Four Lightless pinned Nona to the stone floor, the two injured retreated, and Thuran Tacsis crouched over her, his son Lano, lean, dark, watching hungrily over his shoulder. Tellasah held a long thin cane tipped with a needle towards Nona. The Noi-Guin kept the needle point hovering about eighteen inches above Nona’s hip, ready to jab her should she somehow start to break free, presumably with a fast-acting poison.
Nona stopped struggling and stared at the red, bearded face of the old man hunkered down beside her. A Sister of Discretion on a mission in which capture is likely often conceals two things in her mouth. First a waxed tablet of crail root powder, secured below the gum. Crail root stops the heart. It’s not painless but it is swift. And second, requiring great skill to use, a needle in a leather tube. It’s not possible to spit the needle without poisoning yourself, but anyone it hits will suffer the same fate. The needles are coated with chamon, a venom milked from eels that feed at the bottom of ocean trenches only accessible from rare spots where warm upwelling water melts holes in the ice. Chamon brings about a slow death: the victims bleed into their lungs and suffer nightmare hallucinations. Most of the poisons the Grey Sisters use are chosen for swiftness. Chamon is not swift, but unlike many of the faster toxins it has no antidote. Nona would happily have spat such a needle if she had one.
“I have a party to attend, Nona. A very important gathering filled with very important people, and I really must show my face. But I will be back to see you later.” He took something from the pocket of his jacket, a disc of black iron maybe four inches across and almost an inch thick, set with raised sigils around the edge, one side having a leather cover held in place by a strap. Thuran Tacsis removed the cover with care, revealing a spiralling set of sigils, each like a twisted spider, something deeply unwholesome in the way they held the eye and seemed to writhe.
“This is the Harm. It has been in my family for generations. The pain it causes is said to be unsurpassed. Worse than burning or acid. Worse than any venom. And it doesn’t leave a mark.” Thuran held the device above Nona’s stomach. He frowned. “It’s very effective but I’ve never really enjoyed it. Pain should leave a mark. Pain should be ugly and irreversible. So when I come back from mingling with lords and ladies, the highest of the Sis, when I’m done with the wonderful music, the exquisite food, conversing with my peers, I will return to this cell and hurt you in more primitive and more satisfying ways. We will start with cutting pieces off you. Everything it won’t kill you to lose. For now though . . .” A shrug, and he pressed the iron disc down onto Nona’s stomach.
Pain filled her, spreading rapidly from the contact site. It felt as if the disc were red-hot, flowing out to cover her entirely. Somehow it combined the first awful shock of a burn with the lasting agony, maintaining both together. Each part of Nona’s body made its own contribution as the effect reached through her. Bones snapped, fingers burst, teeth shattered, her tongue blistered, her eyes scalded. The torment lasted far longer than Nona could endure. She had no way of knowing how long and could do nothing in its grip.
When at last Thuran Tacsis lifted the device from her spasming stomach the pain lifted, leaving only nausea and tingling. Nona lay there gasping. The limbs she thought broken looked untouched. The eyes through which she looked were unharmed. Where the Harm had touched her she had expected a charred circle of raw flesh, but the skin there showed just faint impressions of the sigils that had been pressed against it.
“You see?” Lord Tacsis replaced the leather cover and returned the disk to his pocket. “No marks. As if it never happened. Cutting off a nose may not hurt quite as much, but there’s a horror to it. Don’t you think?” He smiled and let the Noi-Guin help him to his feet. “I’ll be back soon, novice. I’ve paid more gold than you can possibly imagine for this and I intend to get my money’s worth.”
Lano paused, dark eyes still on her. “It’s a nice toy Father has, but now it’s back in his pocket you’re not in pain any more, are you?” He held up his right hand, the middle two fingers crooked over as if he couldn’t straighten them. “You did this to me.”
Nona remembered. Lano had shed his disguise and attacked her on the abbess’s steps, in front of the judge his father owned. She wished she’d done more than slice his hand. She wished she’d cut his head from his shoulders. She wanted to say it, to spit defiance at him. But pinned on the floor at his feet, her body still spasming with the aftershocks of the agony that had run through the marrow of her, she lacked the courage. And she hated herself for it.
A heartbeat later, with full-blood hunska swiftness, Lano was leaning over her, his face close to hers, the point of a thin blade inserted into her left nostril. She felt his breath on her lips. “Before you die I’ll take your fingers, one by one, and then your eyes.” He stood and at the last moment pulled
