There is a tale told in Daillon of a _shegri_ where the challenger was
left in a room alone, where he was blindfolded and told to await the
beginning of the torment.
Somewhere in those dark hours of waiting, between the unknown and the
unexpected, the hours of telling over to himself the horrors of past
_shegri_, the torture of anticipation alone became the unbearable. A
little past noon he collapsed in screams of horror and died raving,
unmarred, untouched.
Daybreak came slowly, and with the first streamers of light came Dallisa
and the white _chak_, maliciously uninvolved, sniffing his way through
the shabby poverty of the great hall. They took me to a lower dungeon
where the slant of the sunlight was less visible. Dallisa said, "The sun
has risen."
I said nothing. Any word may be interpreted as a confession of defeat. I
resolved to give them no excuse. But my skin crawled and I had that
peculiar prickling sensation where the hair on my forearms was
bristling erect with tension and fear.
Dallisa said to the _chak_, "His gear was not searched. See that he has
swallowed no anesthetic drugs."
Briefly I gave her credit for thoroughness, even while I wondered in a
split second why I had not thought of this. Drugs could blur
consciousness, at least, or suspend reality. The white nonhuman sprang
forward and pinioned my arms with one strong, spring-steel forearm. With
his other hand he forced my jaws open. I felt the furred fingers at the
back of my throat, gagged, struggled briefly and doubled up in
uncontrollable retching.
Dallisa's poison-berry-eyes regarded me levelly as I struggled upright,
fighting off the dizzy sickness of disgust. Something about her
impassive face stopped me cold. I had been, momentarily, raging with
fury and humiliation. Now I realized that this had been a calculated,
careful gesture to make me lose my temper and thus sap my resistance.
If she could set me to fighting, if she could make me spend my strength
in rage, my own imagination would fight on her side to make me lose
control before the end. Swimming in the glare of her eyes, I realized
she had never thought for a moment that I had taken any drug. Acting on
Kyral's hint that I was a Terran, she was taking advantage of the
well-known Terran revulsion for the nonhuman.
"Blindfold him," Dallisa commanded, then instantly countermanded that:
"No, strip him first."
The _chak_ ripped off shirtcloak, shirt, shoes, breeches, and I had my
first triumph when the wealed clawmarks on my shoulders--worse, if
possible, than those which disfigured my face--were laid bare. The
_chak_ screwed up his muzzle in fastidious horror, and Dallisa looked
shaken. I could almost read her thoughts:
_If he endured this, what hope have I to make him cry mercy?_
Briefly I remembered the months I lay feverish and half dead, waiting
for the wounds Rakhal had inflicted to heal, those months when I had
believed that nothing would ever hurt me again, that I had known the
worst of all suffering. But I had been younger then.
Dallisa had picked up two small sharp knives. She weighed them,
briefly, gesturing to the _chak_. Without resisting, I let myself be
manhandled backward, spreadeagled against the wall.