His leg jerked as she triggered the prod, and fire chased ice up and down his nerve channels. He fuzzed out and back and out and back again. His eyes blurred.
The twitching stopped, and he could focus. Dierdre was up and at the door, talking to a shadow against the hall lights.
"Nope, just getting started. You can't rush an artist. Not if you want the truth."
The shadow shook his head. His or hers. Couldn't tell. "Bring him anyway. Captain-General's orders."
Male voice, sounded like Duncan. Why were they rushing things? Reprieve? Good-cop, bad-cop?
They hauled him up, with a third pair of hands that materialized from the shadows. Duncan tucked himself under Brian's arm, comradely, supporting, whispering. "You're for it, lad. First Liam and now showing up in Circle territory without an engraved invitation to the ball. I think I can winkle you out, but just keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking."
His bloody legs wouldn't work right, pins and needles jostling through the veins. Stumbling down corridors and up stairs, Brian tried to memorize the turns and doors and carvings in case he ever got a chance to move. Dierdre skittered forward and back beside them like an impatient mongoose blocked from attacking a particularly juicy cobra. The unknown guard kept several paces off, fingering what looked like a Beretta SMG with suppressor screwed onto the muzzle. So that would work here? Brian filed the note away for future reference.
They passed a silver crucifix on a carved door, seemed Italian. Chapel? Work looked like Cellini, Baroque, not Brian's taste at all. He blinked and tried to shake the cobwebs out of his head.
Double doors, raised panels with men and women carved on them. Pin-cushioned by arrows, beheadings, iron grids over fires, lions out of Medieval woodcut prints. Martyrs? Saint Sebastian on the upper right? Gruesome. Bugger it, omens again.
Long room, wide, flaring torches, ragged banners hanging from black hammer-beam trusses high overhead in the flickering gloom. Why couldn't they use electric lights like they had in the bloody dungeons? Bloody image games, just like Dougal and Fiona.
Great hall, probably. Long horseshoe table, with heavy chair set between the two arms, at the focus of nine black-hooded faces. Judges. Unanimous decision, or majority? Or sham? Dierdre settled him into the chair, the prisoner's dock, with a touch.
Hooded faces, but Brian could make some guesses. Central on the table facing him, obvious boss by everyone's body language, Captain-General Llewes. Left of him, long black hair showing beneath the hood and two bumps on the front of the purple uniform, that would likely be Amanda, mis-named "Worthy to be loved." Reported to be vicious in the tangled head-office politics of the Pendragons. Down halfway on the right, massive signet ring on the right hand, MacDonald, head of operations and never identified any further.
Brian might come up with more names when they spoke. Or if. Right now, they just stared at him in silence.
His brain settled back between his ears. Duncan and Dierdre stood behind him, Duncan's hand lightly on Brian's right shoulder as either support or restraint, Brian wasn't quite sure which. The guard settled cross-legged on the floor in front of Llewes, where his line of fire didn't include any of the judges. The neat 9mm hole in the muzzle of the Beretta's flat-black sound suppressor made it look like a tenth hooded judge. Maybe it was.
The silence dragged on.
Finally, the last hood on the left pushed himself to his feet and turned toward the head of the horseshoe. He bowed. "My lord." Then he faced Brian. "Prisoner at the bar, you stand accused of deliberate and premeditated murder of an agent of the Circle, desertion, betraying secrets of the Order, and entering a forbidden area. How do you plead?"
Murder. Agent. Circle.
Those three words hit him like another kick in the balls.
Brian couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn't speak. Forbidden area? He'd expected that. Plead ignorance, plead incompetence, plead that he hadn't had any bloody choice once his bloody bitch-sister had followed him to the bloody safe-house transit room. That covered the secrets, as well. And they probably expected pillow-talk with Maureen. As if he hadn't learned to avoid that trap long ago.
Desertion? Yeah, they might see it that way. He saw it more like resigning from an endless winless war. Like that guy in the Hemingway book.
The hood waited.
Now Dierdre's hand settled on Brian's other shoulder, right over the nerve-pinch that would drop him into writhing pain if he made any kind of move.
Murder. Agent. Circle.
Only way to make sense of it was, Liam had been a double rat, a mole. Only way to make sense of that was, this Circle had turned a blind eye to all the things Liam had done through the years.
Including Mulvaney. The thought made Brian sick.
Mulvaney had been a fellow Pendragon, sergeant major to Brian's captain in the SAS, old friend and solid trusted man-behind-me-back. Liam had tortured the old soldier to death, just for the pure hell of it. And Duncan had ordered Brian off the trail.
That hadn't made sense, so he'd marked it up to the garbled message, a mistake in coding or decoding, and pushed on. Killed Liam when he'd tried to take Maureen to the Summer Country.
"Let the record show that the accused stood mute." The hood sat down.
"Questioner," the signet ring spoke, with MacDonald's voice, "have you discovered how the accused reached this place?"
Dierdre stirred, her grip tightening on the nerve plexus in his shoulder. "You saw the video. Claimed he 'felt' the way and took it."
"Do you think he told the truth?"
"He beat me before, in training. The council cut my questioning short."
"Who guards the way from Joseph's Throne?"
Now Duncan stirred, his hand heavy with tension. "I do, my lord."
Silence, dragging on for a minute or more. Joseph's Throne, Joseph of Arimathea, myth tied him with Glastonbury and Arthur and the Grail. And Castle Corbin, also known as Carbonek. The signet ring lifted
