"Are you all right, Storm?" du Mer softly questioned.
Slowly, Storm turned to look at Roget, seemed to swallow a hard lump of emotion before he could speak. "How?" he asked, his voice little more than a breath.
"A long story."
Storm Jale had been third in command of the Elite Guard, behind Thom Loure and Marsh Edan. He was a physically powerful man with thick corded muscles and a belly hard enough to brag about bouncing a gold coin off of. His thick chestnut hair and dark eyes were direct and honest; his lean jaw was strong and gave evidence that the man had a sensual nature to his powerful build and physical abilities. He was not given to being overly sensitive, but he did have a strong sense of honor that often caused him trouble, for his innate honesty meant more to him than anything else. He had cried only once in his life and that was when the young Princess Nadia—Conar's daughter—had been found murdered. Now, his eyes flooded with tears. "I have all the time in the world to hear it."
* * *
Conar lay on his belly for well over a week, his back red, pulpy, and oozing with pus. He drifted in and out of consciousness, crying out with pain and raging fever, incoherently begging those who cared for him, anyone, to take his life. He pleaded to be set free, to be allowed to fly from the earthly bonds that kept him captive in agony. He wept, and they wept with him.
The second week, his back scabbed over and the healing went well enough that they gently turned him so he lay on the ruin of his tortured flesh. He was still dangerously close to death, but each man who sneaked in to see him—more and more each day, despite the Commandant's orders forbidding it—was pleasantly surprised to see his shallow breathing, for the Healer had not thought he would live after this brutal beating.
"How is he?" Roget asked the Healer at the start of the third week.
"He wakes for longer periods, but isn't aware of what is going on. It's the gods-be-damned fever."
Shalu cast a quick look at the Healer. He had come into the hut with du Mer. "Is there no medicines for this malady?"
"This fever is unique to Tyber's Isle." Xander Hesar ran a tired hand over his eyes. "If I had access to Hermit's root, I might be able to lessen the severity of the illness, but there is no way for me to obtain such a medicine here."
Shalu nodded. "We call it the healing tree in Necroman." He smiled. "If you brew the beans of that plant with ale, you see visions."
Roget grinned. "I've heard of it."
"He sees enough visions without giving him more," Xander grumbled. He sat in a chair. He was exhausted, but thankful the Commandant had not stopped the others from coming in to help him. At least the poor boy was aware that people who cared about him were near. Xander knew that knowledge had gone a long way in helping to heal Conar's tortured spirit, if not his body.
"You think he dreams?" Roget asked.
Xander nodded wearily. "I know he does. He mumbles such horrible, pitiful things. Things that would make a strong man cry."
"There will be a new shipment of men at the end of the year," Shalu said to no one in particular, looking at Conar's face. How Shalu knew such things, no one dared to ask.
"Do you know who?" Roget inquired.
"They will be connected to him. One in particular, but I don't remember his name." He glanced at Roget and his voice lowered to a soft whisper. "A Sentinel."
Roget whistled softly. "Whose?"
"I have no idea, but I feel a great change coming."
"You'd better hope a change comes," Xander growled. "I don't know how much more of this abuse the boy can stand." He turned as Conar began to mumble in his sleep.
Xander adjusted the covers over his patient's thin body. He didn't like the flush on the young man's face, nor the dotting of thick perspiration on his brow and upper chest. "Fetch me some fresh water?" he asked, looking at Roget. "He needs to be bathed again."
Roget nodded, cast a quick glance at Shalu and left.
Conar wasn't even aware of who tended him. He was locked in his own private hell where his skin was sloughing off in great peels. He heard things, but the words had no meaning to the distant, muted, hollow sounds. Hands tenderly stroked him, and for that he was grateful; he needed human contact in the red darkness in which he lay dying.
He was imprisoned inside his own mind. Thinking, dreaming, remembering. Memories took him far away from his nightmare world of leering faces and grasping, hurting hands. They took him through green-filled meadows beside silent silver streams, over high-crested mountain peaks steeped in white crunchy snow, down into lush valleys strewn with clover and daisies, through cool green forests alive with the thick smell of pine and fir, over warm sand dunes sprinkled with wind-moving sea oats, down along black sand beaches with cresting waves of white foam.
But all the time he dreamt, journeyed from one more beautiful place to the next, a serpent slithered around his ankles. He was helpless to keep it at bay, to stay the ravaging destruction with which it tore apart his life, his world, his soul. Leaving him torn and bleeding, alone and unable to protect himself.
Then his memories, his pleasant dreams altered, began to metamorphose. Memories gave way to nightmares, intermingling, blending into one another.
Here first was the battered, abused boy-child, beaten and ceremoniously locked inside a black marble crypt to remind him that life was not eternal. Then came the beaten, tortured man, lashed and entombed in a wooden coffin, shut away from the rest of the living world to remind him he no longer existed in that world. Images of the priest then jailer, arm raised high above his head, striking with a belt then a cat-'o-nine, the sounds of a small boy crying in terror, of a grown man screaming in pain.
The scars of his battered childhood lay just beneath the surface of the scars of his manhood. He had been able to ward off the priest's blows with his child's ineffectual hands tied with silken cord no more than he had been able to deflect the jailer's fists with hands restrained in heavy manacles. His childhood had been a nightmare horror of vicious, well-timed abuse, ruthless exposures to the very thing that terrified him most. Dark, confined spaces where monsters lurked to snatch his breath away. His manhood had ended in a torrent of pain caused by the one thing he had come to fear even more than the demons of childhood. His final, total separation from all he had once been.
At the age of six, he had learned to expect the pain his identity could bring him; now, at whatever age he was—and he truly didn't know, nor care—he had learned to expect the pain his non-identity could cause. It was that pain which hurt him more, for now, in his own mind, he was what Appolyon Kiel had labeled him—nothing.
He could hear himself whimpering with hopelessness. But was it the child who cried so piteously, or the man? It had been the crying that awakened him. He was no longer dreaming. He was awake, apparently living his nightmare.
How long have I been awake? he thought dismally. A day? A week? A month? A year? How long do such nightmares last or do they ever really end? If the dreaming stopped, would the nightmare end? Would the dreamer end?
He willed the nightmare to end; begged the dreams to go away so the nightmare would leave him in peace.
"He's giving up," Shalu told Xander. "He wants to die."
"He'd be better off dead!" the man left by Appolyon to guard the prisoner insisted.
Shalu looked at the guard for the first time. "You think that's good, do you?"
"I know it is!" the man bellowed. "Do you really see what they've done to him? How they've broken him? How can a man want to live like that?" Tears crept into the guard's face as he glared at the Necroman. "I wouldn't want to; would you?"
"No," came the darkman's honest reply, "but then again, I'm not the Prince of the Wind."
The guard's eyes jerked toward Conar. Uncertainty flooded his face.
"I've noticed, Kirke, you don't mistreat him like some of the others. Why?" Xander asked.
The guard shrugged. "I don't know."
"You don't because you know it's wrong." Shalu stood, carefully
watching the guard's face. "You know he doesn't deserve to be here and you know what's been done to him was done because of who he was, not what he did. That is why you say they instead of we when you speak of the evil done this boy."
Kirke's body went rigid as he looked from the Necroman to the Healer and back again. He glanced at Conar, stared for a moment at the floor, then looked at Xander. "He is my Overlord and always will be."
"Do you want him to die?" Shalu asked.
Kirke lowered his eyes. "No."
"Then help us to help him," Xander pleaded. He pulled a chair close to Conar's cot, took one fevered hand in his own and stroked it. "We're here with you, son. You aren't alone anymore."
Shalu took Conar's other hand. Kirke moved to the table and laid a reluctant hand on his Overlord's shoulder. "Stay with us, Your Grace. You be needed here."
"No!" the shout came, startling the men. Appolyon Kiel stood in the doorway, fat face livid with fury, jowls wobbling. His pudgy hands clenched into fists. He stomped into the room with enough force to rattle the rafters. "How dare you?" he screamed, his bloodless lips drawn back over snarling teeth. "You will not call him that name!"
Xander stood and faced the Commandant. "Do you want him to die?"
"He is to receive no recognition here, Hesar!"
"He is the Prince of the Wind! You can not deny that, Kiel!"
"He is a traitor! He is nothing!"
"He is dying!"
"Then let him die!" Appolyon spun around, fixed Kirke Lanier with a fierce, deadly gleam. "Take these men out of here."
"I have to care for—" Xander began.
"I will have other men care for your patient! Until he is on his feet again, you and that darkie will be kept in the Indoctrination Hut and no one will be allowed in here except those I choose!"
"Does that include that rabid dog, Lydon Drake?" Xander snapped, his body trembling with fury. "Men like that who will gladly put a dagger through the boy's ribs?"
Appolyon violently shook his head. "I'll see to it he gets all the care necessary, but no such tender treatment like you are trying to give him!"
Xander walked to the man, held his insane gaze. "If he dies, you'd better have a gods-be-damned good excuse ready for Kaileel Tohre!"
Appolyon glared his hatred at Hesar. "If he dies, I doubt you'll be around to know about what Tohre does to me! I'll hang you myself!"
Several guards entered with pikes and swords at the ready. Their blank faces and hard expressions were enough to tell Xander and Shalu they would kill if told to do so.
"Take these men to the Indoctrination Hut," the Commandant ordered.
Despite his yelling fury and struggles, Xander was dragged away, the Necroman along with him. The last thing either heard was Conar's whimper of fear.
Chapter 4
* * *
Roget, Thom, Storm and Shalu looked up from their bathing to the five guards exiting the medical hut. Behind them stumbled a weak, pitifully thin young man whose leg irons were once more in place and whose shoulders sagged in defeat.
"Sweet Alel," Thom whispered, hating the sight even more after witnessing it now for two years. "I can not bear to see that."
"At least he's alive," Roget remarked.
"But for how long?" Storm ground out. "Five years it's been! Five long years! Haven't they done enough to him?" His face was tight with fury.
Roget sighed. It had been more than six weeks since Conar had suffered still another of Lydon's brutal beatings. It had taken the young man all that length of time to get over the savagery of the attack and the fever that almost killed him. Du Mer knew another such beating would be the last Conar would ever suffer.
"What do we do, Roget?" Jah-Ma-El asked. He sat with his head bowed, his hands clenched together. Baths were for fools, and although he sat with the men as they took theirs, he sat well enough away so no random water could find him.
"I wish I knew," du Mer answered.
For the next few days the guards worked Conar as they had before his bout with the fever. He was up long before the others; still up long after his fellow inmates were abed. He was kept away from any human contact and not one word was ever spoken to him, not in angry command or in insult. Not once in all that time did he lift his eyes above waist height to any of those who guarded him. He went about his work, head down, shoulders drooping. He he ate food with little awareness that he did so. If he had to relieve himself, he would stand perfectly still until a rock was thrown at his feet, giving him permission to walk a few feet away to do what needed to be done.
It was at the beginning of his second week back to work that he was directed to a large pile of boulders that had fallen from the tallest bluff during the night. He was made to understand he was to remove them from where they obstructed the pathway leading to the vegetable garden behind the equipment hut. He hefted two of the smaller ones, rolling them away, but the third was heavier and he strained hard to move it. He tried again and again to shove the boulder, but all he managed to do was dig his bare feet deeper in the shifting sand.
Sweat glistened on his upper torso, ran down his straining face. He heaved, gasping for breath in the still, dry desert air, but he made no headway. He stopped, leaning his head against the hot surface of the rock, and took a breath, and tried again. Shoving with all his strength, he grappled with the boulder, still getting nowhere, but refusing to give up. He pushed, pulled, and slammed his shoulder into the rock. He tried to circle it with his arm, to lift it free, but still it wouldn't move.
The guards watched him. At first, they smirked when he had tried to lift the boulder, but the longer he worked at it, almost with a fevered intensity that bordered on insanity, they grew worried. They looked at his face, hot and sweating and red with anger, and glanced at one another.
"Move," Conar grunted.
He dug his toes into the hot sand, strained with all his might to push the boulder, but the harder he pushed, the deeper wedged it became. He was soon knee-deep in shifting sand, the waistband of his breeches soaked with sweat. His hair was plastered to his forehead in long, greasy strands and his teeth were drawn back in a feral snarl.
"Damn you, move!" he spat, his voice croaking and rusted.
"Get the Commandant," the guard in charge told one of the others.
Conar put his arms around the rock, embraced it, felt the rough surface digging into his bare chest. He heaved against it, slammed his body into it, felt his flesh scraping, gouging. "Goddamn you, move!" he shouted, doubling his fists, bringing them down on the rock with enough force to split his skin. "Move!"
Appolyon hurried from his hut, hearing the one word shouted again and again. He heard meaty thuds as Conar's fists pounded the rock.
The guards were standing with their mouths open as they watched Conar pummeling the rock with every ounce of fury and strength he could muster. His lips bled where they ground against his teeth. His face was as red as blood and his body quivered with fury.
"I told you to move, rock!" He kicked out at it with such force, it knocked him backward. Scrambling wildly to his feet, he put his shoulder to the rock and shoved with all his strength.
"Stop him!" Appolyon shouted. "Don't let him do that!"
Two guards stepped forward, almost afraid to put hands on the young man. He had turned a fierce, insane glare to them and was actually snarling.
"Holy Alel," one guard mumbled. "He's foaming at the mouth!"
Pink foam dribbled from the left side of McGregor's mouth. He was gasping so hard, flecks of the foam sprayed outward from his drawn-back lips. When the guards tried to drag him away, he lashed out at them with such fury, they yelped and got as far away from him as possible.
"Kill me!" he shouted, crouching. "Kill me and be done with it!"
The Commandant saw the wild, insane look in Conar's eyes. There was nothing human in those eyes, nothing human in the rage on the snarling face. There was nothing in the way he was positioned that would have named him human, either. He lo
oked like an animal, cornered, held at bay, and looked dangerous.
"Circle him," Appolyon said quietly, "and bring him down before he hurts himself."
"Look at him, Commandant! He ain't rational!"
Appolyon could see that. He was somewhat pleased, for he had accomplished what he had set out to do years earlier—he had mentally crippled Conar McGregor. "Just bring him down. He'll have to be tied up, caged, but—"
"The hell he will!"
Appolyon turned to face Xander Hesar. The Healer had a group of men behind him—some inmates, some guards, all with fury etched on their hard faces.
"The only thing that's going to be done with him will be done in the medical hut!" Xander snarled. He held up a rolled parchment. "This is a direct edict from Kaileel Tohre!"
A stabbing fear shot through the fat man's gut, but he would not let it show on his face. "Where'd you get that?"
"It came with the last shipment of prisoners this morning!" He thrust the parchment at Appolyon. "If you can't read it, Commandant, I'll tell you what it says!"
Appolyon snatched the parchment from the Healer and unrolled it. When he looked up, hatred infused his face.
"Do you dare to ignore a special edict from Tohre?" Xander asked. "It says the boy is to be removed from that infernal cage immediately! He is to be allowed to mingle with the rest of the prison population!"
"Tohre must have finally divined what you've been doing to the boy," Shalu Taborn snapped. "And he has put a stop to it!"
More inmates and guards joined the group. A few were new arrivals, having been processed into the colony only the day before. The new arrivals were curious to know what was going on. One in particular, an older man with a mane of thick white-blond hair, pushed aside some of his fellow inmates and strode confidently to the front. His pale blue eyes swept over Appolyon with distaste, lingered for a moment on Xander, and blinked with surprise before moving on to the young man crouching near a cluster of fallen rocks.
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