Shadow Over Kiriath (68 page)
Finally he heard the first echoing clatter of the approaching cavalcade. Movement and sound rippled along the ranks of bystanders, some of whom leaned into the street to see up the road where the first helmeted horsemen came into view round the tight switchback.
They trotted past two by two, eight of them altogether, breastplates gleaming and gray Gadrielite cloaks spread across their horses’ rumps. Riding close to the side of the road, they forced the onlookers back as the coach finally appeared: a black box on black wheels, led by a team of two black horses. Two helmed and armored men sat on the driving bench—one holding the reins, the other a sword and shield. Four more sat atop the coach itself, all with shields and swords. And of the six, two were not what they seemed.
The coach rumbled by, but Abramm kept his eyes off the railed window, moving his right hand to his sword hilt, belted high up under his left arm. He fingered off the loop of leather that had so far held it lengthwise against his leg and hidden beneath his long cloak. Closing his fingers about the leather-wrapped hilt grip, he tugged the harness gently down to make his draw easier.
The second of the four pair of horsemen trailing the coach passed by him as the vehicle slowed for the turn. With the clatter of the horses’ hooves and the rumble of the coach’s wheels bouncing and echoing off the hard stone, he never heard the twang of the bows as the arrows were released, never even saw the driver hit. His attention was fixed on the Gadrielites beside him as they stiffened and stepped toward the coach. Straightening from his slouch, Abramm flung back the edge of his cloak, his rapier flashing in the gray daylight. As shouts rang out down the street, he lunged, sliding his blade past the armhole edge of the nearest man’s breastplate into his heart and pulling it free to parry the strike of the Gadrielite’s companion. Meanwhile Tarker took out the third.
As the escort horsemen drew together behind the halted coach to face their attackers, its back door opened and a dozen more soldiers poured into the street. Exactly as Abramm had hoped. They pelted toward him, and he stepped to meet them, snaring an incoming rapier with his cloak and lunging to score another hit. By then his cowl had fallen all the way back, his hair and face revealed. The bystanders recognized him first, gasping and pointing in their surprise. Once he’d also drawn the attention of the bulk of the Gadrielites, he turned to give them a clear look at his face and was amused to see their eyes widen and their steps falter. Also as he had hoped. In their moment of inaction he called the retreat and raced for the alley, his men running both before and after him in a hedge of protection.
The escape route had been well planned, and he’d already given instructions detailing at what point each group was to peel off on alternate paths. It was designed to look like attempts to confuse the pursuers—his own men believed that was what they were doing—but really it was only to see them safely out of the way. Most of the pursuers ignored the men he sent off to “trick” them, however, so Abramm led the Gadrielites—their number growing with each new street they crossed—on a line directly away from the route the coach should now be taking.
Having gained a bit of a lead and now a good ways from the original point of attack, Abramm led his handful of remaining supporters out the back of a tumbledown stable into a small yard and stopped. A two-story stone building loomed uphill to the left, with smaller structures, also stone, ahead and to the right. Except for a narrow rail-less stone stairway running up the inner side of that tall building, and the small garden area tucked between it and the smaller building ahead, there was no way out.
“Split up,” Abramm commanded. “Half of you take the stairs, the other half the garden. Seth, Alex, you know the routes. We’ll be taking that tunnel there.” He gestured to the age-warped cellar door that lay in the dirt to his left.
The men hesitated, frowning at one another. Finally Tarker said, “But, sir, weren’t you—”
“Now!” Abramm ordered sharply.
And they went. All save Simon, Whitethorne, and Philip, who turned back from the parting men to regard him suspiciously.
“What are you waiting for?” he demanded of them. “I told you to go.”
Simon was frowning fiercely now. “What are you up to, sir? This was not in your plan.”
“It was always in my plan. I simply didn’t tell you. Now get out of here before they come.”
“There are at least forty of them,” his uncle erupted. “You may be good with that blade, but you can’t hold off forty all by yourself.”
“I don’t intend to.” He met his uncle’s gaze grimly. “I’m sure their orders are to take me alive.”
“To take you alive?” Simon gaped at him, understanding at once what he intended. “There is no need for that, sir. Even if you couldn’t get away—”
“I can’t, Uncle. And neither can the rest of you if I stay with you. They have the city too well guarded. I saw that right from the start.” He paused, hearing noises from the stable now as the first of their pursuers entered it, then said quietly, “It’s me they want.”
“Do you have any idea what they’ll do to you as their prisoner?”
He met his uncle’s gaze evenly. “This is about far more than you know, Simon. The time for fighting with blades is past. My life is in Eidon’s hands now, to take or not as he sees fit. But I have no desire for you to go down with me.” He paused as more voices sounded from within the stable. “My sons are out there somewhere. And my wife. And I believe the people of this land will one day want deliverance from this choice they have made. There is much work for you to do, Uncle.”
“There is work for
you
to do, sir!” Never had he seen his uncle, the gruff, stoic rock of the family, look so distressed. “I will not leave you, Abramm.”
“Not even if I command it?”
“No, sir.”
“Very well.” And Abramm swung at him hard, smashing the butt end of his swordhilt into the side of his uncle’s head. The old man dropped like a stone. Abramm glanced at Whitethorne and Philip. “I trust the two of you can handle him by yourself?”
Whitethorne frowned at him. “Are you
sure
this is what you want?We—”
“Go. Now.”
Philip bent to sling the duke’s senseless body over his shoulders, and the two of them hurried into the green darkness of the narrow garden, even as the Gadrielites shoved open the wide stable door and poured into the yard. Seeing Abramm standing there alone, they stopped just outside the gate, panting and red-faced from their run, eyes narrow with wariness. A few glanced up at the roofs and bare walls surrounding them, but most kept their gazes fixed on Abramm as more of their fellows poured through the door and gathered alongside them.
Then they just stared at him, seeming reluctant to move. He stared back, marveling that even when they so outnumbered him—and Simon hadn’t been far off on his estimate—they feared him.
Finally he sighed and took the lead, stooping to lay his blade on the ground. Then he backed a step away from it and raised his arms, palms open, fixing his mind on Tersius and praying for the courage to endure what would follow.
The soldiers closed around him tentatively at first and then, gaining courage, seized him and tore off his cloak, jerkin, and boots. After searching him to be sure he carried no other weapons, they shackled his wrists and ankles and brought him into the stable. There he was shoved and pulled up into the wagon, receiving a steady stream of punches, elbow jabs, and rough jerks, as if each man wanted to be sure he got in his blows while he had the chance. In the bed of the wagon, he was chained round the waist to the driver’s bench, forced to stand while the others climbed in around him. They packed together, kneeling with their faces turned out, as if they feared his supporters might return.
They did not know that his men were all on their way out of the city now, each group on its separate course, each with strict orders to stay away from all citizens and a clear understanding of what would happen to them should they be found out. He’d also warned them specifically to be wary of reports that he himself had been captured, telling them it would very likely be used by their enemies as a trap.
By the time any of them learned what had really happened, it would be far too late for them to do anything.
The news spread quickly through the immediate area that he had been captured, and a stunned crowd gathered along the route as the wagon bore him up to the High Court Chamber, where the heresy trials were ongoing. Most would wait weeks to face this tribunal, but the king was granted a special hearing. No doubt they wished to conclude the affair as swiftly as possible, to reduce the chance of him being rescued. Which was just as well, for he, too, wanted it over with quickly.
He was led in through an audience composed of men with familiar faces, men who’d eaten at his banquets, who’d received his largesse, who he’d thought supported him. They stared at him coldly now, their true colors revealed.
The Mataian High Council sat in the raised box at the room’s fore: High Father Bonafil in the center flanked by his subordinates, among whom were Abramm’s old discipler, Master Belmir, and Bonafil’s rising star apprentice, the newly promoted Master Eudace. Darak Prittleman stood in a new and more elaborate Gadrielite uniform to the right of the box, serving as the high court’s bailiff. And seated in the king’s box to the left of front was Gillard, who, to Abramm’s utter astonishment, appeared to have taken Mataian vows. And not just as a novice but as a full Guardian, for he wore the robes of that rank and his white-blond hair was long and caught up into the single braid of the confirmed brother. More than that, he wore the ruby amulet at his throat.
Abramm would not have recognized him had he not seen him in his own bedchamber. Gillard’s reduction in size was every bit as dramatic as it had seemed then, but only now did Abramm have the time to appreciate the immensity of what had been done to him. The fire of hatred in his eyes, however, remained unchanged.
Prittleman called the court to order, and following the High Father’s lead, everyone sat but Abramm and Prittleman. The charges were read and the evidence presented, beginning with his shirt being cut off him to reveal the shield and dragon—two marks of evil—branded into his flesh, and ending with the testimony of fifty men, each of them determined to outdo the other in the heinousness of their claims. Then the verdict—never in doubt—was read: Guilty as charged of heresy, colluding with evil, obstructing the truth, disrespecting the High Father, and a host of other crimes rendered irrelevant when the penalty for heresy alone was death.
Finally it was time for Bonafil to pronounce the sentence—death, of course—followed by the inevitable offer of mercy. “Given your past, and the fact you were once a dedicated servant of the true Flames,” he said ponderously, “if you will renounce your error, allow the mark of evil to be removed from your flesh, and swear to serve the truth forever more, we will let you live.”
“I swear only to serve the truth,” Abramm said. “And that I do not find here today.”
A spark of red flickered in the amulet at the High Father’s throat and was echoed faintly in his bulging eyes. He folded his hands very carefully before him, asked, “You are sure?” And to Abramm’s astonishment he launched a veil of translucent Shadow through the air to wrap itself around him. Coldness caressed his naked torso, crept into his blood, and sought to ignite the fear that lurked at the edges of his soul, reminding him of what would come after this trial—a trip to the dark den of the torturer, blades and whips and implements of glowing iron applied to his flesh in multifarious, unthinkable ways. The pain would be excruciating, the damage to his body worse than anything the morwhol had done . . .
He turned his thoughts from those fearful speculations and affirmed to himself that whatever Eidon asked him to do, he would give him the power to accomplish. The Light rose in him and the cold pressure vanished.
Lifting his chin, he gave firm answer to Bonafil’s question: “I’m sure.”
The High Father leaned back in his chair with a grimace. “Well, you give us no choice, then, but to do whatever we must to deliver you from the evil that has captured your soul.” He glanced at the bailiff. “Take him to Wetherslea.”
Outside the High Court Chamber, the crowd was now openly hostile. People lined the labyrinthine route down to the prison, cursing him and shaking their fists, and he marveled that they could turn so quickly from adoration to hatred.
At the prison, Abramm was marched down a long stair of weathered stone into a nightmare of darkness full of distant screams and dreadful smells. They passed through a series of locked iron gates, then down a long corridor to a dark pillared chamber lit by the flames of a bronze brazier balanced at room center on a waist-high stand. Two men in black tunics waited beside it, and various long-handled iron implements whose purpose Abramm preferred not to consider hung from the upper collar of the stand. Farther out, where the flickering light gave way to shadow, stood a ring of large, freestanding wooden frames—racks to which the torturers’ victims were chained so they might do their work.
Wordlessly, Abramm’s escort stripped away the remains of his slitted shirt and shackled him into one of the racks, pulling his arms out straight to either side and angled slightly upward, tight enough to put an uncomfortable pressure on his stiffened left arm. His legs were shackled likewise but not spread so far apart they couldn’t hold his weight. Throughout this operation not one of them so much as glanced at his face.
When he was secured, the guards took up positions about the room as if they still believed somehow he might escape, while the smaller of the two torturers placed several of the implements into the blaze. Then the other man shook out the small black whip he wore coiled at his waist and, with no more warning than that, came round behind Abramm and started in.
He heard the whip sing through the air half a heartbeat before it struck. The first blow was like fire cutting across the flesh of his back. The second was worse. By the third he was feeling light-headed and queasy. After that he stopped trying to count and concentrated on trying to breathe, for his chest kept wanting to close up, and he found it was hard to think about Tersius anymore, hard to think of anything but the pain which filled up all his senses.
