Lamine stood contentedly outside the prisoner’s cell. He had served the King of Bahteel since he could hold a sword, thirteen years now. His father had been a soldier who died in the last war with Junjai, when Lamine was just a baby. His father’s name had secured him a post as a a soldier’s boy–fetching water, hauling baggage, sharpening swords, digging trenches, building fires. The work was hard, but the other soldiers’ boys were his friends. It was the best time of his life.
When he was sixteen years old, Lamine got his chance to prove himself as a soldier of the king. His warband hd been dispatched to put down a peasant uprising–greedy, ungrateful farmers complaining about taxes or bandits or famine or some nonsense. Lamine and his friends–his sword-brothers–had marched in lockstep against the disorganized rabble. A cowardly farm wife had caught Lamine in the thigh with a flint kitchen knife when he had tried to take what she owed the king. Her final breath had been a shrill scream that still haunted Lamine’s dreams.
But the wound was deep and did not heal as it should have. Lamine could walk well enough from here to there, but the strain of long marches was beyond him. He might have found an apprenticeship and learned a trade. He might have started again at the bottom of the heap, without even his father’s name to help him along.
But a soldier’s life was all he knew. Lamine secured a place among the palace guard, watching the gates through the long, silent nights. Patrolling the halls through the long, sweltering days. Trading scuttlebutt with the fellow guards about which courtiers were up, and who was on their way down. Flirting with the kitchen sculls and the chambermaids.
Baya, one of the chambermaids–short, but filled with the spirit of an unbroken horse–had rejected one of his advances just yesterday. Her words still festered in his heart. Just because he was unmarried at his age didn’t mean that Lamine had nothing to offer. And if she didn’t like the way he looked at her, didn’t she understand that it was her own fault for being too beautiful? How could a man possibly help himself when she had those lustrous eyes, out there for everyone to see? How dare she reject him? Didn’t she know that he was trusted by the grand vizier himself? Didn’t she realize that he had been personally chosen for the most important duties?
As Lamine listened to the freakishly-tall prisoner scream and sob from within her cell, he imagined that it was Baya being brought low. He liked the thought of her crying out her regrets at rejecting him, and begging for his forgiveness in an agony-scoured voice.
Lamine realized that he hadn’t heard the prisoner in a while. Perhaps she had just passed out. If she had died, though, Lamine didn’t like to think of the whipping he would receive from the vizier.
The cell door had a small, barred window, covered by a stout wooden hatch. Opening the hatch, Lamine peered into the cell. There was nothing to see but a smear of reddish smoke. “Hey! Speak up, bitch!” he called out, pushing his face up against the bars of the little window. Where was that freak?
Out of nowhere, two brown-skinned fingers drove into Lamine’s nostrils, pulling his face hard against the bars. Pain shot through him like lightning. He couldn’t even get a breath to scream.
“Open the door or I tear off your nose,” came a gravelly whisper. Lamine tried to pull his head back, but any movement felt like driving two daggers deeper into soft flesh of his nose. His face was on fire. He tried to fit a hand through the little window, but there was no room, his face covered the whole thing.
Fumbling blindly, Lamine found the door and raised the bar. The fingers vanished from his nose at the same moment the door burst open, hurling Lamine across the hall. He collapsed to the floor, the cool stone pressing hard against his wounded face. He turned toward the prisoner, blood flowing from his nostrils.
The freak staggered out of the cell, obviously too weak to stand straight. She raised an arm longer than any woman should have, pointing to the cell. “Get in,” she rasped.
“I don’t take orders from bitches,” Lamine said and hauled himself to his feet.Drawing his sword and swinging it in a single motion, he lunged for the arrogant cow.
It whistled through the air. Somehow she was already beside him, faster than any woman should move.
The white-hot pain of an iron spear tip exploded in his gut.
His own momentum drove it deeper.
Lamine’s whole world dissolved into agony, then silence, stillness, and death.
— — —
Photo by Martins Krastins from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/cave-with-hole-at-the-top-photo-826490/
Wayfarings of Sabit: Agony is copyright (c) 2018 by Michael S. Miller. All rights reserved. New chapters post every Thursday (and the occasional Monday). You can support this and other stories on Patreon: https://patreon.com/michaelsmiller Find more sword and sorcery fiction at http://ipressgames.com/fiction/.