“Leave it,” Caim said. “We can’t save everyone.”
Side passages branched off halfway down the main corridor, but Caim focused on the doors. It made sense that a high-profile captive would be kept somewhere convenient.
As they moved down the hallway, Caim saw there was a door at the end. He thought it was only another cell at first, but as they approached a sense of anxiety began to build in the pit of his stomach. While Keegan and Dongo unbarred another cell, Caim realized what was bothering him. The feeling was the same he’d been experiencing since he came north, a powerful presence that wrapped around him like a ghostly tentacle. Here, it was almost overwhelming.
And it came from the door at the end of the hallway.
Caim went up to the door. On the outside it looked like all the others. He reached for the latch.
“Caim!” Keegan called out.
Caim pulled his hand back. With a long glance at the door, he turned and hurried over to the next-to-last cell. Keegan stood halfway out the doorway. His face was ashen.
“What is it?”
“Look.”
The youth held open the door for Caim to look inside. Dongo knelt beside a lump of tangled rags in the middle of the floor. Caim went over to the young man. He stooped down and reached out to the layer of rags covering the lump’s head. Five thick fingers with hairy knuckles snatched his wrist and held it in a viselike grip. Caim yanked hard, but he was held fast. The lump’s other hand pulled the rags from its face, and a pair of ice-blue eyes glared at him from beneath bristly red brows. The face was exceedingly dirty, and ugly beyond imagination.
Caim drew his left-hand knife and put it to the lump’s chest.
“No!” Dongo cried in a feminine voice.
As Dongo grabbed his knife hand, Caim glanced at him. No, at her. Dongo’s hood had fallen back in her rush to stop him to reveal Liana’s features.
“Li!” Keegan yelled from the doorway. “What are you doing here? Where’s father?”
“He left the city. He’s not angry, Keegan. He doesn’t like what we’re doing, but I think he understands.”
Caim sat back on his heels. Keegan hadn’t realized his sister had accompanied them here, and Caim was a little angry at himself for not noticing either. He wasn’t sure what to do. Fortunately, the ugly man’s grip was faltering. Caim pulled free and stood up.
“You know this man?” he said.
Liana nodded. “His name is Samnus. He’s thane of the Hurrold clan. He was at Aldercairn, wasn’t he, Keegan?”
Her brother nodded from his post, but kept his distance.
“He stood up with Caedman against the duke,” Liana continued.
Caim’s gaze traveled across the man’s torso. Splotches of old blood marred his cloak of rags. His left arm was tucked against his ribs; the right foot looked twisted.
“We don’t have time to carry a cripple,” Caim said.
The ugly man growled like a wounded bear. “I can walk, damn you! Let me up and I’ll prove it.”
They stood back, and the man, Samnus, rolled onto his hands and knees. With exquisite slowness, he rose to a kneeling stance, and then got his feet under him one at a time until he was standing before them, albeit with a sway.
“I can help him,” Liana said. “We won’t slow you down.”
“I don’t need coddling, girl!”
Caim stepped up to the prisoner’s face until their noses were a finger span apart. “We aren’t here for you. If you fall behind, we’ll leave you to rot. Understand?”
Samnus grinned and revealed a mouthful of broken teeth. “Why are you wasting time then, boy? Lead the way.”
“We’re looking for Caedman,” Liana said.
The man nodded, and even that simple gesture betrayed the depths of his exhaustion. “The door across the hall. That’s where they’ve been keeping him.”
Caim headed out of the cell, and Keegan moved aside. Out in the corridor, the dark presence from the end of the hall beckoned, like an echo of a bad dream. Tiny quivers ran up his arms and across his body. He motioned for the others to stay back as he headed for the malignant door.
“Boy.” Samnus leaned in the entrance of his cell. “You don’t want to go in there.”
But Caim pushed open the door.
The room beyond was larger than a cell, but hardly spacious. Its stone walls enclosed several tables, a pair of wooden chairs, and braziers filled with dim red coals. Naked bodies occupied the tables and thrones, strapped into place, six men in all. They had been tortured to death. Though his nose was deadened to the stench by his exposure to the noisome cells, Caim’s eyes picked out the worst of the mutilations: flesh peeled away from the faces and chests, hands and feet hacked from their limbs, eyes burned out of the sockets, genitals sliced clean off. A pile of flesh scraps lay on the floor like a dog’s dinner. The professional part of Caim’s mind had to pause in admiration for the handiwork; it was exquisite in its precision, better than any sawbones he’d ever met could do. But that part of him that could still feel quailed at the sight.
The stench of Shadow was thick in the air, lingering around the bodies like the perfume of a departed lover. Pushing through his anger, Caim examined the corpses one at a time. He forced himself to touch them, turn their heads from side to side, lift their handless arms and peer into bloody sockets. Traces of black residue confirmed his suspicion. The memory of Mathias lying dead, a hole cut into his flabby chest, left Caim cold and angry.
A call from the hallway roused him from his thoughts. Caim turned to find Keegan in the doorway.
“We found Caedman.”
Caim pushed Keegan out of the gruesome chamber and closed the door behind him. Samnus stood in the corridor, looking unsteady. The thane cocked his head toward the open door opposite his cell. Inside, Liana knelt beside a pallet, upon which lay a tall man under a swaddle of stained blankets. She had an arm under his head, trying to help him sit up. Caim went in to help her. Together they wrestled the man upright. Then the blanket covering his body slid down, and Caim reconsidered.
“This is the right man?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Caim didn’t see how she could tell. The captive’s face was a mass of bruises; his chest, stomach, and arms were crisscrossed with a hatchwork of incisions and burns. In some places, the skin had been sliced off to reveal the red meat underneath. He was unconscious or dead, and Caim couldn’t tell which would be the better deal. Then the man made a low groan.
“Go… not here…”
Caim looked back. “Keegan, help me with this.”
Liana made room as Caim and her brother wrestled the prisoner off the mattress, although he couldn’t walk. Caim guided them back out into the hall. Liana waited with Samnus, who leaned on her despite his earlier show of bravado. As Caim and Keegan passed them, Samnus spoke up.
“I’ve seen you before, boy.”
Keegan kept walking, but the outlaw thane reached out and grabbed the back of his jacket, dragging Caim and the captive to a halt as well.
“You were at Aldercairn, right? I don’t remember these others, but you were there.”
Keegan yanked free of the grasp. “Yes. I was there.”
“But you weren’t taken,” Samnus pressed.
Caim slid his free hand down behind his back and loosened a knife.
“This is my brother Keegan,” Liana said. “He escaped the massacre.”
Samnus grunted. “You ran, huh? Glad you finally found your bollocks, boy. So what is this about? A way to soothe your conscience?”
Keegan winced as if the man had struck him across the face, but said nothing.
Liana dropped Samnus’s arm. “You don’t know him! He stood up to fight when others would not.”
Caim winced at the volume of her voice. Down the corridor, someone groaned in their cell. Samnus watched Keegan with hard eyes. Caim had seen that look in a thousand other eyes; more often than not they preceded an
