Shadow Over Kiriath (69 page)

Then it ended and he was left hanging there, gasping and shuddering as his legs trembled beneath him and the dark room spun around him. He hung there for what seemed a very long time, listening as his guards conversed idly with each other and the torturers, and marveling at how pain could so completely command one’s thoughts. His left arm had fallen asleep when he heard a distant clang and the men broke off their talk to reassume their formal positions. Approaching footsteps heralded the arrival of more Gadrielites, marching in to intersperse themselves with his original escort. Shortly thereafter, Master Belmir strode into the room, followed by Gillard and Darak Prittleman.

They filed in behind the brazier, standing in a half circle in front of guards, and stared at Abramm with expressions cold, hard, and grim. For a long time no one moved. Then Belmir stepped up to face him.

“You say Eidon has chosen you. Tell me, then, how has it come to pass that you are hanging here, beaten and bloodied? If we are wrong, why has he delivered you into our hands?”

Abramm stared down at him, the old doubts stirring uneasily.

“And why was your army unable to stop the forces of Shadow?” Prittleman added, stepping up behind Belmir. “Where those empowered by Eidon’s Holy Flames succeeded?”

“Can’t you see how wrong you’ve been?” Belmir asked. “I told you it would be like this . . . when you said that Eidon himself speaks to you. How could you think he would let such blasphemy go?”

“We promised you would feel his wrath,” Prittleman said. “And so you will—”

“Unless,” Belmir interrupted, “you repent of this madness and return to the truth!”

“I already have the truth,” Abramm said.

Belmir’s gaze grew troubled. “Please, Abramm. You know what we have to do if you refuse to bend.”

“And this is how your god must gain his followers?” Abramm asked. “By torturing them into submission?”

And Belmir’s gaze grew more troubled still.

“Bah!” Prittleman cried, stepping in front of him. “Your god lets you fall into the hands of his enemies and leaves you there, helpless against them.” He turned to Belmir. “The Shadow holds him too strongly, Master. We must proceed.”

Looking grieved and reluctant, Belmir stepped back and motioned for the torturers to begin. Immediately the smaller one pulled a pair of tongs from the fire, and in it dangled a black, frog-sized, tentacled mass that Abramm recognized at once. As the larger man daubed white hamar onto the side of his ribs, the other lifted the griiswurm, suckered tentacles already groping toward him.

But it hadn’t even touched him before it was repelled by a flash of Light he did not consciously generate. Both men staggered backward before it, and the griiswurm wound itself so tightly to the tongs that no amount of prying could unfasten it. Only when it was brought back to the flames did it let go, falling into the safety of its bright nest. Grim-faced, the torturer pulled another from the brazier, as his accomplice picked up a second set of tongs and pulled out another.

This time the men hit with a sudden blast of the fearspell before applying the griiswum, seeming to know that if they could just get a little spawn spore into him, it would give them the leverage they needed to eventually break him. It didn’t work, but they kept coming, using griiswurm after griiswurm, as the Light kept driving them off.

Suddenly Gillard strode in among them and bade them stop. “You’re wasting our time. Ply the whip again. Or else use those tongs and pokers for what they were intended.”

The men looked around at Master Belmir, and Gillard gestured impatiently at the whip dangling from the torturer’s belt. “Here. Give me that and I’ll do it myself.”

The torturer handed the whip over, but as Gillard shook it out and stepped toward Abramm, Belmir stopped him.

“Makepeace,” he said sternly, “you have sworn a vow to do no violence.”

Gillard looked round at him with arched brows. “Yet I can stand here and direct others to do it at my command?” He snorted. “What’s the difference? I’d rather do it myself anyway. Tell Father Bonafil he can grant me another special dispensation.”

And the whip came snapping like fire across Abramm’s belly. He grunted with the shock of it and felt his muscles twitch and contract.

“There. See? He can’t stop that.” The whip sang and snapped again. “Repent!” Gillard snarled. “Give up that stupid mark and yield.” But his insincerity was patent.

“Makepeace, that’s enough,” Belmir commanded. “Give him back the whip!”

Gillard did so, but he then turned to push his face up into Abramm’s. “If you are so sure you are right, why hasn’t Eidon delivered you, brother dear?” Abramm smelled the incense on his robes and the garlic on his breath. “Why has he let your sons die?”

Abramm stared at him, shaken to the core, and Gillard smiled. “My own man threw your youngest into the side of a cliff.” He paused and his smile widened. “Why, it’s just as the Words say we are to do to our enemies, isn’t it? ‘You will dash their little ones against the rocks. . . . ’ Remember that passage? Your other boy I chased off the ledge trail under the white wall—same place I nearly pushed you off twenty years ago. . . .” His face twisted into a smirk. “I guess that means for all intents and purposes I’ve dashed him against the rocks, too.”

Abramm hung there, struggling to breathe but determined not to give his brother the satisfaction of knowing how deeply those lies drove into him. For they had to be lies. The alternative was not something he could consider.
Your glory is in your goodness, my Father. And I will trust in that. I do not believe you would take my sons from me in this way
.

“I don’t believe you, Gillard,” he said tightly. “Or I guess it’s Makepeace now, isn’t it?” And he smiled a little at that, wondering why in the world they’d given him that name.

Gillard glared at him as if he’d just offered him the gravest insult possible and then attacked like a wild man—slapping, hitting, punching—the blows landing willy-nilly on his face and neck and stomach. . . .

By the time the torturers pulled him off, Abramm’s right eye was swelling closed and his nose, which Gillard had already broken once in their youth, felt broken again. His lips were cut and throbbing, and he spat out the blood that filled his mouth.

Gillard wrestled free of the torturers and staggered back, panting and rubbing his hands as if they stung while he grinned ferociously at Abramm.

“You’re going down, brother. I will take your place and you will never be king again. In fact, I will see that no one even remembers your name.”

And behind him now, Abramm saw another man, who must’ve entered while Abramm was being pummeled. A man with spectacles and a pasty face and long silver-threaded hair. A man with a telltale tic by his right eye. He was smiling.

Abramm blinked and the man was gone, swallowed back up into the shadows.

“Please, Abramm,” Belmir said. “Surely you must see your error. Or if not that, then the futility of resisting. Don’t make us go on.”

“I’m sorry, old friend. I will not renounce what I know to be true.”

“You’re being too soft on him, Master Belmir,” said a new voice.

Abramm expected Byron Blackwell to appear, but instead it was young Master Eudace who stepped through the circle of Gadrielites to join them. He fixed his luminous blue eyes on Abramm, who was reminded weirdly of the kraggin’s great orbs. . . .

“Sentimentality is blinding you, sir,” Eudace said, his voice as cool and hard as his eyes. “He is a servant of the Shadow. You will not save him from himself with kindness. Only the agony of great love will do it.” The young master smiled up at Abramm. “You will thank us in a day or two.”

And then it began in earnest. They used the whip and the hot irons and the griiswurm all together, the pain and shock and constant attempts to infest him with spore along with a steady stream of accusations wearing him down.

“If you are Eidon’s chosen, why are you here? Why is this happening? Why does he not rescue you?”

His responses to the griiswurm grew slower. They began to actually touch him, and spore gained a foothold, was burned away, only to gain another. . . .

“Where is your great power now?”

“Why did he let your sons die?”

“Why has he abandoned you?”

He saw the rhu’ema hovering around him in the shadows above, savoring his pain as if it were fine wine, delighting as the Shadow rose up to take him for longer and longer periods of time.

He kept seeing Blackwell now, among the others, his white wrinkled face, his long silver hair, and the tic working rapidly in his excitement. One of the lenses in his spectacles had cracked, but he seemed not to notice. Sometimes he came around behind to whisper alternate accusations into Abramm’s ear. . . .

“You should have protected Carissa. Now she’s been defiled with the bastard of your enemy, and it’s your doing.”

Darkness and pain and gasping grunts. His throat was raw. His body felt as if it had been turned inside out, as if all his skin had been stripped away.

“You did this yourself. Your sin with Shettai, your audacity in going after another. You’ve ruined Briellen. And Maddie is dead. As are your sons.”

No . . .

“They are! See?”
Images flooded his mind, a tiny bundle torn from his wife’s arms and hurled against the rocks, falling to the ground, still and silent. A small figure in a child’s cloak running in terror along a narrow ledge, clutching a bedraggled stuffed horse to his chest. He looked back, a small white, frightened face, then tripped and fell over the edge. . . .

“NO!”

“Dead . . . even as your realm lies in ruin, your people betrayed. . . .”

“Let us cleanse you,” Belmir pleaded. “Let us take the mark and we will stop.”

“So many ways you have failed. You think he would ignore it all? Pretend it did not exist? That is why you are here, you know. Because he has had enough of you and your failures.”

The darkness pressed at him from without and within. Red light reflected off hideous faces, knitted brows, open mouths, and wagging tongues. And on and on it went.

“Let us take the mark, Abramm. Please.”

“Yes, let them take it. You don’t deserve to wear it anyway. . . .”

His sons were dead. His wife taken . . . He had failed them all—family, realm, Eidon. He did not deserve to wear the shield.

Another griiswurm slapped upon him, introducing successive lines of new fire, somehow more excruciating than any of the rest, and he could no longer hold in the screams. As his shrieks echoed off the stone around him, spawn spore raced through his veins, hot and nauseating, flaring blue across his vision as the Shadow took him and held on.

Eventually he ran out of breath and the screams devolved into ragged groans as he hung there, weak and shaking and wanting to die. Surely it would end soon. His body was a bleeding, throbbing agony, his reality a world of darkness and torment into which Belmir now said in a shaking, desperate voice, “Abramm,
please
. . .”

And he heard himself moan, and then his own voice, dry and raspy, said, “Yes. I don’t deserve to wear it. Take it and make it stop.”

And they did.

————

When he came to again, he was still shackled to the frame, but now Bonafil stood before him with all his High Council, the lot of them staring at him with bright and avid gazes.

The High Father Bonafil smiled condescendingly. “We knew you would come around, son, and we rejoice in having broken the power of evil on your life. See . . . you are no longer bound.” He gestured to Abramm’s chest.

Abramm looked down at himself, numb and so stupid with pain that it took him a moment to sift through all the welts and slashes cut by the whip, the oozing burn marks, the ugly red bites of the tongs, and the blistering lines of the griiswurm to realize his mark was missing. In its place lay a smooth, pale patch of new skin.

“No.” The word came out a half sob. “How could I. . . ?” He closed his eyes, a wave of grief and despair and searing guilt washing through him. How could he have turned? How could he have allowed them to take it?
No. . . ! “No man shall snatch you from my hands.”

The words floated through his mind, stopping the inward wail. And then he recalled the gold shields embossed into the breastbones of the skeletons they’d pulled out of Graymeer’s and the pigskin covers some Terstans used to pretend they weren’t Terstan. Byron Blackwell had pressed Abramm himself to use one of them more than five years ago, when the Table of Lords wanted to arrest him for wearing a shield. His mark wasn’t gone. They’d simply covered it and wanted him to think it was. They’d pressed him and pressed him, and he’d finally said yes. He remembered that now. Guilt welled up in him, sharp, flaying . . . Worse, he had no idea how to remove it and was too ashamed to even seek the one who did, let alone ask.

Which is exactly what they intend.

You knew I would do this.

I did
.

He began to weep, overwhelmed by all of it, his pain, his struggle, his failure . . . and the faithfulness extended to him now.
How could you . . . You’re still here.

I am.

Take it off me, Lord. I don’t want this. You know that.

If I do, they will order their torturers to continue.

I don’t care. I want it off
.

He didn’t have to ask again. The Light welled up in a terrific burning over his heart, skin, and bone, gathered into a fiery crescendo that exploded out of his heart, and left a cooling tingle in its place.

He opened his eyes. Bonafil was picking the bloody patch of skin off the front of his robe where it had been flung. On Abramm’s chest, the mark gleamed bright as ever amidst a patch of newly raw and oozing skin.

Every man in the room stared at him openmouthed. He gazed around at them, his eyes catching on Belmir, who looked as if someone had struck him on the head.

“Well,” Eudace huffed, “I see we must begin again.” He turned to the torturers. “Wellman, bring more of the Shadow cleaners.”

“No,” said Bonafil. “He has defied us long enough. Take him to the square.”