Now they were passing doors made of bronze or stout wooden bars instead of stone slabs, with heavy cross-bars and ropes holding them closed. As the priests swept the litter along the corridor, Blade saw what lay behind those doors. Like the screams, the sights gave him an unpleasant chilling sensation.
Men, chained to the walls, but jerking at their chains, staring wide-eyed, drooling and moaning like idiots. Were they idiots, or were they drugged? Other men-no, not quite men, eunuchs, with thick wads of once white bandages showing that they had become eunuchs only recently. Some of them were boys who had never even been men, and now never would be. Still other men, chained only by the leg, screaming and hurling themselves against man-shaped dummies, hitting them, kicking them, slashing them with swords. Some of these last men wore masks that concealed their whole heads, white masks in the shape of a bat's head.
And women. They were the worst. Most of them were young, most of the young ones were at least pretty, but none of them showed any life in their eyes or in the way they sat. Naked and chained, they sat or lay slumped against the wall, eyes staring blankly at nothing. Unlike the men, most of whom were matted with grime and filth, the women were all as clean as new-laid eggs, their hair long and well kept. But their ankles showed the scars of their chains, and some of their backs showed deep, half-healed welts from savage beatings. Blade did not know why the priests of Ayocan saw fit to maintain this private inferno of theirs. But every bit of it that he saw worsened his impression of them.