“Make it possible,” he growled.
“She has been imprisoned for crimes against the king and the state. After your departure, she became ever more aggressive in her attempts to stir up rebellions. She was arrested a week ago along with fifteen other members of her group of rabble. She was sentenced to death along with the rest of them.”
“You don’t touch what’s mine,” Archon growled, his expression thoroughly fearsome. “You certainly do not attempt to destroy it.”
“You had left, my liege, and you said you had no interest in returning. She didn’t particularly seem to be yours. She didn’t seem to be anyone’s, for that matter.”
“That did not give you the right to take my human.”
“Your human? The one you used and abandoned? The one who found herself begging for the mercy of strangers who would not give it? I took her, and I killed her because killing her was the only merciful thing to do.”
And that was when Archon slew him.
It was not a considered act, nor a particularly dramatic one. The king simply took his weapon and fired it twice in quick succession, sending two bolts of hypercharged electric probes into the flesh of Naxus.
The general was dead before he knew what had happened to him, experiencing first an overloading of his neurons and then complete combustion of his physical form. In an instant, what had once been a general was now nothing more than a pile of faintly steaming ashes.
Archon looked around the war room, very much depressed by the action he had been forced to take, and the reason for it. The human was dead and gone, and now he was forced to face a kind of loss and loneliness he had not imagined himself capable of experiencing.
“You’ve killed the general, haven’t you.” Brimsley did not sound upset, simply a little tired and resigned. He had been out in the hall, inspecting the tapestries and trying not to overtly overhear anything.
“He needed killing. He killed my woman.”
“I was not aware you had a woman, sire?”
“Her name is Iris, and he killed her.”
“Ah the human you were rutting with,” Brimsley said. “The other servants have informed me that there are humans imprisoned in the dungeon. Perhaps we should free them as an act of goodwill.”
Archon waved an uninterested hand. “Fine.”
“Sire, I know you are disappointed at the loss of your favorite, but there are many thousands more humans who could no doubt fulfil your desire for a disrespectful mate who dislikes you.”
“Brimsley…” Archon snarled the name with all the meaningless threat he could muster.
“Archon, you owe the girl a debt of kindness. Show mercy to those in the dungeons and perhaps you will find yourself rewarded.”
Archon very much doubted that. Being king was far less rewarding than he had imagined. He was ready to take the blasted crown and throw it into a spatial anomaly.
Chapter 18
“Did you hear?” Thalia was back from being tortured with news. She was a brawny young woman who never seemed to mind being pulled from the cell and taken off to be hurt for the amusement of those who incarcerated her. Iris admired her fortitude, and wondered how she might become as strong herself. Since her capture, she had felt spectacularly weak. Discarded by a king, captured by a rogue general, used and degraded and finally imprisoned, she was not sure that life could get any worse - or any better, for that matter. It seemed to her that existence had become something of a slow and tedious torture whether it took place in the dungeons or not.
In Naxus’ dungeons, every prisoner was tortured for several hours a week. Sometimes the torture was so terrible they would not survive it, other times it was simply menial labor. It all depended on the torturer and his mood.
Iris had been down in the depths of the royal palace dungeons for an indeterminate period of time. There were no day or night cycles down here, there was only the volume and duration of screaming, moaning, and general misery from her fellow prisoners.
A surprising number of women had been incarcerated by Naxus. There were at least two dozen in the cell Iris shared. There were men too, of course, but they were kept separately so that no comfort might be found in the sexes lying together.
“Did I hear what?”
Thalia smiled and wrapped her damaged arm with a dirty scrap of fabric. “I heard that king is back - and General Naxus is dead.”
“What king?” It was a stupid question, but dungeon imprisonment wasn’t conducive to having the quickest mental reaction time. The dungeons were lit with greasy torches, so the entire place smelled like barbecue the entire time but without almost any food to eat. Sometimes a prisoner would snuff out a torch and they would take turns sucking on the grease soaked wrappings which were the richest source of calories in the awful place.
“Archon. He's come back to rule over us all.”
Iris felt her stomach start to do flip-flops of extreme nervousness. Archon had returned. Why? Was she being arrogant if she thought it was on her account?
It barely seemed to matter. From the cell in which she had been thrown, beaten and bloodied, it was an irrelevance. The king didn’t know where she was, unless the general had told him, and that seemed unlikely.
“Come on then! Out you all come! It’s your lucky day!” The guards started hollering at the lot of them, confirming Thalia’s words.
“They’re letting us go! The king is pardoning all prisoners!”
The cry was taken up by all the ladies, and what ensued was best described as a stampede from the dungeons. Iris let the others go first. She assumed that she would still be put to death. No doubt the king they were referring to was Naxus. He had the bearing of a male who would declare himself king just to make the peasants bow.
Shuffling toward the end of the line, Iris tried not to get her hopes up. If she did somehow get out of here alive, she was going to keep her head down for the rest of her life. Better have a head down than no head at all. She had not enjoyed her incarceration even a little, and facing inevitable execution had not been any easier on her sanity.
Ahead of her, the women had all formed something like a receiving line, and were going past thanking the one who had set them free. When Iris looked in his direction, she thoroughly expected Naxus.
But it wasn’t Naxus.
It was Archon. He was standing handsome as ever, wearing the most astonishing gold scale armor which gleamed more brightly than the sun she had not seen in a long time. He was there to take credit for his alleged act of mercy. He was there, perhaps, to look for her.
Iris pulled her cloak up over her head and kept her face bowed. She was indistinguishable among the stinking wretched women who emerged from the dungeon. Or at least, so she thought. They all passed by the king, bowing, scraping, crying their gratitude.
“Thank you, thank you so much! I will forever be in your debt!” Thalia wailed in front of Iris.
It occurred to Iris that she shouldn’t stay silent. Some noise should emerge from her, even if she didn’t mean the words, or even if the words weren’t the same as the others words.
“Oh thank you wonderful dick bag king whose fault this all is,” she gasped, putting emphasis on the nice words and muttering the not so nice ones under her breath. It gave her a certain satisfaction to defy Archon one more time.