by Lee Ramsay
Pure white light permeated the clear stone as runic structures responded to her magic. A spherical illusion coalesced before the sorceress, allowing her to see the wriggling tails attached to hundreds of corpuscles. She sorted out the idle vacuoles from her own body with another wave of her hand, then manipulated her magic to isolate a single cell from the seminal fluid. She slid a smoky amethyst into another tube, altering the magical currents to focus the hovering image on the spermatozoon’s component materials.
Studying the building blocks of an individual in such a manner was simpler than what she had shown Sathra, as only half of the material was present. It was also far easier to manipulate and experiment with the structures in this form. Alterations to an individual’s sequences must be performed when they were very young, as attempts to modify genomic sequences after the first year invariably proved fatal; thus, the ideal method was to perform alterations pre-fertilization.
A line formed between her brows as she studied the various components comprising Tristan’s fundamental essence. Many alterations and substitutions were evident to her eye, but others were so subtle she nearly missed them. Despite centuries of study and experimentation, she had not determined what each segment of the material controlled. A significant portion of what had been manipulated appeared in those areas that remained a mystery to her.
She knew of no other nec’divinos capable of altering the very fabric of a person’s being to this extent. To prevent Terador from bastardizing her work, she had taken only the most critical of her journals and burned the rest of her research. Brilliant as Merid’s king was, she doubted he could recreate her experiments or construct a device similar to the genetea, much less achieve this degree of manipulation.
“Who are you, and what were they trying to achieve?”
Chapter 38
The hatred twisting Tristan’s gut was a living thing, a smoldering viper coiled and eager to lash out in any way it could. Its gnawing fangs envenomed his soul with loathing – for himself, his impotence, and most especially for Ankara. Each day that passed, each cruelty and indignity, stoked his fury. He fancied that, when his hate was strong enough, it would incinerate the sorceress while burning away the foulness saturating every fiber of his being.
A glacial twin, born of fear and despair, matched the fiery serpent as it constricted his soul and crushed the breath from his lungs. Though he feared the grand duchess and the torments she inflicted, he feared what he was becoming terrified him more. The ease with which he rationalized terrible choices appalled him. Each decision splintered what he believed was virtuous and robbed him of empathy.
He found it more palatable to retreat behind an insensate wall. Ankara saw beyond the callous and reveled in finding new ways to break through the barrier. She failed far less often than he wished. Servants fed him rishka whenever she claimed victory and stole horror-enriched vitality from his flesh.
Though she no longer partook, Sathra often bore witness. He saw beyond the bland expressionlessness she presented; the young woman was fascinated and furious in equal measure. Her kinswoman and mentor had found a new game to play, and delighted in the misery she inflicted on him and the idleness her pupil was forced to endure.
When the grand duchess once more presented him with the choice he had faced with Eosan and Kayla, the decision was disturbingly simple – he chose the smaller, more delicate woman to survive. He did not know the man’s name or anything about him; likewise, he knew nothing about the woman. It was better, he believed, if he did not.
Anonymity made it easier to watch the man strangle at the end of the noose. What ate his conscience was knowing the woman he saved cared for the dying man. Forced to watch him dangle, she screamed and sobbed and begged for mercy. Any satisfaction at sparing one life was poisoned by the suffering his choice inflicted.
His anguish was Ankara’s objective.
The grand duchess kept her word; having decided which person died, she allowed him and the woman to eat the provided feast. Persistent hunger and thirst were assuaged for the first time in he knew not how long. Yet the meal was tainted; the woman his choice had spared sat across from him, and he was forced to watch her alternate between bouts of wracking grief and ravenous consumption.
What Ankara spoiled with one hand, she further ruined with the other. Masked by savory flavors and starvation, Tristan belated realized his food and drink was laced with rishka’s bitterness. He recognized it only as his eating slowed. Judging from the way his unfortunate companion consumed her food, her meal was not tainted.
“Take her, Tristan,” Ankara ordered once the drug took hold, lounging in her seat with a glass of wine cupped in her palm. “On the table.”
Unable to resist the command, his body did as she commanded. The woman screamed and fought him, broken nails raking his cheek and teeth bloodying his shoulder as he brutalized her amid the meal’s ruins. Hate replaced the sorrow in her eyes, and his soul shriveled beneath their withering gaze.
“Strangle her, Tristan, but do not kill her.”
His thumbs dug into the hollow of the girl’s throat as his hands went around her neck. The woman’s face purpled and choked, and her thrashing diminished as his body spent within her. The pulse beating against his fingers grew thready and weak before his body recalled the order to spare her life.
The assault was not on the woman but on him. Ankara had found the weakness in his callous and deprived him of control to fan his hatred. She fed well on him, suckling the bite in his shoulder as the unconscious woman gasped for breath.
THROWN INTO A DARK cell together, Tristan wedged his spine into a corner to stay as far from the woman as he could. The lightlessness was a balm to his lacerated conscience, as it hid not only the bruising his body had inflicted but his shame and helplessness. A tremble shivered through him as the woman’s ragged breathing shifted from unconsciousness to a more measured, wakeful rhythm. She was aware of his presence; enough light from the torch outside the cell filtered beneath the door to lime their pale skin and glitter in her eyes.
Her voice rasped from emotion as much as the bruising his fingers had inflicted. “I do not blame you. You had no choice.”
“I could have chosen him.”
“It doesn’t matter. I will soon join him, and gladly. It is you who shall suffer. Anasha likes her games.”
A choked snuffle came from her side of the cell. He wanted to apologize, but there were no words for the pain he had been forced to inflict. Part of him wondered if he could accept her forgiveness if she provided it. He wrestled with whether he should comfort her but suspected his touch would be unwelcome.
The choice not to comfort or learn about the woman was something he came to regret, as she died in the second game Ankara forced them to play. Had he done so, he could have mourned her better.
Dushken hauled them from their cell and returned them to the room where the hanging had been conducted. The huntsmen forced them into two chairs turned to face each other, and bound them with coarse ropes. For this game, Ankara forced them to decide which would suffer torture while the other watched. She presented a torment, and they had to argue which of them should suffer; the best argument won her approval.
Though Tristan was not spared his share of beatings and cuts, the sorceress more often chose his argument over his fellow prisoner’s while critiquing the strength of his contentions.
Screams echoed from the stone walls as the woman had one ear sawed from her head with a dull knife; a Dushken held his jaw when he attempted to turn his head away. He closed his eyes against the sight of a hammer-driven chisel knocking teeth from her jaw, which caused the huntsman to pull his eyelids open with his blunt fingers. The cutting of the woman’s fingers from her hand, followed by the removal of her toes, made him retch up what food remained in his stomach.
When presented with the subsequent torture and the chance to argue who should suffer, he attempted to justify why it should be him.
“That is not how the game
is played,” Ankara said, clucking her tongue as she gestured to the Dushken assigned to execute the torture to proceed.
As the chain of horrors progressed, he begged the sorceress to spare the woman and turn her attention to him. He shouted his protests over the other prisoner’s screams until his voice failed. Helpless, he watched the flesh of her arm peeled away, a breast sawn off, and her womanhood mutilated. Each torment was done with the skill of a trained hunter dressing its prey and conducted to prolong the victim’s suffering. By the time the young woman’s chest was cut open and her ribs snapped from her sternum, the floor beneath her chair glistened with blood, bowel, and urine.
Watching the pale sacks of the woman’s lungs swell and deflate as they lay on her chest left him gibbering. He descended into hysterics when her throat was slit, the length of her tongue pulled through a horizontal gash to lay on the ruin of her chest.
SO THE GAMES WENT, each designed to violate the morals and standards by which people lived. If he succumbed to hopelessness, Ankara would win. Though his sanity frayed, he knew the sorceress would have bested him if he succumbed to madness. Despite a fervent wish for it all to end, something prevented him from losing his will to endure. A detached part of his consciousness counseled patience while his tormented mind used memories to feed his hate.
Echoes of Dougan’s words – the old soldier’s voice so disconnected from Tristan’s situation that he could scare remember what it sounded like – reminded him that complacency led to mistakes. Eventually, the chance to enact a measure of vengeance would come. He was determined to seize it when it did, though there was every likelihood he would die in the process.
Ankara scrutinized his reactions through it all, sapphire eyes hooded and an amused, satisfied smile on her lips as she devised new ways to twist him into an unrecognizable form of himself.
KNEES DRAWN CLOSE AND his shackled wrists crossed against his chest, Tristan lay on the floor of his small cell. An empty plate rested beside the clean waste bucket in a corner. A torch provided modest light through the small barred window set high in the door. Old, dry straw scratched his cheek through the short beard he had grown since Ankara’s visit.
He stared at the wall, trying not to think or feel. Though it had taken him time to recognize it, there was a routine to his life by which he could estimate the passage of time. The grand duchess preferred tormenting the mind over physical torture, though she was not above using it; the body healed, while wounds to the spirit hurt more keenly. She delighted in presenting him with impossible choices and reveled in his self-inflicted torment when his decisions resulted in the suffering or death of another.
Ankara was a master of the art of anguish, her technique refined to sow seeds of misery and harvest a crop of sorrow. She knew how to draw the best yield and recognized when the field was exhausted and needed to recover. When he was nearly spent, she left him to stew in doubt and self-recrimination until the hate within him once more burned strong.
If he could estimate time by the growth of his beard, more than a fortnight had passed since the grand duchess’ last visit. The door opened twice in what he estimated to be a day, first to provide him with a plate of unappetizing food, followed by a later removal of his soiled waste bucket. The servant women tending these chores never spoke, their faces slack and eyes dead from rishka.
Fifteen people had died because of his choices; Ankara was not foolish enough to give him a weapon and force him to kill someone even with rishka in his body lest he turn on her. The guilt of his decisions rent his soul. Echoes of dying screams fueled his nightmarish dreams.
People often willed themselves to die in Dougan’s beloved adventure tales, and the young man often fantasized about depriving Ankara of his vitality by doing so. Part of him wanted nothing more than to turn his face from the food he was given and starve. Urzgeth disabused him of the attempt by forcing food down his throat while another prisoner was tortured to punish him.
Regrettably, the sorceress understood both the flesh and the spirit. The body was indeed an animal tenuously leashed by the conscious mind; his desire to die was immaterial, overpowered by the cravings of the flesh. Though the food was unpalatable, he ate it. Haunted by dreams, his body slept to preserve his strength and heal from months of suffering and neglect.
His subconscious assured him a mistake would be made, though his conscious mind doubted such a chance would come; Ankara was too cagey by far. Any such event would be a gambit in the next round of the game. On the off-chance it was not, and between bouts of torturing himself over his choices, he traced the mental map created in his wanderings through the dungeon’s labyrinthine passages.
In the deepest recesses of his being, the animal Ankara sought to unleash waited and ignored his rational mind.
Chapter 39
Summer 1415
Rishka was bitter when laced with water and stunk of boiled cabbage. Tristan drank the tankard Urzgeth brought him in five swallows as the aged huntsman filled the doorway and waited for the drug to take effect.
In some ways, he no longer minded the drug; it absolved him of actions beyond his control.
As always, the slow severing of his will from his flesh started with his face growing lax and expressionless. Ever-present tension eased as his shoulders slackened and his clenched hands relaxed against his thighs. A tingle swept him as skin flushed and tightened, and he grew warm as the rishka raised his body temperature.
The young man was unsurprised when the Dushken alpha guided two servants with buckets and cloths into his cell once the drug had taken hold. Their faces were as dead as Tristan’s own, and their movements were mechanical but efficient as they lathered coarse cloths with lye soap and scrubbed him clean. Ankara always commanded him to be cleaned before she toyed with him; she disliked filthy, smelly playthings. He fretted over what torment she planned for him as the servants worked.
Lye killed or drove away lice and brought welcome relief from the itching their bites caused. Scrubbing broke his half-healed scabs and stitches and released bloody trickles across his freshly washed skin. Soap sharpened the wounds’ raw edges; when one of the women dug a needle into his skin to repair the stitches, each stab felt worse than it was. Too tall for the Anahari women to tend while standing, Urzgeth commanded him to sit on a stool brought into the cell. He remained unmoving as a razor scraped away his short, thick beard, but his hair was left untouched beyond being washed.
The servants gathered their tools and left him raw, red, and tingling from the vigorous cleaning. Urzgeth ran a critical eye over him, then beckoned. “Come.”
Tristan’s bare feet slapped the floor as he trailed the Dushken through a maze of passages and up short flights of stairs. The huntsman moved without pause and seldom looked over his shoulder. Rounding a corner, Urzgeth pressed his hand to an irregularly shaped block in a wall. There was a faint click, and a section of wall no wider than the man’s shoulders ground open. The hidden staircase rose at a sharp angle, the risers tall and narrow.
The alpha removed a torch from a sconce beside the opening and began climbing. “Follow.”
Unaccustomed to the strain, his leg muscles ached and trembled as his body steadied itself with a hand against the walls and did as commanded. A click echoed through the stairwell’s confines as Urzgeth’s boot depressed a riser, and the false wall swung closed behind them. Tristan cursed himself, never considering the possibility of hidden passageways and staircases while he roamed through the labyrinth. He understood why so few people had escaped over the centuries; there was no exit from the dungeons unless a prisoner stumbled on one of these passages.
They reached a landing in the darkness, where the Dushken permitted a moment’s rest. A fine film of sweat clung to his skin as he panted for breath, but the aged alpha seemed unaffected. Once the young man’s breathing calmed, the huntsman beckoned for him to follow and climbed a second flight of stairs. His thighs burned by the time they reached the next landing and quivered when they reached
the third.
The dungeons were deeper beneath the Feinthresh Castle than he expected. His original plan to find pipes drawing water into the dungeons or flushing waste to the sewers would never have been successful, unless the sewers below the city ran deeper than he thought. The only way to escape the dungeons was through one of these stairways, and he assumed there was more than one.
Why he was being shown the hidden stairwell escaped him, but he reasoned two possibilities.
The first and most frightening was that Ankara never intended to allow him to use them. That seemed both the most and least likely option; she wanted to nurture his hope that escape was possible while preventing him from doing so. Revealing the existence of this staircase, which implied others might exist, might be nothing more than an elaborate ruse designed to encourage him to attempt.
A flaw with that theory was apparent based on what he knew of his captor. Above all else, the sorceress prized control and was too canny to give more than the vaguest hint about anything. Revealing a means to escape the labyrinth introduced unpredictability to her game, as there were too many possible ways to escape the castle proper.
This led him to the second, and most likely, conclusion – it was not Ankara, but Sathra, who had summoned him. The younger noblewoman was forbidden from touching him, and he recalled her resentment the few times she witnessed Ankara’s torments. If she dared so now, it was because Ankara was not present to prevent her disobedience.
Urzgeth, therefore, maintained his alliance with the younger woman. A chilling possibility occurred to Tristan that Sathra had deposed Ankara and assumed the mantle of Grand Duchess of Anahar. If that were so, he hoped his heart burst during the climb to the castle. She was vicious and bloodthirsty; with the elder sorceress dead, none of the prisoners had long to live.
