Nightside 11 - A Hard Days Knight

pleas for death and an end to pain. More faces had been stapled to the walls, the eyes following us as they passed. The mouths moved, but their tongues had been torn out. Further in, people had been buried alive in stone walls, with their hands left to protrude, still feebly moving. Bloody organs and human viscera hung from the ceilings in intricate displays, dripping blood and other fluids—still alive, pulsing, twitching. I asked Blaise about them.
    “Works of art,” he said.
    I couldn’t stop to set them free. There were too many. I had to save my strength for the fight ahead and hope there’d be time later.
    Finally, after so many horrors and brutal indignities that I’d actually started to become numb to atrocity, we came at last to the Court of Camelot. And, of course, Merlin had kept the worst till last. Two huge doors of beaten brass stood before us, covered in deeply etched satanic workings and blasphemous designs. Severed hands and feet had been nailed to the doors, in patterns that made no sense. The doors opened slowly before us, and Blaise crashed to a halt. Suzie and I stopped and looked back at him.
    “Aren’t you coming?” I said. “I thought you were going to watch, while Merlin did nasty things to us.”
    “I know better than to enter unless invited,” said Blaise. “He’ll send for me when he wants me.”
    I looked thoughtfully at the slowly widening gap between the two doors. “What’s in there, Blaise?”
    “The dead and the damned.”
    “Ah,” said Suzie. “Knew I should have dressed up formal. And brought more grenades with me.”
    “We’ll have to improvise,” I said. “Shall we go?”
    “Let’s,” said Suzie.
    “But first things first,” I said, and punched Blaise right in the face. He reeled backwards, blood spurting from his ruined mouth. Suzie stepped in behind him and cracked him round the back of his head with the butt of her gun. He bent forward, as though he were bowing to me, and I rabbit-punched him. Blaise hit the floor hard and didn’t move again.
    “Shouldn’t have been a mouthy little shit, Blaise,” I said.
    “Got that right,” said Suzie.
    We marched into the Court together, smiling cheerfully, our heads held high. It was a huge open space, full of a dull, murky, blood-red light. The smell hit me first; bad as the outside land had been, this was worse. Blood and offal and filth, but concentrated, as though someone had chosen to make perfume out of it. The massive walls were covered with the flayed bodies of all those who had defied or spoken out against Merlin or sought to change the world he’d made. Thousands of them, with their skins sheared away to show glistening red muscle and splintered bone. Pinned to the wall like so many trophies, so many mounted butterflies. Still alive, enduring agonies that should have killed them, maintained on the very edge of death by Merlin’s magic. He fed on their pain and was content.
    The marble floor was stained with blood and filth and scattered human offal. Some old, some new, piled up here and there, or kicked aside to make rough passageways. From the high beamed ceiling hung massive chandeliers, made from human bone and gristle, with candles fashioned from human fat. They gave off a thick greasy smoke that hung heavily on the air. There were braziers with irons heating in them, and iron maidens with fresh blood round their bases, and all kinds of instruments of torture, ready for us. One man had been recently dissected, all of his parts cut out and separated, pinned to a large display board. His heart still beat, his lungs still moved, and—like all the others—he was still somehow alive.
    I knew what all these things were, without having to be told; there was a low-level information spell operating in the Court. Merlin wanted his visitors to know what happened here. So he could stamp out the last little bit of hope they brought in with them.
    Merlin Satanspawn sat on his great iron throne at the very end of the Court. Hugely fat and naked, and happy in his evil. He beckoned for Suzie and me to approach, with one plump, blood-stained hand. I headed straight for him, as though that was what I’d intended all along. I didn’t look down at what I was striding through. Suzie stuck close beside me. I made a point of not hurrying. In a place like this, small victories were sometimes all you’ve got. I took the time to study the woman sitting on the iron throne next to Merlin’s. Incredibly tall and