by Carol Berg
Suppressing a smile, I opened my palms in invitation. My gards wreathed my fingers in sapphire light.
He used his small lamp to light the larger one on my table. Then he squatted beside me and reached for my right arm, hesitating only at the last moment. “May I?”
In the interest of our partnership, I suppressed my revulsion and allowed him to take my arm. He peered at my wrist and turned it over. “It seems you have powerful kin, Valen, and we don’t quite believe your claim that these marks happened by chance.”
I followed his gaze. The grass outlined so delicately on my forearm and fingers might have been sea grass as I assumed. But among the fronds that curved along the inside of my wrist, where I had not seen it before, stretched a long, lean cat with a snarling face. I thumped the back of my head against the wall.
Ronila would surely know Stian’s mark.
His long brow drawn tight in consideration, Gildas released my arm and returned to the vicinity of the door. “Something is not right about your presence here, friend. I am told that you may have acquired certain…capabilities…along with these Danae markings, skills that might contribute to an escape. We can’t have that.”
“Did you forget your leash?” I said bitterly. “You own me now.”
“I’ve not forgotten.” Leaning in deceptive ease against the door, he tossed a fist-sized pouch across the room. It landed heavily in my lap. The smell near set me howling. “Because you lied to me, I think we must restructure our agreement slightly. I want you to work your nasty little enchantment this afternoon.”
A stray wind gust snapped my hair, stinging against my cheek. “But it’s not time yet. If I do it between times…”
“…your need will grow stronger and demand to be serviced more often. Alas, that’s true.” He cocked his head. “But it only accelerates a condition that exists in you already. Do it now, or Jakome will introduce our young friend to the doulon.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “Iero’s holy name, Gildas. You would not…”
But whyever would I imagine that he would balk at this depravity? No one would ever fault Gildas de Pontia for failure of insight. His very posture, so like a strutting rooster, told me he knew that of all the torments he might promise, this one I could not abide.
Rage and hatred only fueled the need lurking in my veins. I struggled to form a plan. To attack him.
To delay. To run. But each solution would forfeit lives more important than mine. One more doulon would not kill me, only embed the craving deeper. What did he plan that called for so strong a control of me?
“You lied to me, as well. You’ve Ronila to take you into Aeginea. Why do you need me?”
“So the clever sorcerer has guessed the crone’s name,” he said. For one moment I glimpsed the true man—greedy, prideful, jealous—the man who had grown up shamed by his poor and ignorant family. Then he slipped on his smiling mask again. “Let’s say I enjoy watching you grovel. Do it now, Valen. And don’t think to throttle me or toss the bag through the windows. Without my password, Jakome will not open this door. When he informs Sila, you will bleed out your remaining life in ways most unpleasant. And then he’ll see that Jullian loses his soul to this perversion.” He shrugged and screwed up his mouth in distaste. “You must understand, I intend to live in this world on my own terms or none, and you are necessary to my plan. Do as I say, and Sila will not know the ugly truth about the abomination she has chosen to…plow her fields. We shall merely proceed with our bargain as before.”
I knew well the determination to find something better than the life one was born to. Not even Voushanti would be so dangerous a foe as Gildas. I wanted to tear out the blackguard’s heart.
Hands shaking, I set out the needle, mirror, and thread and spilled out a pile of hard black seeds beside them. I was a doulon slave already. Gildas and Jakome had but fed tinder to the coals that Saverian had warned would ever burn in me. To do it once more…truly it could not make ridding myself of the doulon’s yoke worse than what I’d gone through after twelve years’ enslavement. I just needed to retain as much sense as possible. Control it. And before they could force me to do this a third time, Jullian and I would be away from here.
Gildas watched from the doorway. Using my arm to shield the work from the wind, I crushed the seeds with the bottom of the wooden cup. I tried not to inhale as I worked, but by the time they were powder, my heart was galloping. I dragged the lamp close.
“Wait,” he said. “Before you begin, double that amount.”
I stared at the pile of seeds in horror. Double…never had I known any doulon slave who used so much at once. “Fires of Deunor, Gildas, you’ll leave me no mind! I’ve told you I’ll do as you wish.”
“I want this leash secure.” Why would he doubt? Unless Ronila had told him something…
I recalled his anxious glances into the corner when he took me to Sila’s room…his annoyance that Sila was late for the meeting. He had known Ronila was there. The old woman had not contradicted his pronouncement about Danae males and their need for pain, though she had grown up in Aeginea and knew better.
I poured out more seeds, crushed them, imagining each as one of Gildas’s bones.
Ronila had no use for Sila’s vision of regeneration and neither did Gildas. At least for the moment, they were allies.
I pricked my finger with the silver needle. It was not so insulting a discomfort as Jakome’s knife, but the pain of this exercise ran much deeper than my skin. I would give much to believe that the remasti had given me a higher tolerance for the perverse enchantment.
My blood dripped into the crushed nivat, the scents mingling. Desire crept upward from my toes, inward from my fingers. “Gildas, please…” My voice was already hoarse with need.
“Remember, I’ve watched you do this. I’ll know if you don’t complete it correctly.”
I held the little mirror glass upright, angled so that I could see the fumes rise. Between two fingers of the alter hand, I gripped the length of linen thread, dangling the end into the sodden little heap. Gildas would expect that. But he didn’t know why I used the thread. Thus he didn’t stop me when my last two fingers made contact with the mound. To touch the paste as it heated drew off some of its potency, spreading the infusion over the preparation time. A small difference only, but perhaps enough to keep me sane. I released magic to flow through my fingers and down the thread.
My gaze fixed on the ensorcelled mirror, as the otherwise invisible fumes rose from the bubbling black paste. Wind doused Gildas’s lamp and threatened the shielded table lamp. Sweat dribbled down my cheeks, down my spine, as dark fire prickled my hidden fingers and surged up my arm. The locks snapped on the door.
Ought to look. Ought to listen…to refine the lock spell. Ought to stop… But I had gone too far. Even when the damnable mirror glass reflected the ruddy young face and the widening eyes of Ardran blue, I could not stop.
“Your protector is occupied for the moment, lad,” said Gildas. “Did you not know of his little problem?
”
“What does he, Brother? Is it some pureblood magic?” Innocent still.
Had I owned a mind or conscience just then, I would have wept at Jullian’s wondering stare. As it was, my arm quivered with the doulon’s burning, and all I could think was, Please, gods, make it hurt more.
Gildas chuckled. “I’m sure he’ll explain when he’s done. Tell him that Malena’s forked blade can seal the spell, if he can but wait till nightfall to soothe all his lusts together. Then the priestess and I will both be happy.”
His voice swelled in my ear. “You will be my slave, halfbreed, and I will not be a kind master.”
Whispers and laughs faded. Friends…concerns…dangers faded. The world faded. Eventually the fumes ceased their rising, and I let the mirror glass fall. As my fingers scooped the hot paste onto my greedy tongue, my other hand groped about the table as if it had a mind of its own. Glass will cut…hot oil will burn. I needed pain.<
br />
The doulon itself carved paths of agony from eyes to heart to limbs. My vision blurred. My back spasmed as if an Aurellian torturer had hung me from his hook and dragged me behind his chariot. Every nerve stretched taut and snapped like drawn bowstrings, launching nets that encompassed every part and portion of my body.
Not enough. Not enough. Gods…I did not want to be this thing.
I swept my arm across the table. The lamp crashed to the floor; the oil pooled and flared. The black paste clogged my gullet, slid downward, and seared my empty stomach. Still the enchantment would not resolve, but kept building…waiting. I choked and gasped and shook, hammered my fists on the table, then gripped its edge as if to snap the oaken plank in twain. I needed more.
“Brother Valen? What’s wrong? Why do you look like that?”
“Strike me…please…use anything!” Lest I be driven to roll in burning lamp oil or gash my hands with shards of glass, damaging myself beyond recovery.
Wind tearing at his hair, Jullian backed away and pressed himself to the door.
“Do it now, boy! Make it hurt!” My heart rattled my ribs, threatening to burst. My lungs strained for air enough to feed the raging power of enchantment. I screamed at him. “By holy Iero’s hand, strike me! I beg you!”
His twelve-year-old limbs had done their share of labor around the abbey. He broke the second chair over my head. It was enough.
A bolt of joyless ecstasy shot through my head and heart and gut, wiping clean the canvas of agony, settling the shards of life and mind into their proper places. I roared in release and rapture.
As ever, the sensation abandoned me as quickly as it had come, and I collapsed across the table, dull, lead-limbed, sick. Only this time my head and shoulders felt as if I had rammed into a tree. And this time it was Jullian weeping.
Though I could not lift my head from the table, I clung to conscious thought, heeded the crackle of dying flames, the smoky stink of cheap lamp oil, the blessedly cold wind—anything to keep me sensible for one moment. The two gatzi had left the boy and me to enjoy this vileness alone.
I stretched out my hand across the table, palm up, and beckoned him nearer. “It’s all right, Archangel,” I croaked, near weeping myself when I felt him step closer. I did not deserve such trust. “You did well. Thank you. Just…give me a little time.”
He tiptoed across to the bed and sat, and I fell into blackness.
“Brother Valen.” The whisper came from a thousand quellae distant. From another world. I turned my back on it and slipped again into my sinful dreams.
“Brother Valen.” The whisper touched me again, like the soft pecking of a chick.
I reached for my wits, caution nagging that I had been unconscious much too long. Mud clogged my veins. Every pore and sinew begged for sleep, and I longed to drag my leaden limbs into a badger’s burrow and hide. From what?
“Brother Valen.” Quiet. Patient. Terrified.
Like a rain of sewage, the abasement of the day fell on my head. I located my hand and raised it, hoping he would see I was something awake. Then I turned my face to the windows, inhaling wind and cloud and winter to sweep away the detritus of sin. The sun, fallen far into the west, hid deep behind Navronne’s shroud of storm. I willed it to sear away these aches and guilts as if it were a cautery iron.
I had no more time for sleep. Soon would come nightfall and Malena. Goddess mother, even after all this, the passing thought of the hateful wench…so ripe and willing…heated my core. I had no time for that either.
I raised my head a quat or two. Blotted my mouth on the back of my hand so as not to drool before the boy. Which seemed a silly matter now he’d seen my worst. “Are you well, lad?”
“None’s harmed me.” The terse declaration spoke more description than a warmoot’s worth of tales.
Jullian, the scholarly boy who read books I would never comprehend, had no words to explain what his captors had done. What I had just done. So, Valen Lackwit, let anger banish lust and shame.
“Sorry I took so long to find you,” I said, shuddering as a howling gust billowed the shirt on my back.
“Not much of a rescuer, eh?”
“I knew you’d come.”
Needing to be still before my skull cracked, I lowered my head onto my hand, where a sea star nestled in the grass. “A few matters came up along the way. Some ugly…like what you just saw. Some wondrous…unexpected.”
“Guessed that.” The bed creaked. His sandals scuffed a step or two in my direction. I felt his eyes on my glowing arms and feet. “Are you a demon?” he said softly.
“Great gods, no. Or…I believe not.” I grinned into my hand. “I’ll show you later. Just now”—I opened my ears; no one on the stair as yet—“we need to prepare for visitors. In the chest, there’s a bag of knucklebones.”
He scrambled to the task. Before I could lift my head up again, the canvas bag sat in front of my nose, alongside Gildas’s small lamp, relit from the dying flames of the spilled oil. “Do you know about the others held captive here—Thane Stearc and Gram?” he whispered over my bent back. “They need rescuing more than me. When I heard you’d come, I thought…”
“Aye, I know of them. We’re all getting out.”
“I don’t think—” His breathing came heavy and fast. “I don’t think they could possibly—I’ve heard Thane Stearc since they brought him here. Why would they do that to anyone? They’ve kept me just down the passage from his cell. They wake me so I can hear. I pray…” His voice quivered. “I pray for him to die.”
“The pr—Gram. Have you heard him, as well?” Jullian did not know Gram’s true identity.
“Coughing. Crying out. Mumbling madness like with a fever. Gildas complains he’s dying and can’t tell them what they want.” Good to hear the boy’s touch of anger. He should be angry. “Gildas says Stearc will open the lighthouse or they’ll burn off his—”
“Doesn’t matter what the gatzé says, Jullian. We’ll get them home.” I ignored the way the room sloshed like the waves of Evaldamon and lifted my head higher where I could look at the boy, so he might believe. His aspirant’s gown had been replaced by scraggly leggings and a thin yellow tunic, belted with rope. Dirt and grease matted his red-gold hair, and his ruddy cheeks were pinched with cold and fear. But his hands held steadier than mine, and his slender jaw jutted firm, willing to work with a demon to free his friends.
“Father Abbot would be proud of you, Jullian. There’s naught you could have done to help Stearc.
Stearc himself would tell you that. The god knows it, too.”
I had once imagined Jullian to be Eodward’s youngest bastard, a Pretender to the Navron throne, hidden at Gillarine until his majority. Though I knew better now, he was well worthy of it—likely more so than any of the three men who stood in line.
“Gildas said I would stay here with you from now on, save when your…woman…came.”
“We’ve a thing or two to teach Brother Gildas.”
I fumbled Saverian’s vials from the knucklebone bag, wishing one of her medicines might help what was most wrong with me. I drained the blue vial. If we were going to be rousting dungeons, my stomach would need calming. The prince’s vial I stuck in the pouch at my waist, along with the vial of yellow broom.
On the floor the silver needle gleamed in the lamplight, and beside it lay the little mirror, cracked through the middle. The nivat bag lay soaking up the unburned lamp oil. Even shamed and sickened, I dared not touch them.
“Those things I was using…toss them through the window bars. Quickly, before I tell you different.”
“What are they?” he said, retrieving them gingerly. “I thought you were working some powerful sorcery. Or dying.”
“Something of both.”
“While I waited…I touched you…to make sure you were breathing.” Gods, he was apologizing.
“The enchantment is called the doulon, Jullian. It is a sinful weakness, a poison that enslaves the mind and body. W
hen I was scarce older than you, I used it to run away from terrible things. But the doulon itself is more terrible than any of the things I ran from. Someone may tempt you to it some day.
Gildas may. But don’t allow it. Not ever.”
I did not watch as he disposed of the implements of sin, lest I grab them away. Instead I pressed my eyeballs back into their sockets and tried to think how to go about what we needed to do. Last time Gildas had given me an excess of nivat, I had experienced recurring attacks of thickheaded confusion for most of a day. Abbot Luviar had died because of it. I could not allow that to happen again.
“Gildas says you’re to be his slave,” said the boy. “I didn’t see how he could force you.”
I shoved myself to my feet. “He won’t. Help me with this palliasse.”
Using the lamp flame to burn through the rope webbing, we unstrung half the bed and ended up with several moderate lengths of rope. I had Jullian pile the palliasse and quilts back over the half-strung frame, using the broken chair to create a hollow like a badger’s burrow at one end, while I rested my woozy head between my knees. Great gods how was I ever going to accomplish anything?
“Can you tell me what guards watch Stearc and Gram?” I asked from my odd position.
“There’s always one or two in the passage except when they all go down to beat Thane Stearc in the morning and when they…hurt…him in the evening. Nikred or Crado mostly. Both of them in the day. At night they take turns for rounds, changing at Matins and Lauds and again at Prime.” Matins—morning at midnight. Lauds was third hour, Prime sixth—the dawn hour in summer. “I try to keep the Hours here. I thought…I hoped I might help him.”
“And this torturing happens the same time every night?”
“Between Vespers and Compline…when they call the last watch but one before Matins. Crado says they like him to know when it’s coming.”
“All right.” Slowly I sat back onto my heels. The boy perched on the rumpled bed, two or three steps away, his body a wiry knot. “So tell me how the cells are laid out, if you can.”
