Kell's Legend

pleasantries? Go to your grave, Vashell, and enjoy the worms eating your eyes.”
    Vashell made a gesture, and Perella hurried from the room. Vashell’s face darkened, and only then did she see the collar and lead he carried. He moved forward, fastened the collar around her throat and wound twin clanking chains around his gloved gauntlet. “Come with me. We’re going for a walk.”
    “You would parade me naked?”
    “Heretics deserve no dignity,” he said.
    Anu snarled then, a vachine sound, and her fangs lengthened showing the gleam of brass. Vashell laughed, and tugged on the chains making Anukis stumble; she righted herself with difficulty, through her broken bruised frame, and he dragged her out into the corridor where the metal grille walkway dug viciously into her naked feet.
    Anu’s face burned red as Vashell led her like a dog, tugging occasionally as if for his own amusement. They moved away from the prison block, and back to the hub of the Engineer’s Palace. As they approached from the prison arm so they passed more and more vachine, and several Engineers and Cardinals who stared at Anukis with distaste, some with open hatred, baring fangs in a show of aggressive challenge. Anu kept her head high, meeting the gaze of every pureblood, challenging them, snarling back with her own hatred and loathing.
    At the hub central there was a high domed ceiling of brass, and a huge circular desk fashioned from a single mammoth block of silver-quartz and polished into smooth perfection, gleaming, beautiful, and sculpted with fine chisels into a thousand different scenes of vachine history, and vachine victory. Behind this circular symbol sat the bulk of the Engineers and their subordinates, Engineer Priests, working on intricate machinery, individual workstations full of delicate hand tools and machine tools, some powered by burning oil, some by the energy and pulse of silver-quartz which was mined, with great loss of life, by the albinos deep beneath the Black Pike Mountains. Silver-quartz was one of the three fabled ingredientsof the vachine. The timing mechanism of a vachine’s heart; and indeed, his soul.
    Vashell stopped before the huge silver bank, and grinned at the other Engineers, obviously displaying his prize with pride. The sentiment was clear; what he had failed to dominate by love and marriage, he now dominated by fear and violence. This would gain him respect after his perceived darkening at Anu’s newly discovered impure status. He had been right. She had made a fool of him.
    The Engineers to a man—for they were all male—set down delicate tools with care and stood. There were nearly three hundred of them; the core of vachine society trained highly in the arts of clockwork and the magick of blood-oil. Anu’s eyes swept along the ranks, ranging across short and tall Engineers and Engineer Priests alike, all wearing silver religious insignia on their shoulders, all focused with looks of hatred at this woman, this half-pure, the daughter of one who had, once, been great. Kradek-ka. The Watchmaker.
    “See?” bellowed Vashell, pulling the chains tight so his superior height caused Anu to stand up on tiptoe, straining, the veins and muscles of her throat standing out. “The one who shamed me! Now, she walks as my slave. Until I see fit to dispose of her.”
    The Engineers were staring, eyes narrowed, and began to hiss, the noise filling the domed chamber as steel and brass fangs slid from jaw sheaths and they narrowed eyes at the impure; but more than that. A high-ranking impure who had shamed an Engineer Priest. This was not done.
    And then, standing there, naked and chained before the Engineers, Anukis realised the full extent of her slavery. Desolation swamped her. This was not going to be a simple case of torture and execution. No. Not only Vashell’s pride and vachine honour were on trial here; the whole of the Engineer culture felt cheated, abused, despoiled, and Anu realised with a lead heart that they would force her to live as long as possible…and make her suffer humiliation, degradation, and pain greater than any impure had ever suffered.
    Anu shivered, goose-bumps running along her flesh, and Vashell pulled her tight before his Engineer brethren and his fangs grew long, and suddenly a hushed silence flowed through the chamber and Vashell’s head dropped, his fangs plunging into Anu’s neck, into her artery, and he sucked out her blood and lifted her, like a ragdoll in his