The Warlord's Domain (27 page)

Kyrin had been expecting Aldric to cry out, or to try to pull his head free, or to do
something
. Instead he did nothing; even the quick, shallow rhythm of his breathing remained unchanged. Voord, however, turned his own head and gazed at Kyrin with such lascivious amusement that she blushed scarlet and looked away. “Yes, indeed,” said Voord. “Nothing hidden.” Then he glanced back at Aldric with the suddenness of one finding exactly what he was looking for, and laughed as he released his grip. “Good,” he said softly. “Welcome to your nightmare…”

Tagen was back in a matter of minutes, with Widowmaker held in both hands and slightly away from his body as if he didn’t want even the scabbarded blade to come too close. The armorer was at his heels, a stocky, silver-bearded man in a leather apron with a canvas bag of tools and equipment hanging from one hand as though a permanent part of his anatomy. He glanced incuriously from Voord to the shackled prisoners and then back, plainly seeing nothing until he was told what he was supposed to do.

“You brought all you need?” asked Voord.

“I did, my lord.” The armorer fished noisily in his bag for a moment before holding up a piece of forged metal for Voord’s inspection. “Two of these clamps, three strips of steel, ten masonry spikes and my best hammer. Do you wish the weapon capable of being drawn, or not?”

“Emphatically not. I want the whole thing immovable. But also I want as much of it on view as can be managed—you understand?”

“I had already suspected as much, my lord. Hence the clamps, one for point and one for pommel, and the steel stripping to hold the crosspiece and the scabbard snug.”

Voord looked quickly at Tagen, but guessed that wherever the armorer had gleaned his information it hadn’t been from that source. Tagen was still looking too worried about the whole proceeding to have realized yet what was in Voord’s mind. But the woman knew; she was glaring hatred at all three of them, blue eyes venomous as those of a basilisk. Voord smiled back at her, quite unaffected by her gaze. “Yes, my dear,” he said. “Expressly to frustrate the pair of you… and especially him.” He jerked his head toward Aldric, and his smile went thin and nasty as he patted the innocent blue-white crystal that was the
taiken’s
pommel-stone. “This… Ah, this sword’s the only thing that makes him what he is. We’ll see how he fares when he can see it and speak to it, but can’t get at it…”

Aldric’s eyelids fluttered, squeezed tight shut and then ventured open. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he announced in a fragile voice, and abandoned any attempt to sit upright.

He closed his eyes to blot out the sight of two of everything, wishing fervently that he hadn’t opened them at all. It didn’t seem to matter that he was lying flat on his back and looking nowhere except straight up; the entire world appeared to be making a slow spiral progress through his throbbing head, with exactly the same effect as watching the real world do the same thing from the deck of a heaving ship. It made him want to heave as well.

There was a sound like little bells jangling in his ears and mingling most unpleasantly with the thumping of his own heart, every beat of which sent another dull spike of pain jolting from the back of his neck to the backs of his eyes. There were a few minutes just after he moved when he thought that he might die; and then a few more when he fervently hoped he would.

“You were hit on the head,” said a voice like Kyrin’s, sounding very far away and almost drowned out by the noise of those damned bells. “I suspect that you have a concussion.”

“I suspect nothing of the sort,” said Aldric. Even his own voice sounded far away, and he had to pronounce each word carefully to make sure that it was the right one. “I
know
I have a concussion… and that I was hit on the head. It’s happened before. Either that or the Playhouse fell on me.”

“Aldric, we’re in trouble,” said Kyrin’s voice, sounding frightened as she began to explain exactly what the trouble was.

He listened to the words without really hearing them, trying instead to track the swirling world and make some sense of it. Although he had passed into something more like deep sleep within two hours of Doern’s cudgel-blow, the brain-rattling effects of the impact required rather more time than just a night’s sleep before he shook them off. Shook off, indeed, was scarcely the proper word, since Aldric knew from past experience that if he tried to shake off even a speck of dust tickling his face, he would regret the sudden movement for a long time afterward. Only the name
Voord
managed to pierce the purple fog filling his mind. It was a name he knew from… Dizziness or not, his eyes snapped open.

“Say that again; the last part, about Voord.” Aldric didn’t want to hear it, because that would mean it had to be true and wasn’t just another part of the foul fever-dreams that were troubling his sleep.

“What I said was, Voord has somehow become the Grand Warlord. And he’s the one who had us both arrested.” She looked over at him again, lying quite flat and still as if posing for the carven effigy on a tomb-lid. After the arrest,
Kagh’ Ernvakh
troopers had searched them both. They had found three small knives on Aldric: one strapped to his left wrist, a second down his boot and the last—a tiny push-dirk—hung from two loops at the back of his tunic collar. After that, they had taken away all outer garments made of fabric thick enough to hide a blade. For the first time in her memory Aldric was in total black, without the touches of white or silver or of polished metal which had been his—conscious or otherwise—nods in the direction of melodramatic dress. That somber uniformity of non-color, and the blow against his head, gave his face the bone-white pallor of someone two days dead.

Aldric closed his eyes again and this time not just through sickness, unless it was a sickness of the spirit. Without the life and movement granted by those eyes, his face became that of a corpse; it was an image and a premonition that made Kyrin shiver.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry? For what?”

“For coming here. For getting involved when you wanted me safe. I’m sorry for all of it. But I told you: where you go, I go. To the end of all things.”

The fetters clinked as Aldric moved his hand slightly, dismissing the matter. He smiled wanly up at the ceiling and shook his head, both sadly and with pride that anyone should think him worthy of such love, then lay quite still and shivered as that head-shake brought the nausea quivering back into his stomach.

“I know how much you want to hurt him, Commander, and I know how much he deserves to be hurt. But what I cannot understand is why you would do anything so dangerous as putting his sword in with him. Putting it
into
him would be—”

“Too quick, Tagen.”

Woydach
Voord finished his breakfast, a syrup of white poppies in brandy and a piece of bread, then pushed the cup aside while his mouth twisted at the taste of the stuff on which he had been living for what felt like years. He looked enviously at Tagen’s mug of beer and at the fried blood-sausage on his plate. Voord’s nostrils twitched; there was thyme in it.
All forbidden now
, he thought.
One more reason not to stay here longer than I have to
...

“Much too quick—although I appreciate the irony of it all. And I have another use for Talvalin. What do you think that he would do if he got loose, knowing who I am and what I’ve done to him and his in the past few years?”

“Sir, he’d try to kill you!”

“And do you think that he’d succeed?”

“Not while you’re under my protection. Otherwise… almost certainly. Except that you can’t die of wounds anymore; they only hurt you.”

“They always hurt me, Tagen.”

“I wish that I could do something to help, Commander— but all I know is killing.”

Voord looked at him for a long, silent moment. “You could help me, Tagen,” he said, “by not killing.”

“Sir… ?” The big man was confused; it was as peculiar a request as Commander Voord had made of him in all the years that they had known one another, and Voord was well aware of it. “
Not
killing, sir? I… I don’t understand.”

Voord had hoped, uselessly it seemed, that Tagen would take his meaning straight away. Evidently not; the leaving-alive of an enemy until that enemy has done what no friend could was far too subtle for this particular
kortagor
of Guards. As well expect an arrow to understand why it must remain in the quiver.

“Talvalin,” said Voord, slowly and carefully so that his meaning was quite clear, “must remain alive until after he has killed me.”

“What?” Tagen came out of his chair so hard and so fast that beer and sausage both went flying. The clatter attracted accusing stares from all across the Food-Hall for the half-second needed to recognize who had made the noise—and who was sitting with him. After that the only thing that it attracted was servants to clean up the mess and to replenish Tagen’s plate.

“After you are certain I am dead, you can kill him as slowly and in whatever way you wish.”

“Commander, are you drunk? Or would you rather I called a physician?”

“No to both. I haven’t been well drunk in over a month; I don’t dare for fear I fall and do myself yet another irreparable mischief, and I’m sick of the constant need for a physician within call. Do you understand me at last, Tagen? Do you begin to realize how my days are no longer anything to live, but just to be endured?
Do
you?”

Tagen sat very still; what he knew and what he understood was that when Voord’s voice took on that particular shrillness, it was safer to be somewhere else—and he had nowhere else to go. As Voord watched him, he could see a kind of comprehension beginning to form in the big man’s mind as he tried to relate the Commander’s trouble to the sort of life he led himself.

Not to take a woman now and then, because her bites and scratches would never go away; not to ride a horse for fear of the broken limb that wouldn’t heal or the broken neck that would leave you still alive but useless; not even to fight someone for the joy of it in case they killed you and you didn’t die… He broke off his nervous, submissive stare at the table, straightened his back and looked at Voord instead. “Yes, my lord
Woydach”
he said, using the new and proper title for the first time, “I understand completely.” He rose, saluted and walked away.

Voord watched him go, wondering just how much Tagen really understood at all. Had he been fully convinced of that understanding he might have asked the big man—the only person in the whole world whom he could trust—to take Talvalin’s sword and do the necessary killing himself. But only if he could have been sure…

Because if the sword alone couldn’t do it, then the spellstone certainly could. Voord recalled the thrill of mingled shock and pleasure he had felt when he discovered barely half an hour ago that someone—Talvalin most likely—had put the two together into what should be a single, supremely potent weapon. And tomorrow, the twentieth day of the twelfth month, was the beginning of the Feast of the Fires of Winter, when night and darkness were at their most powerful. By the twenty-first, the Solstice itself, he would know if his planning had been successful—or more hopefully that success would be manifest in his knowing nothing anymore. Now that Tagen had been dealt with—and it had been both easier and much more difficult than he had expected—there remained only the prime mover: Aldric Talvalin himself.

His own reflection, his image in a smoking mirror. That was one of the many, many reasons why Voord hated the young Alban so very much. Mirror-reversed from right to left though it might be, and invisible to others, Voord could see it. What Aldric Talvalin was, Voord Ebanesj might well have been… except that he was not.

They were most alike in one very particular characteristic, the one that was most useful to Voord now. Give either sufficient reason to do so, and they would rip the world apart to gain requital for an injury. Voord’s methods were crookedly subtle, but Aldric Talvalin could be just as implacable and far more savagely direct in avenging any violation of his personal honor-codes. It was a matter confirmed by written records, both here in the Empire and most likely in Alba as well. That vengeful streak was a quality of which Voord approved, though he himself had never let something so abstract and valueless as honor control the way he acted.

There was just one risk: that if Talvalin guessed how he was being manipulated, and that killing his enemy would not be vengeance but a kindness and a gift, then he would be just stubborn enough to withhold the final cut. Therefore he would have to be brought to such a white heat of hatred that the risk did not exist.

Voord reconsidered the word
violation
, and liked it.

Aldric and Kyrin had learned at last where that other door led to, and Kyrin’s worst terrors were made manifest in the white-tiled room beyond. Some of the equipment there was so elaborate that they could only guess at operating principles, but the function of each and every device was invariably plain enough. They had been designed and built solely to bring pain, or to hold securely while the pain was brought by someone else.

They sat on opposite sides of the room, leather straps around their wrists and ankles holding them in wooden chairs that were far more ordinary than the ugly, ominous metal seats which squatted empty here and there.

Not all were empty; one held the clerk from The Two Towers, or what the past two hours had left of him. No questions had been asked, none of the babbled confessions to various petty crimes had been paid any heed, for that was not the function of this particular exercise in cruelty. Before it had begun, the gloved and aproned chief torturer had studied both of them dispassionately as they were strapped down and informed them that Voord had ordered an entertainment for their benefit. “I am Giorl,” she had said. “The
Woydach
orders me to show you what it is that I do.” And she had said nothing more, but had shown them far more graphically than any words.

It was sufficiently appalling to learn that what they were witnessing should be done to another human being merely to impress them; the revelation that the principal architect of this fleshly dissolution was a woman came close to unmanning Aldric entirely. It was grotesque beyond belief; torturers were hooded, hairy, subhuman brutes, not a pleasant-faced woman who looked more as if she should have been at home with her children than here putting a near-surgical skill to this perverted use.