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E-minor-seventh.
     
    “What do you think, Whitey?” Nobody had ever asked me that.
     
    “What is it, Sarge?”
     
    “A mandolar. From now on, it will be your life.”
     
    The Sky Demons
     
    Slop, I remember thinking, is a bit early today.
     
    I had heard the barred doors slamming open along the length of the hallway. Now a shadow eclipsed the only light in my severely atrophied universe. To my immense astonishment, a heavy mallet rose, fell, rose again, fell—exactly as it had done when we were sealed into this purgatory, this time miraculously splitting the soft rivets in the hasp.
     
    The rust-blistered door grated open noisily. Out in the hallway, forms moved erratically from side to side, throwing bizarre shadows into my world. I cringed backward, only partly in terror of renewed torture, mostly because my fear-filled eyes were painfully blinded by the raw, unfiltered glory of a smoky torch in the sconce across the passage.
     
    “Ye’re of a certes as these be the ones ye’re wantin’?”
     
    His harsh voice seared forever into my memory, the Bailiff stood before the door, visible from the waist down. I recognized his boots, the hem of his mailed shirt over its padded vest. A hammer with chisel dangled from one of his sword-callused hands. A hatchet hung from his belt.
     
    Other figures, completely anonymous in their floor-length hooded robes, bent down nearly double to examine us, each in turn averting its hidden face as it did so, from the ghastly sight, from the vile stench of two once-human beings being slowly converted into piles of putrescence.
     
    The rats skittered back into their niches.
     
    The last of these hooded apparitions, in a dialect of Scavian that was almost unintelligible to me, spoke to both of us in a low sibilant crackle betraying not a hint of personality, or of gender, or even of humanity.
     
    “You are the sky demons?”
     
    Backlighted by the flickering torch outside, the vapor of its breath hung menacingly before my face within the frigid cell. I tried to look it straight in the face. Firelit shadows gave the impression of a brown-robed man, arms folded into opposing sleeves, faceless, terrifying.
     
    “What is it you want from me now, torturer?” I managed to croak a question of my own in response. They were the first words I had spoken—besides Eleva’s name—in what seemed like centuries, “Yet another confession?”
     
    “With the right truth, demon, yet may you live to see the moons rise.”
     
    I had almost forgotten that this planet had two pairs of natural satellites. It had been very scenic, four moons, until the animal-riders slammed down on our half-built camp, shattering our dreams forever.
     
    “I will see them—just before you light your bonfire! Now get out ... ”
     
    The comparative fresh sweetness of the air outside our cell seemed suddenly unbearable. For some reason I began coughing uncontrollably, huge tears streaming down my face. Fever, followed by chills, passed through my body in waves. I was suddenly ashamed of the filth that covered me, worse of being humiliated before my captors. What would Eleva—
     
    “Silence! Silence!” the whisper demanded. “Your silence or the truth! Now listen carefully! Do you hold the reins of the star-flying machine?”
     
    It was another minute before I could speak. At this rate, I would not last much longer. The figure bending before me, after its brief tirade, remained mute. When my voice came, it was a hoarse sobbing rasp.
     
    “What are you asking me, priest?”
     
    “Guide you the star-flying machines?”
     
    Burning, I reasoned dully, is probably better than being hanged. Once the flame sears your nerve-endings, I am told, you can not feel a thing. It certainly beat outliving my inoculations, as I seemed to be doing now, eventually contracting leprosy or perhaps something equally attractive.
     
    Or being eaten in my sleep by rats, for that matter.
     
    “Sure,” I lied.