Burn Bright - By Marianne de Pierres Page 0,47

to her about unseemly displays. That is all.’

Retra heard the anger underlying Brand’s soft tone.

Lenoir’s eyes narrowed with mistrust, but he leaned back and draped a leg across the arm of his high-backed chair. ‘Take her back to Vank. Charlonge has a talent with the awkward ones.’

‘Not for much longer, Lenoir,’ said Varonessa.

‘Indeed, my dear. It is soon to be her time.’

Retra glimpsed his sadness again.

Brand raised her hand, signalling for assistance, and two more Ripers stepped forward, lifting Retra to their shoulders, hanging her between them like a hunting trophy as they carried her out of the chamber.

‘Retra!’ a voice shouted.

Suki. She wanted to call out to her friend, but her throat had closed tight with panic.

‘Let go of her!’ bellowed Rollo. He ran after the Ripers and barrelled against their sides, but his weight barely disturbed their momentum.

Then heavy doors closed behind her and she could no longer hear Suki or Rollo at all.

The air grew cooler, and still. Above her, carved wood ceiling struts rose into peaks. The Ripers carried her along the corridor and finally, after many turns, into another chamber similar to the Circle room. In this one the marble-arched recesses in the rock contained stacked iron beds, not altars. Grotesques and crude crosses decorated the front edges of each arch and a mural of entwined, naked bodies ran in a fringe above them.

She shut her eyes from them but thick, smoking incense assaulted her senses.

When they laid her on a hard slab, she opened her eyes again to a dome-shaped ceiling lit by wall candles and depicting an old mural of a lamb in bloody sacrifice. Her heat beat painfully in her chest. The walls were bare rock, which seemed to press inward on her. The air was so cold she was sure she was deep inside the mountain.

Brand released her grip and began to feel her way over Retra’s body.

Retra tried to wrestle free but several sets of hands held her fast.

‘Brand? Should you?’

Retra couldn’t see which of the Ripers questioned Brand’s actions.

‘Hush,’ Brand hissed. ‘I sensed something wrong with this one when I saw her at the re-birthing.’

‘Is she a Peak?’

‘No. She is young enough,’ Brand replied. ‘Look at the freshness of her skin, the soft pout of her lips. No … it’s something else.’

‘Lenoir won’t like what you’re doing.’

‘Lenoir does not rule. We all rule,’ Brand insisted.

‘But Lenoir leads,’ objected the other.

Brand ignored them, reaching beneath Retra’s skirt, feeling the soft flesh of her stomach and thighs.

Retra’s mind flooded with panic to be touched in the way the warden had done when he came with his spying devices. Auditing, he’d called it.

Then Brand’s hand stopped. The Riper keened in a dreadful, high-pitched sound of triumph. She lifted Retra’s skirt above her waist.

The Ripers crowded around her naked limbs.

‘Brand?’

‘Brand, what ails?’

Their voices rained on Retra. She wanted to scream loudly enough to drown them out, but her Seal-disciplined vocal chords would not oblige her. Seals did not shout for help for themselves. Seals did not scream. Seals did not …

She heard a gargle and knew it to be her own weak protest. Tears stung the corners of her eyes, more for her own choking impotence than anything else.

‘I thought so,’ the scarred Riper-woman gasped. She fingered the obedience strip on Retra’s thigh. ‘She’s been hobbled.’

The Ripers stared down at it. She read shock on one face, disbelief on another, while another showed sly amusement as if party to something dirty and secretive.

Retra wanted to shrivel and die under their crass inspection of her body.

Then Brand’s face came closest of all to her, blotting the others from her vision. ‘That is why the Register does not trust you. You are hobbled.’

Retra wet her lips. ‘No.’ Her hoarse whisper echoed about the cavern.

They laughed at that, all of them; hissing noises that bounced off the walls, like excited catlings.

Brand silenced them with a turn of her head. ‘This one is mine,’ she said.

She drew an ivory-handled blade from inside her coat. ‘Hold her still,’ she hissed.

Strong, pitiless hands forced Retra’s shoulders down and twisted her arms wide. More of them held her feet.

Brand climbed onto the slab and sat astride Retra, her black eyes unemotional now as she lowered the blade.

The knife’s first sting on her tender skin dislodged something inside Retra’s mind. She grappled to put it back in its place but it crumbled away.

‘NO!’ This time she shouted and thrashed, railing against them with all her strength. Desperate.

But the Ripers’ weight held