by Nina Mason
“You are a knight of Avalon?”
“I am, sir.” He did not add, “Though not for much longer, if all goes according to plan.”
“What business had you with the druids?”
“I went to Brocaliande on an errand for the queen.” Axel could see no reason to lie to the god. “She asked that I retrieve the Cup of Truth, which was stolen from her several weeks back by another knight and his lady.”
“The cup does not rightfully belong to your queen.” The god’s watery eyes narrowed. “I made a gift of that vessel to King Cormac, but it was stolen after his death by his faery lover, who gave it to Morgan.”
“In that case, you’ll be glad to know the cup remains in Brocaliande, in the care of Cathbad the druid, who refused to honor the queen’s claim.”
“I am indeed glad to hear it, as the cup is capable of potent magic—and I shall sleep better knowing it is in the hands of one who will use it for good instead of ill.”
“As will I,” Axel said.
“Come aboard.” The god extended an arm in welcome. “I shall carry you across to Avalon before her magic destroys you.”
Heedless of his boots and stockings, Axel waded out to the chariot and hopped onto the translucent deck, which, to his surprise, was made of glass and afforded an excellent view of the sea below.
As the chariot set off toward the island, the god held out his hand. “Welcome aboard, Sir Axel. You are looked upon with favor in Asgard. Few men still keep the old ways with the vigilance that you do, and Odin was sorry not to have you among his einherjars in the Hall of the Fallen.”
Asgard was both the home of the Norse gods and the location of Valhalla—the Hall of the Fallen to which he had referred. “He sent a Valkyrie to retrieve you from the battlefield at Bannock Burn, but she arrived too late,” the god went on. “Queen Morgan had already claimed you as a drone.”
“I would much rather have been an einherjar.” Axel felt bitter about his near-miss until he remembered he would not have met Jenna if he had been taken to Valhalla. Jenna could save him from his unfortunate circumstances and give him the happiness he had not known he was without until she came into his life.
Axel’s gut coiled tighter as they advanced toward Avalon. The craggy cliffs protecting the island grew ever closer, ever higher, and ever more threatening. As the outlying basaltic sea cave came into view, so did something else that caused his chest to constrict: the golden beehive-shaped royal carriage was parked on the shore. Morgan had come out to greet him upon his return, and had brought with her a platoon of red-coated Sangpagnese soldiers.
The god must have sensed Axel’s tension, because he clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Fear not, my friend. Neither your queen nor her vampires can see us coming. For I have called upon the mists to conceal us from their gazes.”
Axel looked from the island to the god. “Then, you must be Manannan mac Lir.”
Wearing a thoughtful expression, the god nodded. “I am called by many names, including the one you have spoken.”
Chapter 19
“You have come back, my knight, which pleases your queen,” Morgan said to Axel through the circular window of her carriage, looking every bit the queen bee in her hive. “But why did you return without my cup or my tithe?”
Axel’s gut clenched as he bowed at the waist. “I did my best, my queen—but was unable to secure either for you.”
Anger flashed in her emerald eyes as she pressed her lips together in displeasure. “Did you at least do away with the baroness and her unborn child?”
He was done for. “No, my queen.”
“What about news of the rebels? Surely, after being among them a few days, you must have some intelligence to share on that front.”
“I spent the whole of my time in Brocaliande in a cell, my queen. Only by escaping was I able to return within the proscribed time—albeit in failure, regrettably.”
“You saw nothing?” Her eyes darkened and narrowed to slits. “Overheard nothing?”
The noose tightened around his throat. “All I can tell you, my queen, is that Cathbad keeps his secrets well.”
She regarded Axel for a long moment. “I do not need the Cup of Truth to reveal such an obvious lie. You have failed me, my knight—utterly and completely—and worse, you have betrayed me. For I expected deceit from the others, but never from you—my once good and faithful favorite.”
“I am sorry, my queen. I truly did my best.”
For a moment, he imagined what he would do to her if he still had the Glaive of Light in his possession. While what he pictured was far from chivalrous, he found it extremely satisfying.
“Your best isn’t good enough by half, my knight—and you will pay dearly for your incompetence—and your treachery.” Her eyes shone ominously. “But first, I must keep you alive for the tithe.”
She offered him a cup he presumed contained the antidote to the time-release potion. Getting to his feet, he took the vessel from her hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, drank it down.
As he returned the cup to her, she said, “Now, I shall grant the Duke of Cumberland leave to extract all the information he can by any means necessary—so long as he leaves you in a condition favorable to ritual sacrifice.”
When she spoke the duke’s name, the corpulent commander leaned forward in the carriage, making his presence known. Axel cringed at the prospect of being turned over to such an unfeeling fiend. On his last few visits to Castle Le Fay, he had heard the agonized screams of the duke’s prisoners rising from the dungeon.
The queen turned to Cumberland with a look of concern. “Do be careful not to get carried away. As much as I want to learn what he is concealing from us, we mustn’t risk invoking the Dark Lord’s wrath by offering him damaged goods—or less than was promised. And I have already committed to offering a knight as our tithe and cannot go back on my word.”
“You may rely on me, my queen,” the duke returned in his haughty English accent. “He will look as fit as a fiddle by the time you ride out.”
And, at that, the fat vampire poked his bewigged head out the carriage window, turned to the guards posted nearest, and pointed at Axel. “Seize him at once, take him to the dungeon, and secure him to the rack. When he is ready for the interrogation to commence, come and find me in my quarters.”
* * * *
Cumberland’s soldiers hauled Axel, handcuffed and bleeding from the severe beating they’d inflicted, across the rickety bridge leading to Castle Le Fay. Once inside the palace, they dragged him through a maze of corridors and down a staircase chiseled from the bedrock. From behind the iron doors lining the long passageway at the bottom, the muffled sobs, moans, and wails of other prisoners heightened his dread.
They stopped before one of the iron doors. The larger of the vampires held onto Axel while the smaller retrieved a ring of keys from a row of pegs on the wall behind them. When the door was open, the guard still holding Axel shoved him into the dark, cramped cell within. Both laughed as he landed hard on the stone floor on his hands and knees.
“Don’t get too comfortable, you filthy turn-coat,” one of them said, chuckling. “We’ll be back for your sorry arse as soon as we’ve prepared the machine that’s going to pull your worthless limbs from their sockets.”
At that, they slammed the door with a thunderous clang, leaving Axel in total darkness. He stayed where he was until his preternatural vision adjusted to the lack of light. Then, he looked around at his new quarters. The cell was no more than seven square feet. From the rusty iron walls hung various chains and shackles. A sparse layer of straw covered the cold floor.
He shuddered at the thought of what tortures he was doomed to suffer at the duke’s hands. If the horror stories Leith had imparted about “Butcher Cumberland” were to be believed—and he had no reason to doubt them—the rack would be the least of his torments.
Axel got up on his knees, closed his eyes, and began to pray—to Thor for strength and to Tyr fo
r courage. When the door groaned open, he turned around. There, grinning at him from the doorway, were the same two guards who’d brought him in.
“Get up, arsehole,” the bigger one growled.
Hindered by the handcuffs, Axel struggled to get up. As soon as he had gained his footing, the guards grabbed him under the arms, hauled him out of the cell, and roughly escorted him down the hall to another room. This one had stone walls leeched through with crusty veins of white lime. The guards set him on his feet in the middle of the floor, removed his handcuffs, and ordered him to strip.
As he pulled off his clothes, he looked about with mounting disquiet. The room was filled with the torture devices commonly used in his day. Not only the rack, but also the bed of nails, the breaking wheel, and the iron maiden. A nearby table displayed thumbscrews and the boot, along with various scourges, whips, pliers, and hammers.
Axel swallowed his rising bile, but could not stop his cods from trying to crawl back inside his body. Odin, help him. Clearly, he was in the lair of a monster who enjoyed inflicting pain.
The largest owl Axel had ever beheld flew into the room and alighted on a raised slab on the floor. Within seconds, the owl morphed into the fat and flabby figure of the Duke of Cumberland.
One of the guards dashed away and soon returned with a lavishly embroidered red-velvet banyan, which he draped around his commander’s sallow sloping shoulders.
“Thank you, private.” Cumberland shoved his saggy arms into the robe’s bell-shaped sleeves.
“The pleasure is all mine, Your Grace.” The arse-kissing guard bowed.
Cumberland looked Axel up and down, lingering a wee bit longer on his manly bits than was appropriate. As the former royal prince stepped off the platform, the guards drew in closer in a way Axel understood to mean he would pay dearly for any evasive maneuvers. Cumberland’s pudgy fingers came to rest on Axel’s chest before lecherously exploring the terrain of his body.
“You’re so delightfully firm,” the duke observed as he took liberties that made Axel cringe.
Leith had told him how the duke had once slit the throat of a man who caught him in bed with his valet—and later imprisoned and tortured the journalist who tried to report the story.
While stroking Axel’s cock, Cumberland moved in and whispered, “If you give me what I want, I can make your last hours pleasant ones.”
“I would rather be drawn and quartered,” Axel ground out.
“Much as I’d like to oblige you, the queen made it clear I’m to keep you in one piece,” the duke returned with a leer. “Therefore, I thought I might start with something that won’t leave any marks—but will almost certainly compel a full confession.”
“Oh, aye?” Dread had him in a stranglehold that made it hard to speak. “And what would that be?”
“This.” The duke held up what looked like a thick black sewing needle threaded with a piece of fishing line. “It’s pure iron. Would you like to guess where it goes, faery boy?”
Axel swallowed hard and bit his tongue. The sick bastard was threatening to catheterize him with a piece of iron that would burn like fire.
“I thought you were going to stretch me on the rack.”
An evil grin elevated the vampire’s jowls. “The two devices are not mutually exclusive.”
Cumberland pushed the iron needle into Axel’s urethra. As searing pain shot through his body, his knees buckled under him.
As he dropped, the guards caught him, lifted him into the air, and carried him across the room to the rack. With supernatural speed, they fastened his hands and feet to the rollers, top and bottom.
Cumberland, who had followed, leaned over him, took hold of the wooden lever, and fixed Axel with his bloodshot yellow gaze. “Are you familiar with the workings of this delightful contraption?”
When Axel failed to answer, the duke proceeded to explain the workings of the rack with a verve bordering on glee. “As the interrogation progresses, I shall push down upon this handle, which activates a ratchet attached to the chains holding your wrists. This increases the tension on the chains and, if all works properly, induces excruciating pain.” He put special emphasis on the word “excruciating” and looked positively giddy. “By a crude-but-clever system of pulleys and levers, the ratchet will also rotate the rollers little by little until the strain on your joints becomes so strong that your wrists, elbows, hips, and knees eventually dislocate.”
The undead duke paused before adding with a macabre chortle, “The whole process is accompanied by a deliciously gruesome popping sound made by the snapping of cartilage, ligaments, and bones. And, of course, your bloodcurdling screams as your limbs slowly separate from your body.”
Axel, though plagued by searing pain and suffocating terror, struggled to maintain the appearance of composure. Looking his tormentor in the eye, he said, “Clearly, you enjoy inflicting pain, Your Grace—not unlike a child who pulls the wings off flies for sport.”
“I do indeed.” Wearing a delighted grin, the duke depressed the lever, stretching Axel’s wrists to an agonizing degree. “More than words can express.”
Though tormented in the extreme, Axel clenched his teeth to avoid crying out.
Holding his gaze with magnetic intensity, the duke activated the lever again. “Now, my double-dealing knight, tell me everything you learned about the rebel plot while in Brocaliande.”
The interrogation went on for several unbearable hours. When it was over, Axel, who had confessed nothing, was in torment. Every joint in his body had been dislocated and his muscles had lost all elasticity.
Cumberland stared down at him without the least hint of compassion on his jaundiced face. “Return him to his cell,” he told the guards. “And when he is repaired, put him in irons.”
Axel groaned in misery as the guards lifted him off the bed of torture and lugged his broken body back to his cell. Alone in the dark, naked and suffering beyond belief, he lay helplessly on his back, waiting for his ravaged body to repair itself. Anger, fear, and dread roiled in his gut like thunderclouds as he struggled to keep his mind in the present. No good could come from dwelling on what lay ahead.
As his joints locked back into place, he removed the catheter and flung it away. In the rush of relief that followed, his thoughts turned to Jenna. She must be worried sick, wondering where he was. His heart twisted at the prospect of never seeing her again. Conjuring a picture of her lovely face, he clung to the image as he rolled on his side, pulled up his knees, and shook with shock.
No more than a few minutes passed before the key rattled in the latch. His mind went black, the air left his lungs, and fear coiled in his gut like an adder.
The door opened, admitting a stream of light. Eyes shut against the sudden brightness, he heard feet scuffling in the straw. Rough hands clasped his underarms. His newly repaired joints pulled insufferably as they lifted him into the air and slammed his back against the iron wall, which seared his flesh like a hot griddle. His wrists and ankles sizzled and blistered when they clamped him in the shackles.
As the guards withdrew, Axel dropped his head and whispered in the darkness, “Please, Jenna. You must trust in your powers and come for me on Samhain.”
* * * *
Axel awoke with a jolt when the key clicked in the lock. The door groaned open and in strode the same two guards, followed by the undead duke, who carried a wicked looking flogger with sharp bits of iron tied to its multiple tails at varying intervals.
Cumberland came within inches of Axel and held out the whip. “Do you know what I have here?”
“It looks like a cat o’ nine tails,” Axel answered weakly.
“The Romans called it a scourge or a flagellum,” the duke explained with obvious pleasure. “It was used on slaves and criminals before they were put to death, usually by public crucifixion. The flogger, known as a lictor, would force the condemned man to kneel—a position that enabled the scourge to tear even deeper into the flesh and musculature of his shoulde
rs and back. This, as you might imagine, left the condemned man in a deliciously gruesome condition for the public to observe as he hung on the cross.”
Axel shrank inside but said nothing. Did Cumberland mean to crucify him after tearing him up with the scourge? If that was the sick bastard’s plan, he would not be surprised. The duke had been the most brutal of officers in life, and was no doubt even more sadistic as a Sangpagnese.
“Be thankful I did not bring the scorpion.” A grin spread across the duke’s multi-chinned mien. “Though there’s always tomorrow, I suppose.”
Axel could not stop himself from asking, “What is the scorpion?”
“One of these little lovelies.” Cumberland stroked the tails of the scourge like a pet. “But with hooks on the ends.”
Axel shuddered at the description and tried hard not to picture being whipped with hooks.
The duke turned toward the guards. “This time, I want him facing the wall with his hands together and his legs as far apart as you can spread them without dislocating his hips.”
When the guards had carried out their orders, the duke ran his hands over Axel’s backside in a libidinous manner. “It’s a good thing this won’t leave permanent scars, as the queen insisted I leave you unmarred. It also would be a shame to spoil such a fine-looking specimen.”
Thorny vines wrapped their tendrils around Axel’s innards. “You clearly take pride in your depravity.”
“Oh, I do.” Cumberland withdrew his hands and stepped back. “Believe me.”
The whip hissed before cutting Axel’s flesh like a knife. Searing pain brought tears to his eyes, but he refused to give the twisted prick the satisfaction of crying out. Inside a cyclone of trepidation, he awaited the next blow.
“I prefer to wait a decent interval between lashes,” the duke said. “Otherwise, one pain can dull the next.”
The scourge struck again, the iron barbs tearing away skin and muscle.
“What did you learn of the rebel effort while in Brocaliande?”
When Axel failed to answer, the scourge struck again, searing his flesh.