The Warlord's Domain (30 page)

If you go mad, is part of the madness in not knowing it?

He had asked that question years ago, so many years that he couldn’t remember if there had been an answer. Certainly there was no answer now, only utter confusion. Seeing the two of them together made no sense, especially when the man he recognized and the woman he feared—and feared enough to admit it even to himself— not only knew each other, but set about the same hurried task of sawing through the heavy bull-hide straps that held his wrists and ankles to the wooden chair.

Cutting was the quickest method, or at least not the slowest. The buckles securing each strap had been threaded through with heavy wires which had been plier-twisted shut, like gross copies of the little golden threads that he had seen—and felt—decorating Voord’s face and body. Unpicking them would have needed armorer’s tools and more time than Ryn and Giorl seemed to be willing to take. Aldric flinched once or twice when the blades, designed to cut through less resilient skins than these, skidded on the leather or the wires and sliced him instead. He made no sound the whole time, not so much through stoicism as not trusting himself to speak, because by then he had seen the looks and the quick nervous smiles that his two rescuers exchanged—and they were the same looks and smiles which passed between himself and Kyrin…

It was impossible to bear, and when his right hand came free with the sting of another accidental cut that became the rending snap of whittled leather giving way, he resisted the first and still near-reflex reaction—which, was to seize Giorl by the throat and not let go until she had at the very least thrown away her knife—and merely asked, “Why?”

“A debt,” said Giorl, gasping slightly as she had to saw with a delicate instrument whose edge was now quite spoiled with all this clumsy work. “You’re owed one life.”

“Whose?” He looked at Ryn. “Your daughter’s?”

“Our daughter’s.” It wasn’t Ryn who said it but Giorl, and the laconic statement shocked Aldric far more than if she’d run one of her spiked probes into his ear instead of speech. Again his stomach did that violent shocked somersault and with as much or better reason.

Maybe going insane is just a way to make the world make sense
, he thought, and almost giggled.
Because I don’t want to take much more of this
... The bubble of crazed laughter welling up inside him turned to a sob that was actually painful; but then he ached all over anyway, thanks to Commander Voord. The cold-eyed, long-jawed face smiled down at him in his imagination, and with the pain was quite enough to jolt him back to something like sobriety, where giggles had no place and sobbing was for later.

The only sound that Aldric wanted to hear in the next while was the liquid ripping of Widowmaker’s blade in flesh…

“Yours, too?” he said to Giorl in a voice that surprised him with its calmness. She nodded and continued cutting. “Then that means he’s your husband?” Another nod, more impatient now; the strap on his left ankle was giving trouble and by now her knife was just a flattened piece of metal with no indication that it ever had an edge at all. “And that means you,” said Aldric to Ryn with all the pedantic are of a child getting some fact explained just so, “are married to the chief torturer of Drakkesborg.” Ryn nodded. “Why didn’t you mention it before?”

“Was it so important?” Ryn said defensively. “Would it have made a difference to what you did for the child?”

“I…” Aldric began to say and stopped, suddenly unsure. The tugging and hacking at his bonds continued and across the room—half-hidden by one of the more elaborate machines—he could see Kyrin trying to get a glimpse of what was happening.
Of course it wouldn’t have made a difference
was what he would like to have said, but wondered now if that was true. A sick child was a sick child, in any language of the several he knew; but to know what one of that child’s parents did for part of a living—let alone that it was the
mother
, for sweet pity’s sake!—and to guess, as he guessed now, what sort of cutting might have been keeping Drakkesborg’s best cutting-surgeon from doing something to help her own daughter… He shrugged, not caring now that the movement would hurt scratched and bitten shoulders, and told the truth. “I don’t know. Probably yes, if I’d known beforehand. Neither of us would have gone near the house. But we didn’t know, and,” another shrug, “it wasn’t so very important anyway.”

“A very pretty confession, Alban,” said Giorl, ripping away the last shred of leather strapping from his leg by main force rather than with the useless knife. “I couldn’t have got a better out of you myself.”

Aldric looked at her for a few seconds, then curled his lip. “That was a poor sort of joke,” he said.

Giorl looked at her knife, made the beginnings of a motion to throw it disgustedly away and then slipped it into a pocket of her overrobe instead. “Someone might notice,” she said to herself, then glanced at Aldric with a far from humorous quirk to her mouth. “I don’t joke about my work… any of it.”

“Then you
are
a surgeon—Ryn wasn’t just using—”

“An imaginative figure of speech? No, he told the truth. The acceptable half of it, anyway.”

“But
why
? Why do you…” Aldric was at a loss for some way to phrase his question that would not be dangerously rude; he hadn’t forgotten that there was still a belt of wire-reinforced leather holding him to a chair far too heavy to be lifted, that Kyrin was still strapped into another chair, and that the woman he spoke to had obviously been persuaded to come here by her husband and against her own better judgment. The combination of factors made for a deal of delicacy when it came to choosing words, and he was grateful when Ryn came to his rescue in a manner just as real as the cutting of any number of restraints.

“It’s a job; someone has to do it. My wife does it.” The man was smiling, but it was a mechanical curving of the lips that came nowhere near his eyes. “Maybe sometime soon she won’t have to do it anymore… and then she’ll be able to stop. Satisfied?”

Aldric nodded silently. He hadn’t missed the emphasis Ryn had laid on certain words, and though there was certainly an interesting story behind how a pretty woman, a mother and a much loved wife would become what Giorl had become, it was no story that he had any wish to hear. He lifted his hand free of the halves of the last strap and stood up; then brought both hands together and bowed, giving honorable obeisance to them both for any number of reasons. He watched as the couple took up new knives and went to free Kyrin, waiting just long enough to see the relief wash the uncertainty out of her face…

Then he turned, forcing down any reaction to the pain which lanced up into him at every step, and walked back as quickly as he dared toward the cell…

Isileth-called-Widowmaker hung upon the wall of the cell, with her weapon-belt wrapped interlacing-style around her scabbard. That style,
hanen-tehar
, showed proper respect for the ancient longsword; but it was respect shown only to mock for instead of being laid across a sword-stand she hung vulgarly point uppermost, crucified upside down.

Aldric looked at the steel strapping and the hammer-forged clamps that were as thick as his own wrists. She was as securely shackled as he had been, and as helpless to resist the hands which had left the smeary marks of fingers everywhere; but she was eager to be free and about the business for which she had been made.

He could feel the killing-hunger radiating from the blade as he might have felt heat radiating from a fire; it might have been his own feverish imaginings, but Aldric doubted it. This
taiken’s
name and reputation had not come from daydreams, and his own respect had always borne the merest unadmitted thread of caution. Many things might happen to a weapon in twenty centuries, and most of them had happened to this sword; but it was widely believed that no good could come from a blade with so ominous a name as
Widowmaker
. Aldric had stopped caring what was said; what the faceless, nameless
They
said, and always had to say, about a hundred disparate matters that were not and never had been any of their concern. Four years now he had slept with this cold mistress by his side to guard him, and she had never failed him yet.

Aldric reached out one hand to Widowmaker, and felt the familiar cool harshness of braided leather and black-lacquered steel solid and reassuring against the calluses of his right palm. He closed his hand around the grip, feeling the hilt-loops squeeze against that familiar angle-joint on the index finger where it hooked over for better control. But she remained where she had been placed, not even moving in her irons, fulfilling the function of that placement, teasing and frustrating him like any object of desire held tantalizingly just out of reach… but not quite far enough.

Had she been truly out of his reach, as she had been before, Aldric would have been more concerned; had he been stronger in both mind and body, it would have concerned him less. But he had outrage instead of health, anger instead of caution and fear not only for himself but for the others outside instead of any cause more just. Those substitutes for Tightness, as so often happened in this far from perfect world, would have to suffice. Their less worthy cousins, vengeance and hurt pride, had been enough before.

“
Abath arhanl
? said Aldric quietly, the words familiar as his own name now for all that he still had no memory of learning them. Warmth of hand and words of power wound together on the longsword’s hilt and worked their magic. There was a sound, a sonorous thrum so deep that it was more felt in the marrow of the bones than heard, and the Echainon spellstone that he had set as pommelstone into Widowmaker’s hilt left off its pretense of being no more than a polished dome of crystal and came back to life.

It began as no more than a thread in the heart of the stone, twisting like a flaw come to life; and then the blue flames spilled out in a great globe of cool radiance that flung Aldric’s shadow up and across the farther wall and ceiling. Fire licked upward from the
taiken’s
pommel, lapping his fingers and Widowmaker’s hilt with lazy tongues like those of sleepy tigers. Aldric brought them fully awake.

“
Alh’noen ecchaur i aiyya, r’hann arhlaeth
.” The words of the spell, if spell it was, came from his mouth in a tangle of syllables that bore no relation to Alban or any other language spoken in the world of men, and the spellstone and the sword responded.

The blast alone should have killed him, for it ripped stones from the walls and tiles from the floor and flung them like catapult missiles from one end of the cell to the other, leaving Aldric standing in a scoured space that smoked and spat as though just drawn from the heart of a furnace. It had been a furnace hot enough to melt proof steel, for the straps and clamps and rivets which had held Widowmaker to the shattered wall glowed rose and white and fell in thick trailing drops like honey to the blackened floor as they let the sword come free. The light that filled his vision faded down through purple and orange to a dazzled near normality, but as the reverberations of the contained thunderclap became no more than a jangling echo in his ears, Aldric heard the slam of a door flung open and then the shouts of angry men.

He drew in a breath and turned, feeling the smooth slide of joints and muscles which no longer hurt. The breath came hissing out again through teeth close-clenched in a feral snarl as he heard a voice he knew among the babbling outside. Voord’s henchmen Tagen was out there, making threats. Aldric buckled Widowmaker’s weaponbelt around his waist and stalked out of the cell.

Kyrin hadn’t believed her eyes when Ryn came through the door behind the torturer. She hadn’t believed her ears when he told her what was going on. But she had believed her sense of touch when the brutally tight strapping on the chairs began to fall away. She let no surprise show on her face at the revelations of how strange the family of Ryn and Giorl Derawn seemed to be, disarming Giorl’s own terse and acid observations with equally sharp comments of her own. It made the interrogator-surgeon look oddly at the knife she held, then stare at Kyrin even more oddly still.

“Ryn told me about you both,” she said. “Not just about what you did, but about what you were like. He was wrong about only one thing: when he said your gentleman friend didn’t talk much.” Without a smile, or indeed the slightest hint from her emotionless features, it was difficult to decide if Giorl had made some sort of joke, or was expressing irritation, or was merely passing the time of day until she was done and could leave.

“We can’t, and won’t, help you to get out of this fortress,” she continued, slicing efficiently at leather and with less success at metal wire. “That’s your problem and his. I have a family to take care of, and playing some sort of hero isn’t part of it. At best you’ll get away; at worst, find yourselves a cleaner death than the
Woydach
has in mind. Because if you’re back on those frames when I come in to follow orders, I’ll do exactly as I’m told to do. I can’t do anything else. Understand?”

Kyrin shivered slightly and made a vaguely affirmative noise. She understood exactly. Giorl had the classic sur-geon’s mind: too classic by a long way, if the opinion of an ex-physician’s aide was worth anything—which it was not—and if she dared to offer it aloud, which she didn’t. To Giorl, work was the bringing together of metal implements and human flesh, to heal on one side and to hurt on the other. She had managed to lock away the different end results in some dark place at the back of her mind, and now regarded what she did as something more akin to mechanics: removing a part that no longer worked, closing an accident-created hole… or testing until something cracked.

“Understood. Thanks for telling me. I hope—”

Whatever it was she hoped was lost in the vast wash of light and noise that blew the fragmented, burning access door of their cell clear across the torture chamber. And then the other, outer door slammed open in the ringing silence after the blast, and
Kortagor
Tagen came in.