Instead her attention wandered out the window. Away in the distance, over the river perhaps, a single amber light burned. It seemed both poignantly lonely and jewel-beautiful, and Zaranda found herself staring at it. As she stared, her vision wandered further and further out of focus, and the amber light grew steadily larger and fuzzier, until it became huge, became a sun, and swallowed her altogether.
23
With a several-voiced whistle and a resounding smack, the knotted rawhide thongs bit into Zaranda's bare flesh. Clenched teeth barred a scream, but a groan escaped her throat. Her body twisted clockwise from the force of the blow, then turned widdershins, toes dangling two inches from a drain set in the slimy stone floor. Her whole weight depended from her arms, chained to a hook in the low, round-vaulted ceiling. Manacles bit her wrists like the pincers of a giant scorpion; her shoulders burned from unnatural strain.
When she could trust herself to speak more or less steadily, she moistened her lips and said, 'I hate to disappoint you, but I don't really have any vital secrets to withhold from you. So there's not… much point… to this exercise.'
Shaveli Sword-Master laughed hoarsely. He swung his cat-o'-nine-tails so its thongs sang savagely. Zaranda shut her eyes and clamped her jaw, then winced as the lash struck stone flagging with a crack.
'Clearly you don't understand, Countess,' he said cheerfully. The glare from a brazier, in which various iron implements nestled yellow-glowing heads among the coals, cast entirely redundant, fiendish highlights over his face. The dungeon stank of mold and hot metal and all the scents of fear. 'You know nothing that could possibly be of the slightest use to my master-only how to inconvenience him, which I fancy you'll not be doing any more. As to-'
Not looking at him, Zaranda had begun to move her lips soundlessly. Shaveli's rat face twisted in rage, and he lashed her so cruelly that she could not help crying out.
He laid the whip's handle to her cheek and forced her face toward his. 'Casting spells, were we, witch?'
'I was merely… sending a prayer to Lliira,'. Zaranda said. 'I don't feel as if my life has enough… joy… in it right now.'
The Sword-Master put his head back and laughed. Then he struck again. 'Very clever. Very clever, indeed. I can tell we're going to have a most diverting relationship.'
He tapped the handle against her cheek. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth where she had bitten her lip. 'You should know, though, that none of your magic will help you now. Into the very mortar of these dungeon walls was worked powdered fragments of the bones of the gods who exploded in the magic-dead realm of far Tantras. No dweomer can penetrate here, so chant away at your futile spells-it pleases me to punish you for doing so.'
That would account for the dull but constant throb between Zaranda's temples; she had heard of such an effect from others who had passed through the rare dead-magic reaches of Toril. Magic was woven into the very fabric of the world, in all the creatures who walked upon it, swam its seas, flew above it or delved the Underdark below. To be cut off from sorcery, from dweomer, was an unnatural condition. Those steeped in the arts magical were so sensitive to such isolation that it caused them pain.
And here I thought it was that cursed brandy, she thought.
'No, it's not information I seek,' he said, pushing her to set her rotating in her chains, sending pain flashes down from torn wrists to tortured shoulders. 'It's merely that whiling away the hours with you is the re-ward my stalwart service has won me from my just and generous master.'
'It's true what they say in the markets, then.' Zaranda said. 'That the only pleasure Shaveli can take from a woman is what he can get with whips and chains.'
Still spinning, she caught a glimpse of his features, a fiendish mask of fury. Her world became pain and screams.
The stone cell floor was cold and slimy beneath her as she lay in uttermost dark. At least it had the effect of soothing her welts. Best not mention that, or they'll come scatter salt.
She could see nothing. On first waking in the dungeon, she had felt her way all around her cell. It had not been a lengthy process. The room appeared to be about ten feet in every dimension; by holding arms outstretched above her head and leaping as high as she could, she could just brush the ceiling with her finger tips. There was a heavy, metal-shod wooden door, a good hand thick to judge by the sound when she rapped it with her knuckles, with an armored judas gate set into it, currently shut. A drain was sunk in the center of the chamber, about half again as big as her palm and covered with a metal grate.
Though the traditional dungeon dampness had en-gendered a coating of slime on the stones, they were well cut and fitted, so that she could barely feel the seams when she ran hands across them. Their smoothness was the smoothness of careful dressing by stonemasons with a Tethyrian concern for craft, not of generations of pris-oners' hands running over them in the vain hope that a portal to freedom would suddenly open up. Moreover the place smelled, well, clean. For a dungeon.
So she was captive in Zazesspur's new Palace of Governance.
She tasted agony raw. Shaveli had a fine hand with a whip; she had to grant him that. Though her body felt as if it were wrapped in nets of live fire, as far as she could ascertain, he had not broken the skin once. Which had certain implications, not necessarily soothing. It was just possible that Hardisty was dim enough to imagine she might be broken to his will through physical abuse. The problem was, he had known her as a war leader with no scruples about using ruses to win the day. He must know he could trust no compact she gave under duress.
And if he didn't realize it, surely Armenides would.
There was more to the self-proclaimed archpriest of Ao than his apple-cheeked smile and halo of hair suggested. During their interview a year ago, he stayed in the background uttering homilies, but all the same Zaranda could practically see the strings running from his hands to Hardisty.
She took it as an ominous sign that, as far as she knew, the baron had not paid her a visit. That implied a reluctance to look an old comrade-in-arms in the eye.
So the odds were good that she was being kept relatively intact for public execution-with first, perhaps, a public show trial.
She shifted, rolled over, cradled her cheek on her other hand. A bale of hay had thoughtfully been tossed in the cell with her to serve as a bed-it wouldn't do to have her body a mass of sores when she mounted the gibbet. The prickly straw was small use at present. She would have been uncomfortable on the finest feather bed in Waterdeep, but she could at least redistribute aches.
She remembered… what? The taste of Tintoram's Select-was there an odd dissonance, like the forty-fifth cherub from the left in the eighteenth row striking a sour note in the midst of an angelic chorus? She wasn't familiar enough with exotic liqueurs to tell. It had to be the brandy, though-she would have tasted something amiss in the candied orange.
After that, remembered impressions: the thump, as of an ancient tome slipping from its shelf far off in a vast, dusty, drafty castle, which was her face striking the tabletop. The door opening, a voice distorted to unrecognizability saying, gruffly, 'Take her.' Men dressed as artisans, plain everyday Tethyrian tradesmen whom none would suspect, rolling her up in a rug and bundling her onto their shoulders. They would have left openly but discreetly by a back exit-it was far from unusual for Faerun hostelries to desire to have a carpet cleaned or replaced at odd hours of the night, and with as little fanfare as possible.
And after that — jostling, horse smell, harness jingle. Then nothing until she woke here in the dark, with only furtive, fugitive scurrying sounds and the dripping of water to remind her she yet lived.
She rolled onto her back-no, that was a mistake-onto her belly, laid cheek against chill stone. Who betrayed me? The thought was like mice gnawing her belly from the inside.
The Ithmong town council-no. Ithmongs were known for being unsubtle by Tethyrian standards, but she found it hard to believe any Tethyrian could be quite that blatant. And to what end? Ithmong didn't distrust Zazesspur as sorely as it did Myratma, but would never happily see its rival rule all Tethyr. That was a major reason the town council was treating with Zaranda in the first place: Star Protectives offered a means of slowing or reversing the death by strangulation that was overtaking Tethyr without bending the knee to Zazesspur and the
