If the woman called, it would be within twenty yards, before Dian reached the stalls. The call did not come. Ten more seconds went by, seconds filled with the beginnings of bitter self-recrimination and her mind’s angry demand for an alternative plan, when the voice followed her down the road. A single word: “Stop.” It was spoken in a low voice but a carrying one, and Dian did not think it a good risk to pretend she had not heard it. The owner of that voice would not repeat herself. She reined Simon in and circled him around to wait. In less than a minute, the Strangers door opened wide, and a woman stood within, darkly indistinct but surprisingly small in the gloom.
Dian took a final look up at the looming, ugly walls and wondered if she would be able to maintain the matching facade of cold brutality that the next weeks were going to require of her. Then she thought of Robin somewhere in there behind those walls and decided the attitude on her part would not be entirely a facade. She urged Simon forward, back to the city, to enter the city’s gates.
. . . SHE DESIRED TO RULE OVER ALL MEN, NOT
BY MEANS OF SHARPNESS OF MIND,
BUT RATHER BY FORCE OF ARMS.
TWENTY-THREE
IT WAS A SMALL WOMAN WHO WAITED, A FULL HAND shorter than the smallest of the four guards Dian had yet seen, but her body was hard under her closely fitted black clothes. She was a white woman in her late thirties with cropped brown hair and a look of patience on her face, and other than her odd amber eyes, at first glance she appeared nondescript. The tube on her forearm was silver, and she wore an automatic handgun at her hip. Dian swung off Simon, downed Tomas, and approached her. With every step, Dian’s sense of the woman’s power grew, and as she stood looking down into the older woman’s face, she could feel the sweat trickling into her hair: nondescript was the last thing this woman was.
“Why did you damage my women?” the shorter woman asked after a minute. There was no threat in the low voice, but it was far from reassuring. Dian felt, rather, that behind the cool words lay a menace more terrible than any posturing or snarl. This woman had no need to assert herself to anyone.
It took a considerable effort to keep her own response equally calm, but a matter-of-fact answer was her only hope. “I only damaged the one,” she answered. “It seemed a better way of getting your attention than filling out forms.”
The amber eyes studied her, then went to Simon, and rested a long minute on Tomas before coming back to Dian. She tipped her head to speak to someone over her shoulder.
“Take her to Center. Give her a bath. Food if she wants it. Bring her to me in an hour.” She paused, and her eyes shifted. “She’s not to be damaged.”
“Yes, Captain.”
The eyes came back to Dian. “My women will care for your horse. They will return your possessions after they’ve been through them, if it is decided that you still need them. And the dog is to stay behind when you’re brought to me.”
“Very well.”
The Captain turned on her heel and swept away, two black figures at her back, and the bare inner courtyard suddenly gained ten degrees and a supply of oxygen. Dian drew a deep and shaky breath, surreptitiously wiped the sweat from her brow, and followed the guard into the city, through narrow passages and oddly vacant streets to a door in a solid, unmarked, unwindowed building, one in a solid block of similar buildings. Her two guards, one in front and one behind, silently marched her up a flight of stairs and down a passage that was much too long for one building, a passage that could only have been made by joining up all the buildings in the block. Up another stairway a door was opened, and Dian was escorted into a bleak, bare room lit by a dim electrical ceiling light covered by a wire cage, showing a rough mattress on the floorboards, no window, and two more doorways. The leading guard walked over to the left-hand door, a closet, and pulled out a stained, once-white robe, which she dropped on top of the mattress’s two folded blankets as she passed to the other doorway. She went through it; Dian heard the screech of a tap turning, followed by the splash of water. The woman came back and looked at her partner, who had not moved out of the doorway.
“Strip,” ordered the woman at Dian’s back.
Without hesitation Dian began to drop fur hat, fur parka, belt, knife, boots, sweaters, shirts, trousers, socks into a heap on the floor. The cold of the room bit at her flesh. The guard reached up to run her fingers carefully through Dian’s hair, then stood back.
“Squat,” came another brusque command.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Dian easily. “I don’t think that’s part of your orders, and I don’t want your hands poking me. Nothing personal, you understand, but you’ll not do it short of, er, ‘damaging’ me. Sorry.” She hid her apprehension behind a taut smile, extended her hand out flat to keep Tomas in his place, and waited.
“We’ll see what the Captain says,” the guard said finally, and the other began awkwardly to gather up Dian’s shed clothing. They left, and a pair of bolts slid to on the other side of the heavy door.
Dian picked up the robe and went into the bathroom, where she found the lack of anything that could be fashioned into a weapon carried to an extreme. No mirror, a small wooden brush with soft bristles, but no comb, one small flat control knob and a faucet that would have required a crow bar to pry from the wall, and a toilet with neither seat, lid, nor tank, flushed by a knob in the floor.
“Nor iron bars a cage,” she commented aloud to Tomas and anyone else who might be listening, although as she climbed into the barely tepid bath she doubted that her mind was innocent or quiet enough to regard this place as a hermitage. As she sank gratefully into the water, she found herself wondering just when her mother had implanted that little snippet of poetry into her mind, and then wondered further what Mother would say at her daughter’s current circumstances. There was no doubt about it, though: even a tepid bath was heaven after two weeks of scrubbing with melted snow. She soaped all over with a rough yellow bar that smelled of dead sheep, drained the gray water, then filled the tub again, lying back to study the ceiling. It was clean. Everything was clean, if minimal, and how the hell was she going to get out of this alive, and with Robin? Tomas came in after a while to drink from the water lapping around his mistress’s knees. Dian held her fist in the water and squirted him playfully; he bit twice at the jets, then turned around and around next to the tub and flopped down on the tiles with a sigh.
The water became cold, and no more warmth could be coaxed from the tap. Dian left the wooden plug in the hole, in case Tomas wanted another drink, and dried herself with the towel that was threadbare but clean. The short bristles of the brush made no headway into her wiry hair, so long now that it brushed her shoulders, so she ran her fingers through it a few times, then dropped the sacklike robe over her head and went to sit in the cold room, legs crossed, on top of the blankets that she was no doubt meant to huddle under.
They came for her before the hour was up, the same two as before. She stood up smoothly, told Tomas to stay, and went with them. They bolted the door on Tomas and took her away without a word.
Down several different corridors and stairways they walked, passing numerous women, all dressed in dull black. Dian revised drastically upward her estimate of how many women it would take to guard Ashtown from itself. Two hundred? More elite guards here than there were adults in her Valley, apparently.
Her escort stopped in front of one of a series of undistinguished doors, knocked once, pushed it open, and stood back. Dian entered, and the woman shut the door and turned the lock from the outside.
Another windowless room, larger but no more luxurious than the one she had come from. It was nearly as cold as the cell, and although there was more furniture, the four wooden chairs looked less comfortable than the mattress had been. There was a table, and an electrical lamp to supplement the two ceiling bulbs, but other than those it was bare of bookshelves, cushions, rugs, or pictures on the wall. Dian chose a chair, tucked her bare feet underneath her, and resigned herself to a wait.
“Your name?”
“Dian.”
“Where are you from?”
“South.”
“Where?”
“South.”
“Do you have a reason you don’t want me to know?”
“Not particularly.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I told you. I was looking for work.”
“Why here?”
“It’s cold out there.”
“It’s warmer in the South.”
“Too warm.”
The woman thought about this for a moment. “Why should I let you in? You’re not here half an hour and I’ve got blood on the ground and lose two of my Guard. You’re trouble.”
“I’m good.”
“I’ve got good people.”
“And I won’t make trouble with them. Those two you put out in the snow, they were temporary gun-toters, taken on because they’re tall and mean. Put their guns halfway across the yard and go stand near the fire—that’s the work of rank amateurs. Real guards I can work with.”
“And if I put you to work with ‘gun-toters’?”
“Do you have many like that?”
“Answer the question.”
Dian shrugged. “If you told me to, I’d try.”
“Why are you here?”
“It’s cold, and I heard of Ashtown.”
“Where?”
“Meijing.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“Most recently.”
“Doing what?”
“I was with their road guards, for a while.”
“The Meijing guards? You’re not Chinese.”
“Wall guards are Chinese, the rest can be anything,” she said truthfully.
“Why are you here?”
“I got bored, for Christ sakes.”
“You’re bored, you’re probably in trouble in Meijing, and I should let you join up? You’d piss off as soon as I put some pressure on you.”
A fractional drop in the Captain’s eyelids told Dian that they had suddenly reached the crux. There was more here than she could immediately identify, but she did not hesitate.
“Pressure I can take.”
“And . . . discipline?” There was a caress in the word, affection and anticipation that caused warning bells to start jangling in Dian’s head, but the only indication of it was the brief twitch she felt along her jawline. She hoped the Captain had not noticed.
“I told you,” she answered, “I’d get along with the others.”
“That’s not discipline, and you know it. Discipline here is putting up with anything—anything—that I say you put up with. I say you crawl, your chin is on the ground. I say you submit to a strip search, you spread ‘em before I finish the sentence. That’s what discipline means in my guard, and frankly, I don’t think you can cut it.”
“I thought those two were just throwing their weight around. If I’d realized the search was your order—” She made to stand up.
“Sit.” The captain leaned back and studied Dian. “So you can take discipline?”
“I understand discipline,” Dian replied evenly, but by God the room was cold, cold.
“Do you, now?” the woman drawled. After a minute she rose and went to open the door she had come through. Two large and eager women came in, all but rubbing their gloved hands together at the sight of Dian in the chair. They were followed by another, who bore a more than passing resemblance to Dian’s interrogator, although her eyes were darker. This woman pulled a chair up next to the one the orange-eyed woman had occupied. The Captain came back and stood looking down at Dian while she addressed the two big, gloved women behind her.
“You know the rules. Blood I don’t care about, but nothing more permanent than a week, and any bones broken, I break the same on you, and maybe another for good measure. You,” she addressed Dian. “Two of my guards are dead because of you.”
“Dead? But I didn’t—”
The Captain’s small, iron-hard palm shot out and cracked Dian’s head around.
“You will not interrupt me,” she said mildly. “Two of my guards are dead, and that is not permitted. You will sit in that chair and you will make no move to protect yourself. If you do, or if you get up from the chair, you will be taken to the city gates and you will leave immediately and you will not come back, ever, on pain of death. Do you agree?”
“I told you,” Dian croaked, “I understand discipline.”
“Right,” she said, and turned to her chair.
“You . . . they called you the Captain?”
“They call me Captain, yes.”
“What is your name?”
“If you ever have reason to speak to me after this evening, you will be told my name. Now, are you finished delaying? Good. You may begin,” she told the two, and sat down in her chair to watch.
Her mind gibbering at the impossibility of sitting still while appalling things were being done to her body, Dian felt her arms gathered high behind her, and the shorter of the two women, the one with the much-broken nose and many scars, came to stand in front of her. She tugged at her sleek black gloves, studying Dian like a butcher about to fell a steer, and it was intolerable.
“No!” Dian heard the sharp edge of terror in her own voice, and she modified the protest into a hoarse whisper. “No. You can’t do that.”
Something in her attitude caused the gloved woman to hesitate and look to her frowning Captain for instruction.
“You want to leave?” the Captain asked. Dian jerked her head in a negative. “Then what is it?”
“I . . . you mustn’t. Not there. I—” She gritted her teeth and pushed it out. “I’m pregnant.”
“Ah. That does change things a little. First time?” Dian nodded. “And you’re what, twenty-eight, nine? Bit of a surprise, then?”
“God, yes,” she blurted, and then clamped down her jaws, hard. No weakness, none; never.
“That’s the real reason you wanted to come in from the cold, isn’t it? First time preggers and nervous with it. Yes?”
She took Dian’s silence for a humiliated admission of weakness, which was not far from the truth. Dian wondered in despair what punishment the woman would devise as an alternative, and closed her eyes briefly and missed the Captain’s nod.
Dian’s leg exploded with agony and she screamed with the suddenness of it as the chair flew out from underneath her. She caught her breath on the floor, looked up at the two waiting, happy women and then at the two in the chairs, the orange eyes speculative, the dark eyes even darker and in a face that had taken on a faint flush. One of the women by her side reached down, set the chair upright, patted the seat; the other grinned through gaps in her teeth; but the decision had been made, and Dian would not unmake it now.
She did not scream again, made no noises other than the choking sounds of expelled breaths. Her silence may have accounted for the misjudged blow that finally rendered her unable to crawl back up to the chair, as an increasingly irritated guard, tired of being limited to her victim’s extremities and growing annoyed at Dian’s lack of response and dogged return to the seat of torture, slapped once too hard. After Dian hit the floor that time, she did not get up again.
“HOW CAN MY ARRIVAL HAVE FAVORED MY
ENEMIES AS WELL AS MY FRIENDS?”
TWENTY-FOUR
DIAN WOKE SLOWLY. AWARENESS BEGAN TO UNFOLD IN tendrils, one by one, delicate tendrils requiring careful consideration. Breathe.
In. Out. The air tasted warm: inside air. And the light: gray under the slits of her eyelids. Dull, distant sunlight, not electricity, or oil, or candles. Which meant there was a window nearby, although why this should be of interest did not occur to her. Next, some minutes later, emerged a sense of smell, bringing the evocative odor of freshly ironed linen. Home. Cleanliness. Mother. Then the harsh tang of something medicinal, farther off but pervasive. Two senses, smell and light, linked her to the world, and after a while a third. Hearing brought the muffled sounds (blankets, she thought, pulled high—I am lying in bed) of people, of distant conversation, and of feet moving in a large building. Everything muffled, feeling slightly drunk, feeling—no, oh, no, mustn’t feel, don’t want to feel, don’t move, breathing is enough. Breath by shallow breath she grew more awake and knew that she was about to open a door and walk into a black room in which a cougar crouched, waiting for her to walk in, to wake up.
And then, sudden as that cougar’s pounce, a nearby door slammed and, with the involuntary wince of reaction, every abused muscle in her body seized up tight. Instantly she was lying on a bed of fire, knives were sliding into her arms, her thighs, stabbing over and over, and even though it was essential, so utterly vital (why?) that she not scream, she could not help the short chuffs of breath that leaked from her closed throat, short, breathy near-moans. She was only dimly aware of feet and a voice, the blankets being pulled back, and a sharp prick on an otherwise pain-free hip, then the blankets being draped carefully across her taut and quivering body.
“Try to let the muscles relax,” said a voice in her ear. “The shot will help, but let them go soft. Concentrate on your breathing. If you go limp, you won’t hurt as much. Relax.” The voice continued in this vein for several minutes, counteracting the tense huh, huh of her breathing, and finally, just as she was becoming dreadfully certain that she was going to have to shriek to rid herself of this awful tightness and agony, the spasm let her go, as suddenly as it had taken her, and she lay limp and trembling and drenched with sweat.
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