Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,98

She is almost concerned, but when she reaches the door and the Scarlet Blade on guard opens it for her, those concerns evaporate immediately.

Bamore is hanging upside down from the ceiling. He is streaked with blood and feces. Beneath him, there is a large bowl collecting all the fluids that leak from him. She can tell that it has already been emptied over him more than once. A thin gray man sits on a chair some distance away, an open book propped on his knees, a pen in his hand. The pages appear completely blank.

“Trivner,” she says, and the fat man in the corner hauls himself upright. Rolls of flab sway beneath his loose robe.

“Priestess!” he says, bowing low. “An honor to see you down here with us lowlifes.” She can hear the smile in his voice, but forgives him that. He’s their head torturer, and it takes someone of particular skills and tendencies to perform the job competently. He has been employed down here for longer than she has been a priestess, over forty years. Some say he has never seen the sky.

“So tell me what he has to say.”

“Nothing, Priestess,” Trivner says.

Jan Ray raises her eyebrows in surprise. Bamore seems to be looking at her, but she cannot be sure. The light is poor down here, his eyes swollen almost shut.

“Nothing?” she asks, glancing at the thin scribe. He shakes his head.

“I started with air shards,” Trivner says, and she knows what is coming. Many times she has heard his delighted recitation of the tortures he has performed. It’s like listening to a poet’s expression of love for the one thing in life he can never let go. “Into his knees and elbows, then both shins. The first I slipped only into the flesh, but the last selection I pushed through his bones. They’ll never come out. Any movement is agony.”

“Delightful,” Jan Ray says. “Hurry with this, Trivner. And then perhaps I can get some answers from him where you’ve failed.”

The torturer blusters for a moment, but then breathes deeply, calming himself. Remember who you’re talking to, Jan Ray thinks. His voice becomes more businesslike.

“After the air shards, some more basic forms of persuasion. Fingernails extracted. Cuts filled with powdered swine-horn. Fire ants into every body opening.” Trivner’s confidence seems to falter, and the lilt drops from his voice. “No one ever gets past the fire ants.”

“But still nothing,” Jan Ray muses. Bamore turns slightly on the rope and it creaks, wet from his blood. He coughs and vomits something black.

“Leave me with him, both of you.” Trivner goes to protest but she holds up one hand, eyes closed. He knows better than to argue with a priestess.

“I’ll wait right outside,” Trivner says, as if that will be a comfort.

“By Hanharan’s will, he will tell me what I need to know,” Jan Ray says. But as the fat torturer and the thin scribe leave the stinking chamber, she feels a slight shiver of something she does not quite understand.

Soon, she will know it as fear.

Stay here, Jave had told her. Like talking to a child. He had been her most trusted captain for some years, and they had developed a rapport that bordered on friendship, though any hint of closeness between priestess and soldier was vehemently discouraged. But still she felt a tingle of anger at his brusqueness.

“He’s concerned, you fool,” she murmured, and the sounds from outside grew more startling. Shouted orders and screams of pain; panicked cries from the people who had been lining the street; the whip of arrows and impacts of cruel metal tips on stone, wood, and flesh. They’ve come for him. She shivered and leaned forward, pulling the curtain aside.

She had been involved in trouble like this several times before. Eighteen years ago, when Willem Marcellan was assassinated by a breakaway Watcher sect, she had been at his side in the carriage when the murderer climbed in and stabbed him to death. The killer had been moving across to her when a Blade’s sword pinned him to the carriage floor and gutted him before her. More recently, she and several other Hanharan priests had been trapped in a blood-feud riot between two powerful families from Mino Mont Canton, a skirmish that had resulted in the Marcellan Wall running red with the blood of fourteen executions over the space of three moons. Brutal, shocking, but necessary. So she was no stranger to bloodshed and the shock of violence, and fear was tempered by