He walked where she pointed him, numb to the core. He didn't even ache anymore. She hummed behind him, a tune that chased through his brain in search of words from memory. It finally connected.
"For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today."
Chapter Seventeen
Brian mourned.
He felt Dierdre's fingers poised over nerve holds, guiding, controlling, firm and yet just the promise of pain rather than the fact. The touch of a virtuoso, who understood that constant pressure would deaden the effect and she'd lose the threat by using it. He walked where the warning sent him, moving in a fog.
Fifty years of his life. Fifty bloody years he'd dedicated to the Pendragons, training and fighting and bleeding and doing ugly things in dark piss-stinking alleys, just to find out that something like Liam had been an agent of the same side. His allies were as filthy as his enemies.
Worse, even. The Old Ones made no pretense. They were what they were, right out front.
Talk about stupid. MacDonald was right. For all the anagrams might say, brains had never been Brian's strong point. He knew that. He made up for it with persistence. Once he started in on a task or a thought, he saw it through to the end however long it took, however much it hurt. That was how he'd finally gotten Liam.
He had just never started thinking about the Pendragons. He took them at face value. He'd been a good soldier, doing everything they told him to the best of his abilities. Sometimes they told him to do hideous things, but there'd always been a reason. There'd been a reason for Dierdre, a need he could recognize that she filled, nasty though it might be.
He'd have obeyed even that order about Liam, if the coding hadn't garbled it. And then he never would have met Maureen.
Dierdre guided him through the door and into the empty corridor. They turned back the way they'd come, the way back to the interrogation cell. Dance the night away with Dierdre, such a lovely thought. See the dawn, and die.
Well, that put a limit on the pain. He'd found out long ago, you could take almost anything if you had an end in sight. That was how he'd beaten her before. He'd known she had a week to break him, not endless minutes that blurred out into forever. Last out that week and win.
Now he just had to make it through the night. His memories would probably hurt more than whatever she had planned for him. Hints he should have read and understood, the inner circle's choices that hid in the shadows within shadows. Things that should have looked wrong, smelled wrong, things like that garbled message that hadn't made sense unless you changed the way you read them. He'd been using the wrong key to decode all the messages. Now it fell into place.
Rotten. The Pendragons were rotten at their heart and head. The foundation of his world had vanished. This was the way Maureen would feel if she found her Father Oak split open and felled by a wind that should never have troubled his top-most leaves -- not just clean wood-rot but some kind of oozing stinking putrescence. This was how a priest would feel if he found out God was evil. Rot at the core of his soul.
The Pendragons were supposed to protect humans. Here at their heart, they kept human slaves. To fight the Old Ones, they'd recruited Liam.
Dierdre stopped them in the hall. "The prisoner will want to pray."
Pray for what? Absolution? No one here could offer that. And he'd long passed beyond hoping for eternal life. That sounded more like punishment to him. Hell was what happened after the first thousand years of heaven, when eternal bliss turned into eternal boredom. He couldn't think of anything he'd want to do forever, not even making love to Maureen.
They'd stopped in front of that door with the Cellini crucifix. Dierdre and Duncan flanked him, with that Beretta-toting guard at a measured distance and a clear lane of fire. Brian felt anger through Dierdre's touch, tension that translated into needles where her fingers pressed his nerves.
"You think I can't handle this alone?" And one hand moved faster than he could think, and pain slammed into his kidney. He bounced forward, smashed his cheek against the wood carving of the door, and slid to his knees. Fingers yanked his hair back, and he stared up into Dierdre's face through blurry tears.
She shook her head, disgust wrinkling her nose. "Bleedin' British army ain't what it used to be. This is the cream of the SAS?"
His head jerked forward, smashing into the lever of the latch and opening the door. He felt blood hot on his forehead as she heaved him to his feet, one-handed. Who ever said women were the weaker sex? And then he stumbled forward from another blow and the door boomed shut behind them and they were in a mysterious gloom of incense and flickering votive lights.
She let him stand, free, shaking his head to clear the daze and tears from his eyes. A chapel, yes, ancient, with carved crucifix and high altar and rood screen, with dark gothic-arched panels that might be more carving or might show stained glass when there was light beyond them. Gallery and choir and two side boxes thrusting out between the arches overhead. Two lines of backless pews flanking a central aisle. Room to seat maybe a hundred.
She pushed him forward again, punching gently this time, almost a love-tap. "Brian, mo croí, you've walked one of those labyrinths before. I saw it in your face, when you stepped through the wall. I'm guessing the deepest cellars of Castle Perilous, yes? So now we have a secret between us, you and I. Everyone else thinks
