The Warlord's Domain (29 page)

Aldric turned his head just enough to look at them, but his blankness of expression did not alter; he remained shut up within himself, seeming neither able to see nor to hear anything except whatever was going on within his head, refusing to react to the crude hands dressing him or the cruder jokes made while they did so. As they hauled him upright, Kyrin got her first chance to see his face in other than shadow—and by comparison with the man she knew he looked like a house where nobody is at home. And then she saw the quick, almost imperceptible glance that he shot toward the back wall of the cell, and toward the
taiken
that was shackled there just as securely as he had been shackled to the bed.

There was just the glance and nothing more; it was gone again almost at once, and if she hadn’t seen it so clearly Kyrin would have doubted that the somehow shrunken figure who slumped between the soldiers had such a speculative, calculating look left in him. She wondered what hope or plan or seized chance lay behind it; and indeed, as the guards dragged him from the cell into the torture chamber next door, whether there would be enough left of either of them to make use of any granted opportunity.

They came back for her a few minutes later, all hot hands and stale breath and hungry eyes as they unlocked the chains and told her what it was they were going to do once
Woydach
Voord had learned whatever it was he wanted to know. Kyrin shut her ears to the stream of dirt; most of it was coarsely repetitive and not overly original, and the fact that they kept using the word ‘later” allowed the tremulous flutter of her belly to relax a little. That “later” would be respected, if only out of fear, for only one of the five dared more than an elaborate fumble around her crotch while setting the chains aside, and he was promptly snarled at by the big
kortagor
called Tagen.

And then they were alone again, strapped to the only ordinary chairs in the interrogation room that was empty of everything but the hulking inanimate machinery of pain, left no doubt to think of the last time they had sat in these same chairs and what they had witnessed. Left to wonder when Voord would come in, and what would happen the next time the door opened. And to wonder whose turn it would be then.

Ryn Derawn filled his wife’s glass with distilled grain-spirit for the third time in ten minutes and watched uneasily as she stared .at the clear juniper-scented liquid like a wise-woman reading futures from a bowl of water, then—also for the third time in ten minutes—drank down the potent stuff in a single swallow.

“I’m still not convinced,” said Giorl to her husband, “no matter what you say. If I was wrong, then the consequences for you, for me, for the children, for all of us…” She shook her head, dispelling the images, and held out her glass for yet another drink.

“No. You’ve had plenty for now, and I haven’t had half enough for this to make any more sense.” Ryn put the tall stoneware bottle to one side and smashed its stopper into place with the flat of his hand. “Giorl, no matter what you do up at the fortress you’ve never needed to hide behind this stuff before. These two new prisoners… You must have
some
suspicions, or you wouldn’t even have mentioned them.”

“All right. All
right
! So I’m wondering.” Giorl looked at her empty glass one final time, then thumped it down onto the table and stared instead at Ryn. “And I’m scared to give room inside my head to what you’ve just suggested. Whoever they are and whatever they did, they’re his now. Voord’s… to do with as he pleases. And there’s nothing I could—or would dare—do about it!”

“If they’re the ones I think they saved Mai’s life—you said that yourself. If they hadn’t been there she would have died long before I could have found you.” Ryn sat down beside her and put one arm around Giorl’s shoulders. “That wasn’t all you said. Do I have to remind you—or didn’t you mean any of it at all?”

“Oh, you bastard…” Giorl’s taut features crumpled, she leaned her head against him and Ryn felt the first sob go jolting through her as she began to cry. He felt wretched too, wishing that neither of them had brought the matter to discussion; but he knew also that he would never have looked at his beautiful, kindly, learned, lethal wife in quite the same way again if he had kept silent.

All he wanted was for Giorl to take him inside the Warlord’s citadel for sufficient time to see the two captive foreigners that she had spoken of. Nothing else. Just so that he would know enough for his own peace of mind. Ryn hadn’t yet decided what he would do if they really were the young couple with the talent for impromptu surgery. He almost hoped that they were not— that he could look, and shake his head and go away again… and try to forget what it was that awaited them. He knew little enough about what was done in the Underfortress when Giorl wasn’t acting as consultant surgeon to various high-ranking personages, and that little he had discovered had been more than enough to prevent him from trying to learn more. For her part, Giorl didn’t talk. That was what had made her outburst today so startling, when she had come through the door of the house shaking all over—and not from the cold— and had drunk down the first of those brimming glasses before trusting herself to speak.

Not that his response had calmed her down. When she described the people for whom Voord had ordered a demonstration—and Ryn was grateful that she hadn’t described what
that
had involved—she had been hoping for a denial. He knew her well enough by now to read something so simple from her face, and he was angry now that he hadn’t told a lie; except that she knew him just as well, and would not only have been in her present state but also something worse because of his attempted deceit. Truth, Ryn decided, was the least painful of the several painful courses open to him. Assuming that
Woydach
Voord did not become involved…

“Put on your outdoor boots and get your overmantle. We’re going to the fortress.” There was still the thickness of recent weeping in Giorl’s voice, but once she had straightened her back and wiped the tears from her face all other traces of uncertainty were gone. She had spoken calmly, with determination and the serenity born of a decision made and now unshakable. Almost unshakable; for when Ryn hesitated she smiled minutely at him and make small shooing movements with both hands. “Do it, love. Quickly. I’m running just a step ahead and if we don’t move now, at once, it’ll catch up with me.”

Ryn looked at her quizzically but received no further elaboration. He stamped into the fur-lined boots and pulled on his heavy, quilted overmantle without asking anything aloud, and it was only as they left the house and walked out into the slowly falling snow that the question moved out of his eyes and became words.

“What are you running from?” He thought that he knew the answer already, but he had to hear it from her just so that he could be sure. The silvery mist of Giorl’s exhaled breath was between their faces and she glanced at him and then turned her head away, still smiling that same small fixed smile, and Ryn knew his guess had been right.

“My own fears,” she said softly, and looked up toward the gray clouds as though a shadow had passed across the unseen sun. “Of course…”

The candles in the ice-encrusted room were burning blue, their flames stirring the sluggish drifts of incense smoke and sending them in spicy-scented tendrils up to the crystalline ceiling. There was a buzzing, the sound of glutted flies, and there was the sonorous rise and fall of words from where Voord knelt once more at the center of the circle and spoke to That which listened to him only through lack of any other worshipers.

“... O my Lord O my true Lord O my lost beloved Lord O most favored Bale Flower O Issaqua Dark Rose Dweller in Shadows I pray thee and beseech thee hearken to thy faithful servant who begs most humbly take away this Gift of life from me and grant me peace…”

He could smell the roses now, an overwhelming perfume which blurred his mind in a way that the poppy-syrup never could. The candle-flames began to shrink and for all that it remained snow-shot day beyond the shuttered, curtained, frozen windows, a darkness deeper than mere nightfall flowed like ink into the room. Voord began to hear the sweet, sad, wordless music that was the Song of Desolation, and with that hearing he began to tremble. The warning words of the charm written into one of his grimoires came back to haunt him; but he had ignored that warning so many times now that the haunting was little more than one ominous memory among many.

Issaqua sings the Song of Desolation And fills the world with Darkness
...

In that Song there was a loss and a betrayal, the sense of being discarded that was all part of the smashing of altars and the tearing down of shrines, or worse, their re-consecration in the names of other Powers with no right to dwell there. When his dabbling in sorcery began, so many lost years ago, Voord had been delighted by the ease with which demons responded to his Sum-monings; it was only as time passed and he learned more that he discovered the truth behind their eager attention. The deities of an older race were reduced to the demons of the new, diminishing thus down through successive generations until they were forgotten. For all their past majesties, they were often as pathetic as lost children— grateful for any attention at all, even idle curiosity, rather than re-consignment to oblivion.

Issaqua the Bale Flower hung before him in the icy air, a wavering nimbus of reddish-amber light—like that from heated iron—that formed unstable curves suggesting the whorled petals of a monstrous rose. He bowed very low, stood up and stepped out of the circle without any of the precautions he had always been so sure to take before. They were redundant at this late stage; and in the Presence of Issaqua, there would be nothing of a lesser stature that he needed to fear. The light throbbed slowly behind him, illuminating nothing but itself, and Voord felt his boots crunch in the hoarfrost that had formed from the moisture in the air as he walked to the door. The dry coldness ground into him, searing his mouth and nostrils as he breathed, chilling the metal wires that held his flesh together until they seemed to burn instead.

Tagen was outside, standing at parade-rest a diplomatic distance down the corridor. As Voord emerged in a pearly cloud of freezing vapor, the
kortagor
came to attention and saluted. Voord nodded acknowledgment, then sagged backward against the rimed timbers, exhausted.
Soon now, very soon
... he thought, looking at the big man through eyes that refused to focus properly.
A long race, but almost run
...

“I was coming out to tell you—”

“That we can attend to the woman, sir?”

Oh eager, eager, my hound
. “Yes. I will be in here, Tagen… waiting. Make certain that Talvalin knows. Now go. Gather your squad. And, Tagen…”

“Sir?”

“Be thorough.”

“Ryn? Well, tell me.”

Ryn Derawn backed slowly away from the small shuttered peephole let into the door of the interrogation room. It was only when Giorl touched him that she realized how her husband had begun to tremble. He stared at her and his lips moved, but no sound came out.

“It’s the pair you thought, isn’t it?” she hissed, shaking him, trying to restore some sort of coherence. Ryn nodded. He had gone chalk white, not so much with fear of where he was or recognition of Aldric and Kyrin, but because of his look within the harshly white-tiled environment where his wife did most of her work. He had never seen a torture chamber before, except in old woodcuts, and hadn’t been prepared for the air of cold efficiency that flowed from the place like mist. Most of the apparatus was too mechanically defined for him to guess its purpose without explanation, but there had been enough pieces whose operation was all too obvious for his stomach to turn sick.

“Yes,” he managed to say at last. “I was hoping not, but… there they are: the ones who saved Mai’s life.”

“And what are we going to do? Let them go and end up where they are now?” Giorl was always deadly practical where cause and effect were concerned, and never more so than when the matter in question was serious. This was a serious as any in her life, and already she regretted giving way to Ryn in the first place. “We’ll have to get out of here before someone sees us,” she said, the hand which had touched his shoulder in comfort tightening to pull him away. “There isn’t anything that we—”

“Cut them loose,” said Ryn. He shrugged free of Giorl’s grasp and turned toward her. “We needn’t help them escape—but we can give them the same chance at life that they gave Mai.” He grinned crazily. “Cut, and go away, and let them survive if they can do it by themselves. Please, love! Do it—it’s only right!”

Giorl stared at him and at the wildness in his eyes. This wasn’t the Ryn she knew, but a man fired by a purpose. She had seen many such, whose various Purposes had brought them no further than the room be-yond the door and to what was done there. Then she shrugged, a quick dismissive twitch that agreed with none of his reasoning and just barely with his plea, and went past him into the interrogation room.

Though his face somehow managed to remain immobile and unreadable, Aldric’s stomach turned over when the woman torturer Giorl came through the door, lifted a knife from on of the wall-mounted clips and walked toward him. He stared at her for just a moment as she approached, then through her and behind her as if she did not exist. At least Voord wasn’t here yet; though doubtless he would arrive before the show really began in earnest, grinning and wearing that self-satisfied expression Aldric wanted so much to shear right off the
Woydach’s
face. It seemed as though he would no longer have the chance to do it—not in this life anyway.

Then Ryn Derawn stepped quietly into the torture chamber just behind her and pulled a second knife from the same row of clips. Aldric made a supreme effort to keep any giveaway flicker from his eyes, wondering first how Ryn had got in here and second if he knew exactly where to plant the knife. When Giorl said, “Hurry up, for the Lady Mother’s sake,” and said it unmistakably to Ryn, he thought for just one horrible instant that his mind had given way.