Free Temple of a Thousand Faces by John Shors

chest rose and fell with increasing speed. Sweat ran down her back. She wished once again that she’d died with the rest of her family. Better to have died with them than to be the Cham’s plaything.
    Voisanne still planned to slay him, and then to end her own life. Later, after she had endured whatever he’d done to her, after he was asleep, she would kill him with his sword. And then she would cut her own throat. As her life bled away, she’d think about her loved ones, letting them know that she was hurrying to reach them.
    The Cham stopped sharpening his sword and turned to look at her. He was large and muscled, and she felt his eyes on herbody as if they were his hands. She started to breathe even faster, and the room seemed to sway back and forth as if she’d arisen too quickly. Though she wanted to be strong, to honor her ancestors, she began to cry. Would it be better, she wondered, to please him so that he would sleep and then die? Or should she resist as her lover had? Should she fight until she could fight no more?
    He walked toward her and then dropped to his knees with the grace of someone much smaller. “Why do you weep?” he asked softly, his accent barely noticeable.
    She made no effort to reply but wiped her eyes and looked away.
    “Why?” he repeated.
    As if to make up for her continued silence, thunder boomed in the distance.
    His brow furrowed. “Did you lose someone…in the attack?”
    Though she didn’t want to answer him, she found herself nodding. She thought about her lover, her parents, and her siblings. “Everyone,” she whispered.
    Asal watched her cry, her tears and shudders reminding him of his youth, of witnessing his loved ones succumb to cholera. Their deaths had not come quickly, and though he had been young, he remembered much. As he watched the Khmer woman, he began to pity her. He didn’t see her beauty or even her face but only her suffering. Having known suffering as intimately as a farmer knows dirt, Asal wanted the woman’s shudders to cease.
    He leaned closer to her. “My king,” he whispered, “has given you to me. And he shall…he shall expect certain things of me.”
    Voisanne shrugged.
    “But I’ll not do these things,” Asal added in a low voice. “I’ll not hurt you. I may carry a sword and I may kill, but I shall never hurt you.”
    She looked up at him. “Why?”
    “Because that’s not my way.” Someone shouted outside the teak door leading to Asal’s room. He stiffened, his jaw tightening and relaxing, and he leaned even closer to her. “But you must act as if I’ve hurt you. You must give my king and his men what they expect.”
    “What…do they expect?”
    “You must whimper now. You must cry. You must fool them.”
    “I cannot.”
    “You can. And you must never speak of what I’ve said. If you do, I shall hear of it and my mercy will vanish.”
    Voisanne nodded.
    “Now cry,” he whispered. “Let them hear your tears.”
    She did as he asked, whimpering at first, drawing on her true sorrow. In her mind’s eye, she saw the Cham spear fly and kill her lover. She felt her brother die in her arms, felt life flowing from him as she desperately tried to keep him whole. Her tears and sobs intensified as her emotions, caged for so long, ran rampant. She thought of her loneliness, of how she should have been wed and in bliss, and her world began to crumble.
    Asal yelled at her to be silent. He smashed his shoulder into the nearby wall. He slapped his own thigh, hitting it hard. She knew he was doing these things for her benefit, and yet his rage seemed so real. Such anger had killed her family, had shattered her city. She pleaded with him to stop, and he shouted in reply, demanding that she be still. He picked up the wooden dais, raised it above his head, and slammed it into the tile floor. Again he slapped his thigh, then yelled at her, and the ferocity of his voice made her draw back in fear.
    Outside the room’s eastern wall, thunder