North Star Guide Me Home (44 page)

‘Alright,’ Rasten said with a shrug. ‘But I want a token of good faith.’

Pelloras stiffened. ‘I am speaking on behalf of the emperor, and his word is law —’

‘I don’t give a shit about your emperor. How do I know you’re not just isolating me from these ones —’ he nodded to Sierra, ‘— to save yourselves the trouble of trying to take us down together? Words are worthless, General, a man can lie as easily as he breathes. Only power speaks the truth.’

‘Very well, then,’ Pelloras said through gritted teeth. ‘What do you propose?’

Rasten glanced across the chamber towards Mira. ‘The redhead. The dark one, too. Give me the pair of them.’

‘I’m afraid they’re already spoken for,’ Pelloras said. He hid it well, but Isidro detected a note of shock in his voice.

‘I don’t mean to kill them, you fool, just have a little sport. For days I’ve put up with this self-righteous prick lording it over me. You’re taking him to Akhara for an Imperial Triumph, correct? I want him remembering every day between now and then how I made the mother of his son choke on my cock. Same goes for the Akharian wench. I want them both. You’re asking me to trust you, General, and that sort of thing goes both ways. I’ll leave them alive and in one piece, you have my word.’

‘Is that all you want?’ the other man, Kasurian, said with exasperation. ‘You don’t want the Sympath as well?’

‘I’ve had her already,’ Rasten said with a shrug. ‘She’s your problem now.’

‘Indeed,’ Pelloras said, cutting a warning glare at Kasurian. Behind him, Fontaine cleared her throat. ‘Sir, Lady Mira belongs to the Wolf Clan —’

‘Hold your tongue, wench, or I’ll give him you next,’ Pelloras snapped. At his words, Rasten turned to Fontaine and looked her slowly up and down. ‘Alright,’ Pelloras growled, ‘they’re yours, but you’ll have to wait ’til the Sympath is secure. You can do as you like with the traitor so long as she’s left alive and standing, but you’ll have no more than an hour with the Wolf girl — her kin will be coming to claim her, and they won’t be pleased I let you have her.’

‘What do you care? There’s not a cursed thing they can do about it.’

‘Perhaps not, but they’ll be useful for a little while longer. That’s settled, then. Welcome to the Mage Corps, Lord Rasten. Now …’ He turned to Sierra, and Cam, kneeling only a man’s length away from her with two mages holding a shield between them to keep Sierra from pulling away the knife held to Cam’s throat. Sierra had listened in silence as Rasten struck his deal, never looking away from Cam and the men who held him.

Pelloras gave no orders — apparently his men had been well-drilled in what would happen next. One of them brought forward a sack, from which a harness of leather and stones was produced. Two men held it between them as Pelloras advanced on Sierra. ‘On your knees, girl.’

For the first time, Sierra glanced away from Cam. ‘You’re a dead man walking, Slaver.’

Pelloras sighed. ‘You see, girl, this isn’t a question of whether or not you’ll obey. The only question is how much your friends suffer before you surrender.’ He turned to the men holding Cam. ‘Put his eye out.’

The men were expecting the command and had begun to move before Pelloras finished speaking. One wrenched Cam’s head back and the other pressed one hand to Cam’s forehead to steady his target, and set the point of his knife against his lower eyelid. Cam flinched as it pierced his skin and Isidro closed his eyes, unable to watch — and then felt an assault on his senses, a tumultuous knot of energy locked into the stones of the harness. Some of them were suppression stones as he’d identified earlier, but the others were something else, something hard and tight and fiery compressed down into the brittle lattice of stone.

Blasters. Dozens of them, worked into the harness. Warding stones never lasted long around Sierra, her power corrupted and eroded them like water cutting through soft earth, but those blasters … Isidro had only the briefest impression of it, but even so he was willing to bet the harness was rigged such that if the warding stones failed, the blasters would blow.

‘Stop!’ Sierra shouted, shrieking above the crackling storm of her power. ‘Don’t harm him!’

Isidro’s eyes flew open to find the men frozen at Pelloras’ signal, though they did not release Cam or remove the blade. Isidro saw Cam swallow hard, shaking from the strain. ‘If you want him unharmed, do as you’re told,’ Pelloras told her. ‘Get on your knees. Surrender your power.’

Breathing hard, she raised her eyes to Isidro, and then glanced at the harness. The Akharians knew what they were doing. That business of negotiating with Rasten had let Sierra burn through her power out of sheer nerves.

Stiffly, she settled to her knees on the rubble on the floor. At once, the Akharians closed around her, and set about ripping her power away.

By the time it was done she was slumped on the floor, gasping for breath, while the Akharians swiftly set about cutting her clothes away, even the bandages wrapped around her ribs, leaving only the breast-band of quilted cloth and the breeches that clad her from waist to knee. Then, they wrapped the harness around her, pulling the straps tight to press the stones hard against her skin. They bound her hands in front of her, and pulled the empty sack over her head for a blindfold. It was only then that the man with the knife pulled the blade away from Cam’s face — and by now his cheek was streaked with blood.

‘Right,’ Pelloras said as the men bound Cam’s hands and pulled a sack over his face. ‘Get them up, get moving. Lord Rasten, if you would be so good as to accompany us?’

It was the last thing Isidro saw before they masked him as well, then hauled their prisoners to their feet and marched them away.

Sierra clenched her teeth as they dragged her through the halls. Inside her head, she might as well have been back in Kell’s dungeons. The wrench as they’d stripped the power from her felt as brutal as when the old man did it, and this chilling march took her back to that awful day last year when she’d faced public rape and degradation at the queen’s order. The cold, numbing touch of the stones and the leather straps biting into her skin were inseparable from the memory and she felt herself trembling. There was no way the men flanking her couldn’t feel it.

You can do this
, she told herself.
You’ve faced worse odds and survived.

But Kell was just one man, an arrogant old wretch who couldn’t bring himself to believe the true extent of her power. The Akharians had seen his failure. They wouldn’t make the same mistake.

She didn’t bother to struggle. Instead, she concentrated on the harness and the stones. She’d never truly figured out how she’d tripped Kell’s harness into accelerated decay — it had been an instinctive working, like so much of her mage-craft.

These stones were different. The power within them was alien and cold, it owed nothing to her at all. And they were not all the same, either; some were bitingly cold, but others seemed to burn like hot coals, or like the rubies Kell had once locked around her wrists. Were they more punishment stones, set to flare with searing heat if she tried to break through the restraint of the warding stones? The thought made her swallow hard, but then she set her jaw. Burns were nothing; they would heal. Better to bear them and live than avoid them and have those she loved be taken from her.

They seemed to have reached their destination, as the men jerked her to a stop and she heard a door swing open. ‘Everything is ready, sir.’

‘Good. String her up.’

They hauled her forward, too quickly for her to react, and the next thing she knew, she was being lifted onto a platform. At first, the height, along with the general’s words, made her think they were going to hang her, but instead of a noose around her neck, they wrenched her arms up with a gut-sinkingly familiar slap of rope. Hauling on it, they hoisted her up until she was standing on her toes.

Then, the men retreated, until the general’s voice made them stop. ‘Wait. Get the bag off her head.’

‘Sir? But —’

‘It’s covering her mouth and nose. Get it off. We can’t risk having anything interfere.’

One set of footsteps came closer again, and a rough hand snatched the sack from her head.

As the man retreated she caught only the briefest glimpse of the room she was in — it was perfectly empty, except for the wooden crate on which she stood, raising her high enough that her hands were only inches below the roof beam. Past her captors in the hall, she caught a brief glimpse of Isidro, masked and hooded. Cam was nowhere in sight. Then they slammed the door shut. It sealed so tightly that not one gleam of light shone through. She was alone in utter blackness.

As the door to Sierra’s cell slammed shut, a portion of the Akharian party moved away, taking Cam with them, Isidro guessed.

Once they were gone, Pelloras spoke again. ‘Get him to the other chamber and get him secured.’

‘What do you intend to do with her?’ That was Rasten’s voice, his tone mild and disinterested.

‘That’s none of your concern.’

‘I know you mean to kill her. That’s a cursed lot of power to waste.’

‘Your former master tried to control her and failed, and only a fool fails to learn from another man’s mistakes. A rabid beast can’t be tamed — you must know that, or why else would you be here, acting as her lapdog?’

‘I have my plans. Or at least I did, before you came along. Now what do you mean to do with this one?’

‘Oh, we have a use for him. Kasurian, bring him along.’

They marched Isidro through a few twists and turns of the halls, and into another chamber, where they anchored his bound hands high overhead, and then tethered his feet as well for good measure. As the ropes pulled tight, Isidro said a small prayer of thanks to the Gods that his maimed arm was long past paining him. A chill sweat broke out across his shoulders as they hauled his arms up, but with the splintered bones long gone the pain it had always brought in the past did not come.

Once he was bound, they pulled the mask from his head. Fontaine was watching, her arms folded across her chest and her face set in a sneer.

‘Now, Lord Rasten, I have a job for you,’ Pelloras said. ‘Your first in service of the emperor. The cache at Demon’s Spire had a library of irreplaceable value. The rest of the installation was irreparably damaged in the accident, but those cursed books are in there somewhere, and this wretch knows where. I want you to make him talk. Can you do it?’

Rasten gave him a look of disgust. ‘Of course. What state do you want him in at the end?’

‘The emperor wants him for the Triumph, but otherwise you can do as you wish. I have my own torturers, but perhaps they could learn a thing or two from an expert such as yourself, Lord Rasten.’

‘No doubt,’ Rasten said, ‘but I’ve dealt with this one before. Let him sweat for a while. A week perhaps, with just enough water to keep him alive. Starve him to weakness before you begin, otherwise you may as well sit there pounding away at a stone wall.’

Fontaine gave a snort. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this, and from the terror of the north, too. Let him sweat? Starve him into submission? Sir, this creature isn’t a tiger, he’s just a housecat, soft as pudding. I’ll wager I can make the wretch talk, and in well under a week.’ She stalked across the chamber to Isidro and trailed her fingers over the scars running from his collarbone down past his navel, skimming over the stones in her path. ‘Take these scars … why don’t we just open him up? He’ll talk soon enough if the alternative is having his guts piled around his feet.’

The scars twinged, but then, as her hand trailed over a stone, he felt the energy bound into the harness throb and die away. It was a brief sensation, a fraction of a second, then the hum of power rose again, but it was slightly different than before. Wasn’t it? It was hard to be sure, and he was a Sensitive. Could any of the mages sense what she’d done? The Akharians had sent only their best on this mission and they were far too powerful to feel such a subtle shift. Isidro held his breath. What was she playing at? Someone had been betrayed, and ever since he’d come to his senses in the northeast tower, he thought it had been him, but now … now he wasn’t so sure.

With her back to the others, close enough that he could feel the warmth from her skin, close enough that only he could see her face, Fontaine caught his eye and winked.

Behind her back, Rasten gave her a scornful look. ‘I hope your other torturers are more skilled than this one, General. Spilling his guts won’t make him talk, you daft wench. All it’ll do is give us a deadline for questioning him. Rule number one, don’t make it easy for them to take their secrets to the grave.’ He turned back to Pelloras. ‘If you give her to me I’ll teach her some sense when I have the leisure for it. She seems to have the spirit for it, if not the wits. It might be amusing to have an apprentice of my own.’

Pelloras glowered at her. ‘You hear that, Fontaine? I swear by all the Gods, if you say one more word out of turn —’

She turned to him with a glare that could have melted stone, but then slunk back to her place with her head bowed. The men around her smirked.

‘Alright, Lord Rasten, the women ought to be ready for you now. Let me check that the shields are in place, and they’re all yours.’

They trooped out, and at first Isidro thought they were leaving him alone, but that hope was dashed when Pelloras signalled two of the men to stay behind. They leant against the far wall to study their prisoner with a single lantern between them for light.

‘So what do you think he’ll do to that traitor bitch? And the red-haired queen?’ one of the guards said.

‘What, aside from spreading their legs and pounding them bloody? The redhead will go back to her kin, but the turncoat is ours until we get back to Akhara. I’d wager that every man among us gets a chance to teach her the error of her ways. Hey, and from what I hear this cursed Blood-Mage doesn’t care where he sinks his shaft. Didn’t he fuck this wretched cripple once before?’

‘That’s what I heard, and I bet he shrieked and squirmed like a woman, too.’

Isidro ignored them, focusing on the stones. As the shock of this sudden turn of events faded, he realised the wall that had blocked him off from all power was gone. He could feel the mages across the room, feel the power they held. It was a lot by the standards of anyone less than Sierra. Isidro couldn’t match it without her power to call upon.