“But I have no unguents for you.” His voice was smooth and gloating… “You see, I can’t afford it—”

“Smahil, how could you?” I asked slowly. I only wanted to know this. “You are not cruel for the sake of cruelty. Why did you let her… ? She knows you let her.”

“I wanted to see you suffer.” His voice was quicker, nearer now, but I couldn’t see him. Perhaps my eyes were closed, perhaps my weariness had blanked my sight after all. “You never show emotion, you’re always like an icicle, aloof, untouchable, untouched no matter what is done to you—You live, you breathe, you worry, but you don’t reach out to other people, you keep your passion for the Reptile—”

His arms slid on my lacerated back, he was covering me with kisses. The sound of his panting roused me.

“Oh, my back,” I moaned.

He threw me into the bed where the stuffed bear’s head still attached to the pelt glared at me in the murk.

I moaned and wept as he caressed me. Even the touch of the linen sheet beneath me was agony. I was too weak with pain and despair even to plead with him. But now my sight was no longer numb. I kept my eyes open.

Even…

He was not even gentle.

“You are good like this,” he mumbled. “Terez is a clever fire—consuming me for itself—you are always mine, you cling to me as if I were a rock in Chaos, you cling to me—you’d cling to the marrow in my bones—I can feel even that moving towards the rhythm of your heart—poor little child—my Ci-ja—poor little weeping child—”

I was nearly unconscious but I felt his tears on my mouth as I relaxed my always-pleading convulsive grip—

I lay for a long time in pain and darkness. Most of the time I could not keep even my vague instincts in a straight enough line for a thought, let alone enough thoughts in a line for an idea—it was all pain, degradation, despair, no one to turn to —That was it; No one to turn to, I have no friends, no one can help, no one can be kind to me—

It is not the pain that makes me ill, I thought; it is that I have no friend, no one who can help—