55
They dragged me through a room, along a corridor and into another room where a stout chair was fixed to the floor. Struggling did no good. I'm no figure from mythology, no golden hero of the past. Just one man, strong enough and fit enough but no match for several other strong and fit men, sometimes not even for one. I stamped on one foot and thought I heard bone break. It just made the pain start sooner. I was already bruised and battered before they tied me into the chair. Half a dozen of them. There was no fighting it. When they were done most of them stepped back to the walls, presumably to watch.
“There is no escape,” Ferrian said.
“Go to hell,” I told him calmly.
He stood in front of me. I looked around the room. It was bare apart from a table with tools on it. I didn't like the look of them. There was dried blood.
A slap on the face got my attention. Hard enough to rock my head, hard enough to make my ears ring. “Now that's what I call reasoned argument,” I said.
“Just because you freed one slave, doesn't make you a good man. You owned a slave, own slaves.”
I tried to shrug. It's the culture I was brought up in. It's the done thing. “Everyone with money owns slaves. You did.”
That got me another slap. Same result.
“Every culture has slaves.”
“Not in the north.”
The north? North of here? What the hell was north of here? Beyond the mountains was wasteland. And Battling Plain. Well, the tribes there fought each other tooth and nail over that puddle of fertility and doubtless always had. What made them so virtuous?
“In the north the men are free and virtuous.” There he went, reading my mind again.
Good for them, I nearly said. In a way I was feeling detached, free to say what I wanted but not yet letting myself off the leash. They were going to torture me. Him or them, what difference? Doubtless they had broken him this way. Tortured him until he broke, then re-made him as a tool for their own purpose. Now it was my turn but they wouldn't win. I knew about torture; I'd read about everything, even things I didn't want to know about. Torture becomes a race; get the information before the victim dies. I wasn't going to give. I was going to die. My spirit would be free and I would learn what Dubaku meant when he told me that spirits didn't perceive reality as we did.
Then the door opened and Ormal came into the room. He looked frightened, twitching and timid in the presence of those he feared. My heart sank at the sight of him and the reality of the situation came crashing down on me. They would beat me and heal me and beat me and heal me until I went mad or broke and became what they wanted, a willing tool like Ferrian or an unwilling one like Ormal.
One of the barbarians pointed to a spot behind me and Ormal went there, moving out of my sight.
Ferrian hadn't seemed to notice Ormal enter the room. He had been talking the whole time but I hadn't been paying attention. I tried to catch up lest I miss some salient point in his argument.
“Kukran Epthel is determined to wipe the evil ways of the city from the world and you will help him, willingly or unwillingly.”
“Freely or as a slave?”
That tipped him over the edge.
It just didn't get any better after that.
56
I was expecting them to throw me back in a cell as they had Gatren. They didn't. During one of my lucid moments, just after Ormal had spent a little time healing something that would have killed me, I asked why that was.
“Gatren was reasonable. He agreed to help us.”
“So you threw him back in the cells?”
“Kukran Epthel is not a fool, don't delude yourself that you can match him in any way, you worthless piece of dung.” Ferrian was taking a break; I didn't have any inclination to be introduced to the scabrous monster who was currently my interrogator. “He will work on their will, subtly weaken their resolve, and he will spy on them until he is assigned another task.”
“And me?”
“You will break, one way or another, some time or another, everyone does and everyone is useful to the purpose in some fashion or another. What use will you be?”
“None.”
Break over.
57
Breaking fingers, setting fingers, healing fingers. It almost became routine.
“Serve. Teach. Spy.”
“No,” snap. “No,” snap. “No,” snap.
Boring. Maddening. Setting them was worse. Healing them only made me feel bad that I'd have to go through the same process again. And again. Different torturers had different methods. I must have gone on for days, I suppose. I lost track of time. There was no sleep.
58
I came to and found Ormal's face close to mine, healing something. “Why are you doing this?”
“Stop fighting them and they will stop hurting you,” Ormal hissed fiercely, keeping his voice to a whisper, his furtive eyes dancing.
“What did they do to you?”
His eyes bulged and he started shaking. “Give in, before it's too late.”
“No.”
“It's pointless, believe me, I know, there's no fighting him, no winning, give in, he will have what he wants, no matter what it takes, no matter what…”
Maybe he said more. Maybe I passed out. I don't know. Things tended to run into each other. Faces, people, questions. And then it was over.
59
I woke up with a start, shaking. More accurately, I was shivering. It wasn't cold. It was light. The surface under me was soft, really soft, not soft because I was too hurt to tell the difference. I was lying in a canopied bed and nothing hurt. But I was shivering and shaking uncontrollably. Fear. It was fear. Not adrenaline fear, but blind blank panicked terror. They were coming to hurt me, I knew it.
For a long time nothing happened. I couldn't recognize the noises coming out of me as human.
I moved. I couldn't stay still. I needed to run. Anywhere. Far from here. Far from me and my memories which
