“Fine. Whatever. Take me to dinner. If there isn’t normal food for normal beings, there’s going to be trouble. I don’t drink blood.”
“We very much enjoy good cuisine.” He motioned me to the door and followed behind me. The door was closed and locked behind us. “His majesty bade me show you the castle before. We’ll do that now, so if he should ask you questions at dinner, you’ll be able to answer them.”
Lord Aiko was beingniceto me.
That was…unexpected.
I nodded. “Let’s go.”
Marching forward, he led me, followed by the guards, down several cavernous, winding staircases that finally opened to a huge entrance hall.
Two enormous doors were located at the front of the hall, across from the walkway where we stood. There were two windows, standing three stories tall, and each held a figure. One was red and black, and one was white and gold. They faced each other holding swords, the red one point down, the white one point up.
Just above that were two more windows, only half a story tall. One held a blood drop above the red figure and the other, a starburst above the white.
Finally, at the very top, was a single window straddling those. Framed there was a gate—not the gate at the end of the Scar, though.
Then, I made the mistake of looking down.
A fountain, two stories tall, sat in the middle of the room. It has several dozen different tiers and dishes and cascades down to the main pool.
Filled with blood.
All of it filled with blood.
It trickled down the sides of the bowls and vertical walls, dripping into the catch basins and pool below, and more flowed in from the two small waterfalls—no, they were blood falls.
“Oh…gods…” I whispered.
One of the guards poked me in the back with his long gun, because Aiko had moved. I tripped over my own feet when I finally started moving.
“It is all blood,” he said. “The blood of the guilty and the innocent. The dead are drained in here, and the punished are rejuvenated with a dunking so their sentences may continue.”
I gasped. “The man in the cage…”
“Disobeyed the king fifty years ago and has been dunked once. He is coming up on his second. He has three more cycles to go. Another seventy-five years.”
“What did he do?”
“He did not listen to the king’s directive to be on time for dinner––for the third time.”
Being late for dinner could earn you one hundred twenty-five years in a cage being drained of blood.
How had I ever thought that these people were our allies and friends?
At the bottom of the stairs, we walked around the fountain where there were goblets of every sort lined along the bottom of the pool.
“Do youdrinkthis?”
“Of course.”
“But blood sours outside the body!”
“Unless it is kept cool,” he said. “This blood is kept circulating through our fountain quickly, and is cooled through refrigeration as it travels the pipes.”
“Re-what?” I’d never heard that word before.
“Refrigeration. A cooling system—you really are behind us in technology.” The lord knight stared at me. “We have a large system of pipes that can cool blood to just above freezing and preserve it for weeks. We can also freeze it and preserve it for years.”
