The Spine of the World - By R. A. Salvatore Page 0,61
Jaka's angry mouth one last time, then started toward home.
Jaka lay on the field for a long while, his mind racing. He had achieved his conquest, and it had been as sweet as he had expected. Still, it would not hold. Lord Feringal would marry Meralda, would beat him in the end. The thought of it made him sick. He stared up at the moon, now shaded behind lines of swift-moving clouds. "Fie this life," he grumbled.
There had to be something he could do to beat Lord Feringal, something to pull Meralda back to him.
A confident smile spread over Jaka's undeniably handsome face. He remembered the sounds Meralda had made, the way her body had moved in harmony with his own.
He wouldn't lose.
Chapter 11 ALL HANDS JOINED
"You will tell me of the poison," said Prelate Vohltin, an associate of Camerbunne. He was sitting in a comfortable chair in the middle of the brutally hot room, his frame outlined by the glow of the huge, blazing hearth behind him.
"Never good," Morik replied, drawing another twist of the thumbscrew from the bulky, sadistic, one-eyed (and he didn't even bother to wear an eyepatch) gaoler. This one had more orcish blood than human. "Poison, I mean," the rogue clarified, his voice going tight as waves of agony shot up his arm.
"It was not the same as the poison in the vial," Vohltin explained, and he nodded to the gaoler, who walked around the back of Morik. The rogue tried to follow the half-orc's movements, but both his arms were pulled outright, shackled tight at the wrists. One hand was in a press, the other in a framework box of strange design, its panels holding the hand open, fingers extended so that the gaoler could "play" with them one at a time.
The prelate shrugged, held his hands up, and when Morik didn't immediately reply a cat-o'-nine-tails switched across the rogue's naked back, leaving deep lines that hurt all the more for the sweat.
"You had the poison," Vohltin logically asserted, "and the insidious weapons, but it was not the same poison in the vial we recovered. A clever ruse, I suspect, to throw us off the correct path in trying to heal Captain Deudermont's wounds."
"A ruse indeed," Morik said dryly. The gaoler hit him again with the whip and raised his arm for a third strike. However, Vohltin raised his arm to hold the brutal thug at bay.
"You admit it?" Vohltin asked.
"All of it," Morik replied. "A ruse perpetrated by someone else, delivering to me and Wulfgar what you consider the evidence against us, then striking out at Deudermont when he came over to speak-"
"Enough!" said an obviously frustrated Vohltin, for he and all of the other interrogators had heard the same nonsense over and over from both Morik and Wulfgar. The prelate rose and turned to leave, shaking his head. Morik knew what that meant.
"I can tell you other things," the rogue pleaded, but Vohltin just lifted his arm and waved his hand dismissively.
Morik started to speak out again, but he lost his words and his breath as the gaoler slugged him hard in the kidney. Morik yelped and jumped, which only made the pain in his hand and thumb all the more exquisite. Still, despite all self-control, he jumped again when the gaoler struck him another blow, for the thug was wearing a metal strip across his knuckles, inlaid with several small pins.
Morik thought of his drow visitors that night long ago in the small apartment he kept near the Cutlass. Did they know what was happening? Would they come and rescue Wulfgar, and if they did, would they rescue Morik as well? He had almost told Wulfgar about them in those first hours when they had been chained in the same room, hesitating only because he feared that Wulfgar, so obviously lost in agonizing memories, wouldn't even hear him and that somebody else might.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if the magistrates could pin on him, as well a charge that he was an associate of dark elves? Not that it mattered. Another punch slammed in, then the gaoler wont for the whip again to cut a few new lines on his back.
If those drow didn't come, his fate, Morik knew, was sealed in a most painful way.
*****
Robillard had only been gone for a few minutes, but when he returned to Deudermont's room he found half a dozen priests working furiously on the captain. Camerbunne stood back, directing the group.