The Pharoah Contract

When darkness completely covered the town and the air had grown colder, a rank of torches was lit behind the stage. Peering from a crack in his cage, Ruiz saw the citizens of Stegatum gathering for the night’s entertainment. The square was filling up; presumably the peasants of the outlying districts had heard about the execution, for there seemed to be many more folk present than lived in the town. The spectators crowded close about Ruiz’s cage, and several adolescent boys climbed to the top of the cage, where their hobnailed boots created a splashing din. Apparently he was to be ignored, for the present.

When the square was almost full, a steam chariot arrived, somewhat larger and fancier than the one that had fetched Ruiz to the keep. The crowd became very quiet. The chariot parked before the stage, and its midsection cantilevered open to reveal Lord Brinslevos, lying on a luxurious couch, with a fur coverlet pulled up to his chin. The Lord seemed pale and tense. After a moment, he raised his arm and made a peremptory gesture. “Begin,” he said, in a weak voice. He looked once toward Ruiz’s cage, and Ruiz thought he saw as much puzzlement as anger in the Lord’s glance.

The Lord’s conjuror, who wore robes of inky black, appeared on the platform, and the torches grew brighter. “Citizens of Stegatum,” he said, in a well trained voice. “Welcome to this Expiation and Exemplification.” He bowed with a flourish. “Bring us the subject!”

Two soldiers in black livery opened Rontleses’ cage and dragged him out. He had fared less well than Ruiz during the heat of the day; his legs would not at first support him, and his eyes stared blindly, without comprehension. When one soldier offered him a drink from a leather cup, he clutched at it, drained it in two gulps.

Just outside his cage, Ruiz heard a chuckle of quiet satisfaction from a person he could not see. The person whispered, “He’s too mad with thirst to refuse the philter, which will make him docile and at the same time abrade his nerves, so that he feels each agony more intensely. Ha, ha, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving man.”

Ruiz shifted to another crevice, and now he could see in profile the pleasant features of Relia, resident doxy at the Denklar Lodge. She turned to glance toward him, and said, “Are you in there, Wuhiya? I think I see the gleam of your eye.”

“Yes,” he answered. “I’m here.”

She shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry to see you. You seemed a decent sort, for an oil man. What possessed you to give the Lord bad oil?”

“I don’t know….”

A short silence passed, during which the soldiers half-carried Rontleses onto the stage. They secured his naked body to the iron frame, and he seemed to recover some of his self-awareness, glaring with burning eyes at the crowd, and the Lord.

Relia sighed. “Later I’ll try to bring you a water reed, so you can defy the philterer when your turn comes tomorrow night.”

“Thank you,” he said, but she had moved away from the cage. A compassionate woman, Relia the doxy, he thought — but he hoped he’d be gone before she brought him the water.

The performance began, and Ruiz watched with morbid interest.

First the conjuror warmed up the crowd with a series of small tricks, humiliating and painful, but not yet mutilating. He pretended to squeeze the coercer’s head, and brown vapor seemed to jet from the victim’s ears. He appeared to discover several large venomous insects here and there about the coercer’s body, which the conjuror retrieved fastidiously with tongs, though not before they had bitten Rontleses painfully, so that the victim shrieked and writhed with astonishing energy. Then, from Rontleses’ straining month, he began to pull a shiny pink egg, which proved a bit too large to extract. He dithered over the problem with the egg half-protruding from the victim’s face. Rontleses turned first red and then blue, when the conjuror pinched his nostrils together, ostensibly to get a better grip on his face. Eventually, the performer tapped the egg with his wand, and it hatched into a greasy cluster of white segmented worms — some dripped off and some seemed to wriggle down Rontleses’ throat. Rontleses coughed out worms and drew a great shuddering breath. His face had already changed, in some basic way, so that he seemed a different man entirely.

Ruiz felt sick to his stomach, but he couldn’t turn away.

The first major episode of Rontleses’ Expiation began. The conjuror flung a thin white silk over the former coercer, who sagged in the middle of the frame, apparently exhausted by the preliminaries. The folds of the silk settled over the victim like fog, and by some trick of arrangement, seemed no longer to be hiding a human shape, but something monstrous, something pregnant with ugliness. The torches guttered low for an instant, motion rippled the silk — then the conjuror whipped it away.