WindLegends Saga 9: WindRetriever (32 page)

The man Chaim sought was sleeping soundly, one arm flung out to the empty side of the wide bed, the other resting lightly across his belly. The faint sound of deep, regular breathing filled the room.

Glancing back down the corridor, Chaim motioned the men who had accompanied him to Abbadon Fortress to join him. He held his breath as the first of the two started down the long corridor. When he was certain the men were moving as cautiously and prudently as possible, their leader slipped unnoticed into the room of the man they had come to Abbadon to take.

Soundlessly, two dark figures joined Chaim in the room at the top of the fortress. No one spoke. They each knew what had to be done. Moving as one entity, they crept up to the bed as stealthily as they had been practicing for weeks and positioned themselves: one man on the left side of the bed, one at the foot, and one on the right. Three sets of eyes fastened on the sleeping man and held.

Chaim eased his right hand into the voluminous pocket of his burnoose and pulled out a small vial. From the man across the bed from him, he reached out to take a folded cloth. With precise care, Chaim uncorked the vial and turned the top of it over the cloth he held in his left hand.

The liquid turned his fingers cold as it flowed onto the cotton material and saturated the cloth.

When enough of the solution had covered the cloth, Chaim re-corked the vial and slid it back into his pocket. Glancing across to the man on the other side of the bed, Chaim nodded curtly. Then after turning his attention to the man at the foot, Chaim reached down so that his right hand could gently grasp the left wrist of the sleeper.

Very, very carefully, Chaim lifted that limp, relaxed wrist and brought it up to the pillow beside the sleeping man's head. There was no resistance, no sound, no movement at all from their target. Even when Chaim's right knee came up to dip the mattress, there was no reaction from the man on the bed. It wasn't until the cloth was jammed over his mouth and nose that the sleeper awoke with a grunt of surprise and instant action.

With a savage jerk, Conar reacted to the confinement that had awakened him. The hands which held both his arms and his ankles were strong, powerful, ungiving. The hand which covered the lower portion of his face had cut off his air and a portion of his brain screamed at him that whoever had come into his bedchamber were intent on smothering him. His head was pressed painfully into the pillow, his vision obscured from a fold of cloth clamped over his nose, but he fought the hard holds on him, trying to twist away from the vicious holds on his arms and legs. It wasn't until he heard the low, grating whisper that he realized that murder, at least not immediate Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 143

murder, was not what these men were about. Swiftly going from being afraid of dying from suffocation to being drugged from some unknown potion, Conar clamped his lips tightly closed and refused to draw air into his aching lungs.

"Breathe!" he heard the man who had straddled him demand. "Breathe!" The hand clamped down over his nose and mouth shifted a little. "Breathe it in, boy!"

Conar twisted to his right, felt a bony knee jamming into the soft part of his upper left arm as he was pinned to the bed. His vision watered from the pain of it and he sucked in a shallow breath, wishing he hadn't for immediately the cloying stench of whatever was on the rag burned his nostrils, penetrated swiftly and deeply into the back of his throat. He choked on the fumes, struggling to arch his body off the bed, to rid himself of the hand on his face and acutely aware of a smell that had managed to invade his very being with the swiftness of a loosened arrow.

"Breathe, damn it!" the man hovering over him hissed. "Breathe this shit in!"

His lips were stinging from the press of the liquid against his mouth. His world cantered off-kilter, righted, then slid violently away again as the light around him, what little light came in through the high, opened window slits, grew dim.

"Damn it, breathe, you little bastard!" he heard someone shouting at him. Then the sound faded, seemed to recede very slowly, drawn out into one long, creeping command. The fierce male voice that was ordering him to breathe in the suffocating fumes seemed to be coming from somewhere far, far away.

"Hit him!" another voice whispered loudly. "In the belly. He'll breathe!"

The hand covering his mouth let up on its pressure and the fumes burned his eyes so badly Conar squeezed them shut. He finally recognized the smell and as the knowledge registered, his struggles increased.

"Ether!" his befuddled and nearly-numb mind screamed at him. "That's ether on the rag!

Don't breathe it. Don't dare breathe it!"

A hard fist drove into his gut with the power of a battering ram and Conar could not stop himself from doing it. It was a reflective action—gasping air when intense pain strikes and you are ill-prepared for it. The stifling stench, the brutal pressure clamped down on his face, the savage hands holding his flailing arms and bucking feet still, the demands to breathe, all combined to defeat him, to bring about his capitulation with a speed that left him cursing whatever god had abandoned him. He tried one last time to twist away, failed to gain his freedom, and then instinct, the old fear of suffocating, the claustrophobic terror of his childhood, the overwhelming need to live, to breathe, made him draw the ether deep into his lungs.

The light exploded in his head and he felt himself slipping irrevocably away from the tethers that had bound him to earth.

"That's it, boy," someone said. "Just breath it in. Nice and slow. Nice and deep."

The amused, and to Conar's slowly disintegrating mind, relieved, voice, was coming from the next galaxy, another universe, through the vast coldness of space to draw him upward.

"There you go," he heard as all the light in his own world began to ebb. "That's it. Just breathe."

He felt himself relaxing, felt the peace and contentment such drugs had once given him long ago, settling again on him to weigh him down, to press him into the cottony folds of pleasant intoxication. Although the rag was still pressed firmly to his face, he could see over the cloth and looked up dreamily into a face that did not seem unkind, into eyes that did not seem intent on murdering him.

"One more whiff," the man above him said in a pleasant voice. "One good, long whiff, Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 144

boy."

With supreme indifference, a total lack of concern for his own well being, Conar drew in a long, sustained, easy breath and the light snapped completely away from him.

"Sweet dreams, Your Grace," the man said, chuckling.

Conar felt the pressure on his face give way to cool, sweet night air. He was aware of his head falling to one side, of the restraints on his arms and ankles giving way to strong, powerful arms which lifted him effortlessly from the bed. He was shifted against a wide, hard-as-steel chest, his head hanging down over one massive arm, his legs dangling uselessly across another.

"Check the corridor, Kanan," the man holding him whispered.

"All clear."

Those were the last words Conar could remember hearing until he came partially awake in the back of a rocking wagon, his body dripping with sweat from the covers thrown carelessly over him.

"He's coming to," he heard a man say.

"Here," another man said. "Give him some of this. He'll go back to sleep."

He felt his head being lifted, smelled the sweet, intense aroma of cherries as something tepid and tart was poured down his lax throat. Instantly, his mind reacted to the smell and the taste and his drooping eyes flew open.

"
No
!" he whispered hoarsely, weakly. "Don't!"

The man above him either did not hear his protest or simply chose to ignore it. More of the sweet cherry liquid was poured into his mouth.

Conar gagged, trying to spit out the potion, but the man who was hunkered down beside him in the bed of the wagon, slapped a hand over Conar's mouth and held it there, pinching closed his nostrils so he had no choice but to swallow the liquid.

"It won't kill you," the man said in an exasperated voice. "It will only make you sleep."

"No," Conar protested, tears coming into his eyes. "No ten …."

"Give him another slug of it," someone ordered in a grumpy voice.

"Please?" Conar begged, trying to move his limp head away from the hand which buried itself in his hair to anchor his head still. "You mustn't ... I'm ...."

The taste of cherries, a taste Conar would hate for the rest of his life, spread over his taste buds, invaded his mouth and slipped insidiously down his throat. He gagged, managing to twist his head away with a supreme effort.

"We aren't trying to kill you!" the man snapped at him.

Conar's last thought as the tenerse, its wild cherry taste as evil as a viper's hit, claimed the Serenian's mind with its velvet-clad poison and spread rapidly through his system.

"Oh, god," Conar cried, tears falling hopelessly from his eyes. "Please god, no."

The bright sunlight streaming in through the back of the wagon, beneath the canopy of its cover, seemed to dim as though a dense cloud had passed over the sun. If it had not been for the intense, unyielding heat, Conar would have thought rain was headed their way.

"We aren't trying to kill you, I told you!"

No, Conar thought as he began to sink down beneath the waves of oblivion. It might not be his abductors intent to murder him, but they might as well do it anyway for the tenerse, if such a large dose didn't kill him outright, would surely destroy what was left of his world.

Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 145

He woke in a place he didn't know and knew he'd never been. Even the smells surrounding him were unknown. There was a faint tinge of muskiness about the place where he lay and he eased his head over so that his cheek rested against something cool and soft. A pillow, smelling slightly musty and old, caressed his face and he snuggled his spinning head into the quilted material. Dust tickled his nostrils and he reached up to rub his nose.

His hand trembled and felt weak. His legs felt heavy, numb, and he was afraid they would not sustain him when he tried to get up. Feeling along the silken bedding on which he was lying, he managed to grab a handful of the material so that he could turn over, dragging himself to his side with an effort that cost him a gasp of pain and a world suddenly tilted off its axis.

"Sweet Merciful ...," he began, but cut himself off. The pagan god of his youth had stopped listening to him for Conar has ceased to believe in the entity. Without a star by which to guide himself, he felt even more cut off from reality, without a Supreme Being to Whom to cast his appeals, he felt more alone than he had been in years.

He was having trouble collecting his thoughts anyway. He had no idea where he was, who had kidnapped him, why, for what purpose. The men who had taken him from Abbadon hadn't seemed as though they had wanted to hurt him. Rather they had taken great pains to let him know they meant him no harm.

"I know you don't like the taste of it, Your Grace," he remembered one of them saying, "but it's for your own good. You can't be seeing where it is we're taking you." A gentle hand had smoothed back Conar's damp hair.

The tenerse, he thought with a sinking heart. They had poured spoonful after spoonful of tenerse down his unwilling throat. How much of the stuff had they given him? He knew there had been several, more than he should have been given. But he didn't think they knew that. Somehow he knew that had they known how much of a danger the potion was to him, they would have blindfolded him instead.

Pulling himself half-erect, he fought the wild tumbling of the room, the jerky lights crinkling behind his closed lids. Nausea leapt up his throat to gag him and he coughed, but nothing came up. Not even the bitter bile, the taste of which he had become use to of late. Carefully, very carefully, he opened his eyes and was surprised that he could see reasonably well. At least his sight was no worse than it had been before his attackers had struck.

Somewhere in the depths of the place where he was being kept, he heard doors slamming, loud male voices shouting angrily. He could make out the unmistakable stamp of booted feet and his heart began to race.

"Get up," he told himself. "You've got to get up and get out of here."

With every ounce of his waning strength, he levered himself up off the pallet and sat, heaving, his breath coming in pants of pain as his head began to instantly throb with white-hot agony. The pain was almost too much to bear and yet somehow he forced himself up to a semi-erect position. He stood, wavering, his equilibrium suffering tremendously with the effort, his hands pressed tightly to his temples. It took a moment to simply put one foot ahead of the other and when he did, he found his right leg asleep, resistant to his brain's command to walk. He pounded the offending appendage with his fist, felt nothing as his hand struck his thigh and cursed softly. But he put the matter out of his mind and half-walked, half-dragged himself toward the only Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 146

door in the room.

Suddenly, the light in the room grew very dim, brightened, then grew dim again as though someone were turning down an oil lamp, but there was no one else in the room with him and there was no lamp, either. He stopped where he was, in the center of a large chamber bare of everything but the pallet on which he'd been lying. Confused, not yet concerned about the sudden shift in light intensity surrounding him, he turned his head to look around him. Blinking against the shadowy confines of the room, he took a hesitant step forward, dragging his right leg behind him, believing that at any moment, his balance would give way.