by Robert Adams
Tim pursed his lips. “Friend Geros, I wouldn’t throw that old charge of witchcraft about too much from now on, were I you. If Mistress Neeka passes all the tests they’ll put her to in Kehnooryos Atheenahs, she’ll be declared a High Lady of this Confederation of ours, and it has been my experience that women — all women, high or lowly — have long memories for insults or slights.” He chuckled. “Not to mention that most women are far more dangerous than men because their strength and determination are so often underestimated.”
The hapless rebel bravos of Captain Plehkos milled about the base of the hill in uncertainty for an hour too long, only attempting to disperse and scatter when they spotted the vanguard of Ahrkeethoheeks Bili of Morguhn’s column … and by then, of course, it was far too late for any of them. The middle-aged archduke led his dragoons, and Tim — on a hastily saddled Steelsheen and accompanied by his four noble relatives — spurred forth to take command of his own company of lancers. Then the horsemen rode down their two-legged game with the whoops and shouts of the hunt rather than war cries. Tahm took one more head, and only Captain Plehkos, rendered insensible when his wounded mule bucked him off, was taken alive.
The rebel captain would much have preferred a quick death from lance or saber, axe or arrow, for Bili of Morguhn — who had right speedily pressed his rightful claim to Speeros Sanderz, the captain and the majordomo, Tonos, who had been found cowering in an old privy pit during the searching for Myron — made no secret of the great delight he would derive from their interrogation, torture and eventual execution.
Tonos collapsed, befouling himself in an excess of unconcealed terror. The veteran Plehkos’ face went white as whey, but he just set his square jaws in silence. Speeros Sanderz, at fifteen, more of a man than his hulking elder brother had ever been, just sneered, then coolly spit at the archduke’s feet.
“Threaten and bluster all you like, cousin,” he snapped, superciliously. “But we both know, you and I, that you dare not harm or slay me for fear of our prince, my poor mother’s cousin. Her murder alone already weighs right heavy on your head!”
Bili grinned like a winter wolf. “Once that was so, young sir, but no more, Sun and Wind be praised. You and your ilk have removed yourselves from any scintilla of protection. You rose in armed and organized rebellion against your rightful overlords, and were Zenos to try to intercede for you in any way, all loyal noblemen would view him tarred with the same brush … and you may rest assured that the prince, your cousin, recognizes his jeopardy as clearly as do I.
“As regards your late dam, the valiant Tonos, here, has signed a sworn statement that she went berserk when your dear brother publicly demonstrated that he held his wretched life of more value than his honor. Stout Tonos goes on to say that she then attacked your brother and a whole roomful of men with an axe. Tonos saw no more after that, but your mother was already dead when first the loyal warriors entered that room. As she was run through with an antique slashing sword, I think it safe to assume that one of her own armed jailbirds did it; so she was hoist on her own treasonous hooks, and I only regret that she did not live to be hoist upon a dull stake.”
Bili had the three prisoners manacled and weighted with chains and guarded closely by his handpicked dragoons, lest they find a way to take their own lives.
While Tim and his noble guests dawdled over their postprandial wines and cordials in the lamplit dining chamber, tall bonfires threw leaping, dancing shadows in both main and rear courtyards, where lancers and dragoons, Ahrmehnee and Kindred milled and laughed and shouted, gorging themselves on coarse bread and dripping chunks carved from the whole oxen slowly revolving on the spits, guzzling tankards of foaming beer, tart cider and watered wine.
The Ahrmehnee loved music and dancing even more than did the Ehleenee, and their musicians never went far without their instruments. Around one of the bright, crackling fires, a circling line of the young warriors of Vahrohneeskos Tahm Adaimyuhn of Lion Mountain stamped and leaped in a fast-paced and intricately complicated dance, their deep chorus rising in the refrain of the ancient melody.
“Nee-nie, nee-nie, nee-nie, nie. HEY!
“Heh-lai. heh-lai, heh-lai,
“Nee nie-nie!”
And the chorus and the shrilling flutes, twanging ouds, jangling tambourines and roaring rank of drums were almost enough to drown out the tearing screams of the captured rebel Ehleen serving girls, stripped, staked out and suffering repeated ravishment.
The noblemen and ladies strolled out onto the wide balcony that ran the length of the central portion of the Hall and connected the two wings. From there they watched the Ahrmehnee dancers for a while as Tahm Adaimyuhn recited the history of the songs and the significance of the dances. Then Tim, Bili, Tahm, Komees Dik, Sir Geros and the brothers Sanderz, Kahrl and Bahb, descended the stairs to make an appearance among their troops, drain off a tankard or two, nibble a little beef and publicly commend those fighters who had distinguished themselves in some way.
Blind Ahl and Sir Geros’ daughter, Mairee, retired to the suite they shared. Mistress Neeka, who looked to be and truly was still moving in a daze, made her way up to her old, familiar rooms, preferring the known comforts to the sumptuous southwing suite Tim had offered her. Another reason she remained in her cramped north-wing quarters was the proximity to Mehleena’s three daughters, whom she had taken it upon herself to console in their grief and fear.
Giliahna and Widahd lingered abovestairs only long enough to to collect the necessaries, then trooped off to the semi-detached bath chamber, returning a good hour later. She and her dusky companion shared a minty cordial, then, while Giliahna sipped yet another thimbleful, the slender, graceful Zanrtohgahn girl went into the main room to turn down her mistress’ bed and bank the hearthfire.
While sitting and musing, Giliahna chanced to think of a particularly treasured gift of her late husband she wished to show Tim when he presently came up to bed. But a quick fumbling through the trunks in the big closet failed to locate it.
“Widahd,” she muttered to herself, “will know where it is.” She opened the door to her bedroom and moved into the large, dim chamber, shrugging off her quilted robe and dropping it into a chair. But before she could kick off her low felt boots, a big, callused hand clamped over her mouth from behind and the icy needle point of a dirk or dagger was pressed painfully against her soft throat, just below the jaw where the vein throbbed.
Myron Sanderz’s deep, hateful voice growled in her ear, “If you scream or try to farspeak, you incestuous bitch, I’ll open your throat from ear to ear!”
Giliahna licked her lips and by a great effort of will kept her voice to a normal speaking level, devoid of any emotion or quaver. “What have you done with my friend, with Widahd? If you’ve slain her or harmed her …”
Myron removed the hand from her mouth but not the steel from her throat, took her shoulder and turned Giliahna to the right, so that she could see Widahd across the room near the hearth. The small woman had been gagged but was unbound. The cook, Gaios, had his left arm clamped about her arms and upper body while he menaced her with the broad blade of a Confederation-pattern shortsword.
Abruptly, Myron pushed his captive forward far enough to hurl her nude body down upon the big bed. “Keep your mouth shut and your mind shielded, you sinful, unnatural slut, or Gaios will let the guts out of yon dung-colored pagan bitch!”
Giliahna’s initial shock and terror were being speedily replaced by cold rage and disgust — the rage directed toward the filthy, disheveled, stubble-faced and wild-eyed Myron, the disgust toward herself for having allowed this craven, perverted whoreson of a half brother to glimpse even a bare eye-flick of her fear.
She levered herself up on her elbows and smiled at the black-haired man, mockingly. “You call me unnatural, brother dear? Then what, pray tell, are you? As regards dung, you should certainly know the color of it, since your abiding lust is to wallow in it.
“Were you a natural man of normal lusts an
d designs, I’d assume you’d come to my suite to ravish me, steal my jewels and gold, then slay me before you sought out Tim and your own death. But I cannot picture you ravishing any female; a young lad, perhaps, but never a girl. As for my treasure, I’ll not make you a gift of it. If you want it, look for it. And you will find that Widahd and I will face such death as you and your bumboy mete out to us with more courage than such a known craven as you will ever be able to muster when your time comes!”
Myron had gone livid, his face twisted in wrath. “Kill you, bitch?” he snarled. “No, there be better ways to deal with strumpets like you!”
Before she knew what he was about, Myron was on the bed, kneeling astride her body, his weight and the strength of his legs pinning down her arms. His left hand clamped tightly over her mouth, grasped her jaw and turned her head. Then the sharp dirk opened Giliahna’s face to the bone from temple to jawline.
She struggled frantically but futilely, for Myron was nothing if not as strong as the proverbial ox. Finally, she sank her teeth into the palm of his hand. He did not lift the hand. Instead, he poised the point of his bloody blade above her face, grating, “Loosen your damned teeth, or I take out an eye!”
*
Widahd, like many Zahrtohgahn women, went waking or sleeping with a pair of thin, flat little steel daggers hidden beneath her garments but within easy reach. These purely Zahrtohgahn items were sheathed in tight metal cases, sealed with dense wax, and they required a real effort to uncase or draw. Such precautions were necessary to prevent fatal accidents, for the needle-tipped and razor-edged little weapons’ blades were coated their full length and width with a poison that brought slow and agonizing death and for which no antidote was known.
Moving slowly and carefully, Widahd had managed to draw the one on her right side. Ever so gradually, she brought her arm up, up, up, flexing it just enough to give power to her thrust, and cocked her wrist to impart the proper angle. Then, mustering all her strength and her not inconsiderable courage, Widahd drove the full three inches of the blade deep into the muscles of Gaios’ swordarm.
The former cook vented a strangled scream. Widahd wrenched herself out of his slackened grasp and made for the bed, not even bothering to pull off the gag so intent was she on the deliverance of her loved mistress from the hulking torturer.
It was a brave effort, but it was doomed at its inception. Forgetting his wound, which though stinging ferociously was not bleeding very much, Gaios brought up his sword and stamped forward. With a meaty tchunnk, the broad, heavy blade descended to strike the valiant brown-skinned girl at the angle of her slender neck and her right shoulder, cleaving through flesh and bone to the sternum. The very force of the blow drove Widahd to her knees, and her shriek of mortal agony was muffled in the gag.
Setting a foot against the girl’s back, Gaios jerked his shortsword free, propelling Widahd’s body face down on the thick carpets, which quickly became soaked with more blood than one would have thought so small a body could contain. A glance showed Gaios that his master, Myron, had taken no notice of the brief, bloody affair, being completely absorbed in the disfigurement of his own victim. Grinning, the former cook dropped his clotted sword, rolled Widahd onto her back, hurriedly shredded off the front of her skirt and set about raping the dying young woman, heedless of the spurting gushes of blood that soon soaked his shirtfront.
Myron took his time on Giliahna’s right cheek, deliberately prolonging the agony. Tears poured from the suffering woman’s blue eyes to water the blood on her cruelly slashed face, but she had set her teeth and her will and no slightest sound came out to meet the barrier of that thick, dirty hand mashing down on her lips.
All the while he carefully marred Giliahna’s beauty, Myron hissed his plans for her and for Tim in a half-whisper. “The way you barbarians searched this hall was comical. Gaios and I could have departed anytime we wished, and we can still, unseen and unsuspected. I only remained to deal with our barbaric brother, Tim, and with you.
“I know that he will come here, soon or late, intent upon doing more of his sinful incest with you. He certainly will be alone and unsuspecting and, like as not, unarmed, so Gaios and I should have no trouble dealing with him.
“By all that is holy, I should be Thoheeks and chief of Sanderz-Vawn, but simply because I am a good, Christian man, my patrimony, my very birthright, is denied me. But if I cannot be chief, he will not sit in my place. As God is my witness, he will not!”
Showing his teeth in a grin of pure, evil malice, he went on, “Your barbarians will not have as new chief any maimed or crippled man, so when once we have immobilized dear Tim, I mean to dig out his right eye. I’d take them both, but I want him to have one so he can forevermore gaze upon what I’ll have done to you, sweet sister.
“Then, when I’m done gelding him, I mean to hack off his right hand and his right foot and char the stumps in yonder fire.”
Widahd was not yet dead. She knew what the man was doing to her body, though she could not feel her defilement or much of anything else. But she was come of a warrior race and refused to die leaving her foe a chance of life. If the arm she had stabbed was removed quickly enough, he might just live. What she must deliver before she surrendered to oncoming death was a wound impervious to treatment.
Awkwardly, her numbing left band sought and found the hilt of her second little dagger, but the cold unfeeling fingers kept slipping off the abbreviated hilt and it seemed for long and long that she would not summon the strength to draw it. Then, at last, it was free, but she found she had used too much of her waning power. She could not stab up.
Haltingly, she worked her small hand and the knife between their two close-pressed bodies. As her ravisher raised himself slightly in preparation for a deeper thrust, she maneuvered the blade to an upward slant so that the straining man impaled himself on it, taking the length of it in his belly, between navel and crotch.
There was nothing strangled about Gaios’ second scream. It rang loud and long … and it served to alert Tim, just approaching the suite, and Sir Geros, who had bid his young lord goodnight and was about to descend the stairs.
Myron ignored the scream for the very good reason that he knew from the earlier sounds that his cohort was raping the Zahrtohgahn and was wont to make loud noises in transport of pleasure. While a woman’s scream within the hall would have been sure to bring unwanted visitors tramping through the corridors and banging on doors and barging into suites, a man’s would not, not with wounded men and prisoners under the roof.
He had done at last with Giliahna’s right cheek. Turning her ravaged, gory face back, he hissed, “Hold still now. I’m going to carve a pi for Porneea on your brow, so that all will know you for the arrant whore you are.”
Tim and Geros, broadswords bared and ready, kicked open the bedroom door and burst into the room. Myron left off his carving of Giliahna’s ruined face and slid himself down her body far enough to get an inch of his blood-slimy dirkblade into her left breast, then he half-turned to face the armed men.
“Take one more step toward me, pagan bastards, and I’ll drive this blade into her heart!”
He had taken his hand from her mouth, and his weight now was on her belly rather than her chest and arms. Giliahna swallowed a mouthful of thick, hot blood, then shouted, “No! I am already hurt, terribly hurt. Take the swine alive, for Archduke Bili and my brother. Tell Tim I love him.” Then she grasped Myron’s knife hand and wrist with both her own hands and forced her body up violently, so that half the length of the wide, thick blade sank into her chest
Tim was at the foot of the big bed in a single leap and the flat of his sword crashed against Myron’s temple, hurling his body to the floor in an unconscious heap. But then the young captain’s sword dropped from fingers suddenly gone cold and nerveless, and, as hot tears ran, he could but stare in grief and horror at what had been wrought upon this, the only woman he ever had loved … or ever would.
Her face was a mask of blood,
with jaw, teeth and white bone winking through the slashed cheeks. Just above the red-pink nipple of her full right breast, the hilt and part of the blade of a heavy war dirk jutted up.
Geros glanced at what lay on the bed, then averted his eyes and stalked quickly to where Gaios had rolled off the body of Widahd and, his trousers still bunched about his knees, was sitting in obvious agony with a handful of cloth from her skirt pressed against his lower belly.
Geros sheathed his sword. “What ails you, bumboy? Bellyache, is it? Mayhap six feet or so of oaken clyster will, if not truly ease you, at least serve as a counterirritant.” He chuckled, then added, “That’s what you get for eating your own cooking, of course. You should’ve known better.”
Giliahna said weakly, “Tim … my love. Please … it hurts … so much … please take … it out.”
Tim walked on wooden legs up to where he could grasp the hilt of that cruel dirk that had robbed him of so much, of so many happy years. Quickly, he jerked the steel from his sister’s chest He did not bother to try to staunch the Wood-flow that followed the blade out, for he had seen many death wounds, and from its location, this could be nothing but such.
But she should have been dead long since. He was too experienced a warrior to deny that incredible, astounding survivals occurred now and then. And with the flare of a spark of hope, some of the leaden enervation left his body and his mind.
“Sir Geros,” he snapped. When that man stood close beside him, he said, “There may be a chance to save her. Go fetch Master Fahreed. At once!”
Even as he raced across the deserted balcony toward the north wing where several adjoining suites had been temporarily converted to a hospital and surgery, Geros knew himself bound on a fool’s errand. No mortal man or woman could survive a war dirk in the heart. But if fetching the Zahrtohgahn physician would ease young Tim’s grieving mind, that is what he would do.