing me. I learned how to stitch torn flesh, how to press intestines back into their cavities, how to saw off rotten limbs, how to make poultices, pastes, and simples. I learned how to pin a man’s spirit to the world, lest he pass away before his captors finished interrogating him with chains, hammers, and presses. An array of herbs, spanning the common and widely known, to those whose names I had never heard and would likely never see again, were at my disposal to ease or prolong suffering. I learned how to watch men die, how to read the signs of their bodies surrendering their spirits, how to know when it was too late to endeavor to save. The cool, waxy skin, the glassy eyes, the gaped mouth, and the uneven rise of the breast. A death from a long illness was not like to a death from a battlefield wound where too much blood had been spilled. Some of them were peaceful, grim, and resolute. Others moaned and writhed and begged for mothers and nursemaids they had not thought of since childhood. I learned the scent of Death. The feel of it in the room. Quivering like sunlight on water, just beyond what one’s senses could ascertain. But knowing it was present nonetheless. It became my only friend, all of my acquaintance, that with which I woke and moved and slept and dreamt. It became my lover. My nemesis. I hated Death as I’d never hated anything before. But we are frail creatures, we Men. We adapt to that which we cannot escape. Death was all around me and within me, and after so many days of its permeation, I came to accept it.
My lord had cornered me the following morning, as I fully expected he would. I felt no anxiety at the thought.
“Tragically,” said I, when pressed. “His body was not strong enough to endure the night, even with the belladonna.” I did not have to arrange my features in any particular manner to appear convincing. I had long ago learned the value of a serene visage, void of emotion. The brow could be left smooth, the corners of the mouth relaxed, and the blinking of the eyelids calm and steady.
The tall shadow of my mentor bent down then, and peered hard at me. It is one thing to control the muscles of one’s face. But what is harder to manage is the window of the eye. The eye is yet a faithful interpreter of the soul, and more difficult to shutter. This man was as far from a fool as any I have encountered in my life. Whatever he read in my eyes that morning, he did not share with me openly. His own face was forever pinched and disapproving of all he beheld. I could not tell if he suspected any misdoing on my part, and he departed from me without saying more about it.
The southerner was the first soul that I had willingly aided on its path out of this unjust and bewildering plane. There was no sense of guilt within me. I felt righteous in what I had done. I was not privy to whatever crime my fellows might have accused him of, nor would I have been able to determine the validity or fault of their claims. I only knew what my own senses informed me of. That a man lay on the brink of death, having suffered greatly, and to intern him longer in the Stone Room would mean further suffering of the most pitiable sort. Perhaps this was the first sign of weakness on my part. Compassion is not a strength, whatever the poets may say.
In the days following, my learning increased, along with the skill of my mind and hands. I wondered if my own life would be utterly spent in the Stone Room, and one day I would lay my aged self on one of the cold, flat tables and beg my dark lord for an end to it all. A hatred for him began to germinate within me, slow, vile, and poisonous. I allowed it. I did not actively nurture it, for it needed no watering from me to grow and twist its roots through my bones. Fantasies began to bud subconsciously. Visions of my lord tutor, laid prone before me, while I sampled and tested an endless line of theories and experiments. To see how he liked them. To see if they might make him understand. To see if he might care.
More deaths would come at my hand.
