by Dan Abnett
'You've got it wrong, Glaw. It's you who will provide the answers/
Urisel Glaw nodded to Locke, who got up and moved towards me, flexing the needle glove.
'That is a strousine neural scourge. Our friend Mr Locke is quite an expert in its application. We were delighted when he volunteered to run this interrogation/
Locke grabbed me by the throat with his bare hand, twisted my head up and his gloved fist disappeared out of my field of view below.
A second later, and cold lances of pain threaded my lungs and heart, and my windpipe went into spasm. I began to choke.
'Educated man like you knows all about pressure points/ Locke said, conversationally. 'So do the strousii. But they like to do more than tap them – they like to burn them out. I studied with one of their sacred torturers for a year or so. This grip, for example, the one that's choking you. It's also paralysing your respiratory system, and stopping your heart/
I could barely hear him. Blood was dramming in my ears and explosive light and colour patterns were fogging my vision.
He withdrew his glove. The pain and choking stopped.
'Just like that, I can stop your heart. Burst your brain. Blind you. So play along/
With all the strength I could muster, I smiled and told him his sister had particularly commended my love-making skills over his.
The glove gripped my face and needles lanced into my cheeks. I blacked out again for a moment.
'… haven't killed him!' I heard Locke hiss as consciousness swam back. Dull pain oozed through my face.
'Look at him! Look at him! Where's that cocksure smile now, you little bastard?'
I didn't answer.
Locke leaned close so his brow pressed against mine and his eyes were all I could see. 'Needlework,' he snarled, his foul, obscura-flavoured breath swamping my gasping mouth. 'I just lanced a few points in your face. You'll never smile again/
I thought about telling him I didn't see a lot to smile about, but I didn't. Instead, I lunged forward and bit into his mouth.
His scream, transmitted by our contact, shook my jaws. Blood spurted. Fists struck repeatedly and desperately against my skull and neck. His long red hair came loose and the beaded ends whipped about my head. At last, he tore away, roaring. I retched out a mouthful of blood and a good fleshy lump of his lower lip.
His gloveless hand clamped around his torn mouth, Locke stumbled back, enraged, and then hurled himself at me. He kicked hard into my belly and hip, and punched me in the cheek so forcefully, it nearly snapped my spine apart.
Then I felt the needles stab in between my ribs on my left side, and breathless agony enfolded me.
Locke was screaming obscenities into my face. Once again, pain blacked me out.
I came back in a rush of excruciating discomfort and gasping breath as Urisel wrenched Locke off me and threw him across the cell.
'I want him alive!' Urisel bawled.
'Look what he did!' Locke complained incoherently through blood and torn lips.
'You should have been more careful/ said Oberon Glaw, stepping forward. He leaned down to study me, and I gazed back into his haughty, leonine face, bearded, powerful, commanding.
'He's halfway to death/ Oberon said with annoyance. 'I told you fools I wanted answers/
'Ask me yourself/1 gasped.
Lord Oberon raised his eyebrows and stared at me. 'What brought you to my house, inquisitor?'
The Pontius/ I replied. It was a gamble, and I wasn't hopeful, but there was always a chance that the very word might auto-slay them as it had done Saemon Crotes in the Sun-dome on Hubris. As I suspected, it didn't.
'You came from Hubris?'
'I stopped Eyclone's work there/
'It was aborted anyway/ Lord Oberon stepped back from me.
"What is the Pontius?' I asked, trying and failing to focus my will. The pain in my body was overpowering.
'If you don't know, I'm hardly going to tell you/ said Oberon Glaw.
He looked round at Urisel, Locke and the pipe-smoker.
'I don't think he knows anything about the true matter. But I want to be certain. Can you be trusted to work efficiently, Locke?'
Locke nodded. He approached me again, flexing the needle glove, and slid a needle into my head behind my ear.
My skull went numb. It became almost impossible to concentrate.
'My index needle is lancing right into your parieto-occipital sulcus/ Locke crooned in my ear, 'directly influencing your truth centre. You cannot lie, no matter what. What do you know of the true matter?'
'Nothing…' I stammered.
He jiggled the needle and pain ignited inside my head.
'What is your name?'
'Gregor Eisenhorn/
Where were you born?'
'DeKere's World/
Your first sexual conquest?'
'I was sixteen, a maid in the scholam…'
Your darkest fear?'
'The man with blank eyes!'
I blurted out the last. All were true, all involuntary, but that last one surprised even me.
Locke wasn't finished. He jiggled the needle, and pierced the back of my neck with others so that my body went into paralysis and ice flowed down my veins.
What do you know of the true matter?'
'Nothing!'
Without wanting to, I began to weep with the pain.
Gorgone Locke continued to question me for four hours… four hours that I know about. Beyond those I recall nothing.
I woke again, and found myself lying on a cold rockcrete floor. Lingering pain and fatigue filled every atom of my being. I could barely move. At that time in my life, I had never felt such an extremity of pain and despair. I had never felt so close to death.
'Lie still, Gregor… you're with friends…' That voice. Aemos.
I opened my eyes. Uber Aemos, my trusted savant, looked down at me with a soulful expression even his augmetic eyes couldn't hide. He was bruised about the face and his good robe was torn.
'Lay still, old friend/ he urged.
You know me, Aemos/1 said, and slowly sat up. It was quite a task. Various muscle groups refused to work, and I came close to vomiting.
I looked around blearily
I was lying on the floor of a circular rockcrete cell. There was a hatch on one side, and a cage-gated exit opposite it. Aemos was crouched near me, and Alizebeth Bequin, her gown ripped and dirty, hunched behind him, staring over at me with genuine concern. Away across the cell stood Hel-dane, arms folded, and behind him cowered the guilder Macheles and the four other Guild Sinesias envoys who had escorted us. All of them looked pale and hollow eyed as if they had been weeping. There was no sign of Betancore.
Aemos saw my look and said, 'Aegis insubstantial, before the deluge' in perfect Glossia.
Which meant Betancore had somehow avoided the sweep that had incarcerated all my other companions. A tiny fragment of good news.
I got up, mainly thanks to my determination and the support of Aemos and Bequin. I was still stripped down to my leggings and boots, and my torso, neck, arms and head were washed in my own blood and stippled with bruised micro-puncture wounds. Gorgone Locke had been thorough.
Gorgone Locke would pay.
"What do you know?' I asked them as my breath returned.
'We're as good as dead,' Heldane said frankly. 'No wonder my master leaves this kind of work to you suicidal radicals. I just wish I hadn't agreed to join you.'
Thank you for that, Heldane. Anyone else want to offer something less editorial?'
Aemos smiled. 'We're in a prison cell under the west wing, to the rear, almost under the woodlands. They burst into our quarters after you'd been gone three hours and seized us at gunpoint. I memorised a careful note of the route we were taking to this place, and have mentally compared it with Midas's map, so I'm fairly sure of our location/
'What the hell did they do to you?' Bequin asked, dabbing at wounds on my chest with a strip of cloth torn from her gown.
Wincing, I realised that was why her gown was so shredded. She had been mopping my wounds while I was unconscious. A pile of torn and blood-soaked scads of material nearby stood testament to her devotion.
They came here an hour ago and tossed you in with us. They didn't say anything,' Heldane added.
'Are you really an inquisitor, Sire Farchaval?' Macheles asked, stepping forward.
Yes, I am. My name is Eisenhorn.'
Macheles began to sob and his fellow envoys did the same.
We are dead. You have taken us to our deaths!'
I felt some pity for them. Guild Sinesias was rotten to the core, and these men were corrupt, but they were only in this predicament because I had duped them.
'Shut up!' Heldane told them.
He looked round at me, and slid a tiny something from the cuff of his body-glove. A small red capsule.
"What is it?'
'Admylladox, a ten gram dose. You look like you need it.'
'I don't use drugs,' I said.
He pushed it into my hand. 'Admylladox is a pain-killer and a mind clearer. I don't care if you do drags or not, I want that in your system if that gate opens.'
I looked at the gate.
'Why?'
'Have you never been to a pit-fight?' he said.
The Glaws had got everything out of me they could. Now they wanted me dead. Me and my party.
And that meant sport.
The gate cranked open at what must have been dawn. Thin, grey light wafted in and was almost immediately replaced by hard, bright artificial luminescence.
House Glaw militiamen in body armour burst into our cell and drove us out through the gate with force shields and psyk-whips.
We were out in the open, blinking into the light, as the gate shut behind us.
I gazed around. A vast circular amphitheatre, enclosed by a dome high above, undoubtedly the golden dome we had seen on our approach. The floor of die pit was dank moss and earth, and lichen climbed the sheer sides of the ten-metre-high stone walls. Above the wall top, House Glaw and its guests sat in steep tiers, jeering down at us. I saw Urisel Glaw, Lord Oberon, Locke, Lady Fabrina, the ecdesiarch Dazzo, the pipe-smoking man. Terronce, the militia captain who had sat at our table during dinner, led an honour guard of nearly forty men of the retinue. All wore green armour, plumed silver helmets and all carried autoguns. More than two hundred baying members of the Glaw clan, house staff, militia and servants made up the rest of the crowd in the meatre. They'd been up all night, drinking and doing whatever other indulgence it took to turn them into hyperactive bloodthirsty hyenas by first light.
Ignoring the noise, I surveyed the compound. Breaks of trees sprouted at various places, and there were low outcrops of bare rock, giving the arena a sort of landscape.
Nearby stood a rack of rusty weapons. Macheles and his brethren had already rushed to it and taken blunt shortswords and toothless lances.
I went over and took a basket-hiked dagger and an oddly hooked scythe with a serrated inner blade.
I weighed them in my hands.
Heldane had taken a dagger and a long-hafted axe, Bequin a wicker shield and a stabbing knife. Aemos shrugged and took nothing.
The jeering and booing welled around us. Then it hushed and a chorus of gasps whispered from the auditorium.
The camodon was six metres from nose to whipping tail. Nine hundred kilos of muscle, sinew, striped pelt and sawing tusks.
It came out from behind one of the clumps of trees, trailing a line of heavy chain behind it from its spiked collar, accelerated into a pounce and brought Macheles down.
Macheles, envoy of Guild Sinesias, screamed as he was destroyed. He screamed and shrieked far longer than seemed possible given the spurting
body parts the carnodon was ripping away. It must have been my horrified imagination, but to me the screaming only stopped when he was a gnawed ribcage being shaken in the bloody moss by the vast predator.
The other envoys screamed and ran. One fainted.
'We're dead,' Heldane said again, raising his weapons.
I swallowed the capsule he had given me. It didn't make me feel much better.
Its huge bared mouth running with blood and its chain jingling, the carnodon turned on the other envoys.
Bequin shrieked.
A second carnodon sprang out of its trap towards us. It was slightly larger than the first, I noticed. It came right for me.
I stumbled and dived to my right and the feline dug its claws into the moss to arrest its pounce, overshooting and scrabbling round. Its trailing chain swished over my head. The creatures both made low, sub-sonic growls that shuddered in their cavernous throats and thumped the air.
The larger beast swung around and made for me again even as I regained my feet and leapt backwards. Heldane ran in from the side while its attention was on me, and hacked into its flank with the blade of his axe.
The carnodon issued a strangulated hiss and lashed around, hurling Voke's man across the arena, the clothing of his torso shredded by deep parallel claw marks. I jumped away and got a few of the twisted trees between it and myself.
The first carnodon had brought down another of the envoys. The shock of the impact and the crippling wounds simply silenced the man and he uttered no sound as his limp body was thrashed and worried.
The creatures were hungry that much was evident from their prominent ribs. One factor in our favour then… when the carnodons brought down prey they were primarily interested in consuming it. The long chains secured them to ground spikes next to their traps, and allowed them free movement anywhere in the pit. Clearly the chains were measured carefully to prevent them leaping clear of the pit into the crowd.
Tail slashing back and forth, the larger predator circled the edge of the arena-bowl, its dark, deep-set eyes surveying the humans in range. Bequin had dug herself and Aemos into a corner, using her frail shield and a wall buttress as cover for them both, but the ruthless crowd were pelting them with coins and bottles and pieces of food to drive them out. They wanted sport. They wanted blood.
The circling carnodon, barking vapours of breath and spittle from its dripping snout, came round and began to accelerate towards Bequin and Aemos. Its pouncing mass alone would kill them, I was certain. I ran out from cover to intercept it side on, and the crowd whooped and stamped.
It faltered in its ran up as it became aware of me rushing it from the flank, and started to turn as I cut in with the scythe. The old hook planed matted fur from its shoulder blade and left a long red scratch down its ribs. It turned hard to face me. A paw lashed out, jabbing. I jumped back,
swung again, hoping to at least hit the huge paw, for its reach was far longer than mine. Then it threw itself forward, a throbbing roar welling from its throat.
I simply dropped on my back, stealing its chance to knock me down and shatter my bones. Then it was on me and over me, a paw crashing and slicing my chest, its head down, mouth open, reaching to bite off my face. Frantically, I thrust with my weapons, blind, and kicked up at its more vulnerable underside.
The weight was off me abruptly. The carnodon jerked away, making a terrible low moaning. My dagger was no longer in my hand.
The pommel was jutting down out of the beast's chin. The blade transfixed its mouth, pinning it closed. It pawed and tore at the weapon, trying to dislodge it, shaking its massive head like a horse bothered by a fly.
I got up. Blood ran from the fresh gashes on my chest. Heldane suddenly crossed my field of vision, his shredded tunic fluttering behind him. His axe came down square onto the great carnivore's back, cutting through the backbone with a loud crack. The carnodon went into spasms, thrashing and clawing, rolling in the dirt. Heldane brought the axe down again and stove in its skull.
The audience shook the pit with their howling. Missiles rained down on us. Heldane turned and looked at me with a murderous grin of triumph.
Then the huge weight of the other carnodon hit him from behind and flatten
ed him face down into the arena floor.
It had finished with the other envoys, all except the one who had fainted, who still lay where he had fallen. It tore into the helpless Heldane, ripping his scalp, rending the flesh off his back.
With a guttural cry, I ran at it, caught it behind the ear with my scythe, and pulled. The curved blade hooked into the meat and I succeeded in yanking its head back for a second. Then a well-aimed bottle struck me on the side of the head and knocked me over. I lost my grip on the scythe.
The creature turned, leaving Heldane a mangled wreck, face down in the bloody soil. I scrambled back, kicking at it.
'Eisenhorn!' Bequin yelled, running forward on the other side. She threw her knife over the creature's back and I caught it neatly. Disturbed by her cry, the beast swung about and lashed at her, tearing the wicker shield into hanks of raffia and knocking her down.
I threw myself astride its back and thumped the dagger down repeatedly into its neck. The dagger barely seemed to bite into the thick hide.
It writhed, trying to throw me off. I saw the scythe dangling from its scalp behind the ear, grabbed it, and hooked the blade under its spiked collar.
The creature was frenzied now, pulling hard at its chain. I pushed the tooth of the dagger in through a link in the chain and down into its shoulder blade, then levered the weapon over with all the force I could muster.
The link twisted open. The chain parted.
The carnodon ran forward a few paces, bellowed, and lunged.
Effortlessly, it leapt up the side of the pit into the shrieking crowd. I was still attached to it by the scythe, the handle of which I clutched frantically. As we landed in the seating, I was thrown clear, and crashed down onto the frantic fleeing audience.
The beast was berserk. It tore into the crowd, hurling limp, mangled forms and gouts of blood into the air. The pandemonium shook the dome.
I got up, pushing away the individuals who fell and stumbled into me in their efforts to escape. Gunfire ripped out across the amphitheatre. In the higher stands, I could see the militia scrambling down, firing at the carnodon as Terronce and other men hustled towards the safety of a side exit. The militia's shots were hitting people in the crowd.