Part 6

Lian estimated it was one day later when the appointment came due. In that time she hadn't seen or heard from another soul. She'd called out to the other prisoners a few times but received no reply. She could barely even hear their breathing, quiet as the dungeon was. No other prisoners were delivered, and nobody did a thing to any of the existing victims. She expected a day without food or water was enough to wreck most people, especially given the soul-deadening conditions of the dungeon and its eerily silent denizens.

Shuli Go, however, could go days without water and weeks without food and still survive, and in a meditative trance that could be stretched out even further. Lighter and more attentive than sleep, but deeper than conscious meditation, the Shuli Go practice was closest to remaining perpetually in the mental space just before one falls asleep: the signals of the body numbed and the mind drifting back and forth between darkness and activity. Lian had gone into the trance for days at a time when food was scarce or her body needed to recover without the risk of falling asleep.

The result was that Lian was little worse for wear when her two guards returned, searing her eyes with their torch for a moment, then pulled her out of the cage and roughly dragged her along the ground.

"Water, please," she begged, adding a hoarseness to her voice she hoped was convincing. All she received was another slap across the face however. She again held back the urge to kill them both, realizing that they were moving her with purpose further down the dungeon. She was about to meet the one in charge of using the Book of Dragons.

That one wound up being a tall, thin, bespectacled man, in his mid-twenties, no older. He had the thin wrists and gaunt cheeks of an academic, and as he stood over Lian she saw he had the eyes of a soft-spoken, gentle and kind scholar. The guards tied Lian down with thick ropes at the thighs and stomach to a hard bamboo chair, but left her hands bound in chains on her lap above the ropes.

Aside from the torch the guard carried, there were a series of candles on a long stone table in front of Lian and behind the scholar. It was more than enough light for Lian to make out a number of books, alchemical implements, and surgical tools on the table. But she couldn't spot the characteristic golden reflection from the supposed Book of Dragons on the edges of any of the tomes.

"Zhu Zhuyang," the scholar said with a smile shallow and deeply unsettling. "Although I assume that's not your real name, it is a pleasure to meet you." He held his hand up to his chest and closed his eyes softly. "I, am Wong Gafung." He smacked his lips lightly as if savoring a tasty meal, and that's when Lian realized he was truly, absolutely psychopathic. It was her torture he was savoring, pre-emptively.

"I…I did nothing wrong," Lian stammered, the fear in her voice no longer an act. She could tell before he'd even laid a finger on her that the intellect in his face had been turned towards something so inhumane he no longer thought that existing in a dungeon and working by thin candlelight was odd or extreme. Wherever he'd come from – University, refugee camp, another dungeon – he had found an environment in which his natural tendencies could thrive. Lian pulled against the ropes holding her and found they were too well tied for her liking. Her pulse quickened involuntarily, and at once the stench of the dungeon air reappeared in her nostrils, almost making her gag.

"It does not matter what you did," Wong replied, an easy-going nature in his voice. "All that matters is what you will do."

"What's that?" She asked, allowing her natural urge to resist to sneak out of her voice as she tugged against the ropes and tested the slack on her wrist chains. She could reach the ropes on her thighs easily enough, but the ones on her stomach were just out of reach on account of the wrist bindings.

"You will soon pay back the Prefect for your transgression, with a lifetime of service."

"But what transgression? Did he even tell you?"

"It does not matter. All transgressions are punishable the same way. Service. A lifetime of service. When you are suitably prepared, you will work for the Prefect, and help him to make Liangyong a better place."

"Uh-huh," Lian gave up all hint of her character, allowing her mind to focus on the logistics of how she could escape in a moment's notice. "Prefect must be a pretty great boss. Seems like you enjoy working for him."

"Oh no, he's quite the… slavedriver." Wong's voice inflected the last word before he burst into a thin peal of laughter that froze Lian in her chair and forced her to look up at him, his face flushed with glee. She remembered the motionless forms of the other prisoners. Their eyelids shut like vices. The thought that had first registered somewhere deep in her mind surfaced all at once. She would need to escape quickly, if the thought was correct. But she had to be sure first. She stared Wong in the eye and tried to control her breathing.

Wong didn't take long to confirm Lian's suspicions. He turned to face his table, pulled open a drawer, and removed a heavy, wide-set tome, then placed it on the table. She watched carefully from behind his back as he flipped to a marked page and re-examined it, even though he knew the incantation by heart at this point. The book was part of his ritual, part of the exactitude as he began mixing some of the elements, powders, and liquids on the table. He intoned something in ancient Imperial, quiet and with purpose. Lian couldn't hear it all, but she heard enough.

"Huono-waitu" she used her own bit of the old language to draw forth fountains of fire from her palms, one directed to each batch of ropes. The ones at her thighs burnt through almost instantly, before either the guards or Wong could even understand what was happening, but the ones around her torso were too far away from her hand to burn immediately. The gap between palm and ropes meant that the fire licked outwards, singing her breasts and stomach slightly until the second set of ropes burnt free. The searing of the fire hurt, but Lian was acutely aware of how much more the guards' short spears would hurt if they were allowed to come into play.

She rose up from the chair and moved towards one of the guards, kicking him as hard as she could in the groin, then wrapping her bound wrists behind his head and pulling his face down to her uprising knee. She felt his skull collapse as blood exploded onto her leg.

The other guard shouted something and attacked, but too slowly to catch Lian off guard. He thrust his spear in her direction, she dodged with ease, closed the distance between them, grabbed the spear and wedged the back end of it against his throat, ending his cries and crumpling him onto the ground.

Wong was absolutely terrified at this turn of events, and had stood motionless while Lian had dispatched the two guards. When Lian turned to face him however, a burst of adrenaline came over him and he began quickly rambling more of the ancient tongue and shaking the vial of mixed chemicals he held in his hand, attempting to finish his conjuration.

Lian wasted no time though, bounded the three steps necessary to close the distance between them, and smashed her combined fists into his face, breaking teeth and knocking him unconscious. She took a brief moment to exhale and let her blood calm slightly in the sudden silence. Then she swung into action, rifling through the dead guard's belt for the keys to her bindings. Her hands free, she stepped over the slumped form of Wong and folded up his heavy book, then grabbed the dropped torch from one of the guards, and set off to look for An.

The sewers had never been a way into Tai's compound. An's first rule of breaking in anywhere was that breaking in was easy. Breaking out was always the harder part. With book in hand, Lian walked down the halls of the dungeon, examining the walls for signs that An had been pushing against the sewer entrance. Lian knew it would not be much – a slightly thinner level of mold on the wall, or a few crumbs of plaster An had successfully dislodged – but her Shuli Go senses would reveal it easily enough.

The problem was Lian had lost all sense of direction and scope after being dragged through Tai's estate and then dropped in the dungeon. According to An, the entrance was likely at the end of a long wall. But Tai's dungeon went on for almost two hundred yards, and the sewer entrance was no more than half a yard wide. It took Lian almost five long minutes to carefully examine a single wall. While she doubted either the guards or Wong would be able to stop her, she didn't know how long it would take before Tai sent someone to investigate if Wong didn't return quickly. A bit of panic crept into her, and she began shouting out An's name as she reached a corner and started on the second wall.

Finally, as she passed the second corner, she found the spot, made evident by An's repeated striking of the wall. "An!" Lian shouted as a small piece of the brick wall began to disintegrate in front of her. She waited as more and more of the wall came apart, and that's when the hands grabbed a hold of her.

Five sets of them, almost as if in a hive-mind, grasped onto her arms, her shoulders, her legs, and pulled Lian backwards, onto the ground. She struck the back of her head and saw the familiar explosion of bright lights in her vision as she involuntarily released the book, torch, and guards keys' she'd brought along. When her vision returned a second later, she saw five faces standing over her. She brought her hands up to protect from a guard's weapon, but these were not guards. These were the other prisoners. Five of the largest, youngest men, all fit and strong, looming over her with menace in their eyes. She knew at once she had made a mistake – she hadn't killed Wong, merely incapacitated him. Because the book he was using, and had planned to use on Lian, was not the mythical Book of Dragons, but the less-mythical, though almost as powerful, Book of Terrors.

"Keep her there," she heard Wong command the prisoners. A heavy foot pressed against each of her forearms and ankles, pinning her under their weight. She considered the spells she had under her own command, but there was nothing that would incapacitate that many men all at once. Instead she called out to her friend.

"An! Quick!"

The wall finished crumbling and An emerged a few feet away, her daggers already drawn.

"Get her," Wong commanded, but to Lian's displeasure, the command was not directed to the five standing on her, but to another group of prisoners who sprinted towards An, bearing the guards' spears and a set of other makeshift weapons.

While they weren't soldiers, and An managed to fell two of them, there was simply no way she could defend herself against so many. She was struck across the back of the head with a spear and stumbled, before being grabbed by the remaining prisoners and thrown on the ground not far from Lian, then held down in similar fashion.

"Well…" Wong said, towering over his two new prisoners, blood dripping from his mouth and a reinvigorated lust for pain twinkling in his eyes. "Two women who know how to fight. The Prefect will be very interested in seeing you become a part of his collection." He then turned to yet more of the prisoners who had come to life. "Bring me my mixture and the book."

Lian turned her head to follow the prisoner, but another foot came down and pressed on her skull, holding her head flat against the ground. She strained involuntarily against all the weight pressing down on her, but most of her concern was for An.

"An, are you ok?" She asked.

An just moaned a long, disoriented shudder, then shouted out the confused "What?" of someone with a fresh concussion. Guilt wracked Lian, not just for the pain An was in, but for what she knew was to come next.

The prisoner handed Wong's book to him, then held the mixture of chemicals aloft beside the magician. Wong started to repeat the same incantation he'd begun earlier, though this time he swept his arms across both Lian and An as he did so, wrapping them up in the pre-emptory tailspin of magics of which the concoction would be the final mixture.

"An!" Lian shouted, even as the men all around her pressed harder on her bones, sending tendrils of pain into her every appendage. "Close your eyes! Close your eyes An!"

Wong finished his incantation, tucked the book under his arm, and took the completed potion in his hand. He then smiled a bloody smile at Lian. "This one," he told the prisoners, "hold her eyes open."

Two large pairs of hands reached down towards her face, and Lian was held in place with more weight than ever as she tried to avoid them. She felt the skin on her ankles and wrists tear under the extra pressure, blood and skin trickling out, but that was not at the top of her list of concerns. She closed her eyes tight and tried to wiggle her head to keep the hands from prying them open. It took a few seconds, but eventually the foot on her forehead pressed down so hard Lian thought her skull might give way, and she let the thick fingers of the prisoners tug on her eyelids and cheeks until they were held open.

Wong's smile reached its greatest width yet. Lian screamed, and he showered her with the potion.

Lian's body froze as the liquid touched her, and her mind expanded within the confines of her body until it was in every corner, intensely aware and conscious of every muscle, every bone, every cell in her organs. This was the Curse of Living Stone: her entire body petrified into rigidity except for the very tiniest breathing, while her brain was severed from the sending of signals, meaning its every resource was dedicated to receiving them.

The weights on her arms, legs, and head – already agonies beforehand – were amplified into absolute, screaming, alarm-filled terror. The heinous scent in the dungeon was amplified a hundredfold, giving Lian the deepest desire and instinct to vomit, without her body being able to do so. Worst of all though were her eyes. Kept open, unable to blink, it took only thirty seconds or so before the pain started to arrive. When they failed to water – even that involuntary action was restricted by the curse – that agony multiplied over and over again, every second a thousand painful knives digging into her skull.

What truly amplified all her pain though, was that she could not even convulse or react in any way – the bodies' natural reaction to experiencing pain of that magnitude. Denied even that freedom of reaction, Lian's entire mind emptied of thought and pain took it over entirely. If she had been able to react, her scream would have broken her lungs, and she would surely have thrashed hard enough to break her own bones. But she couldn't. She could do nothing but experience the pain in its horrible, maddening fullness.

Wong waited a full minute – it felt like a year in Lian's mind – before he instructed his guards to at least release her rigid frame from under their weight. Then he stood over Lian's torso and looked into her eyes, frozen open.

"You… knew what this was," he seemed genuinely impressed. "There are only a few hundred people in the Central Empire who know what this book is. You are not a mere thief," he surmised, his eyes alive with a fresh problem to be solved. "You are a saboteur. The Prefect will want to know about this." Wong wiped his mouth free of blood, revealing gaps where Lian had knocked his teeth out. He considered something for a moment, then nodded in satisfaction. "If you know this book, then you know the Curse of Living Stone cannot be broken. I can freeze you at any moment with but a word. From now until your death. No matter where you are, or what you are doing, I own you entirely."

Wong savored the slow delivery of the information, knowing that inside her motionless body Lian was undergoing an agonizing absence of movement, and even without the extra pain points provided by the weight of the prisoners, she was surely suffering immensely. "Yes," he continued his soliloquy, "you belong to me now. Which means you will belong to Prefect Tai. You are a saboteur who will pay for her crimes. And perhaps, if you prove your value. Prefect Tai will keep you alive and allow you to serve as he intended."

Lian heard little of his speech and made sense of even less. She had reached the point of absolute delirium from the pain in her eyes, which had in turn prompted a headache of such proportions that it made her wish the prisoner had successfully crushed her skull. Inside this state, time and words meant nothing. She only knew that should she ever regain control of her body, she had to close her eyes as hard as possible and never leave them open again.

"Suono shen."

They were the only words she heard clearly – ancient Imperial for "lock" and "body" – which freed her to close her eyes and finally allowed her to complete the scream she had initiated earlier, this time magnified by all the variety of pains she felt. She curled into a ball and grasped her wrists, silently begging for tears. The prisoners picked her up in this weakened state and dragged her back to her cage. It was only then that she heard An's own screams – whether because she'd failed to keep her eyes closed or they had inflicted some other pain on her, Lian couldn't tell. Though Lian dared not open her eyes again, she heard An being thrown into a cell nearby.

"Get comfortable," Wong told them both. And Lian did as she was told, returning to her meditative position.

"Suono shen," he said again. Lian froze in her cross-legged pose, her eyes shut tight, and prayed that next time she was unfrozen, she could do something about it.