The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition) (111 page)

"Did you talk of this with your wife, Griffith?" the High Priest asked.
"Of course, High Father," the soldier replied. His eyes appeared puzzled, and he was frowning. "The sacrifice is from both of us. She finds it as hard as I do to let the boy go, but she understands where my spirit lies in this matter."
The High Priest gave a small sigh, and then said firmly, "You are both god-lovers, Griffith; that has been clear since long before this. Nevertheless, your son's best interests are a matter that the God would wish you to consider. To leave his family now—"
"I want to leave."
The boy's words, hard and without hesitation, caused all in the room to look at him. Ducking free of the soldier's arm, the boy stepped forward and endured their scrutiny.
He was shaking, and had been shaking since the moment of the soldier's announcement; bile filled his throat. Yet he tilted his head steadily to look up at the High Priest as he said, "I don't want to live with my parents any more. I want to live here."
"You see?" said the soldier joyfully, smiling at the boy. "He is my son; his love of the gods is as great as mine."
The boy did not look his way. Still staring up at the High Priest, he asked, "May I wait outside? I was talking with one of the other orphan boys before."
The High Priest's gaze travelled over to the smiling soldier, and then quickly back to the boy. "Of course," he said quietly. "I'm sure that you would like to explore this house during your visit."
The boy turned then and walked stiffly past the soldier, ignoring the hand that the soldier laid upon his head. He closed the corridor door behind him quickly, but as he did so, he could hear Aiken saying, in a changed voice, "Perhaps, in the boy's best interests . . ."
Much to the borderland boy's surprise, Gareth was awaiting him.
The corridors were empty now, and all of the doors were shut. In the short time since the borderland boy had entered the chamber, the light in the corridor had turned ruddy from the setting sun. In one of the pools of light falling upon the east wall, Gareth stood, watching the borderland boy with uncertain eyes. The borderland boy, with barely a pause in his stride, walked down the corridor, passing Gareth on the way.
As the borderland boy had expected, Gareth detached himself from the wall and hurried down the corridor beside the older boy. "I'm sorry," he said. "I talked too much before. You're the guest; I should have let you talk."
"You can talk without cease," said the borderland boy, not looking his way. "I'll be here for the next six years."
"Will you?" Gareth channelled his delight into a skip and a leap. "Are you coming to live here, then? You'll like it here, truly you will. You'll have lots of friends. I'll be your friend if you'd like."
The borderland boy stopped then. They had reached the end of the corridor, and all that lay before them was the rectangular doorway to the sanctuary, leading to the narrow passageway between the tiered seats. The borderland boy considered for a moment the empty sanctuary, which held only fiery specks of dust, twisting through the air under the evening light. Then he turned to Gareth, who was waiting anxiously beside him.
"If you want to be my friend," he said, "where's the cup?"
Gareth gaped at him for a moment, and then hopped in his place, saying, "Wait here. I'll be right back. Don't go away!" He darted past the borderland boy into the sanctuary.
The borderland boy turned his back on the sanctuary and looked down the corridor he had just travelled. The sun's rays were crawling up the sides of the wall now, leaving a pool of darkness collecting on the ground. The door he had travelled through was shut.
Gareth arrived at his side, panting in his haste. In his hand was a bejewelled cup, with the berry-red wine of Koretia inside it. "It's from the altar," he explained. "I don't think the High Priest would mind, though. What we're doing . . . It's a sacred vow, really."
The borderland boy had turned his back halfway on the shut door at the other end of the corridor. He reached out and took the cup from Gareth, slowly raised it to his lips, and sipped from the wine of friendship. Gareth, his face flush from the evening light, wriggled with delight.
Unnoticed by both boys, two men stood at the other end of the corridor, with the door behind them flung wide open. The soldier gestured toward the drinking boy, raising his eyebrows. The High Priest looked for a long moment at the borderland boy, as well as at Gareth, whose face was alight with a smile. Then the High Priest nodded heavily, and the two men turned to re-enter the chamber.
If they had waited a moment longer, perhaps their thoughts would have changed, and if so, the destiny of the Three Lands would have taken a different course.
It may be that the High Priest would not have recognized what he saw. Though a wise man, he was still relatively young, and he had always seen darkness in shapes that were easily recognizable: in the vicious look of a murderer holding a thigh-dagger, in the angry expression of a man who hated the gods, in the petulant pout of a self-centered woman. This was where he was accustomed to seeing darkness, and he had not yet learned the many shapes that darkness can take.
The soldier might have been wiser, for within his family a seed had been planted long ago, so many generations past that the family tales told without words of the many methods by which his ancestors had prevented that seed from growing. The seed had not skipped his own generation, and if he had wished, he could have spoken to his children the warnings that his father had given him. Such a thought had never occurred to him, though, and he had not recognized the signs of the seed in his eldest son.
What happened next would perhaps have alerted him to the danger and awoken him to the darkness he had turned his back on when he entered joyfully into the light. But he had turned away too soon, and so he did not see what Gareth saw in the moment that the borderland boy lowered the cup from his lips.
Quentin-Andrew son of Quentin-Griffith was smiling.
At age ten, Quentin-Andrew already had darkly beautiful eyes. His smile, calculated to the slightest degree in the manner of its curve, would have driven women wild later in his life if he had ever bothered to bestow it upon them. As it was, the smile caused Gareth to wriggle again, clearly overwhelmed by the gift he had been offered. As Gareth reached out to take the cup and drink from it, his hand brushed the borderland boy's, and Quentin-Andrew felt a warmth enter him, such as he had never felt before. His smile increased, and Gareth laughed with joy.
Not until five years later, in the final moments of his life, would Gareth learn that Quentin-Andrew had smiled that day because he was imagining Gareth's death.
 
CHAPTER TWO
They brought him to the dungeon of the Jackal's palace, the great building that had once housed hundreds of people. Just a handful remained now. The people in the Koretian capital had scattered, harried by the dark thrust of war, so that the only people left in the capital were the southern soldiers and the palace officials and lords whom they guarded. The lords and officials well knew what fate awaited them if they were captured; none of them had dared venture beyond the protective cordon of the Southern Army.
Quentin-Andrew saw none of those men and women during his forced march through the bowels of the palace. All that he saw were soldiers, grim-faced, confronting their coming doom with short words and tight lips. Some were old men, others were boys; not many were left to fight for the freedom of Koretia and Daxis. They glanced at Quentin-Andrew without interest. He wondered for a moment whether they failed to recognize his northern uniform and simply thought that he was a southern soldier who had been arrested for crimes. Then he realized that the men would have regarded him in the same empty manner if he had been the Jackal himself, rising from the dead to lead his people in their final battle. The southern soldiers were husks, void of all thought and hope; they were reserving their energy in order to die in an honorable manner.
The dungeon corridors were thick with tar-filled smoke from the torches; the soldiers escorting him coughed into their fists. Quentin-Andrew idly noted how little had changed in this place since he had been there last. Here was the same rough stonework, arching in a low ceiling that was blackened with torch-smoke; here were the same moans and cries, seeping like blood from under the doors; here were the same shadows, fluttering over him like the wings of a carrion bird. And there, straight ahead, the same golden glow—
A door opened next to him, he was thrust without preliminary through the doorway, and he found himself in a cell hot with fire.
The light was harsh to his sight. His eyes were slow to adjust, and when they did, he saw nothing that he had not expected. The instruments on the wall, the tools on the table – they were as familiar to him as the toys of his childhood. He wondered, dimly, why his heart pounded in his chest, as though he were in a strange place.
The door had closed behind him. He heard the rasp of a key turning in the lock, and the part of him that was examining this room with professional interest gave a small smile. The locked door was a mistake. It was better at the start to leave the prisoner with hope that he might escape – better, in fact, to allow that hope to linger as long as possible. That made the moment when the hope died all the more delicious.
As a soldier unbound his arms and wrists, Quentin-Andrew looked over at Randal, who was pulling off his cloak and hanging it on one of the hooks that was intended for other purposes. Without surprise, Quentin-Andrew saw that the young man's gaze was already fixed on him. Randal smiled as the borderlander looked his way, and he said, in a voice that sounded serious, "I hope that you approve."
Without meaning to – and the fact that he had not meant to told Quentin-Andrew immediately what level of man he was dealing with – Quentin-Andrew shifted his gaze back to the objects of the room: the rings, the chains, the pulleys, the irons glowing on the fire. Beside him, Randal said in a matter-of-fact voice, "When I was hired last year, our subcommander gave me permission to stock this place in any way I wished. I made up my list based on the reports we'd received of the methods you use. I didn't think that I could improve upon perfection."
Quentin-Andrew's mouth felt dry; he wondered why it was taking so long to recover from the effects of the gag. He turned his attention back to the soldiers. Only two of Randal's men had remained in the room. The older one was checking the heat of the fire, while the younger one was carefully inspecting the tools to see that they were ready. Quentin-Andrew noted this with professional approval.
Randal snapped his fingers at the first man and nodded toward a shadow-smothered corner. Then, having delegated the early duties, he pulled himself onto the table, stained with black blood, and sat there, swinging his legs like a schoolboy.
"I had mixed feelings about taking this assignment," reported Randal in the same light voice. "You're the hero of my childhood. I used to lie awake at night, dreaming that you would come and ask me to be your apprentice. I knew, of course, that I couldn't hope to reach your heights, but what man could? Since you never came, I learned everything I could about you: I studied your techniques, I recorded your questions in the few cases where the prisoner was released alive – I even received permission from the subcommander to examine the bodies of the men you had questioned, whenever those bodies were returned to our army.
"It was like gazing on the work of an artist. What you did here—" He reached up with his hand and briefly indicated a spot on his body. "It never would have occurred to me, even if I'd lived as long as the Jackal did. Yet you knew . . . How in the names of all the world's gods did you know? You knew what it would do to a prisoner. The first time I used that technique I felt like a bard stealing another man's song, yet the results were too beautiful to throw away. Neither I, nor any man living, will ever be able to match you in what you do.
"It seems such a shame to destroy you."
The fire roaring quietly in the corner was pricking Quentin-Andrew's body with heat. With the sluggishness of a mind that has not been roused to curiosity for many years, Quentin-Andrew wondered why he continued to feel so cold.
From the dark corner, the older assistant emerged, holding several objects, long and black and keenly crafted in a way that made Quentin-Andrew's heart ache. He had never had equipment that fine during his years of work; the Northern Army had been forced to wage war with makeshift tools, scarce at all times. Quentin-Andrew had not even had an assistant since the day that the man who helped him had been foolish enough to listen secretly as the Lieutenant questioned a spy who had to be broken quickly. Perhaps the assistant had merely wished to improve his own skills; perhaps he held hopes of rising above his official. Quentin-Andrew had never discovered the truth, for the assistant had lost his wits shortly thereafter.
Quentin-Andrew had been puzzled by this event; his special technique was supposed to affect no one except the prisoner. But the end result had been that no one was willing to be the assistant's replacement. This had pleased Quentin-Andrew: he could accomplish more on his own.
Now Randal turned to inspect what his assistant had brought him. After shaking his head at the first object offered, he carefully studied the remaining objects. As he did so, he said, "Your special form of questioning – you know what I'm talking about. You wouldn't be willing to teach that to me, I suppose? No?" Quentin-Andrew had said nothing, but Randal had glanced at his face as he spoke and extracted his answer from there. "Well, I suppose it's just as well. I'm not sure I'd have the skill to survive such training. If it could be taught in the abstract— But of course it can't; you'd have to demonstrate it on me. And even if we had the time for that, I wouldn't want to play the odds and see whether I could be the only man you ever failed to break."
He made his decision, reaching for the one with knots, and then turned to look at his prisoner. Quentin-Andrew waited with practiced stillness to see which direction Randal would take. He could tell Quentin-Andrew to do it to himself – that would be the right technique for some prisoners. And if he decided the matter that way, Quentin-Andrew would know that he was in the hands of a man who had not yet learned his trade.