“How’d you like that?” bellowed Doulos. “Are those enough lashes for one day?

By now George had learned not to shout out. Instead, he scrunched up his eyes and his face, taking the pain into himself. He focused on the feeling of clawing agony in his back, then imagined it was a stream of hatred flowing into him. In his mind’s eye he welcomed the stream, then redirected it, making it flow back out of him as anger and power. As he was being trained to do, he told himself that the beatings were making him more powerful.

In any case, he did not feel them as much any more because his skin was toughening up and becoming scaly. This was an effect of the black liquid he was drinking. Through imbibing the dark substance, he was slowly metamorphosing. Underneath the skin of his shoulder blades he could feel two lumps starting to push up, which he was told would become wings. George wondered if the whipping sped up this process.

Doulos gave him another couple of thrashes for good measure, then said “Alright, that’ll do nicely for this morning.” He untied George from the barracks fence. Twice a day, this was where George would come to be literally whipped into shape by Doulos as part of his training regime. “Now get off with you,” said the slave master, and then spat.

Today, first thing George was on slave-driving duty himself. This was one of his many rotating assignments as a trainee soldier in Nachash. He walked with a handful of other recruits who had been being whipped too, out of the barracks gate and towards the nearby slave yard, where a number of male and female slaves were working. They were making bricks out of mud and clay in order to build structures for Shul and shrines for Echthros.

George was given his own whip by the soldier on duty and sent out among the slaves. He walked to and fro among them, yelling commands and, where he deemed it necessary, using his whip on the slaves himself. As it lashed across their skin, most of it visible and unconcealed by the filthy rags that hung from their starving bodies, the slaves cried out with pain, a pathetic sign of weakness.

Somewhere inside George, a small voice still questioned whether this was the right thing to be doing, and protested at him causing these people pain in this way. At first it had been a lot louder and harder to smother, but he had been training for a long time now, and the voice had quieted a lot.

In order to quieten it further, he called back to mind the pain that had been inflicted upon him in his own beatings. He wasn’t allowed to fight back against the beatings he received from his superiors. But he could rail against them by inflicting that same pain on these slaves. He imagined the pain coming out of him as he passed it onto the men and women in the slave yard, cleansing himself of it and unloading it on them.

All of a sudden a man looked up at him. This didn’t normally happen. The slaves were not supposed to look directly at the soldiers, and they did not normally have the courage to do so either. George had just delivered to him a lash across his left arm, for failing to drag along a block of clay fast enough. The man was bone-thin, and had a thick, dirty, white beard. He looked at George with huge, pleading eyes.

“Please,” said the man, “why are you doing this to us? You look like a good person--you have not yet been completely changed. Let me go!”

For a moment, George felt a pang of sympathy for the man stir in his chest. He suddenly saw how the two of them were actually not that different: both of them were being enslaved against their wills to the cruel and harsh service of Echthros, they were just at different levels in the system. He contemplated whether he could have mercy on this slave, whether he could find a way for him to escape, seeing as he had asked…

“What are you waiting for Georges?” said a deep voice behind him. “Put this worm in its place.”

George turned. It was Khilliarkos. He was out on one of his morning patrols, checking on the progress of the slaves, and the work of the recruits.

It was useless now. George did not know what had come over him. Of course he shouldn’t free this slave. That would do no good for anybody; for Shul, for Echththros, for the slave, most importantly for him. A temporary madness. He fought down the voice that had considered freeing the slave, crushed it, subdued it.

He took the whip and struck the man again, sending it hard across his back. The man cried out and doubled up, sinking to the floor.

“Good,” said Khilliarkos. “Again.”

George struck again. And again. He took all his pain, all his anger, all his resentment, and poured it into the whip. How could this man dare to look up at him and not keep to his place? Did he not know that he was a slave and that he was meant to serve and obey? What right did he have, what arrogance did he possess, to have the gall to lift his face to a soldier of Shul?

George stopped, judging that he had finished. He didn’t want to kill the man, after all. That would make him no longer useful to Echthros.

“Don’t end there,” said Khilliarkos. “He hasn’t properly learned his lesson yet.”

Khilliarkos took the whip from George and carried on striking. By now the man was unable to call out. George noticed some of the other slaves wanting to stop and watch, to protest, but they knew that if they did they would only receive the same treatment, so they carried on moving.

Khilliarkos beat the man to within an inch of his life. He seemed to revel in it, to love it, his black lips twisting into a horrible smile, and breaking out with laughter. When he had finished, he handed the whip back to George.

“Now he has learned his lesson,” said the commander. “That is how it is done, Private Georges.”

George watched as the commander walked away, and marvelled. He could still only aspire to be as merciless as that.

But soon he would be.