WINDHEALER

by Charlotte Boyett-Compo

  They dragged him off the ground even as he bucked against their hold, struggling to free his arms, but the men were strong. Pure animal rage tore from his throat.

  "Hold the little bastard!" Lydon shouted as he came running up.

  They took him into the mine, turned left toward the far reaches, and Conar knew where he was being taken. He fought as hard as he could, stumbling, pulling against them, but they carried him deeper and deeper into the mine.

  "No!" he bellowed, realizing too late that Brelan and the others were too deep in the mine's midsection and he was being taken in the opposite direction.

  Appolyon was waiting at the wine cellar. The heavy riding crop in his hand tapped out a fierce rhythm against the gaping portal. Torch lights in wall brackets overhead made the grin on his pudgy face look demonic. His jowls wobbled with glee when he saw Conar's terrified face.

  "Didn't he want to join us, Mr. Drake?"

  "Don't think he likes tight little places."

  Appolyon nodded to the guards. They forced Conar to his knees, their strong, hard hands on his shoulders.

  "Is that so?" Appolyon asked. "Do you have a fear of closed in places, son?"

  Conar clenched his teeth to still his trembling lips. Past the bulk of the Commandant, he saw the gaping maw of the wine cellar and his blood raced ice-cold through his veins.

  "Are you afraid of this little room?" the Commandant inquired in a gentle tone. He used the handle of his riding crop to lift Conar's chin. He stared into a face filled with fear and smiled. "Have we finally found your weakness?"

  Conar jerked away his chin. "Go to hell," he hissed.

  Surprise stretched over the fat face, then turned to mirth. The man clucked his tongue. "My, my, my! Have you learned nothing from your time with us? Maybe I haven't been as diligent with you as I thought." With a meaty hand, Appolyon dragged up Conar's reluctant face.

  "What the hell do you want?" Conar snarled, his cheeks tightly compressed between the man's fingers.

  "Your total cooperation!"

  "To do what?"

  "I want you."

  Stark terror shot through Conar. He well remembered the man's hands on him when he had first come to the Labyrinth. Having Appolyon touch him again would send him over the edge.

  "You can want with one hand and—"

  Appolyon pressed his cheeks together so tightly Conar tasted blood. "I can see I shall have to teach you a little humility."

  With a strength he didn't know he possessed, Conar wrenched his face free of the man's hold. "There's nothing you could teach me, pig!"

  If there was one thing Appolyon was rabid about, it was any insult that called him "fat." He reacted with the kind of retaliation he was best at—viciousness. With astonishing speed, he brought up the riding crop up, lashing Conar across the bridge of his nose from cheek to cheek.

  Conar couldn't stop his shriek of agony. He had to bite his tongue to hold back any other sounds, not wanting to give the dirty bastard the satisfaction of hearing him whimper. Not even when another lash caught him across the chin and throat. He managed to tuck down his chin; the riding crop stung him from left temple to right cheek. The riding crop landed on Conar's bare shoulders, bent head, but still he wouldn't open his mouth, just clenched his fists until the knuckles were white.

  Appolyon, angrier than ever that his abuse produced no screams, threw away the riding crop and lunged forward, grabbed a handful of Conar's hair. He arched back Conar's head. His eyes glinted with ecstasy as he saw the criss-crossed markings, red and livid, beading blood, on the handsome face.

  "You have two choices. You can come back to my quarters, and you know what will be expected of you; or you can spend the night in this room." He smiled as Conar's eyes widened in fear.

  Conar knew if they put him in that room with its enclosing walls he would never live to get out. Already, fear gripped his guts so hard he felt his bladder loosening. With a hindsight, he knew he should have mentioned to Brelan, anyone, what had happened the day before with Jones.

  "What's it to be?" Appolyon snarled. "Me or the room?"

  Perhaps it was a greater terror that Appolyon offered, or else he had simply reached the end of what mortal strength he had left. Whatever the case, his pride, or what was left of it, returned. "I'd rather spend the rest of my life in there than have you touch me."

  Appolyon stood up, thinking an hour's stay in the room, maybe less, would break the boy's spirit. He was sure of it. He looked at the bleeding face. "When you come to me, and you will, I will make you pay dearly for this trouble."

  Conar could only stare at the hated face. He felt the stinging pain, felt blood oozing across his cheeks and temple, but didn't say a word as Appolyon motioned for the guards to pick him up.

  "Let him see what his stubbornness brings him."

  Conar couldn't help but recoil as they pushed him toward the room. Panic rose in his mind like the sludge rose in the ditches during the torrential rains. Panting and terrified, trying not to show it, his entire body began trembling. He struggled against the hands, more from instinct than any idea he'd get free.

  "I'll have Lydon return in two hours. By then, you'll be ready to do anything I want!" The Commandant laughed, his hollow mirth echoing as he walked away.

  I won't live that long, Conar thought.

  Two guards picked up Conar's feet to swing him off the floor. He fought them with all his strength, but it wouldn't be enough; they knew it and he knew it. They carried him into the room, his back arching, his legs jerking. He cursed them, screamed at the top of his lungs. They dropped him and scurried out of the room.

  "You'd have been better off giving in," Lydon said. "He's going to have your ass anyway!"

  Conar scrambled to his knees as the door began to close. He rushed forward, pushing against the door with all his might. He slammed his shoulder into the wooden planking, once, twice, three times and heard the men cursing as they strained to close it. With a lunge, he slammed into the door, but more men pushed from the other side, closing it.

  "No!" he bellowed, pounding. "No!"

  It wasn't a scream of pain or even terror. It was a howl of ungodly frustration. It rose out of the depths of a man who had finally been pushed beyond the limits of endurance. It was a bellow of insane rage, a scream of unrelenting hate, and it echoed off the rock walls and down the tunnels. Unbridled fury took over in Conar's mind. In his rage, he was blinded to his surroundings. All thought was of the many torments he had undergone in the years of his captivity. The degradation, the humiliation, the beatings and worse. They flashed through his seething mind like uncoiling serpents, struck at his manhood with vicious fangs that tore apart his fear and injected him with a strength of will that had long ago been lost. He cursed the men who had brought him to this low point in his life, slammed his open palms against the door with a resentment that brought tears of fury and frustration to his eyes.

  "Let us know when you're ready to be a good boy!" Lydon called.

  "Fuck you!" Conar screamed, pummeling the door with his fists until the flesh was bloody.

  "Don't let the boogie-man get you!"

  Conar yelled, pounded, then listened. No sound. No movement. No light. Nothing.

  "Brelan! he yelled. "Shalu! Roget!"

  He became aware of the silence.

  "Sentian! Jah-Ma-El!"

  He became aware of the darkness.

  "Grice! Chase!"

  He became aware of the closeness.

  "Xander!"

  Frustration became worry.

  "Storm!"

  Worry became alarm.

  "Don't leave me in here!"

  Alarm became fear.

  "Open the gods-be-damned door!"

  Fear became terror.

  "Brelannn!"

  He plastered his back to the door, his eyes wide with horror and full realization of the position he was in. Locked in. In the dark. In the silence. In the confining closeness.

  Without a single pers
on who would come to his aid.

  The dark seemed to reach out to him with the scabrous fingers of the dead. A horrible, suffocating death was rising, calling his name, coming for him out of the black depths of the grave. He could smell the damp earth, could feel the wetness beneath his toes. He had no place to hide. No place to run.

  No way out.

  Wildly, he stumbled from one wall to the other, pushing, shoving, using his waning strength and sanity to try to force open the door. He fell, his body hitting the ground hard. He doubled over, his knees drawn up to his chest, his head tucked down to his bent knees, his body shuddering with great racking spasms of terror.

  "Brelan! Help me!" His shout reverberated through the room.

  Nothing could have stopped the hideous scream that tore from his throat as something scurried across his face. He jerked upright, convulsively wiping his hands down his face. Something ran across his shoulders, down his arm, and he swatted at it. He felt some vile thing squish and smear beneath his hands, and he opened his mouth and howled.

  Terror became true horror.

  One horrible, terrified shriek after another and he felt himself tumbling into the mindless, endless, black void, spiraling into jabbering oblivion. His throat began to close. His lungs burned as he struggled for air. He scrambled across the floor, slithering on his belly, until he reached the door. Feverishly he clawed, wildly gouging the panel with his fingernails as he had done the whipping post at Boreas Keep so long ago. Like then, long slivers of wood embedded themselves under his nails; the nails pulled back, ripped off.

  Sparks of red light flew in front of his eyes. He gasped. Wheezed. Convulsed with his need to draw in life-giving air. The blackness grew darker, closing in around him, pressing its cloying weight upon his body like a massive stone.

  Like the stone that covers a crypt.

  "Oh, God! Please! Please, don't let them do this to me! Please!"

  The air was hot, scalding as he sucked what little he could down his parched throat. It tasted of grave soil, fecund and rotting.

  "Brelan! Please help me!" he begged, his voice straining to be heard.

  Then his horror became hysteria.

  The blacker darkness with its stench of the dead was as ebon as the pit of hell. As lightless as the Abyss, Itself. It caught him in its fierce grip and began to drag him into the bottomless, eternal, infinite bowels of the grave. Decaying fingers gouged into his flesh with vile and intimate strokes and compelling thrusts into every orifice of his body. His stomach churned; his mind reeled with the knowledge that he had been interred alive.

  Before he shivered and then lay quiet, a scream tore from his throat, the final end to a lifetime of waiting for what had come out of hell to claim him.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  His head came up. He had heard a scream. He stopped, listened, his head to one side. He heard it again. And again. And again, but couldn't tell from where it had come. He heard it one final time, and with a clear knowledge of from whom it had come, Chase Montyne of Ionary dropped his shovel and sprinted as fast as he could toward Tyne Brell. "He's in trouble! Get Brelan! Now!"

  Chase ran back through the tunnel and threw down his pick ax.

  * * *

  Brelan was overseeing the loading of the mysterious metal mined in the Labyrinth. Mounds of the glittering green ore was being loaded onto carts and then pushed along rusted tracks into another tunnel where it would be stored until the next prison transport made its run to Tyber's Isle.

  "How much longer until you think the next ship will be here, Lord Saur?" Paegan Hesar asked as he stopped to rest, running a grimy hand over his dirty face.

  "Another two weeks, I would imagine," Brelan answered, knowing Paegan meant Holm van de Lar's ship, not the black-hulled prison ship.

  "We're running low on handles," said Roget, grinning. "That ship better hurry." He was about to say something else when Tyne Brell came running forward, shouting for Brelan.

  "Brelan! There's trouble on the outside!"

  As one, twenty men dropped their tools and ran after Brelan.

  "Cave in?" Sentian yelled as they ran past.

  "Would have heard it!" Thom shouted, pushing aside a guard who made to bar his exit into the main tunnel. "I'll kill you!" he warned. The guard backed off as the big man fell in behind those already running toward the passage out.

  Brelan had known Chase Montyne all his life. As a little boy, Chase had shown a remarkable ability to read people's minds, to know things no boy of four or five should know.

  Seeing Chase running as fast as he could toward the crescent of light leading to the outside, Brelan used his most powerful running kick to catch up with the man. "Is he hurt?"

  "Don't…know…"

  The two men came to a skidding halt outside in the bright light. Neither saw Conar.

  Roget du Mer didn't bother stopping, but ran as fast as he could toward his hut. Sentian Heil was as close on his heels as space would allow. They found the hut empty.

  Brelan couldn't get his legs to move fast enough as he cleared the distance to Xander Hesar's medical hut. His breath came in harsh gasps when he found the Healer sitting in a chair by the row of cots—tied hand and foot to the frame.

  "Untie him!" Brelan shouted to Storm as he came through the door.

  "Conar!" Jah-Ma-El screamed as he and some of the others ran from hut to hut, shed to shed.

  "We can't find him!" Shalu shouted from the Indoctrination Hut.

  Brelan bounded across the distance between the medical hut and the Commandant's quarters. He crashed into the door, banging the portal back against the wall with such force, it pulled free of its top hinges and leaned crazily into the room.

  Appolyon and Lydon Drake were in the back part of the quarters, glasses of wine in their hands. Neither was properly dressed and it didn't take Brelan much thought to guess what the profligates had been doing only moments before.

  "Where is he?" Brelan shoved Lydon and grabbed the fat man by the throat. He momentarily felt Lydon's hands on him, then someone pulled away the guard.

  "How dare you!" the fat man blustered. "Take your hands off me! Guards!" Fear rolled off the slug-like, quivering mass of flesh as Appolyon stared at an enraged Brelan Saur.

  "Where's my brother, you son-of-a-bitch!" Brelan tightened his hold on the Commandant's neck until the jowls started to turn red. Sausage-like fingers scrambled at Brelan's hands grip. "If you value what little time you have left in this world, tell me where Conar is!" Brelan jammed his knee into the man's genitals.

  Roget burst into the room, panting hard. "We've looked everywhere. We can't find him!"

  Brelan shook the gasping, crying man like a rag doll, actually lifting his bulk clear of the floor. "Where is my brother?"

  Appolyon's loins were on fire; his throat was aching, his lungs slowly being drained of air. He slumped to the floor in a heap.

  Thom forced a struggling Lydon Drake to his knees, then drew back the tight blond curls with a vindictive fist.

  Lydon gazed up with indifference at Brelan. "I ain't gonna tell nothing!"

  Shalu realized that Thom was not in the mood for Lydon's uncooperative attitude any more that he was. With a swift movement, Shalu gripped Lydon's left arm and snapped it at the forearm. The loud crack shot the room like a bomb exploding.

  A howl tore from the guard's mouth. He shuddered, the floor running wet with his urine. Another, prolonged squeal erupted as Shalu broke the left wrist.

  Brelan bent over the moaning, contorted face and spoke in a calm, clear voice. "I'll gut you wide open if you don't tell me where he is right now!"

  When Brelan took a wicked dagger from the sheath at this thigh, Lydon looked into a face filled with loathing and lethal intent. He saw death, horrible, prolonged death. Still he hesitated.

  "Break his leg!" Thom snarled.

  "We locked him in the wine cellar!" Lydon screeched.

  All color drained from Brelan's face. For a heart
-stopping moment he couldn't move. He wasn't aware of the men gathered around him. He wasn't aware of shouts and cries coming from outside. Horrible images flew through his mind; he thought he was going to be sick.

  "How long ago?" Jah-Ma-El screamed.

  Shalu grabbed Lydon's ankle.

  "An hour!" Drake screamed.

  "Oh, god." Brelan stumbled out of the room. He careened across the porch, tripped as he started down the steps, went sprawling, then scrambled to his feet. His feet flew across the distance to the mine. Xander Hesar joined him, the others close behind.

  Brelan raced through the serpentine tunnels, seeing that torches had been left to light the way to the wine cellar. The lock on the door made him scream his rage. He clawed at it, calling Conar's name. There was no answering. He kept calling, yanking and pulling on the door, twisting the heavy padlock, but neither lock nor door budged.

  "Move out of the way!" Shalu shoved Brelan aside.

  "He's afraid of confined places." There was panic in Saur's voice—even he could hear it.

  Shalu had grabbed a crowbar before entering the mine. He jammed it under the hasp of the padlock and began to lever it upward. The lock fell with a thud. Shalu jerked open the door.

  "Conar?" Brelan called as someone thrust a torch into the room.

  Conar was curled along the far wall, knees drawn up to his chest.

  Brelan hurried forward, slipping his arm under Conar's legs and beneath his back, then lifted him up. Brelan rushed out of the room, slipping along the passageway back to the outside world. Men stepped aside as he hurried into the sunlight and lowered Conar to the hot sand.

  "Is he alive, Lord Saur?" a man asked. "Have they hurt him, sir?"

  Brelan put his ear to Conar's mouth, where the lips were turning blue. "He's not breathing!"

  He arched back Conar's head. He put his lips over his brother's mouth and began to breathe.

  Conar's chest rose and fell with each intake of air, but there was no movement made on his own. His callused fingers lay still, his hands flung out to either side of him as though he had been once more crucified.