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“I am pleased to see you in condition for such a gallant and stylish endeavor,” Master Caldrea said, “but I did warn you that it would be useless. As every other will be.”

“Whatever festivity you and your Hunters may have planned for me,” I assured him, “I will not be in attendance. You will have to send a messenger to inform me of the outcome.” Master Caldrea smiled without replying.

Maintaining form, I made two more straightforward efforts to escape, both of which failed resoundingly. The first involved me dressing in a guard’s clothing, over the strenuous—and rather too loud—objections of the guard. The second try had to do with my discovery—thanks to the shy little kitchen boy who came every evening to clear away my food tray—of a small hatchway a few yards down the corridor, through which it was loaded onto a belt that was then wound on rollers back to the kitchen. It is still something of a sore point that I would have easily gotten away unseen if I had known to wait even half an hour for the brother on the night shift to close up the kitchen and go to bed. But he happened to be an extremely conscientious monk, who liked to see the belt completely clear of dirty dishes and utensils before he considered his work done. I crawled out of that hatch to a grinning welcome, and was cursing myself—not my captors—all the way back to my cell.

Actually, it was a different cell this time: one without a mattress of any sort, nor any light, except when the door was opened. This did not happen, as a rule, more than once a day, even on the occasions when Master Caldrea brought my single meal himself. Despite the severity of my punishment, he could not resist praising my inventiveness, saying that no prisoner had ever thought of such an attempt, and that he almost wished that mine had succeeded. “Not that it would have made any difference in the long run—but all the same, I do wish you and I were to have a bit more time together. It would have been pleasant. Ah, well, the moon is the moon.” With that, he bowed, as he always did on leaving me, and shut the door, returning me to darkness, along with my sudden question.

Which was not really a question, but an understanding. Having had no window in either cell, nor any way of seeing sun or moon, it had not occurred to me that he—and, obviously, the Hunters—were waiting for a certain phase of the moon. Why the waiting was necessary was a riddle I could not answer, but I did not feel I needed to. What I
did
need was to be out of this room. I sat on the cold floor that was all my furniture, and pondered whether it was yet time to make use of certain knowledge.

To this day I do not know whether my hesitation served me well or ill, as men measure things, for the third Hunter came before the moon.

He was dead. I had buried him. I had said “Sunlight on your road” to him.

Yet there he stood in my cell, holding a tallow candle in one hand, having shut the door behind him with the other. It had made a sound like an axe falling, waking me out of a half-doze. Master Caldrea and another robed figure, unfamiliar to me, stood behind the small, smiling man. I stared up into their faces and felt my life closing with the door.

“Soukyan,” the Hunter said.

I have, from time to time since, seriously considered taking another name, to be rid of the sound of his voice speaking this one. His smile widened, but the blue eyes…no, there is no comparison for those eyes, no declaring that those eyes were
like
anything else. They were just what they were, and I see them still. He spoke softly, with that upward, questioning lilt they all have, always. He said, “Fool?”

I shook my head—not to deny his judgment, the gods know—but to clear it as best I could, and to focus on that face I had last seen when I was shoveling earth on it with my hands and my unstrung bow. He repeated, “Foolish Soukyan? Foolish.” And his smile gobbled me up—I could truly feel myself sliding down his throat: whole, headfirst. The Hunter said, “Tricked. All the way.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “Yes, I see that now. Not a mark on you beyond that forearm scratch, and
still
I took you for dead. I
knew
you were dead. No breath, no heartbeat.” I shook my head again. Obviously he did not need these things in the normal fashion or degree. I said, “Fool, yes. You tricked me into coming here. From the beginning.”

“From the beginning.” The Hunter laughed fully then, and actually slapped his thigh. I had never seen such a thing before. He said again, “All the way. Never a moment out of Masters’ sight. Not riding, not sleeping—not even when you…when the woman-face came.” Hunters are strangely prudish about women: that was the best even he could manage in reference to the guise he was now telling me had made no difference. “Deceived nobody. Not Brother Laska, not Master Caldrea, nobody. Welcome home, Soukyan. Good to see Soukyan. Never leave us again, Soukyan. Never leave again.”

He sat down beside me, and said, softly, “All my brothers? So many, I can only kill you once? Unjust.” He did seem a bit depressed as he set to his work.

We think of torture as a matter of instruments: racks, heated irons, pincers, crushers, knives, razor-edged flails. The Hunters, however, take great pride in their skill, and this one produced only a small silver knife very similar to the one with which Master Caldrea had peeled the
sulyak
pear during our dinner. It may well have been the same knife, for all I know—I recall that the tip was daintily divided for a little way along the blade, and I certainly remember for what purpose. It is not quite so efficient on flesh; after awhile he tossed it aside with an irritable grunt. I hear that sound in the middle of the most pleasant dreams, often, even now.

After that he went at me like an insane masseur, like a butcher tenderizing a tough slab of meat—no, better, say rather a fisherman working over the giant shellfish that South Island folk call
shamokin,
but coast people name
marlouk.
The belief common to both is that the creature must die in a state of relaxation, or it will become almost unchewable in minutes, no matter how long you pound it. I braced myself in every way I knew against the ceaseless, merciless storm of hand-edge hammer-blows to my gut and groin and face (blood there, a good deal of it, spoiling his record); to my neck and throat as well; to every vulnerable ligament, muscle and tendon in my body, and even to my hair, which he would grab to haul me back to pain each time I lost consciousness. Looking up into his blue eyes as he slapped my head back and forth, grabbing my jaw, my whole mouth, between his thumb and fingers, I could feel through my bones how badly he wanted to kill me, and I would grin my red grin in his face, because I knew it would not be allowed. Then he would hit me harder, because he knew it too, and I would go away again, and so it went, world without end.

But there are a few ways of dealing with even the worst agony—of
absenting
oneself from it—that
the man who laughs
taught me long ago, and I employed them to their fullest extent, as I had prepared myself to do the instant I looked into the third Hunter’s mad blue eyes. For three different purposes were crowded into my cell that day, and I kept reminding myself that I needed to stay present, so I could pay attention to all of them. This is difficult when you keep being beaten to the brink of death by someone who knows how to do it, and has every intention of doing it once for each of his cohorts you have killed. I know this, because the Hunter told me so. Each time.

The Masters themselves obviously wanted something from me, some information that I must eventually yield up to them to stop the beating. And I
would
yield it to them in time, but not until I focused more clearly on exactly what they were saying to one another as they watched the Hunter taking out his fury on me. Because I wanted something too. If I had been lured back to
that place
by a false death and other possible deceptions, that did not mean that there was no greater truth to be found. If I could only hold onto consciousness long enough—the periods of coherent awareness were definitely becoming shorter—and if the Hunter could only be kept from going over the brink himself and taking me with him, what I was enduring might yet turn out to be worthwhile.

Finally he hit me hard enough that I actually skidded across the cell floor on my back, coming to rest with my head almost between one Master’s foot and what I recognized as Master Caldrea’s fine
sheknath-
leather sandals. I felt his voice in the stone under me, rather than hearing it. “That will be enough for now.
Enough!
When he comes to himself, I will question him.”

I kept my eyes tightly closed, feeling the Hunter’s breath on my face. But he did not touch me. I heard the other Master say pettishly, “I would like it to be recorded that I have found this entire affair distasteful in the extreme. If the man had anything of value to tell us, he would surely have babbled it all at least an hour ago.”

“So noted,” murmured Master Caldrea. “But you do not know him as I do. He is Soukyan, and he has killed more Hunters than you, Jedrath, have had your wine glass refilled. It would be more than worth our time to learn how he became our nemesis, even if we had nothing more than that to concern us. Even if the Tree were not dying.”

It took more will than surviving the Hunter’s best efforts not to pop my eyes open and demand details. There
was
a Tree then, and it
was
somehow intimately connected with the existence of the Hunters, the Masters, and
that place
itself. I knew that this, finally, was the reason I had been lured back here—though I could not yet see the purpose.

The Master named Jedrath asked, somewhat hesitantly, “That
is
certain, then? There is no saving the Tree?”

“There is now,” Master Caldrea said.

The Hunter growled, “He wakes.” I gave up pretense and opened my eyes just as he reached for me. Master Caldrea made a small sound, and the Hunter confined himself to dragging me abruptly into a more or less seated position. The cell spun in and out for a few moments, and I would have vomited, but I had already done that two or three times. The Masters quite kindly waited for me to find my equilibrium before questioning me. Master Jedrath even tossed me a rag to wipe away the blood from my nose and mouth.

I spoke first, thinking to take them all perhaps a little off-balance. I said thickly, “I presume you have questions for me. Ask them, and I will answer if I can.” I peered at them through fast-closing eyes. “Or was all this activity merely for my amusement?”

Master Caldrea said, “Hardly that. We have been speculating for years—almost since you left us, really—on just how you acquired the skills that let you evade and kill our Hunters, time on time.” He shrugged, slowly and gracefully. “We felt it necessary to inquire directly.”

I suddenly felt very tired, and not entirely from the Hunter’s work. I said, “No.
That
makes no sense at all. All this effort to bring me here, tricking me into believing that it was my own will…all for some absurd course in combat strategy? Even with my mind still bouncing between the walls of my skull, I would know better than to believe a single breath of that. Please, ask what questions you
will, but make them real ones. I should like to take a nap before dinner.” The blood from my nose had stopped flowing, but I knew it was broken. It has happened before, and since.

Jedrath whispered loudly to Master Caldrea, “Ask him what he knows of the Tree.”

Master Caldrea gave him a cold, disgusted look. Possessed on the instant of a small and ridiculous demon, I croaked, “The Tree, yes…I have come to destroy the Tree. I will cut it down and tear up the roots, so no one will ever know where it grew.” I said that last part two or three times, because I liked the way it sounded. I don’t think I was yet quite back in my right mind.

“He knows nothing,” Master Caldrea said. Exactly as courteously as though he were bowing himself out of
my
rooms after another pleasant dinner, he said, “I’m sure we will be speaking again in the near future.”

“I look forward to it,” I said. I believe I even bowed where I sat, as much as my ribs would let me.

The Hunter stayed briefly after they had gone. He put his face so close to mine that I could smell the odd faint oiliness of his laughter, warm in my ear. He whispered—no question-cadence in his voice now—“Nothing you do harm the Tree, never. No axe you swing ever touch the Tree, no spade of you ever dig into, no poison you put to the Tree ever bite—no fire, no fire you set…”

And he stopped. Just for a moment, no more, before patting my cheek, almost caressing it with a certain awful tenderness. He stood up and said, “We wait for you at the Tree soon,” and I looked again into those blue eyes, and I nodded. With that he left, and I crawled into one corner of the cell, where I ambled in and out of sentience for the next several hours.

I was left alone for the next several days, during which I mainly slept. I ate so little, in fact, that Master Caldrea clearly came to fear that I might be a little too damaged to recover, or had spitefully determined to fast, to starve myself to death. I had no such plan, but I did enjoy watching him worry—he was an anxious man, under the coolly knowledgeable exterior—and I especially savored his one diffident apology. “I assure you, I took no pleasure in what was being done. It was not something I would have chosen to do, of my own will. But the Hunters…the Hunters are born obsessed with you, and had I forbidden it.…” A single graceful shrug, a quick gesture of both open hands, and that was the end of it.

Still, he came every day, until he was satisfied that I was fully recovered from my ordeal. And he brought me plain new garments, to replace the bloodied, soiled tatters I was wearing. I hesitate to say that he felt any least guilt or shame—such emotions are completely foreign in
that place—
but I suppose it could have been so. I will never know now. What I did know, lying there, was pitifully little: that there was indeed a Tree, that it was irremediably close to death before I came, and that my blue-eyed torturer fully expected to meet me again there soon. As for what purpose, I felt reasonably certain that it could not be something enjoyable. Not for me, anyway.