“Good!” he told her, nodding enthusiastically even as he puffed out air to cool his scorched tongue and lips. “Hot, but good.”
“Not the only thing here you could say that about,” she told him with a saucy wink, and headed back off through the early evening crowd with an even saucier swing of her hips.
He smiled after her, but then the smile faded as he thought about how far he’d come. Not much further to go, though, he thought. Not much further at all.
He never would have admitted it to a soul, but he’d had more than a few reservations after his mission had been fully explained to him. Not about the mission itself, but about the complexity involved in getting him into position and preparing the way for it. The thought of returning to Charis completely on his own would have been enough to make anyone nervous. The fact that he was strictly prohibited from actually contacting any of the people who’d made his trip possible or contributed to the arrangements here in Charis had produced even more anxiety. He had to simply trust that each of the people responsible for moving him along would do his-or her, for all he knew, in some cases-part and that none of the details would go astray. The notion that such a complex set of arrangements could possibly work had seemed absurd, but as Archbishop Wyllym had pointed out, the Inquisition had been conducting similar operations for centuries. Perhaps not under conditions quite this extreme, but close enough to give them the expertise they needed once they’d realized what an efficient counter-spying organization they were up against here in Charis.
And there hadn’t been all that many people involved, not really. It only seemed that way to him because he’d had to rely on them so blindly. But that very blindness had been his own best defense, because they hadn’t known him, either. For that matter, they hadn’t even known why they were doing what they’d been assigned to do. Not only that, every one of them had done his or her job exactly as Ainsail had-with no contact with anyone else in the service of Mother Church from the moment they or their instructions left Zion. No one would overhear any conversations or intercept any communications between them because there were no conversations or communications. There were only Ainsail and his fellow volunteers (none of whom had ever met, so far as he knew, even in Zion) and the detailed directions they’d been given before they were sent out.
When the Charisian powder mill blew up, Ainsail had been certain the entire operation had gone up in the same explosion. He had no idea who the Inquisition’s contact inside the Charisian Navy was, yet it had been obvious there had to be one. And when he’d heard about the explosion-he’d still been in Emerald at the time, waiting for the brig to carry him for the final leg of his wearisome journey from Zion-he’d realized that whoever the contact was, he must have been unmasked somehow. And that meant he hadn’t been able to complete his part of the preparations.
Ainsail had considered aborting the operation. He’d had that option, yet he’d known even as he’d considered the possibility that he wasn’t going to do it. He hadn’t come this far to turn back. And so he’d continued and, to his amazement, he’d found the promised supplies waiting exactly where he’d been told they’d be. Obviously, the Inquisition’s contact had managed to complete his preparations, and Ainsail found himself wondering if perhaps the destruction of the powder mill had always been part of the plan. For that matter, had the contact been in the mill when it blew up? Could he have contrived the explosion with some sort of delay mechanism that let him escape before the blast?
Ainsail didn’t know about that. It wasn’t the way his part of the operation was supposed to work, but there was nothing that said other parts of it couldn’t work differently. In fact, he rather hoped it had. Anyone who could have made Rakurai possible was far more valuable alive than dead.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever know, he reflected now, cautiously testing another of the potato slices to see if it had cooled enough. It had, and he chewed slowly, savoring the taste despite his scorched tongue. It was the best tasting fried potato he’d ever had, he thought, and then snorted in amusement. Sure it is! Then again, maybe it’s not. And maybe the beer isn’t really as good as I think it is, either. Maybe it’s just that knowing how close I am is making me savor everything more than I ever did before.
He didn’t know about that, and he wasn’t going to waste his time worrying about it, either. He had two more five-days here in Tellesberg, and he intended to use those days wisely. . IV.
Citadel of Schueler, The Temple, City of Zion, The Temple Lands
He didn’t know if it was day or night.
They were careful about that. There was no daylight, no moonlight or stars, to help keep track of time, and they deliberately fed them-if you could call it “feeding”-at irregular, staggered intervals. No one was allowed to sleep uninterrupted, either. Buckets of ice-cold water hurled through the bars of their cells were enough to wake anyone up, although sometimes the guards varied their procedure. White-hot irons on the ends of long wooden shafts were quite effective at rousing sleepers, as well.
They’d been stripped of even the ragged remnants of their uniforms before they’d been consigned to their cages under the bowels of the Citadel of Schueler. It wasn’t part of the original Temple complex, the Citadel; it had been built later, expressly for the Inquisition, and its walls were thick enough, its dungeons buried deep enough, that no one beyond its precincts could hear what happened within.
And that was where they’d been thrown into their cells, naked, deprived of any last vestige of human dignity. Beaten, starved, tortured at seemingly random and totally unpredictable intervals. Perhaps the most horrible thing of all, Gwylym Manthyr thought, was that they’d learned to sleep right through the shrieks of their tortured fellows. It wasn’t that they’d become callous; it was that their bodies were so desperately starved for sleep… and that those shrieks had become a routine part of the only hellish world they had left.
He looked down at his own hands in the dim lantern light. There were no nails on those scabbed, scarred fingers now, but he was luckier than some. Naiklos Vahlain-before his valiant heart finally failed him and he escaped-had been held down by two brawny inquisitors while a third had used an iron bar to methodically break every bone in his skilled, deft hands one joint at a time.
He wanted to put it down to nothing but rabid, unthinking cruelty, yet he knew it was far worse than that. All of it had a purpose, and not simply to “punish the heretics.” It was designed not simply to break them, but to shatter them. To stretch their souls upon the rack, not just their bodies, until their faith in themselves, the courage of their convictions, whatever it was that let them defy Zhaspahr Clyntahn, shattered into a million fragments that sifted through their broken fingers to the floors of their cells. It was designed to turn them into shambling scarecrows who would mouth whatever lies were dictated to them when they were paraded before the faithful, if only they would finally be allowed to die.
It was hard, he thought. Hard to maintain his faith, his trust in a God who could let something like this happen. Hard to sustain his belief in the importance of standing for what was just in defense of what he knew was true and his love for his homeland. All of that seemed far away, dream-like, from this unchanging, lantern-lit slice of hell. Not quite real, like something out of a fever delirium. Yet he clung to that faith and belief, that love, anyway, and their unlikely ally was hate. A bitter, burning, driving hate such as he’d never imagined he might feel. It filled his tortured, half-broken body with a savage determination which lifted him above himself. Which drove him onward, despite the sheer stupidity of surviving another single day, because it refused to let him stop.
He heard iron-nailed boots clashing their way across the stone floor, and the sliding sound of someone’s feet trailing across it as the inquisitors hauled him along by his arms. He stepped closer to the front wall of his tiny cell, holding on to the bars despite the way the guards liked to hammer the prisoners’ fingers against the unyielding steel with their truncheons, and peered through them. He heard the soft moaning as the inquisitors drew closer, and he recognized the prisoner being dragged to face whatever fresh torture had been devised for him.
“Hang on, Horys!” he called, his own voice hoarse and distorted. “Hang on, man!”
The words were pointless, and he knew it, yet Captain Braishair managed to raise his head as he heard them. It wasn’t the meaning of the words that mattered; it was the fact of them. The evidence that even here there was still someone who cared, someone who knew Horys Braishair for who he was, not what the Inquisition was determined to make him.
“Aye, Sir Gwylym,” Braishair half whispered. “I’ll do that thing, and-”
He broke off with a strangled grunt, jerking spastically as the weighted truncheon slammed into his kidneys. The inquisitors didn’t even bother to explain why the blow had landed; to do that would have been to acknowledge that their prisoners had some remnant of humanity that deserved explanations.
They dragged Braishair away, and a few moments later Manthyr heard fresh screams echo down the dungeon’s stone-walled gut. He leaned his forehead against the bars, pressing his eyes closed, feeling the tears on his cheeks, and he was no longer ashamed of that “unmanly” wetness, for it was so utterly unimportant against
