Chapter 84:
By the time Vek had finished dragging his mark to the nearest clinic, he, too, felt like he was about to pass out. The doctor-priest who received them apparently agreed. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked Vek when Vek tried to leave the clinic room. “You’re bleeding all over, you’ve got multiple stab wounds, you’re about to collapse. Get in that bed.”
Vek had been too weak to argue back. He had just enough strength to insist on a pair of bioplastic ties to cuff his mark’s wrists to his bed rails, but that was it. Someone else had to do the actually cuffing.
The next few hours, or was it days? Vek was in and out of consciousness, waking up to being wheeled somewhere else, or to his mark being wheeled back into the room, or to a doctor-priest’s apprentice switching his intravenous fluid bags. Only once did Vek wake up for longer than a few seconds, and then it was to overhear some other doctor-priest explain to an apprentice what had happened to Vek. “These dumb servies brawling,” Vek heard. “Both are lucky to be alive. A butcher’s knife in that one’s stomach and poison in the other’s system. We barely managed to detoxify him in time.”
Hearing the doctor-priest’s contempt put a bad taste in Vek’s mouth. He glanced over at his mark, fuming. Poison? On a fellow servie? By the rock-god, he was going to pay for that!
But not yet, apparently. According to what the doctor-priest went on to say to his apprentice, Vek was out of danger but not yet recovered. Both Vek and his mark had a ways to go before either of them could leave. I’ll take that as a challenge, Vek decided. Counting down the diurnals, he tested his strength every day. At the end of the sixth diurnal, he told the clinic staff he was leaving. He’d had enough. Six diurnals of the Uprising that Vek had wasted on this mark!
His anger only increased as he dragged his mark, now blindfolded and properly cuffed, out of the clinic and down the hall. Six diurnals, in that time Vek could have been discovering the Promised Daughter’s location, he could have been helping his squad patrol the Rajas barracks, he could have been doing any number of things that didn’t involve sitting inside a clinic for six diurnals! Vek hated clinics, he’d spent so much time in them before the Uprising, always injured from some encounter with a soldier, always sneered at in the clinics that did admit him, and he’d thought things were going to be different, he’d thought things were different, they were supposed to be different!
Maybe the Eenta are scared straight, but those damn doctor-priests and regents are always going to look down on me no matter what. I’m never going to stop being a servie to them. Nobody in the clinic even recognized me. Not that I wanted them to! I don’t want to be treated specially! I just want to be treated like everyone else! The Uprising’s happened! It shouldn’t be this way!
Savagely Vek yanked on his mark’s cuffs, pulling him forward. He’d thought that when the first doctor-priest had agreed to provide the bioplastic ties that that meant the staff had known who Vek was. Apparently not. Apparently they’d agreed to Vek’s demands for some other reason. Probably because they didn’t care. What was it to them if one servie wanted to cuff another servie? What did it matter to the upper castes what happened to serfs like him? Their lives remained good, remained the same!
Vek turned left down a hallway, still furious. He had to get to a telegraph room and let Op know where he’d been. Six diurnals, by the rock-god! At least there was a telegraph room on the same floor as the clinic. And good, there were also some wall-stocks near the telegraph room door. Vek could leave his mark here for now and send his message, then come back and take him down to the crypts.
Only one of the wall-stocks still had its key; Vek locked his mark into it and put the key into his pocket before slipping into the telegraph room. It was again a round room with several doors leading into it – all telegraph rooms were like that – but in this one bits of ardish were embedded into the walls, causing the sunlight coming through the windows to shimmer and dance. Just looking around made Vek’s fingers ache. He’d worked his hands to ribbons more than once pressing tons of bits of glass into other such walls.
Thankfully a teleprinter was free. Vek went up to the servie working it. Without saying anything he picked up the notepad next to the servie and wrote down both Op’s handle and an encoded message. Sat got caught up, injured at work. Vek waited just long enough to see the message typed up and sent. Then he turned around and made his way back to the door.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As soon as Vek stepped back out into the hallway, he could tell something was wrong. Why were there so many people packed in here? Telegraph rooms got busy, but if all these serfs were here to send messages, why weren’t they going inside? Why were they clustered around – they were clustered around – around Vek’s mark – in his wall-stocks –
“Why is he being strung up like that?” Vek heard someone hiss. “The Rajas are the ones who should be in the wall-stocks! String them up!”
Another voice made Vek’s blood run cold. “Who put him there? We should find him and put him up instead!”
Vek was at the edge of the crowd. He couldn’t even see his mark up on the wall, not through the serfs in front of him. The last thing he wanted to do was elbow his way forward and declare himself to be the serf who’d put another serf in wall-stocks. But what else could he do?
Then a thought struck him. What if Vek pretended to find the key? What if Vek pretended to release him only to hustle him away?
The gathered serfs were chanting now. “Free him! Free him! Free him!” Another set, their voices overlapping, were shouting to “Put up the Rajas, put up the Rajas!” Taking a deep breath, Vek forced a path through to the front of the crowd. “I have a key!” he shouted, pulling it out of his back pocket. “This will open it!”
A thunderous cheer rose up. Vek couldn’t help but enjoy it, even though he knew it was stupid of him to do so. Reaching up, Vek opened the lock with ease. He pulled the collar off his mark and unfastened his cuffs from the chain. His mark stepped out of the wall-stocks, and the shouts and cheers increased. Everyone was practically screaming now, screams everywhere, all around them, hands reaching out to touch the both of them.
Ignoring them the best he could, Vek grabbed his mark by his cuffs. He started to try to pull him to the side. Surely there was a way around the crowd, around and along the edges?
A sudden lull passed over the mob. Some of them began whispering. As it became clear that Vek was not going to unblindfold or release the man, the whispering grew into muttering and then into raised shouts. Vek jerked away when he heard someone call out his name. “How could you do this?” the person yelled, fury in her voice. “You, of all people!”
Soon the crowd was shouting and screaming once more. This time, though, it was at him. Vek could feel the noise and fury assaulting him from every angle. Frightened, he turned so that he was half-facing the wall. He had enough presence of mind to keep his hand on the cuffs around his mark’s wrists, but that was it. The torrent of outrage was worse than any beating Vek had ever been given, worse than any disrespect he’d ever been shown at an elevator bay.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, silent, his head bowed, his face hidden as best as he could hide it. When he finally looked up, the throng had thinned out some, although there were still plenty of serfs hissing and booing. At the sight of one – a balding man with venom in his eyes – Vek jerked into action. He couldn’t force his way out of the crowd, but he could go back into the telegraph room and get away from everyone that way.
Letting go of his mark’s bonds, Vek instead tugged him forward by his arm, guiding him towards the door to the telegraph room. Thank the rock-god, Vek was able to push his way back in easily. It helped that his prisoner didn’t resist him; the sedation drugs Vek had requested of the clinic were working. Inside, the typists were all sitting at their desks, looking terrified. Vek didn’t want to waste time, he wanted to get out, so he ignored them and tugged his prisoner deeper into the room towards an ardish-specked door on the other side. Nobody had yet followed him into the telegraph room, but that didn’t mean they weren’t going to.
Vek led his mark through the door and down a hallway and out onto the serf staircase. It was only after he was standing on a tread getting rained on that he felt himself start to breathe again. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at anyone. Not at the serfs patrolling a few levels down, not at his prisoner, and definitely not at himself.
“Come on,” he mumbled. “It’s perfect – it’s going to be perfect.”