The Warlord's Domain

by Peter Morwood

Giorl gazed at him, a speculative stare which had unsettled better men than Voord Ebanesj, but then they had not had the twin safeguards of rank and knowledge to protect them.

  "Understand me, Giorl, if it was possible I would go myself, but I need whatever information these two have seen fit not to tell me, and if they're left alone now, knowing what they know, they'll concoct some story or—"

  "Try to cheat you in some other way, yes." Giorl spoke in the weary voice of one who had heard the same explanation offered on many other occasions to many other people, and hadn't been convinced then either. "Very well. But if you used sorcery there would be no need for all this."

  "Aren't you forgetting that sorcery is illegal, and that I've learned I can't trust it, and that if it was permitted then there would be no need for you and because of what you know there would be no way in which I could let you leave this citadel alive… ?" Voord rattled off the clauses, not threatening her because all the threatening had been done most effectively a long time ago, but just reminding her of her present situation.

  "I was not forgetting," Giorl said, and turned from him to her assistants. "That one." She pointed to one of the tulathin, fastened naked to an iron chair by neck and waist and thigh, by bicep, wrist and ankle. At present it merely held him fast, but various levers, probes and oil-soaked wicks built into its structure could make it much more than just an ugly, clumsy piece of furniture. The man glared horror and hatred at her, but Giorl had seen worse and in any case intended him no harm just now. "Fit the clamps and the mirror panels. If he can see and understand what I can do," she told Voord over one shoulder, "maybe I won't have to waste much time in actually doing."

  Voord said nothing. He was leafing through the small book that always stayed in here, a book as sinister as any grimoire, the accumulated wisdom of generations of interrogators and generations of pain. Various levels of torment were listed in its pages, set out in the language of bureaucrats the world over. Like the neutral titles of the participants in this abbatoir—Questionmaker, Recorder Subject—it was an arid pedantry of instruments and applications and durations intended to place comfortable distance between the reader and the reality of what he read. What Voord read was a handbook of anguish.

  Metal clicked and rattled as the clamps were slotted and locked into position. Adapted from a mechanism for performing delicate surgery, once they were secure the taulath in the chair could neither move his head nor close his eyes. That effect had been the original intention of the physician who had invented the device, but not in such a circumstance as this. The prisoner could look only at his companion and at what was being done to him, for once the mirror panels were in place even turning away his eyes would show only a reflection of the bloody reality. There was a choking-pear in his mouth, forcing it into a straining gape which at the same time muted any sound of encouragement he might make to a snuffling grunt, and other than what went on inside his own mind he was unhurt.

  The assistants stepped back to let Giorl inspect their work. She checked locks and straps and grub-screws with the same dispassionate concentration as she had been giving to the setting out of her own surgeon's instruments—for none of the delicate devices that were her specialty were ever kept down here with the heavy equipment. They stayed at home, and were cared for along with the tools of her other, later trade.

  "The questions are decided," said Voord, his consultation with the Questionmaker at an end. "Proceed. Begin with…" pages rustled for a moment. "Twelve."

  Giorl paused an instant, recalling what Twelve entailed as she might have recalled the steps of a complex surgery, then lifted the medical instrument which most closely approximated to what she would normally have used for torment Twelve, shifted her mind away from any concern for the trembling human being trussed before her and set to work…

  The two knives, the curved tongs and the three needles— all carefully threaded from a new wax-sealed packet of stitching-gut—which Kyrin had chosen were all laid on a metal tray and covered with a white cloth by the time Ryn and a servant returned with the salted water and the clean bedding. She had also picked out several long strips of a soft, loose-woven cloth and two bottles, one filled clear and one with a straw-colored liquid. From the expression on his face, Aldric had expected her selection to be much larger and more complex, and he seemed almost disappointed with the simplicity of it all. For her part, Kyrin knew that he would soon be grateful there was nothing more elaborate to handle.

  With his sleeves rolled up past the elbows like hers, Aldric was watching her preparations with far more apprehension than Ryn; he looked indeed, more like the sick child's father than her father did. "Cheer up," said Kyrin, and saw him twitch, "this is a fairly quick and simple undertaking. You shouldn't be more than a few minutes about it."

  "I shouldn't… ?" His voice, in the Alban language, was no more than a whisper, and it was clear that only force of will was keeping it free of a horror that would have needed no translation. "Just what in hell are you talking about? I can't do this—I don't know how! You're the physician's aide, you do it!"

  "Aldric, my loved, I can't." This was the crunch. This was for his health as much as for the child's, but if he learned she was lying to him…

  "Why not, for all Gods' sake?"

  "Because my oath forbids it."

  "What?"

  " 'I will not cut—but shall leave that to those trained in that Art.' " She spoke not in Alban but in Imperial

  Drusalan, loudly enough for Ryn to hear what she was saying, and looked to him for confirmation of it. Aldric looked too, but he was hoping more for a denial; he didn't get one.

  "I know that oath," agreed Ryn. "A shortened version but the truth, near enough."

  Kyrin folded back the cloth from the instruments and moved their tray a little closer. Aldric stared at the tiny knives and didn't move, seeming to the casual or uninformed eye to be considering how to begin. Only she was close enough to see the terror in his eyes; they were fixed, unblinking, watching the bright lamplight shift and glint in the polish of edges and on the points of needles. She knew that he was seeing dead faces reflected back from the burnished metal—faces whose lives he had stolen away with a blade in his hand.

  And now, thanks to the hasty planning of the woman he loved and who loved him, he was being asked to cut again, not now for death but for life; and maybe to close at long last the raw lacerations in his own mind. It was a dreadful thing to be wounded so deeply and for so long with a wound that never healed, and if trickery was part of the cure then Tehal Kyrin had a clear conscience about its use.

  Moving with the easy speed of long practice, Kyrin set about preparing Mai for surgery. She started by opening the door and all three windows so that a breeze of chill fresh air began to flow through the room, then extinguished all the lamps and angled the bedroom mirrors to reflect light from the door and windows instead. Had he been concentrating on Kyrin rather than on his inner fears, Aldric might have wondered why; except that both reasons were explained the instant she opened one of the bottles and began soaking a cloth in its straw-yellow contents. A heavy, sweetish scent flowed through the room, so intense that it was almost visible, and Aldric shook off his own private thoughts with a jerk of his head and a muttered oath.

  "What in hell is that stuff?"

  "A distillate… and an important one. Pungent, poisonous and explosive, hence no lamps and open windows, but this stuff will keep the child asleep and out of pain until you're done." She made a pad of the sopping cloth, folded it once and then again before laying it over Mai's mouth and nose, then removed the stopper from the second bottle, poured clear liquid into a ceramic dish and began washing her hands. The nose-pricking smell of twice-distilled grain spirit mingled briefly with the heavy odor of the sleeping-drug. "Now you wash," she said, shaking drips from her fingertips, "while I clean what we'll need."

  Aldric's eyes followed her hands as they lifted the small metallic things that clinked when they were laid into yet another
spirit-filled dish until they should be needed, then dutifully scrubbed his own hands and arms up past the elbows with the same chilly, fast evaporating liquid. Kyrin glanced at him, wondering if the slight shiver she saw was a result of the cold breeze or the cold alcohol or what her old master called cold feet. She doubted it of this particular man, but it was so very hard to be sure…

  Then Mai whimpered even through the drug-deepened shadows, and Aldric's teeth came together with a click that was audible clear across the room; Kyrin had the first knife out of its spirit-bath and ready just in time for his hand to snap out and receive the handle slapped into his palm.

  "Where do I cut?" he asked, and his soft voice was without any trace of tremor.

  Kyrin breathed a sigh of relief, not caring anymore who heard it, and pressed her fingertips against Mai's neck, counting the beats of the little girl's pulse. Still too fast. "Wait," she said. The rapid fluttering began to slacken its pace, became something like normal for the first time since Kyrin had felt it, then grew slower still. A touch on the eyelashes drew no response. The pad over the child's face was almost dry, and Kyrin moistened it with more of the sleep-drug. She dipped another pad of cloth into a dish of clean grain-spirit and wiped it gently across Mai's belly from hip-bone to navel, waited until the sheen of alcohol had dried and then drew a single marking stripe. "Cut there," she said, "and—and cut as well as you know how."

  She saw Aldric's throat move as he swallowed hard.

  But she also saw him balance the knife in his hand as an artist might balance a brush, with as much authority as her master had ever shown in all the years that she had watched him work, and as she readied a swab she saw him make the first sweeping cut…

  … The blood felt very warm, tickling Giorl's skin as it wandered over her face in four distinct and separate threads: one from just above her right eye, another down her cheek, a third coming out of her nose and the last dribbling from her slack-lipped mouth.

  She moved a little, whimpering because moving hurt. At least Ryn wouldn't be back for some hours yet. She had said as much to Terel, let him know that he had time, just before he… She brought one straddled leg under her body and a ragged spike of pain rammed up into her belly, reminding her—as if she needed the reminder—of just what he had done. All that mattered now was that she would have time to clean herself up and think of a credible story before Ryn came home. Clean her body, anyway. Cleaning her mind of the past quarter-hour would not be so easy.

  But he's Ryn's friend! she thought wildly. He's been to our house before, he's eaten here, drunk here, even slept here when he and Ryn were working late. I know him! Known him, and yet plainly not known him well enough. Oh, wonderful hindsight that let her see now the truth behind his frequent visits to the house, his excessive Jouvaine courtesy with all its kissing and embracing—no matter that he was as much a Drusalan as they were, yet he was a well-traveled man and the affectations had looked well on him. She had treated his over-familiar hands and mouth as ostentatious worldly wisdom, or as the slightly off-color joke it sometimes seemed to be. And oh, the compliments, both private and in Ryn's own hearing, about how lucky her husband was and how jealous he, Terel, was of his old friend, and how if she ever wanted to run away from home she could run straight to him. All with a grin and a laugh. That was all it had seemed to be and perhaps all it was, then; and all it should have remained. Giorl didn't know why the bois-terous friendship had turned so sour. Probably no rape victim ever did.

  Her bottom lip was split and one of her teeth felt loose. Hardly surprising. She had bitten, until Terel had… had persuaded her to stop.

  That man used to play with my daughter, thought Giorl, and went cold inside. Lorei had been five, already becoming beautiful. But never alone. Never, ever alone, even then. Oh, thank you for that much, Lady Mother, thank you… She had not cried in pain for herself and for her own hurts, but she cried now in gratitude for the safety of her child.

  Ryn had been told only of a fall downstairs. Mai was his child, their child. She had claimed the three barren years a consequence of the "fall" and Ryn, bless him, had believed. During those years she had made sure to take the proper drugs against conception until she was quite certain that Terel had given her no more than pain and filthy memories… and until Terel himself was just another of those memories.

  Hatred had brooded in Giorl's mind for those three years, but nothing had come of it until the day when Lorei came in and told how she had met Uncle Terel in the street, and how he had spoken to her for the longest time and had been so nice…

  For two days Giorl had been quiet and withdrawn. On the morning of the third, she reached a decision. With Ryn off to deliver some finished work, Lorei at her lessons and Mai left with a trusted neighbor, she had gone down to Ryn's toolbox and stolen the leather-working knife he used to cut soft skins into coverings for his buffing-pads. And then she had gone looking for Terel.

  He hadn't been hard to find, for all that he no longer visited their house—because of a friendship-breaking quarrel over their shared business which Giorl was certain had been staged just for that purpose. But he had kept his own place on the other side of the city, and opened his own goldsmith's shop as if to prove he no longer needed any partnership. Giorl had thought of dressing up, of wearing cosmetics and letting him believe that she had been taken with his prowess. The thought had been rejected; he was not so much of a fool as to be taken in. And using that sort of deception would leave her no better than the man who had pretended to be her husband's friend.

  For all that he had been taken in, deceived by nothing more than his own arrogance and pride. Terel had invited her indoors with all the old overblown courtesies, bowing low and kissing the back of her hand like a courtier. He had even started to seduce her, smiling, purring, showing her his house and especially its fine bedroom, plying her with wine the whole time as he had not troubled to do before when brute force had been so much cheaper. That was when she had mashed the wine-jug against the side of his head. He had recovered consciousness tied spread-eagled to the posts of his own ostentatious bed, gagged by the whole apple she had rammed past his teeth and secured with her silk scarf.

  Then Giorl had taken out the knife.

  She and Terel had learned many things that stinking afternoon: that men plainly knew no natural pain like the pain of bringing a new life into the world; that rape was much more than just an over-rough display of affection—and that it was possible to peel a human being like a ripe fruit…

  For those few hours Giorl had been insane, and only when the madness and the hatred drained away and let her see what she had done did all the good memories replace the bad. How she and her husband and Terel had laughed at jokes, and gone to the theater, and worried over lack of work then seen it all come right at last. How Terel had made Lorei a little jeweled bracelet for her naming-day, the one Giorl had thrown away and claimed was "lost" and replaced with another gift that had never quite been the same…

  She was still crusted with drying, flaking blood, still holding the knife and still crying bitterly when some instinct brought two off-duty constables and their drinking companion into the house. The officers had seen only the knife and the mess on the bed, and had arrested her at once, but their companion—much more than another policeman—had been more interested to note that the mess was still alive.

  And that was how it had begun. Either you can do it to them at our instruction, and comfort yourself with the knowledge that they're all criminals anyway—or we'll have someone do it to you and your entire family, because we know you're a criminal, too.

  Ryn had heard it all from the constables' non-police comrade, an eldheisart Kagh' Ernvakh named Voord, and though it had taken her lovely husband a long time to come to terms with what his friend and then his wife had done, he had recovered something like equanimity at long last, accepted that she was now in the service of the State and left it all at that. Giorl had just one long-cherished and most unladylike ambition: to
be a physician. Now that she was employed in activities far less ladylike than healing the sick, some unnamed person in Drakkesborg citadel spoke words—and likely some threats—on her behalf. It was an annoyance that her success in examination stemmed less from her long, hard studies than from that anonymous patron; and from her extraordinary knowledge of anatomy gained in the bloody chamber.

  It was still more annoying to learn that she earned more by carving an interrogation Subject like a dinner joint than she ever would by restoring an operation patient to full health and strength. There was also the small matter of her own expendability. Voord had said it himself: she wouldn't be allowed to leave the citadel alive if Kagh' Ernvakh lost their hold on her. Giorl, however, had taken some steps in that direction herself. The insurance, if it could be termed such, took the form of hundreds of sensitive facts filtered from the screams in the questioning room, written down, multiply copied, and held by various people instructed either to open or to forward them elsewhere if Giorl Derawn should either vanish or die of anything other than undisputed old age. It might work, and it might not; there would be no way to tell until the time came to try. And that time was not quite yet…

  There was less blood than Aldric usually saw when he brought a blade and a body together; but then, there was nothing usual at all about this situation. For all that Kyrin had talked about the clinical detachment of physicians, Aldric knew perfectly well that he was deeply involved in what he was doing. It was as much a matter of his personal honor as any of the ancient kailin-oaths.

  "Gently," Kyrin said, "as if you were cutting silk on a table you didn't want to scratch." Aldric nodded silently, astonished by both the sharpness of the knife's edge and the steadiness of his own unaccustomed hands.

  A bare touch of the blade was enough. The offending organ burst from the incision as if it had a life of its own. Kyrin brushed past him and began to do rapid things with a length of suture and another of the ceramic dishes. She stitched and tied, then stitched some more and drew the stitching tight. "The other knife," she said, and pointed. "Cut there. Now."