“Are you mad?” Rathe said in shock, knowing the fortress was at least ten days distant.
As if no protest had met his ears, Treon ordered his men, “Make ready to march. We depart within the hour.”
“What of the Maidens of the Lyre?” Loro called.
Treon’s stare showed no hint of compassion. “I must report to Lord Sanouk this grievous attack. Let this brood of simpering whores fend for themselves.”
The armored women gazed on him with contempt, but did not protest.
“You condemn them all!” Rathe shouted in their defense.
Without warning, one of Treon’s sycophants cracked his jaw with a blinding fist. Rathe fought clear in a wild frenzy. The butt of a spear slammed across his shoulders, and another struck the back of his head, then all became a flurry of crushing blows that drove him to his back. A boot crunched down on his wrist before he could raise his dagger, and the tip of Treon’s sword pricked his throat, ending his struggle.
“I fear you will make for a poor hound,” Treon said, flicking his sword to the side, nicking the skin under Rathe’s chin.
Treon stepped away and drew a coil of rope from the company’s supplies. With a harsh grin, he threw it at Rathe’s face. “Your leash, dog. Do not make me rescind my mercy and turn it into a noose.”
Rathe climbed slowly to his feet, the rope dangling from his fingers like a dead serpent. He was too dumbfounded by his own humiliation and remorse for Nesaea’s dreadful end to feel anything, save impotent wrath. He bared his teeth at Treon. “Be sure the pace is swift—I like to run.”
The soldiers who had so recently chanted his praise, now changed allegiance and laughed with Treon at his defiance.
After he tied the rope around his waist, one of Treon’s sergeants dragged a sack over Rathe’s head, cutting off all sight. The first threads of desolation wormed into his heart. In that moment, he fully understood what it meant to be an outcast condemned to a life at Fortress Hilan.
Chapter 12
“You may leave us, sergeant,” Lord Sanouk said to the leader of the twelve soldiers who had taken Nesaea and two of her girls captive. Nesaea had marked the sergeant and six others as Hilan men. The remaining five had been part of Rathe’s outcasts—by their readiness to abduct innocent women at a word from Captain Treon, they were outcasts no longer.
Having delivered only two of the three women he and his men had taken during the battle against the plainsmen, the sergeant looked infinitely relieved that his head would continue to sit atop his shoulders. He bowed deeply, murmuring gratitude for his master’s mercy, and left Sanouk, Nesaea, and Carnala alone. They stood within a graystone corridor that stretched to darkness one way, and led to an open door at the head of a stairwell in the opposite direction.
As she had since the soldiers had tied the three women into their saddles many days before, Carnala kept her head down, weeping quietly. Each night, during their brief halts, Nesaea had tried to console the flaxen-haired wisp of a girl, to no avail.
Better had I freed her, Nesaea thought for the hundredth time since the night she cut Fira loose, and sent her off to find the rest of the Maidens of the Lyre … and, if possible, Rathe. She did not know what Captain Treon and Lord Sanouk had in mind, but did not doubt that evil intent controlled their hearts.
Sipping the wine Sanouk offered, she let the heady flavor quench her rising fear. She took in Carnala’s hanging head, slumped shoulders, and tear-streaked cheeks. Yes, it would have been kinder to free Carnala, but the poor girl would never have made it back to the Maidens. Fira, a fiery woman of great courage, would.
Nesaea forced herself not to think of the alternative, and set the silver-chased goblet on the small round table at her side. Carnala had not touched her wine, which Nesaea considered a pity, for it was possibly the finest she had ever tasted. Pleasures of any sort, she judged, would be soon be absent.
“Why have you done this?” Nesaea asked, striving for a meek tone, despite wanting to gut the man before her.
Sanouk, a handsome man with a noble bearing and the most impassive stare she had ever seen, made a flourish with his hand, inviting her to look toward the stairwell.
It gaped black and cold as a demon’s throat. A smell oozed from those lightless depths, that of vermin, mold, and the musty rot of the spiced and shrouded dead.
“You are to aid me in gaining my rightful place in the world,” he said, voice smooth as the rare vintage she had set aside.
“I care not about your place in the world,” Nesaea said, “or helping you achieve it.”
He smiled enigmatically. “You will,” he said, fingering the hilt of a serpentine-bladed dagger at his belt. “Soon, your part in my destiny will be all that you care about.”
“Do you mean to kill us?” Nesaea asked, wishing she had been able to hide the knife she had used to free Fira. Before being presented to Lord Sanouk, however, the soldiers had searched her and discovered it. Carnala moaned in horror at the question. There were worse things than death, Nesaea knew. She had suffered some of it across the Sea of Muika, on the isles of Giliron. Neither before nor since could she understand how a single year had passed so slowly, as it had while she served as a pleasure slave.
“What use would your death serve?” Sanouk asked.
Though he strove for a conciliatory tone, Nesaea detected a bald lie in his voice. Her gaze skimmed over the goblets on the table and landed on the tall bottle. If I am to die anyway….
In one fluid motion, she caught the bottle about its neck, and flew at Sanouk with all the coiled fury of a provoked adder. With a surprised squawk, he flung himself outside of Nesaea’s swing, twisting away. The dense glass shattered against the stone wall, and she danced to one side, the dagger she had deftly plucked from his belt held in one hand, and in the other the bottle’s jagged remains.
Carnala wailed, bloodshot eyes rolling. Nesaea shoved the girl behind her, and whipped the wavy-bladed dagger under Sanouk’s nose. He leaped back, nimble as a dancer, and settled his feet in a relaxed stance. Unaccountably the brief, fearful surprise he had showed dissolved, replaced by amusement.
“Come any closer,” Nesaea warned, “and your place in the world will be the grave.”
“Indeed?” Sanouk drawled. He advanced, driving Nesaea and Carnala toward the stairwell. He smiled, prepared to utter some inanity, and Nesaea slashed the bottle at his eyes. Sanouk knocked it from her grasp, even as she raked the dagger across his face.
Lord Sanouk spun away, hands clutched to his face. Then, slowly, like a conjurer revealing a fine trick, he dropped them.
Nesaea shivered in dread at the impossibility before her. She had felt the steel slice his face to ribbons … but no wound marred his flesh, not even a pinprick of blood showed. He laughed at her shock, and the dagger fell from her nerveless fingers.
“You will understand my gift in time,” he said, all amusement gone. “Between then and now, I would prefer you were more docile.” His fist flashed, and Nesaea felt the blow only as a fleeting, thudding pain, then all the world passed beyond her sight….
“Yaazapa Gathul! El yettairath dakerr! Yaazapa Gathul!”
Those dark words swirled around her like living things, lighting upon her skin, defiling her flesh.
“Yaazapa Gathul! El yettairath dakerr! Yaazapa Gathul!”
The incantation echoed into oblivion, and Nesaea came around by increments, groggy, head pounding. She lay on some sort of table, its top molded around her body. Though she could not see it, she felt a pulsing, bulbous knot at her temple. What happened … where am I?
She blinked, thinking her eyes betrayed her, but without question a rough-hewn rock ceiling hovered a few paces above her. Spider webs and dust motes danced on hot currents rising from strange, silver-flamed torches ensconced around the grim chamber.
Chamber? she thought uncertainly. The last thing she remembered was coming under attack by plainsmen. “I will watch over you,” she heard the memory of herself say to s
omeone … a man.
“I could ask for no greater comfort,” he had answered, with a breathless grin that quickened her pulse. Who …
… Rathe!
All came back in a rush—the battle, her capture along with Fira and Carnala, the slogging ride to Fortress Hilan.
“Yaazapa Gathul! El yettairath dakerr! Yaazapa Gathul!” came the dread incantation, spoken in a voice she now recognized: Lord Sanouk.
A creeping breath of ice teased her skin, and she knew that she had been disrobed. That concern became a mere curiosity when the torchlight lost a measure of its radiance. Nesaea sensed a presence rising below her, an upwelling of cold. Dread coated her bare skin in a greasy sweat—
Suddenly all went blacker than a starless night, and flashing horrors passed before her vision. Some suffocating substance poured down her throat, choking off her cries. Cold, jellied hands—dozens, scores—at once caressed and tormented her bare flesh, and a grinding voice filled her mind, stilling her heart. Hers was the torment of the beset and the ravaged, the countless victims of life’s follies and cruelties, all pressed into her being and made her own in a single instant—
Then a creature drifted above her, a devilish god of gangrenous flesh and goggling eyes, an abomination with the grotesque attributes of both male and female. The foul deity glided away and spoke to Sanouk.
“This offering is fit and timely,” the creature grated.
“Indeed, master?” Sanouk babbled excitedly.
“And now you must dig deeply into the bones of the world, make a thousand and a thousand tombs. Enshrine therein your offerings, for my ageless hunger has been rekindled. You will nourish my appetites unto your final, gasping breath steals from your breast.”
“But I cannot—”
“You will … unless you yearn to slake my hungers with the meat of your own soul?”
“No,” Sanouk murmured humbly. “I will do your will. Of course. Anything, master.”
“And so shall I grant your petty wants.”
“Thank you, blessed Gathul!”
“Ask of me what you will,” the god bade.
Instead of answering, Nesaea heard Sanouk jump to his feet, followed by a wretched mewling sound that drew her gaze. Disheveled, compliant and utterly broken, Carnala knelt before Sanouk, who stood as naked as his captives.
“What are you doing?” Nesaea said, her words slurring and thick. He was not the first man to beat her into unconsciousness, but she feared something else troubled her speech and wits.
Sanouk did not answer. Carnala shuddered as if stricken with ague, her alabaster skin slicked with sweat and dirt. From her neck hung a noose. Before Nesaea could protest, Sanouk yanked the tail of the rope, cinching the noose tight.
Carnala’s eyes bulged, her whimpering became a strangled hiss. For the first time since her capture, the shell of her terror broke and she fought. Her resistance came far too late. Sanouk dragged her kicking before a tall, narrow niche carved into the wall of the chamber. Stooping, he caught the girl in his arms and flung her into the bizarre grave. Face purpling, Carnala lurched forward—only to slam into a pearlescent gray barrier. Tongue protruding, she yanked at the noose, but it held fast. She threw herself at the barrier, mouth yawning wide to draw a breath that would never come.
Nesaea’s gaze swept around the chamber, finding a charred and flailing figure wreathed in flame, and an eyeless old man covered in bleeding wounds. Roaring fires entrapped the burning figure—Oh gods, it’s another girl!—and a faintly transparent wall of flowing blood entombed the old man.
Nesaea shivered in horror. “Please, do not do this!” she begged, mortified by the fleeting idea that she would do anything to avoid what had befallen the other three.
Sanouk faced her. Over his shoulder, a handful of blazing pits formed where eyes should be in Gathul’s face. “Alas, it’s already done,” Sanouk said with a greedy smirk.
“What is done?”
“Can you not feel the poison’s taint in your blood?
What poison? She nearly asked, but she already knew. Had not her fear and dismay been so great, the strange confusion and effort to speak would have alerted her earlier.
As though enlivened by recognition, the effects of the poison fell fully upon her. She tried to clamber out of the queer depression in the tabletop, but it held her fast. Her insides clenched violently, and her skin came alive with an awful crawling, burning sensation.
“I am … dying,” she rasped.
Sanouk touched the table, and a sucking noise sounded beneath her, even as the pressure on her limbs dwindled. He heaved her up off the table, and her head dropped back so that all appeared inverted. The table was an arcane, greenstone altar, its heart alive with dark, agitated shapes. With not a whit of care or caution, he tossed her into a nook in the wall—her tomb.
Struggling, Nesaea clawed her way to her feet and spun drunkenly. Already a barrier stood between her and Sanouk. He was laughing, but no sound came to her ears, save the pounding of her own heart and ragged gasps. She fell against the barrier, its color that of decaying flesh.
“Let me out,” she moaned, wishing for the first time in her life that she would die, for surely in death she would escape the wracking ills plaguing her body.
Sanouk cocked his head, making a mockery of trying to catch her words, then he threw back his head, laughing his silent laugh. As if seen in a dream, he departed.
Death did not come, but Nesaea’s pains increased tenfold, a hundredfold, more. She retched until blood replaced bile, her limbs quivered, and the poison gained potency every passing moment. Mind awash with the delirium of endless pain, she sank to her knees. Do not come, Rathe. For your life, stay away, she managed to pray, before delirium swept away her wits.
Chapter 13
Raining….
That recognition meandered through the valleys of Rathe’s weary consciousness, trying to reach the surface of greater awareness. He groaned, rolled over, and threw an arm over his head to block the drizzle. Half-asleep, he did not want to sacrifice even a precious moment of rest to worry over something so minor as a little dampness.
Warm, stinking rain….
Rathe came fully awake, sputtering at the bitter taste on his lips. Unconsciously knowing what was happening, he lunged to his feet, but the staked tether tied to his waist jerked taut and he slammed against stony ground. The stream followed, running over the back of his head and down his neck.
“A dog needs a bath, yes?” Treon rasped in his leathery voice.
Crablike, Rathe scuttled away, the tether forcing him into a circular flight around the stake. Treon came after, spurting jets of urine and chuckling.
After he drained his bladder, the captain said, “Looks to be another fine day for running, dog.” Still laughing, he spun away and returned to camp, now readying for departure.
Rathe lay shaking, piss dripping from his head to the yellowed grass and lichen-crusted rocks under him. His fists clenched, grimy fingernails digging against his palms. It was not the first time Treon had made water on him over the last several days, and was not the worst of his abuses, but frequency and degree did not ease Rathe’s outrage.
“I will not break,” he murmured through clenched teeth. Always before, the mantra had allowed him to face each new mistreatment with some measure of dignity, had given him strength to rise above encroaching weakness. Taking longer than ever, the words eventually diluted the black hopelessness within his heart.
When Treon returned, the light of dawn had fully come upon the thinly forested land, and he found Rathe sitting cross-legged, a serene smile on his lips.
The captain smiled in return, the breeze tugging his long white hair. “As my dog seems hale, I suppose there’s no use wasting this on you,” he said, holding up a waterskin in one hand, and a heel of bread in the other. “Of course,” Treon added slyly, his narrowed eyes the hue of a winter sky, “if my dog were to beg, even a little, I might concede that he needs sustenance.”
<
br /> Rathe’s defiance withered as he tried to imagine another day without food or drink. His belly cramped with hunger, and his dry throat convulsed painfully. Somehow, his smile remained affixed to his face, but it felt as brittle and as false as it was.
Treon waited awhile longer, shrugged, and tossed the bread away. He leaned over and pulled the stake from the ground and gave the tether a snapping tug. “Come along, dog. We have leagues to travel this day.”
I will not break! Rathe’s own voice of warning shouted in his mind, even as he saw himself catching hold of the rope and jerking it out of Treon’s hands, envisioned himself rising up and wrapping that hempen cord around the captain’s neck and pulling the ends tight; he saw Treon’s eyes bulge, heard the man’s wheezing struggle to draw breath….
He saw those things, desperately wanted them, but he lowered his gaze and clambered to his feet. Treon laughed as he led Rathe to camp. Standing apart from the others, Loro glared at the remaining outcasts and the Hilan men. When his eyes fell on Rathe, his face briefly softened in pity before tightening in anger. Before the man could say anything that would bring suffering upon himself, Rathe caught his glowering stare and shook his head. It was the same every morning and evening, when the sack came off his head.
Taking Rathe’s suffering as his own, Loro looked ready to balk, then abruptly wheeled and stomped to his mount. After he climbed into the saddle, he refused to look at Rathe again. Anger did not twist his face, but abject misery.
As in days past, Treon hooded Rathe, tied the leash to his saddle, and ordered a fast march. Rathe shambled along behind, nostrils thick with the reek of sweat, urine, and burlap. Choking dust made breathing all the more difficult.
Though it strained his eyes, he could look at the ground through a gap in the hood and see coming obstacles in the roadway. Unfortunately, he had less than a heartbeat to react to any jutting stone or fallen tree branch that might trip him, and the effort of looking down at such an acute angle made his eyes ache. Worse still, to avoid anything on such short notice left him mincing along like a drunken dancer, much to the brutal delight of Treon and his sergeants.
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