Winter Be My Shield (35 page)

Delphine pulled off her mitten and her glove to bare her hand. She could feel the power radiating from him as a hot but insubstantial wind, streaming through her fingers rather than around them. In the centre of his back, hovering right over his heart, she could feel the rigid form of a sigil carved into the part of him that most folk called the soul. As she touched it, the prisoner gasped and shuddered as though he could feel it himself. Well, most likely he could. It probably felt as though she'd plunged her hand into his vitals. ‘He's got the mark, right here,' she said. ‘You can feel it.'

‘Thank you, but I think I'd rather not,' Harwin said. ‘Are you sure, Delphi?'

‘As sure as I can be. He's been tortured by a Blood-Mage. What are the chances it's the same one who wiped out the scouting party a few weeks back?' Delphine circled around the slave and crouched down to look him in the eye. ‘Why do you suppose they stopped where they did? You're surprisingly intact for one of their playthings.' The question was rhetorical. Of course the slave didn't speak her language, but his unfocussed eyes sharpened for a moment and flickered to her face.

Delphine leaned closer. ‘Can you understand me?'

Nothing. He didn't respond and held himself perfectly still. ‘You
do
understand me, don't you? You're just trying to pretend otherwise.'

One of the guards standing by drew a knife from his belt. ‘He's concussed, madame. Best let us deal with him now before he comes to his senses and makes a fuss. We've just got the slaves settled down; don't want them getting stroppy again now, do we?'

‘Put it away, you clot,' Delphine told him. ‘And go and fetch Mage-Captain Castalior. Tell him we've found a prisoner who's survived a session with the Ricalani Blood-Mage.'

The prisoner drew a sharp breath and tossed his head — it was a small movement, but Delphine was watching for it. As the soldier left she crouched down again. ‘You
do
understand,' she said and then switched to Mesentreian. ‘How about this tongue? Do you know this one too?' He was ready for her this time and didn't respond.

There was no doubt he'd suffered a great deal — all these people had. And this was just the beginning; they still had the long march to the slave markets in Akhara ahead of them. She didn't want to add to his misfortune, but the Ricalani Blood-Mages had already killed hundreds of Akharian soldiers, and by defending the settlements that sheltered and supplied the Mesentreian raiding-ships they were implicated in the deaths of thousands more.

‘Playing dumb will get you nowhere,' she said. ‘You have information we need and we're going to get it one way or another. I can see you've survived torture before — do you really want to go through that again when you know full well we'll get what we want in the end? It will go much easier on you if you cooperate.'

The slave kept his eyes firmly fixed on the floor but as Delphine spoke he began to tremble uncontrollably. He was very thin — she could count every one of his ribs and even the knobs of his spine.

Torren arrived a few minutes later, looking annoyed, but his scowl lifted as he saw the prisoner kneeling on the flagstones, now shivering as much with the cold as from the strain of this examination.

‘Here,' Delphine said, taking Torren's hand to show him the sigil over the prisoner's spine. Charged with all the energy he was giving off, it felt hot enough to burn.

‘Merciful Gods,' Torren said.

‘We've been hearing rumours about Blood-Mages in Ricalan for years,' Delphine said. ‘Every Mesentreian trader who comes to port has some tale of the demons in the north.'

‘How on earth did they let a survivor escape?' Torren said. ‘It's a cursed shame he can't tell us anything about them.'

‘Oh, but he can,' Delphine said. ‘He understands Akharian, I'm certain of it. Mesentreian, too, I'd wager.'

Torren gave her a sharp look. ‘What makes you so sure?'

‘He reacted to what I was saying,' Delphine said. ‘He got cracked on the head when the men stormed the hall, so his wits are likely a bit addled. Now that he's got sense enough to know he's in trouble, I think he's playing dumb in the hope we'll leave him alone.'

‘She's right,' Harwin said quietly. ‘I saw it, too.'

‘Merciful Gods,' Torren said again. ‘Do you know what this means? Do you have any idea how much we could learn from him?'

Delphine rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, Torren, the thought had occurred to me.'

‘I'd best take him to Presarius and the other commanders,' Torren went on, oblivious to her words. ‘In the shape he's in, it won't take much to make him talk.' Torren signalled to the guards, who cut the ties that bound the prisoner's ankles and hauled him to his feet in a movement that made him cry out in pain. ‘Good work, Delphi.' Torren beckoned the guards. ‘Bring him,' he said, and started for the doorway.

 

The guards half carried, half dragged Isidro across the temple grounds to the Priests' Hall. The folk who had taken shelter there were crammed into the common room, divided by sex as they had been in the shrine. Guards armed with clubs roamed amongst them, doling out punishing blows for every murmur or movement.

The men escorting Isidro dragged him right past them and after conferring for a moment with another Akharian they shoved him into the High Priestess's chamber. The priestess herself lay on the floor, a wizened, shrunken figure crumpled into her heavy robes. Her pinched and narrow lips were blue and her watery eyes were already covered with a milky film. There wasn't a mark on her and it looked to Isidro as if she'd been taken by an apoplexy, perhaps even before the temple had fallen.

In the chamber the men shoved him to the floor, bound his feet again and left him there. There was a guard at the door but he kept his back to the chamber and paid Isidro no mind. Every so often other men would come in and deposit a heavy sack or basket onto a growing pile accumulating on the bench. As Isidro came back to his senses, he realised they were sacking the temple; he was being stored alongside looted valuables until someone could be bothered dealing with him.

The blow to his head had left him feeling queasy and the stone floor pressed painfully against his bones, but at least it was warmer here than
out in the shrine. After a while he fell into a shallow and restless doze, only to be woken again when a pair of men freed his feet and marched him outside. There, he was loaded onto a sled like so much cargo and driven behind a slave-train through the darkness to the Akharian camp.

The journey was a nightmare. With his hands bound, there was nothing he could do to ease the pain in his arm or brace himself against the bouncing of the sled. Every time he moved, the Akharian guard marching alongside him would jab at him with the butt of his spear and snarl at him to be still.

At some point, he must have fainted from the pain, for when he came back to his senses, much later, Isidro found himself in a dark and sheltered place. He was lying on a bed of spruce with an old and worn fur thrown carelessly over him for a blanket. His bed, such as it was, was amid a great stack of wooden crates and trunks. His hands were still bound behind his back and when he tried to wriggle away from where he lay he found they were tied to one of the crates as well. With his head pounding and his throat parched, Isidro lay very still, listening for any sound that might give him a hint where he was. There was a stove nearby with a fire crackling within and Isidro thought he could hear the comforting hiss of a simmering kettle. The air was uncomfortably cold, but not so much that he risked hypothermia. Although it was dark he could make out the outlines of the boxes and crates to one side of him and the roof of the tent overhead, so there was
some
light nearby. The tent was made in the Mesentreian style, with a peaked roof sloping away from a central pole to meet vertical walls, all held taut with guy-ropes. Isidro could tell nothing else, not even whether it was night or day. Nothing was moving except him and he hurt too much to do much of that.

Hours passed and Isidro was dozing again when the sound of people entering the tent brought him suddenly, heart-poundingly, awake. They were speaking in Akharian with voices too low for him to make out the words, but one of them laughed as they tramped around the boxes and crates towards him. As they rounded the corner to his little enclave they paused for a moment looking down at him — two men with close-cropped hair and winter furs belted over red tunics, accompanied by a shorter man, who had the demeanour of a servant. The taller men each carried a small lantern about the size of a woman's fist; one of them wore
his tied to his belt and unlit, but the other held his high to shine down on their captive. After the gloom of the tent, it was so bright Isidro had to squint and turn his head away to shield his eyes.

There was power in the air. It crawled over Isidro's skin, making his hair stand on end. Those two were mages.

‘At least we don't have to go to the trouble of waking him up,' one of the men said. ‘Do you suppose that wretched woman is right and he does understand us?'

The other one shrugged and reached inside his coat to produce a small sack of dark cloth. ‘She's a pain in the arse, but Mage-Captain Castalior believes her. I suppose we'll find out soon enough.' He handed the sack to the servant. ‘Bag him and get him on his feet.'

Blindfolded and masked, Isidro was hauled to his feet and marched out of the tent. He could hear men around him, passing by in a crunch of boots on snow as they talked and joked in a foreign tongue. It was utterly disorienting; the only familiar thing was the cold, biting through the soft indoor clothes he had been wearing after being dumped in the storage tent. By the time they brought him into another tent he was shivering so violently he had no strength to resist when they forced him to his knees and held him while they stripped him to the waist. There was a moment of murmured consternation when they discovered his splinted arm and the scars on his back, then they bound his hands together in front of him.

By the time he felt them throw a rope over something above them, Isidro was trembling uncontrollably and it had nothing to do with the cold. His heart was beating so hard it felt as if it would burst. His breath was coming fast and hard, no matter how he tried to control it. In his mind he was in another place, another time. This was how it had begun on the day he'd been brought to face Kell and Rasten. Back then he'd been calm, despite the fear. He had focussed on just one thing, keeping it firmly in his mind no matter what came — he had to hold out long enough for Cam to get away. Nothing else mattered.

Now he could only guess what they wanted from him. Moreover, both he and they knew he'd already been broken once by torture. It wouldn't take much to bring him to that point again.

They hauled on the rope, lifting his arms over his head and pulling him to his feet. The splints on his arm protected him a little, but the
pressure of the rope was enough to tear a groan from his throat. He tried to support his weight and ease the pressure of the rope, but they kept hauling until only the tips of his toes were touching the ground. For a moment the blackness threatened to swallow him again, but Isidro gritted his teeth and fought his way through it, concentrating just on breathing, in and out, in and out. He'd done this once before, he suddenly remembered, under Rasten's glowing poker and then the club, only he'd forgotten it until now.

He sensed someone standing in front of him and, for an irrational moment, he feared that it
was
Rasten, come to finish what he'd begun. The sense of power prickling over his skin was the same, and Isidro could feel the scar on his back throbbing beneath the burn-marks and the healing skin — the
original
scar, the one Rasten had scored at the beginning of the ritual to suck his life-force the way a leech sucks blood.

The person facing him took hold of the mask and pulled it off in one swift movement. It wasn't Rasten — Isidro knew it couldn't be, but his mind was too overwhelmed to be rational right now — it was the mage who had taken him from the shrine. Other men were standing around the edges of the tent, arms folded as they watched in silence, or muttered to their neighbours in low voices. They were all mages, Isidro realised.

The man facing him tossed the sack aside and turned to a trestle set up along the long side of the tent. He picked up a device consisting of a two-foot rod with a leather-wrapped handle at one end and two metal prongs at the other, while wires bound a handful of jade plaques to the shaft. The mage held the prongs under Isidro's nose and somehow activated the device, sending a big blue spark buzzing and crackling between the prongs. ‘Now,' the mage said in a conversational tone. ‘I know you can understand me and if you can understand my tongue then you can speak it well enough. First of all, I'm going to give you a taste of what you can expect if you choose not to cooperate with us.'

He pressed the prongs of the device against Isidro's breastbone. Isidro had been on the receiving end of enough of Sierra's accidental zaps to have a vague idea of what to expect — he tried to brace himself for it.

It was not enough. If the device was kin to Sierra's power, then it was closer to one of her attacks than it was to an accidental spill of energy.

It sent such a jolt through him that it felt as if he had been picked up bodily and hurled against the ground. Every muscle in his body clenched
and it knocked the wind from him in such a rush of breath that he couldn't scream when the muscles in his ruined arm twitched and clenched around the splintered bones. An awful buzzing like a swarm of wasps filled his ears and he was vaguely aware of thrashing against the ropes hard enough to make the tent shake. When the mage pulled the device away it left twin welts on his skin, livid and throbbing like the sting of a wasp. It stole what strength he had and Isidro slumped in the ropes, head hanging to the ground with sweat trickling down his brow.