rummaged within, producing a couple of lengths of sturdy chain. In consultation with Ingrey, he fitted loops tightly around Ingrey’s booted ankles, and secured them with an iron staple and hasp. Ingrey crossed his hands at the wrists and suffered a similar arrangement there, then tested both bindings, twisting and straining. They seemed solid enough. Then he sat on the floor with his back to the window seat and had Bernan bolt the wrist chains to the ankle chains. He felt an utter fool, sitting crouched with his knees up halfway to his ears. His audience looked extremely bemused, but no one demurred.
Learned Hallana heaved herself up out of her seat and waddled over to him. Ijada stood anxiously by her on one side, and Hergi on the other. Hallana shot back her cuffs and laced her fingers together, stretching her hands with a faint crackling pop of the joints. 'Very good,' she said, in a medically brisk voice all the more sinister for its good cheer, 'tell me if this hurts... ' She laid a warm palm across Ingrey’s forehead.
The sense of heat flowing from her touch was pleasant for the first few seconds, and he leaned into her hand. But then it grew uncomfortably warm. A disturbing haze clouded his vision. Abruptly, the heat was roaring like a smithy’s furnace across his mind, and he was seeing double. The second image parted from the first: twisted, altered.
The room was still present to his physical senses. But equally present was another
In it, he was standing nude. Above his heart, his pale flesh puckered, then swelled. The skin burst. From it, a vine, no, a vein, sprouted, and began to wind and twist around him, climbing. He felt a second hot bulge burst on his forehead, and saw the vine-vein wind down from it, blurred by its proximity. Another from his navel, another from his genitals. Their moving tips muttered and dripped blood. His tongue, too, was transformed, pushing out from his mouth, forming into a pulsing tube.
In the material room, his body began to writhe and yank against his chains. Harder. His eyes half rolled back, but still he could see the Learned Hallana leaning near—she scrambled back as he opened his mouth to howl. But between her two glowing hands, held apart, violet fire still roared, spiraling into his horribly transformed mouth.
The long tentacle growing from his tongue flapped and jerked in agony, its unintelligible whisper speeding into a hiss, yet seemed to devour the heat. The other four, mirroring its excitement, continued to mutter and thicken, splashing him with blood. The hot metallic smell and slippery feel of it drove him to distraction. His real body bucked and arched with near bone-cracking force, straining against his chains. His hair rippled, and his genitals engorged and stiffened. He fell sideways, convulsed, began to try to roll and rock himself across the room toward the wall where his sheathed sword leaned.
Ijada had fallen to her knees, mouth open, eyes wide. In the second reality, the leopardess appeared...
Its fur was a silken ripple over moving muscle, its claws carved ivory; its brilliant amber eyes flashed with golden lights. It fell upon the writhing veins for all the world like a kitten upon a mess of cords, paws patting, then clawing, then pulling the hissing things toward it to bite at them with its great teeth. The veins lashed like whips of acid, leaving black burns across the elegant, spotted coat, and the leopardess snarled, a rich sound that shook the air, that shook Ingrey to his heart. From somewhere deep inside him, an answering growl arose.
His jaw began to lengthen...
The tortured chain twisted, an iron link snapping like a stick. His wrists and ankles were still bound, but freed from each other. His body straightened, and then he could writhe and roll, arch and turn. His sword was very close. Panicked feet trampled about him.
His real hands were as slippery with real blood as his second body now was with the strange red spew that flowed out of himself, onto himself. To his utter horror, he began to feel the links slip from his bleeding wrists, over his yanking hands. If he freed his right hand, reached his sword... surely none would leave this room alive. Perhaps not even himself.
He would take the yammering manservant’s head first, with a single stroke. Then turn upon the screaming women. Ijada was already on her knees like an executioner’s victim, strands of loosened hair falling forward veiling her face. The whipping sword edge, the pregnant one... his mind shied, denied.
Then howled denial, so fiercely that it turned itself inside out and transmuted to assent.
His jaw lengthened, his teeth grew into sharp white knives. He began to bite and rip at the veins, snarling and shaking his head as a wolf shakes a rabbit to break its back. The hot blood spurted in his mouth, and he felt the pain of his own bites. He gripped, ripped. Pulled the things out of his body by their gory roots. Then it was no longer inside him, but in front of him, wriggling like some malevolent sea creature brought to the lethal air. He kicked at it with naked, clawed feet. The leopardess pounced, batted, rolled the shrieking red thing across the floor. It was, briefly, alive. Dying.
Then it was gone.
The second vision vanished, or rejoined the first, melting one into another, the leopardess into Ijada, his wolf-jaw—where?
His body sagged. He was lying on his back near the door, ankles still bound, bloody hands free. Bernan was standing over him, his face pale as parchment, a short iron crowbar gripped in his shaking hands.
A little silence fell.
'
A rumble of footsteps sounded from the corridor outside the chamber. An urgent thumping on the door: Ingrey’s soldier called in alarm, 'Hello? Is everyone all right in there? Lord Ingrey?'
The warden’s frightened voice: 'Was that really
A third man: 'If you break my door, you’ll pay for it! Hey in there! Open up!'
Ingrey stretched his jaw, his normal human jaw, not a muzzle, and croaked, 'I’m all right!'
Hallana was standing with feet braced, breathing rapidly, staring at him with very wide eyes. 'Yes,' she called out. 'Lord Ingrey... tripped and upset the table. It’s a bit of a mess in here just now. We’ll see to it. Don’t concern yourselves.'
'You don’t sound all right.'
Ingrey swallowed, cleared his raw throat, adjusted his voice. 'I’ll come down to the taproom in a while. The divine’s servants will deal with the... with the... mess. Go away.'
'We will take care of his injuries,' added Hallana.
A baffled silence, a mumble of argument: then the footsteps retreated.
A sigh seemed to go through everyone in the room but Bernan, who still brandished his crowbar. Ingrey lay back limply on the floorboards, feeling as though his bones were turned to porridge. He was sick to his stomach. After a moment, he raised his hands. The chains dangled heavily from his left wrist; his right, lubricated with blood, was free. He stared at it, barely comprehending the torn skin and throbbing pain. By the unpleasant trickle in his hair, his furious thumping around had ripped apart some of his new stitches, as well.
Ijada... He twisted around in feverish concern. Bernan made a warning noise and raised his crowbar higher. Ijada was still on her knees a pace or two away, her face very pale, her eyes huge and dark.
'No, Bernan!' she said. 'He’s all right now. It’s gone.'
'I have seen a man afflicted with the falling sickness,' said Hallana in a distant tone. 'This most assuredly wasn’t
With an eye to the crowbar, Ingrey rolled very slowly and cautiously onto his side for a better look at Ijada.
