The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (15 page)

He opened the door for me and I went out.

But I never did get to the Keeper ship.

They were waiting for me outside Niamor’s house. And this time they never gave me a chance to draw my sword. All I heard was a soft footfall behind me; all I saw was an upraised hand holding a cudgel as I half turned, my hand groping for my sword hilt too late.

I woke to pain.

I was staked out like a rayfish drying in the sun: arms and feet spread-eagled and pinioned at wrist and ankle, a thong around my neck that was also staked into the ground on either side so that I could not lift my head without choking myself. I was, in fact, in the sun, with compacted sand and dried seaweed under my body; the sea, now at high tide, lapped a pace or two away from my feet. I was naked and my head ached abominably. I also had a fair idea that worse was yet to come.

‘She’s waking up.’

The words were softly spoken, said with pleasure, and they froze me with their malice. I did not know the voice. I could not see the speaker; he stood somewhere above me, behind my head; although I could move my head a little from side to side, there was no way I could glimpse anyone behind me. I knew it had to be the dunmaster; the stink of dunmagic was so thick it furred my throat as I breathed.

‘Just as well for you, Domino. I would have been
most
unhappy had she died. Hitting people on the head is a risky way to immobilise them—please remember that in the future.’

I could see the other two men, the ones he had addressed. They were both short. One I remembered seeing that first day in
The Drunken Plaice
: a wiry fellow with lined skin. Sickle the torturer. A halfbreed, with an impossible combination of Calmenter honey-brown eyes and Souther brown skin. No earlobe tattoo. And he was no eunuch either—which meant that he was either a lot smarter than most of his kind, or he had lived out most of his life on Gorthan Spit, where no one worried too much about interbreeding.

The other was even shorter, a fair-skinned Fen Islander with green eyes and brown hair. He looked at me with fervent hatred: Domino, who had an obsession about his short stature, who hated the tall, who looked at me now—and smiled.

‘Syr-master,’ said Sickle deferentially. ‘What are th’orders?’

The dunmagic stirred as its originator moved; it whirled around my head, raging at its impotence against me. The smell of it contaminated the air, so intense that I could feel its strength. Its
increased
strength. It was growing stronger, day by day. The Keepers had better find this man before he was too strong for them…

‘I want to know who helped her free the Castlemaid, that’s all,’ the voice purred from behind my head. ‘The Cirkasian will return to me of her own free will shortly; I don’t need to track her down. But I don’t like not knowing who the other one was in the meantime; such Awarefolk are dangerous to me. Find out, then dispose of her however you please. The longer you take over it, the happier it will make you, eh? A week, a month, a year. There’s no need to hurry. Perhaps chained to the wall in our whorehouse as a final destination? But just get that name first. And make sure it’s the right one, you understand? Don’t let her fool you.’

He didn’t wait for an answer. I heard him move away over the sand, taking his dunmagic with him.

I could breathe again. I could puzzle over why they thought Flame was the Castlemaid. I could recall silly things like Ruarth’s mother had sylvtalent. I could meditate on what fools Tor and I had been to think that we could deceive a dunmagicker like this one.

I looked around as best I could, searching for any hope. However small.

As far as I could see, staked out as I was, I was on a deserted beach. There were no houses, no buildings, no boats out on the ocean. The only things in sight were a couple of sea-ponies, tethered to stakes at the edge of the water. They were cavorting in the sea, keeping themselves cool, their glistening coils winding in and out of the waves like a thread following a needle. A dried-out sea-pony is a dead one; they’re not much use as mounts, except on a place like Gorthan Spit where the sea is never more than an hour or two’s slither away.

They were my first hope: they represented a way of escape, if only I could free myself.

The second hope was just out of reach: my sword. It lay on the pile of clothing beside me, tantalisingly close.

The third hope was in the sand itself. Stakes might not hold, even in hard, compacted sand, if I was free to work at them. But I doubted Domino or Sickle would leave me here alone. Still, there was a lot I could do under the guise of writhing in pain.

Guise? It wouldn’t be guise. Pain was inevitable where these two were concerned.

I looked up at the cloudless sky: the sun was almost overhead. Close enough to midday—but what day? I had no idea how long I had been unconscious. I had a thirst that stuck tongue and lips together as if they’d been smeared with sea-pony slime. My head ached and ached without end.

Flame. Shards of memory scored my mind.
How long did she have left?

Domino leant over me. ‘This is going to be very slow, lady-bitch. But I make you a promise, huh? Give me the name he wants and I make sure you’re dead by tomorrow night, ’stead of some time next year. That’s your choice, my sweet. Think about it, eh?’

I gave a hollow laugh. ‘Tomorrow night? In this heat I’ll be dead without water in a matter of hours.’

He didn’t take the hint. He nodded to Sickle. The torturer came forward with a gutting knife in his hand. ‘This stretch of coast here is known for its blood-demons,’ Domino continued.

I didn’t react. I’d never heard of blood-demons.

He read my mind. ‘Maybe you never seen one. Lemme show you what they look like.’ He walked down to the water’s edge, picked up something and walked back. He held up a seashell of some kind for me to have a look at. It was about the size of a man’s thumb; an upper hard purple shell covered a softer body underneath, like a limpet. He turned the creature over to show me the underside: it was spongy and pulsated gently. There didn’t seem to be any claws or mouthparts, nothing that seemed lethal or horrible.

Domino smiled down at me, his green Fen eyes so like mine. They have beautiful eyes, the Fenlanders, have you noticed? —The colour of clear seawater over coastal sand. I used to wonder whether I inherited mine from my mother or my father…but I digress. Deliberately, I suppose. Even after all these years I find it hard to talk about what happened next.

Domino said, ‘Still wondering, eh?’ He put the creature on his arm, soft part down. ‘It don’t hurt. ’Less it finds an open wound and tastes blood. Then it hunkers down into the gash, turns its stomach inside out and sucks it up… I been told—by those who’ve felt it—that it’s a very painful thing, cos of the poisonous gastric juices. Mind you, I only got their screams to go by. None of them were able to actually
speak.
’

He looked at the blood-demon with affection. ‘They can go months without food. Then, when they do find a wounded fish or animal, they go into a sort of feeding frenzy. A small school of them can guzzle a whole whale in a week… Oh yeah, they have to crap as they eat, of course, and what they crap is mostly pure acid. It adds to the pain, I’m told, though I always doubted that it was possible to feel more under the circumstances. Still, you’ll find out shortly, eh? Perhaps you could tell me; for future ref’rence, you understand.’

‘Let me get on with it,’ Sickle growled at him.
‘He
wants that sodding information today, not next week.’ Casually he bent down and slashed at my breast with his knife. The wound wasn’t particularly deep or serious; he didn’t want me to bleed to death. He wanted it slow…

Domino dropped the blood-demon into the cut. For a moment nothing happened. Sickle grinned at me, and opened up another slice on my stomach, and yet another on my thigh. The creature on my breast wriggled a little, settling into the wound as if it belonged there. Sickle disappeared from my vision and then returned with another couple of blood-demons. He ran his hand insolently over my body before placing them into the other cuts. Then he loosened the thong around my neck. ‘We wouldn’t want you to choke, would we?’ he asked.

A moment later pain ripped my body apart. There is no other way to describe it.

I hadn’t been going to scream. I hadn’t been going to give them the satisfaction.

I started to scream and went on screaming. Yet I heard nothing. The pain would not allow me to hear. Or see. Or think. Only to feel…

If it had been enough to want to die, I would have died in the first five seconds.

Time has no meaning to the tortured. Thirty seconds of agony seems like a lifetime; when the torture doesn’t stop, there is no concept even of the length of a lifetime—there is only a longing for death. Death is the vision that keeps madness at bay; the knowledge that it will come is the sole salve for endless pain. I thought I was going to die with pain and I was glad.

I do not know how long I lay there with the blood-demons in me. When they took them away, I would have thanked them, had I had the strength. The sun was still in the sky; a flock of small birds chattered away in the murram grass; seabirds squabbled over the waves; everything was as it should be on an ordinary day.

A water-filled sponge was pressed to my lips and I drank eagerly, separating parched tongue from the roof of my mouth, glorying in the sweetness of the moisture, in the cessation of an unreal agony. Now it was merely painful. Worse was the knowledge that sooner or later I would tell them anything they wanted to know. The stakes they had used to anchor my bonds had been loosened by my struggles; they hammered them in again, deeper this time.

Domino’s voice whispered in my ear. ‘The name, bitch. The bastard who was with you when you took the Castlemaid. Quick now, or there’s a week of this in store for you.’

I opened my eyes and saw Sickle, impassive-faced. He was less obvious about his enjoyment of my pain. Sickle, fellow halfbreed, professional torturer. Professional… I gambled with the life of the one man I had ever loved.

‘Tor Ryder. Tor Ryder—at
The Drunken Plaice.’
I stumbled over the name.
Beloved. Forgive me.

The silence seemed to last too long.

Then Domino asked, ‘Well?’

And Sickle shook his head. ‘Nah. She’s too good for that.
He
reckons she’s in Keeper service. They only employ the best. And she’s a halfbreed.’ He gave a cynical laugh. ‘You wouldn’t know what that means, Dom, but I do. Abandoned at birth. Left to die in some gutter somewhere. Nine in ten halfbreeds never make it to adulthood on islandoms other than this one; only the tough ones get as far as she and I have. For some reason she wants us to go after this Ryder—it’s either a trap of some kind, or it’s a false trail. A lover who spurned her, maybe. She wouldn’t give up the correct name after one bout with the blood-demons. Not this lass.’ He grinned at me and dropped the blood-demons he had been holding into the wounds on my body.

I floated in pain, shouting out for everyone I had ever known, whimpering for forgiveness, calling on a God I had never believed in. The colours came: reds and oranges, burning my eyeballs. I was dismembered, my pieces lying in the sun to be desiccated and sold. I was scrabbling for food thrown in the backways of The Hub when I was five; resisting the sexual advances of an older boy when I was six; fighting the delusions of fever in a vermin-infested tomb in a cemetery when I was seven; having my womb irreparably scarred when I was thirteen; stabbing the man who had raped me in Bethany when I was fourteen; earning my passage to Fen Island by sleeping with a stinking captain of a fisher a few days later; selling my soul to the Keepers in order to keep my body alive when I was fifteen…

You were right, Niamor. Life’s shit.

Flame, sweet Flame, can you survive a little longer…

I have to die.

No one can live with this pain.

I don’t want life on these terms.

That water’s good…

I’ll give you the name, just kill me.

Syr-aware Duthrick. (God, how he’d hate the downgrading!). The Keeper Syr-councillor. Tell the dunmaster, I don’t care. (He probably won’t believe in an Awarefolk Councillor anyway, but who knows.) Just kill me.

‘No, you big bitch, not yet. We haven’t finished…’

Beloved…

###

An eternity of pain is a long time.

Long enough to bore even those who enjoy the watching of it.

They tired of their game, especially when I drifted in and out of consciousness, robbing them of their triumph, especially when they had to refix my bonds again and again as I struggled. They threw away the blood-demons and began to taunt me with descriptions of other tortures they had in store for me, agonies so vile I couldn’t conceive that it would be possible to endure them. For them, half the enjoyment was to savour the victim’s dread.

I wasn’t sure whether it was the same day, but anyway, the sun was setting over the dunes. The tethered sea-ponies came out of the water to lie intertwined on the sand, licking each other and enjoying the rest now that the heat had gone from the sun. Their green hides were tinged with the pink of sunset. Sickle threw a bucket of seawater over me, washing away the sand and blood. The sting of it in my wounds might almost have been pleasant after the hell of the blood-demons, if I hadn’t known that it was just the prelude to more pain.

I dreaded all right, but I was lucky. They never did get around to the next instalment they’d had in mind.