Call of the Colossus: An epic fantasy novel (The Mindstream Chronicles Book 2) (17 page)

Korlan did as he was instructed and turned the thumbscrews, which tightened the bands for a snug fit. “What is this thing?”

“It’s a kendern. Keeps Truth Sayers from using their power for Witnessing. In her case, it’ll also keep her from summoning a monster to untie her.”

The thought of Jora’s pet monsters made him shudder. Despite knowing Po Teng had once been his best friend, Boden, the things terrified him. He’d been trapped in their world for what seemed hours between dying and becoming relived on the battlefield. Since then, he lived with the certainty that they were waiting in the fragile moments between sleep and wakefulness to drag him, screaming and flailing, back into their haunted world.

“If I catch you loosening the gag or removing the shackles, you’ll have to answer to Milad. Trust me, if he assigns me to see you punished, that’s one mistake you won’t make twice.”

As soon as Gruesome was gone, Korlan loosened her gag. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I can’t refuse.”

Jora spit the gag out of her mouth. “It’s all right,” she said, though the look of betrayal in her eyes said otherwise. “I understand.”

“All this after you saved my life. I swear, I didn’t want to do it. Milad–”

“I said it’s all right.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room.

“I’ll stay with you if you want. Keep you company.”

She nodded, though she didn’t look at him.

“The smell in here is pretty bad, isn’t it?” He sat on the floor against one wall so that he could see anyone coming down the hallway, giving him time to put Jora’s gag back into place should someone come to check on him. “You got pardoned, huh?”

Jora nodded and turned her face away. “The king asked me… commanded me not to investigate the smuggling or talk about it to anyone. That’s the condition of my pardon.”

“You’re going to adhere to it, aren’t you?”

She hesitated before nodding, giving Korlan the impression she wasn’t sure. Or maybe she didn’t trust him. How could he blame her?

“I was writing a letter to my wife when they told me about my treason charge being dismissed. You have no idea how hard it was, trying to find the words to explain to her why I was being executed.”

“Does she know yet about your court-martial?”

He shrugged. “They won’t tell me. The thought of never meeting my daughter made me understand a little of what you went through after Kaild.”

“The adepts at your camp said your baby’s a girl?”

“Adept Orfeo did, mostly to shut me up. I was relentless, asking every day, sometimes twice a day for news.”

That prompted a tiny smile. “I could tell you how they fare,” she said.

“You would do that? After I… did this to you?”

She shifted side to side and rocked her head like she was trying to get comfortable. “I know this wasn’t your idea, Korlan. It was the dominee’s.”

“Whoa,” he said. “You have powerful friends
and
powerful enemies.”

“I guess that goes with being the Gatekeeper.”

After a moment’s consideration, he loosened the screws on the kendern and pulled it off her head. He had to know whether his family was safe, and she was the only person whose word he trusted. “Don’t tell anyone I did this or I’ll get into trouble.”

She closed her eyes. “It’ll only take me a few seconds.”

He looked down the hallway to make sure no one was coming.

“Your wife is quite comely,” Jora said. “She’s sitting in a rocking chair with your daughter, feeding her.”

“What does she look like?”

“She has light brown hair and the sweetest little face. Big blue eyes. She’s looking at her mama with such adoration. Your wife is singing to her and stroking her head with her free hand. You should be proud, Korlan. Your family is beautiful.”

A lump caught in his throat, and he swallowed it down, nodding. He wished he could see what she was seeing. If he was lucky, he’d have a chance to travel to Burnd in fulfillment of his duties.

“Let me go backwards a little,” Jora said. “It’ll take a few minutes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to see whether she was told anything about your arrest and court-martial.”

On the stairs at the end of the corridor, boots appeared, then the gray pant legs of an enforcer’s uniform. “Someone’s coming,” Korlan said as he scrambled to his feet. He set the kendern on her head, settling it into place over her ears, then put the gag back into her mouth and pulled it tight, though he didn’t yank it the way Gruesome had. Once it was tied, he stepped away and leaned against a wall with his arms crossed, feigning nonchalance.

Justice Captain Milad entered the room and looked Jora over. “Is everything all right in here?”

“Yes, sir,” Korlan said. “Just biding my time.”

Milad checked the cord around Jora’s ankles, the shackles, and the gag. Satisfied, he started back toward the door. “Come with me. I have another assignment for you.”

“What about Jora?”

“She’s got five-and-a-half hours left. Let’s go.”

Chapter 10

The first half hour of her punishment, Jora was uncomfortable, but at least she had Korlan to keep her mind focused on something other than her sore buttocks and aching joints. Once he left, though, the discomfort became pain. The minutes crawled by. All around her was evidence of other people’s agony. How many had died in this room at the hands of an overzealous enforcer?

She leaned to the left, hoping to give her right buttock a moment’s rest, but all her weight on the left side was even more excruciating. A pillow would have been too much to ask for, but she should have at least asked Korlan to smuggle a folded towel into the room for her to sit on. He might have said no, and she would have understood if he had, but not asking was the same thing.

Her wrists ached from the shackles, her shins from the chain between them, her knees from the rod and her hips for being bent for so long. The gag was tight and uncomfortable, but the corners of her mouth started to feel numb after the first hour. She only wished her butt would get numb.

It occurred to her that Korlan hadn’t tightened the kendern on her head. It fit loosely enough that by leaning her head back and jerking it quickly forward, she could move it.

With hours ahead of her and no one to talk to, she needed something to occupy her mind. Might as well start tracing the smuggling for the princess—if she could get the damned kendern off. The problem with investigating during the day was that she had to open the Mindstream, which also meant the barring hood would fall. Anyone with Mindstreaming ability and the training on how to ride someone’s stream could eavesdrop on her activities and report to the elders, who knew nothing about her secret agreement with the king. Leaving it until the dark of night when everyone would presume her to be sleeping made the most sense, but she didn’t think she could bear to sit there for another four-and-a-half or five hours without doing
something
. Besides, they would assume the kendern was safely in place.

I
’
ll be vigilant. The moment I suspect someone is riding my stream, I
’
ll close it and put up the barring hood.

That decided, she leaned back and jerked her head forward again. After a few tries, she managed to fling it from her head. It struck the wall with a
twang
and skittered across the floor. Free of the muffling silence, she closed her eyes, opened the Mindstream, and found Korlan’s thread.

He was sitting with a group of enforcers, discussing a case and the punishment for the convict. She didn’t care to stay to listen to the details, and so she zipped backwards along his thread by about two weeks to put her a couple of days before they first met in Turounce’s office. He was quietly fuming, tearing a stick into bits and hurling them at an imagined target.

Jora backed through his stream slowly enough that she could tell what was happening. She watched him salute Boden as he was taken off in a wagon in shackles. Before that, he argued with an officer, a sergeant perhaps. Even earlier, she Observed him standing at attention in front of March Commander Turounce.

That might be interesting
, she thought and let the stream flow forward at its natural pace.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Turounce demanded. “You don’t know those men were Mangendans.”

“They had the tattoos, sir,” Korlan said.

“Did it ever occur to that pea-sized brain of yours that these men were spies working for us? What about the possibility that they were Serocians painted with umber to look like Mangendans? Of course not. Because you’re an idiot.”

Korlan drew his brow and studied his boots. “Sorry, sir.”

“Sorry won’t cut it, Rastorfer. You’re scrubbing pots and raking leaves until I say otherwise. Breathe one word to anyone about smuggling or godfruit thieves, and I’ll break your puny neck.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And stay away from Sayeg. He’s an even bigger idiot than you are.”

Korlan acknowledged the instruction by pressing his lips together, but he didn’t agree to it verbally.

“Dismissed.”

Good
, Jora thought as she continued to move backwards along Korlan’s thread. She was close. The previous night was when she Observed Korlan and Boden fighting the smugglers. She paused the stream, Observing Boden’s still form as he stood with Korlan on the beach, the moonlight casting pale bluish light across his handsome face. She could see his father in the shape of his eyes and mouth, the set of his jaw, and the way he squared his shoulders. A pang of longing and grief drew a sob from her chest. Gunnar was dead. Boden was changed. The peaceful, happy life she’d once had was but a fond memory.

She used her grief and anger as a weapon, honing them as she would a knife and pointing them in the direction of those who were at the root of it all. She would find out who was profiting from the deaths of the soldiers, and she would stop them or die trying.

Back she went until she found the moment Korlan had first spotted someone suspicious unloading sacks of godfruit from a wagon. Like a spider darting across a web, she jumped to the thread of the wagon’s driver just before he sped away.

Though the moon was behind him and his face was shrouded in darkness, she could clearly see his features. Observing within the Mindstream had few limits, and light and the quality of her eyesight were not among them. He wasn’t a Legion soldier. That she knew by the dark brown hair atop his head. He had small, brown eyes set close together and a sharp nose. His narrow lips were open and stretched taut, his bottom teeth showing in an expression of determination.

He cracked a whip down on his lead horse’s rump as he sped toward the Tree of the Fallen God.

Impatient, Jora advanced the stream forward to the moment he arrived. There, under the tree, were perhaps two dozen men and women, each gathering godfruit from the ground and shoving it into a messenger-type bag that was slung across one shoulder and rested against the hip and backside. When the bag was full, he brought it to another man, and the two dumped the contents into larger burlap sacks, which were then tied at the neck and added to a growing pile. All this was done solely by the light of the moon, without the benefit of lamps or candles.

The driver grabbed a sack from the storage box under his seat, jumped down from the wagon, and ran to a woman counting sacks, a writing board clutched against her breast. She was a thick-waisted blonde with a patch over one eye.

“We were spotted,” the driver said breathlessly. “A pair of soldiers on patrol.”

As she took the jingling sack he offered, she regarded him with her brow drawn and her head cocked. “They engaged you?”

“One did. He called for his friend, but I got away before they killed Jug. Buck, Gin, and Grease were down below. There’s a good chance they got away.”

“Against two armed soldiers? We can’t count on it. I’d better let Snipe know. He’ll want to get in touch with his contacts on the other side to make sure the shipment got there.”

“Most of it’s sitting at the top of the hill,” the driver said. “I still have a half dozen bags in my wagon.”

“Retar’s bollocks,” she said. She paced across the bare earth, her one eye fixed to the ground. “Well, at least we didn’t lose the payment. Take your wagon back. We’ll split your loads between the other five. That ought to satisfy them.”

“What about those two soldiers?” he asked.

The woman shrugged. “Depends on their commander. They might get off with a warning. That’s not your concern. Be back here same time tomorrow. I’ll pass word to the captain and make sure no one interferes.”

The captain?
Jora wondered.
Which captain?
She needed a name.

She jumped to the eyepatch woman’s thread and advanced her stream through the night. She didn’t learn the woman’s name but found out she went by the nickname Patch. In fact, it seemed everyone involved went by nicknames, probably wise on their part, in case some nosy Mindstreamer with morals found out what they were up to. All Jora had to do, if she were so inclined, was to stream far enough back to hear someone call them by their real names, but it would take time to gather the names of all the smugglers. These low- and mid-level operators didn’t concern her as much as the ones leading the effort, and so she simply waited until Patch’s shift was over to see who she reported to.