A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist by Ron Miller Read Free Book Online

passed. The walls and ceiling radiated heat like five plates of incandescent cast iron. Rykkla felt like a baking breadstick; globules of grease condensed on her face like an oleaginous dew. Her blouse had become an unendurable torture and she pulled it off, leaving only a thin cotton camisole that clung to her torso like wet tissue paper. She took off her boots, pulling from them feet as wet as though they had been wading in a swamp. Fumes from a pit she had dug in a corner of the hard-packed dirt floor, in which to relieve herself, was now rapidly replacing what little air the chamber contained with something unspeakably unsuitable for respiration. She hammered on the thick wooden door, calling for water, to no avail. The only thing she gained was a shower of choking dust and cooked spiders. “You pimple-balled camel-sucking bastards! Fish-eyed sons of streetwalkers! Let me out of here! Get me some water, you bloody rotten hemorrhoids!” she cried, and then had the horrifying thought: What if they’ve already passed verdict on me, and this is the way they’ve decided to execute my sentence? It was an idea that was almost more than she could bear considering.
    Her mouth seemed filled with a sticky glue and her tongue was like a balled-up sock. The temperature in the room must have long since surpassed 120 degrees which was, she calculated, nearly sixty percent that of boiling water. It was not a particularly logical or even relevant thought, but understandable under the circumstances; even had she realized this, it would have made her feel neither cooler nor the least bit rehydrated.
    Evening had arrived when the door began to rattle preparatory to opening. Rykkla was slumped in a corner as limply as a spent pyrometric cone in a red-hot kiln and was only just able to lift her head and croak an insult as her captors entered. She was not so incapacitated as to not make it such a particularly foul insult that it managed to sizzle even in that air.
    “Musrum protect us!” cried one of the men, making a cabalistic sign in the air, which no one saw but some puzzled insects and a slowly circling buzzard, which had its eye out for something interesting to be momentarily taken from the dark door, it knew the odor of ripe death when it smelled it.
    “She is for certain one of the Weedking’s own harlots!” said another, clasping a crusty kerchief to his face. “There is the unholy stench of his kingdom in here!”
    “Look! Look!” panted a third man as he stared at the thin, damp cloth that clung transparently to Rykkla’s torso. “The unclean strumpet’s still trying to seduce us! Look at her! She’s flaunting her naked body at us yet! No! No! I mean don’t look!” He ineffectually tried to hold his hands in front of his companion’s faces while at the same time unable to tear his own bulging eyes from the girl.
    “Get a blanket,” ordered the first man, absolutely unmoved, “and get her covered and out of here. The judge is waiting.”
    Rykkla had struggled to her feet by the time one of the men had returned with a large sheet of light cloth. Her long legs, revealed from mid-thigh down since she only wore a flimsy pair of damp cotton step-ins, seemed to frighten him and he approached her warily, as though she might explode at any moment. He threw the cloth over her shoulders and retreated hastily.
    “Come, harlot,” demanded the leader, “thine deservéd fate eagerly awaits you.”
    Rykkla could barely stand, and the two yards between where she stood and the doorway seemed impossible of transit, it might as well have been two miles of open desert; the floor wavered under her feet like gelatin. She stumbled forward a few steps and, rather than help her, the three men stepped further away, stumbling over one another in their haste. It was not until she had passed through the doorway and into the incredibly silky coolness of the twilight air that two men, less fearful of the demoness’s prowess than the others,