A moment later pain ripped my body apart. There is no other way to describe it.
I hadn’t been going to scream. I hadn’t been going to give them the satisfaction.
I started to scream and went on screaming. Yet I heard nothing. The pain would not allow me to hear. Or see. Or think. Only to feel…
If it had been enough to want to die, I would have died in the first five seconds.
Time has no meaning to the tortured. Thirty seconds of agony seems like a lifetime; when the torture doesn’t stop, there is no concept even of the length of a lifetime—there is only a longing for death. Death is the vision that keeps madness at bay; the knowledge that it will come is the sole salve for endless pain. I thought I was going to die with pain and I was glad.
I do not know how long I lay there with the blood-demons in me. When they took them away, I would have thanked them, had I had the strength. The sun was still in the sky; a flock of small birds chattered away in the murram grass; seabirds squabbled over the waves; everything was as it should be on an ordinary day.
A water-filled sponge was pressed to my lips and I drank eagerly, separating parched tongue from the roof of my mouth, glorying in the sweetness of the moisture, in the cessation of an unreal agony. Now it was merely painful. Worse was the knowledge that sooner or later I would tell them anything they wanted to know. The stakes they had used to anchor my bonds had been loosened by my struggles; they hammered them in again, deeper this time.
Domino’s voice whispered in my ear. ‘The name, bitch. The bastard who was with you when you took the Castlemaid. Quick now, or there’s a week of this in store for you.’
I opened my eyes and saw Sickle, impassive-faced. He was less obvious about his enjoyment of my pain. Sickle, fellow halfbreed, professional torturer. Professional… I gambled with the life of the one man I had ever loved.
‘Tor Ryder. Tor Ryder—at The Drunken Plaice.’ I stumbled over the name. Beloved. Forgive me.
The silence seemed to last too long.
Then Domino asked, ‘Well?’
And Sickle shook his head. ‘Nah. She’s too good for that. He reckons she’s in Keeper service. They only employ the best. And she’s a halfbreed.’ He gave a cynical laugh. ‘You wouldn’t know what that means, Dom, but I do. Abandoned at birth. Left to die in some gutter somewhere. Nine in ten halfbreeds never make it to adulthood on islandoms other than this one; only the tough ones get as far as she and I have. For some reason she wants us to go after this Ryder—it’s either a trap of some kind, or it’s a false trail. A lover who spurned her, maybe. She wouldn’t give up the correct name after one bout with the blood-demons. Not this lass.’ He grinned at me and dropped the blood-demons he had been holding into the wounds on my body.
I floated in pain, shouting out for everyone I had ever known, whimpering for forgiveness, calling on a God I had never believed in. The colours came: reds and oranges, burning my eyeballs. I was dismembered, my pieces lying in the sun to be desiccated and sold. I was scrabbling for food thrown in the backways of The Hub when I was five; resisting the sexual advances of an older boy when I was six; fighting the delusions of fever in a vermin-infested tomb in a cemetery when I was seven; having my womb irreparably scarred when I was thirteen; stabbing the man who had raped me in Bethany when I was fourteen; earning my passage to Fen Island by sleeping with a stinking captain of a fisher a few days later; selling my soul to the Keepers in order to keep my body alive when I was fifteen…
You were right, Niamor. Life’s shit.
Flame, sweet Flame, can you survive a little longer…
I have to die.
No one can live with this pain.
I don’t want life on these terms.
That water’s good…
I’ll give you the name, just kill me.
Syr-aware Duthrick. (God, how he’d hate the downgrading!). The Keeper Syr-councillor. Tell the dunmaster, I don’t care. (He probably won’t believe in an Awarefolk Councillor anyway, but who knows.) Just kill me.
‘No, you big bitch, not yet. We haven’t finished…’
Beloved…
###
An eternity of pain is a long time.
Long enough to bore even those who enjoy the watching of it.
They tired of their game, especially when I drifted in and out of consciousness, robbing them of their triumph, especially when they had to refix my bonds again and again as I struggled. They threw away the blood-demons and began to taunt me with descriptions of other tortures they had in store for me, agonies so vile I couldn’t conceive that it would be possible to endure them. For them, half the enjoyment was to savour the victim’s dread.
I wasn’t sure whether it was the same day, but anyway, the sun was setting over the dunes. The tethered sea-ponies came out of the water to lie intertwined on the sand, licking each other and enjoying the rest now that the heat had gone from the sun. Their green hides were tinged with the pink of sunset. Sickle threw a bucket of seawater over me, washing away the sand and blood. The sting of it in my wounds might almost have been pleasant after the hell of the blood-demons, if I hadn’t known that it was just the prelude to more pain.
I dreaded all right, but I was lucky. They never did get around to the next instalment they’d had in mind.
Domino bent to check my bonds—and took an arrow in his rump. The feathered shaft stuck out like a make-believe tail for a make-believe animal in a strolling players’ masque, but the arrow was real enough to have him howling with outrage and pain even while it seemed an absurdity. He bucked through the haze of my pain, a pantomime ass, braying to the audience… Then Sickle, still gaping at Domino, went down with an arrow in his shoulder and I stopped lying there passively as if I’d been lightning-struck, and began wrenching at the already loosened bonds and stakes.
Another arrow, in the thigh this time, had Sickle rolling on the sand screaming. Domino was scrabbling away on all fours, a second arrow in his backside waggling beside the first in an even more ridiculous caricature of a tail. I had my right arm free, stake still attached, and was fumbling for my sword where it lay, just out of reach, with my clothes.
‘I’m here, love,’ someone said in my ear. ‘It’s all over.’
His voice was heaven.
I closed my eyes and stopped fighting, stopped hurting, stopped the desperate struggle to look after myself. For the first time in my life I gave myself over to another’s care.
He cut the bonds and raised me gently against his chest. ‘How badly are you hurt?’ he asked, and his voice ached for me.
‘Lucky…I don’t get sunburned easily. I’m a little…tattered…here and there…but it’s not as bad as it looks.’ Or feels. Not any more.
‘Do you want me to stake these fellows out and feed them to the blood-demons?’ His tone, coldly clinical, made it clear that he had recognised the wounds on my body—and knew what they signified.
I opened my eyes and looked around. Domino had vanished, but he couldn’t have gone all that far. Sickle was trying to drag himself towards the sea-ponies, but his injuries were severe and he wasn’t making a very efficient exit.
‘That would be…a sort of poetic justice, Tor. But…no. I don’t think it’s…quite your style. You don’t have to do that for…me.’
He hesitated. ‘My style? No, I wouldn’t have said so…but it’s tempting, Blaze, very tempting. I would if it would help you. I would do anything.’
‘Just kill them, Tor. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to exist.’
He left me briefly to execute Sickle with my sword, knocking him out and then slitting his throat with ruthless efficiency. When he turned his back on the body as if he didn’t want to acknowledge what he had done, the look on his face jagged at me like sharp coral.
I held out my hand and stayed him as he moved to go after Domino. ‘No, Tor. Leave the other one.’
He couldn’t bring himself to hide his relief, although he tried. Something didn’t quite match up wi
th what I knew of him, but I was in no state to mull over it just then.
He was back at my side, lifting a drinkskin to my lips, tending the wounds, helping me to dress, chafing my wrists and ankles to restore circulation, touching me with gentle care, concealing his pain.
‘Flame?’ I asked, finally giving voice to the fear in me.
‘She was still hanging on when I saw her last, about four hours ago. It was she who told me where to find you. When you didn’t come back this morning she was worried. She sent a flock of Dustels out looking for you all over Gorthan Spit. One of them saw you and returned to tell her. You do know about the Dustel Islander birds?’
‘I do,’ I said, and added talking Dustel birds to my growing list of things he ought not to have known about, but did. ‘The dunmaster’s bastards were waiting for me, Tor. Outside Niamor’s house— They knew I was the one who had saved Flame. I don’t know how they knew. And I don’t know how they knew where to find me this morning.’
‘We found the tapboy with marks of a dunmagic whipping. Could that have had anything to do with it?’
‘Shit. Oh yes. That could have everything to do with it. My fault—I asked him the way to Niamor’s. And he knew Flame was back; he told me he saw her come in. And he knew I went after her last night. Damn. The poor boy.’
‘He’s still alive. Do you know who the dunmaster is yet?’
I shook my head. ‘Perhaps we should have waited in that prison of Flame’s, seen who it was coming up those stairs.’
‘And if he’d had enough company, maybe we’d be dead by now.’
‘Perhaps. I think he must have seen us go out through the window after all, Tor. He knew we were Awarefolk. The dunmagic bolts he sent after us were sent in anger, not with any real hope of killing us. But I must get back: Flame.’
‘Ransom went to ask the Keepers for help. Perhaps they have done something by now.’
Gently he helped me to my feet. I looked around; Domino had disappeared into the sand dunes. ‘You came alone?’
‘Yes. I hired a sea-pony.’
‘The Lance of Calment strikes again… You fire a mean arrow, Tor.’ He still wasn’t wearing a sword, but at least he did have a knife in his belt as well as the bow and arrows.
He smiled slightly. ‘On the contrary. I meant to kill them. All I managed to do was stick them full of shafts like spice-sticks in a pomander. I’m out of practice. I haven’t shot an arrow since—since those days in Calment Minor.’ Come to think of it, he had probably loosed a few in my direction back in those days. Perhaps the same thought occurred to him because there was suddenly something remote about him, a withdrawal.
I touched his arm in question. ‘What’s the matter, Tor?’
He turned stark eyes to me. ‘I was too late to help you. I don’t know how to help you now.’
It was only half the truth, and I knew it. Something else troubled him, but I let it ride and dealt with the problem he had mentioned. ‘You saved my life. You stopped my torture. What more could a lady in trouble want? As for now—you can go on loving me. That’s all I ask. I’m as tough as dried rayfish, Tor. I was born a halfbreed, and there’s nothing much anyone can teach me about survival. But to have someone love me—that is a joy I’ve never known before.’ I quelled the pain that standing up had aggravated and told him the truth: ‘Just to have you look at me the way you do is to make life worth anything fate throws my way, even a torture or two.’
I took a deep breath, as if that would bring order to jumbled thoughts and chaotic emotions. I let my hand fall away from his arm. ‘But we don’t have time for this—I must get to Flame.’
He was back to his efficient self. ‘Can you ride a sea-pony?’
‘Of course. How far are we from Gorthan Docks?’
‘Three hours ride along the beach. Are you sure?’
I forced a grin. ‘Stop playing mother, Tor. I’m not used to it.’
He smiled reluctantly and took my hand.
###
I don’t know why those animals are called sea-ponies; they don’t resemble the real meadow ponies I’ve seen on the Keeper Isles. Those are shaggy things hardly bigger than a dog. Sea-ponies swim better than they gallop. They have fins along their sides and a fin for a tail—and no legs at all. They’re rare outside Gorthan Spit nowadays. People prefer those animals you introduced us to: horses. You haven’t seen a sea-pony yet? Well, they resemble oversized earthworms as much as anything, I suppose, but even there the resemblance is only partial. Earthworms don’t have necks, and sea-ponies do. They have long bodies with many segments, each one covered with a hard shell that conceals body tissue; the necks rear up from the ground to a height well above that of a tall man, and the head is very little different to the neck below it. The stalked eyes, feelers and mouth parts are there on the front side; the breathing apparatus is on the same segment but on the other side, facing the rider. Or riders. One sea-pony can carry five or six people—more than your horses can!
Anyway, I was grateful for the use of a sea-pony that day, I can tell you. Tor settled me in front of him, both of us sharing the same body segment. He knew how weak I was and wanted to give me support on the ride: the rhythm of a sea-pony can be tricky. On land they move by contracting their segments from the rear and then shooting their front half forward; if you weren’t careful, you could end up with a snapped neck when they reached top speed. Riding one is an art, but I’d ridden every animal there was to ride in the Isles of Glory, including sea-ponies, and mastered them all. I hooked my feet into the man-made hollows on the segments and leaned back against Tor’s chest. He gathered up the reins that fitted on to a halter around the head.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
I turned back to assent, and drew a sharp breath instead. From where we were then, at the top of the dune, I could see what hadn’t been visible from where I’d been staked out at the water’s edge: a village. Its outline against the sky was just discernible in the crepuscular light of dusk. But it wasn’t the realisation of its existence that made me gasp; it was the angry red glow that seemed to hang over it. I heard Niamor’s words echo in my head: those who go there don’t seem to come back—
‘In the name of all the islands,’ I whispered, ‘what abomination is that?’ I knew it was dunmagic, of course; what appalled me was the extent of it. Surely no one dunmaster had caused all of that.
Tor urged the animal forward by poking it in the soft skin between the segments with a riding-prod. ‘There’s more than one dunmaster here,’ he said, ‘that’s obvious.’
‘The Keepers must be told—’
‘I imagine they know.’
‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’ I hadn’t meant to say that; I hadn’t wanted to force him to tell me his secrets, but my fear had overridden my respect for his privacy.
‘There have been many disappearances of sylvtalents over the past year or so,’ he said with an oblique neutrality.
I thought of Flame. Sylvtalent under a spell of subversion. To be forged by dunmagic into a perversion of herself. I glanced back once more at the village and my stomach tightened with nausea. The red was more than the contamination of dunmagic; it was a disease eating at what had once been true, evil forged from good, a cancer wrought from healthy flesh and healthy minds. ‘Oh sweet God—’ The words jerked out of me. In my horror, I turned on him. ‘And you would condemn the Keepers? They are the only people who can stop this.’
He shook his head, implacable. ‘No, Blaze. Only Awarefolk can stop this. Sylvtalents can be corrupted, just as Flame is being corrupted.’ He prodded the sea-pony again and its pace quickened.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Every thought I had appalled me.
Letter from Researcher (Special Class) S. iso Fabold, National Department of Exploration, to Masterman M. iso Kipswon, President of the National Society for the Scientific, Anthropological and Ethnographical Study of non-Kellish peoples.
Dated this day 13/1st Double/1793.
Dear Uncle,
Yes, I would be delighted to stay with you and Aunt Rosris before and after my presentation to the Society. And I have taken take note of your warning about the charming Miss Anyara isi Teron, and shall be on my guard against her smile. My aunt always has impeccable taste and I am sure it will take all my powers of resistance! I was, by the way, delighted to hear that Aunt has had her first religious aetherial. I know how hard she has prayed over the years that she would be one of those blessed to have such a transcendence at the holy Menara festival. Cousin Edgerl writes that Aunt’s face was quite transformed by the wonder of her visual experience. I live in hope that one day I will be blessed in a similar fashion and that my face too will shine with the miracle of seeing God before me.
As to the anomalies in the conversations I have sent you so far, you are quite right, of course. It has been a source of considerable puzzlement, not only to us researchers aboard the RV Seadrift, but to numerous Kellish traders and missionaries who have been dealing with the islanders much longer then we have. What are we to make of people who talk of magic as though it was something with which they themselves have had intimate contact; what are we to believe when people speak of the Dustel Islands existing and then not existing; what are we to make of people who all say that the tattoos in their ears were made by a race of alien people that none of Kellish origins has ever seen?
Are Blaze Halfbreed and others of her ilk just congenital liars, who love to weave improbable stories? Or do they believe what they tell us, no matter how unlikely it seems to our ears? Herewith is another packet of conversations; yet more tales of intrigue and, I hope, an insight into a culture that—alas—no longer exists in quite the same form. Partly the fault of Kellish contact, partly the fault of this weird episode in their history, the period they call the Change.
The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) Page 15