A Sketch from the Citadel

Post-induction, she had them buckled and hooded. Their mouths

seeped through ball-gags and wet strips of cloth.
The concubines had returned to their distant quarters. She was back at
the Processing Yard where drugged internees were decanted over the
cavernous staging area. She saw them always from a great distance, as
through a long tunnel. Even in their inert state, she felt they expected
something of her.
His straitjacket prolapsed red across white, petals and coils, a sour
stink of stomach acids and excrement. The way he cradled his viscera
so tenderly; the way blood-flecked saliva bubbled until he shook. She
removed his gag, shrugged off her short silk gown, put away the
gutting knife, allowing the miracle of his tongue to sting.
He rose to the occasion, extended a cooling body. She convulsed as
he died, aware of the chained eyes of the inductees egging her on;
learning to appreciate her.
They had lived beyond the black bulwarks as mothers, fathers, lovers,
students, artists, bureaucrats, thinkers; now reduced to anonymous
toys - Citadel carrion, as she had been once. Yet she craved their
attention and more. Power in the Outside was anonymous and
dispersed. In the Citadel it accrued into spectacle then mutated into
something else.
She relished all the contradictions this visibility entailed. For today,
she appeared to them in well-fed, sore and scabbed flesh. She wanted
to understand what it was to inexist. They could help each other out.
That night, she had phoned in another team from a nearby arsenal.
They journeyed through the sinuous tram-shafts, burrowing in ancient
catacombs webbed with gantries and girders in a substructure of pure
imperviousness, Primary Matter.
The two male concubines touched her tentatively, afraid to hurt her
until ordered to. But they soon got the hang of snagging breasts in
teeth, pinching, licking and raking, before they slipped into her with
the modesty of their kind. The women kissed and cut, leaving her red-
burning, wet and angry.
The condemned, at least, would appreciate the incongruity while the
Clock Guards - heavy industrial automata with a minimal regard for
human anatomy - beat a select few into red pap. They killed slowly
yet were indefatigable once the order was passed. This instructional
process always seemed about to plumb her capacity for horror but
never exceeded it.
At her panoramic window, she stared out across the winding tunnels
and the minatory prows of Black Ships floating on Void Winds
between the Dolorous Cities, rearing thunderheads from the Citadel’s
prime substance. The Ships waited to drink her as they waited to drink
them all, before the entire assemblage halted, screaming its insolent
prayer at the final emptiness. She was changed utterly. On the Outside
she had never wielded power or appreciated how it damned its
possessor. Now it was a weapon for that which waited across light
centuries of glacier, under the collated facsimiles of former galaxies.
The Clock Guards stumbled out of pools of blood mash and splintered
bone, gauche as baby crabs. One day, she would order them to pick
her apart, then to deconstruct themselves, claw out their synthetic
muscles and camera eyes. She would tell the condemned to watch
carefully. It would not be justice. There would be too much pleasure
in it, and death would be but a hesitation before the Ships.
And perhaps this alone bothered her. If perversion was the rule, where
was she? What could she do, who came from nowhere and would
never return?
From the Outside, the Citadel is finite, local, secreted in a waste
quarter of every city: a baroque town house reserved for silent
ritualists, a fortress, residue of a defunct police state, a chateau
crumbling in the heart of a decaying steel works. Nervous magistrates
concoct paper misdirections to ratify the internees’ disappearance,
implicating them in corruption, theft, prostitution or child murders. It
doesn’t matter if they are punished justly, only that the greater mass
believes it. Yet from the Citadel, the Outside is irretrievable. An idiot
loneliness.