My hands twitched convulsively, anticipating the slash of steel, and my
throat closed in spasmodic dread. This was breaking the compact, bound
as they were not to inflict physical damage. I opened my lips to protest
this breaking of the bond of honor and met her dark blazing stare, and
suddenly the sweat broke out on my forehead. I had placed myself wholly
in their hands, and as Kyral had said, they were in no way bound by
honor to respect a pledge to a Terran!
Then, as my hands clenched into fists, I forced myself to relax. This
was a bluff, a mental trick to needle me into breaking the pact and
pleading for mercy. I set my lips, spread my palms wide against the wall
and waited impassively.
She said in her lilting voice, "Take care not to sever the tendons, or
his hands would be paralyzed and he may claim we have broken our
compact."
The points of the steel, razor-sharp, touched my palms, and I felt blood
run down my hand before the pain. With an effort that turned my face
white, I did not pull away from the point. The knives drove deeper.
Dallisa gestured to the _chak_. The knives dropped. Two pinpricks, a
quarter of an inch deep, stung in my palm. I had outbluffed her. Had I?
If I had expected her to betray disappointment--and I had--I was
disappointed. Abruptly, as if the game had wearied her already, she
gestured, and I could not hold back a gasp as my arms were hauled up
over my head, twisted violently around one another and trussed with thin
cords that bit deep into the flesh. Then the rough upward pull almost
jerked my shoulders from their sockets and I heard the giant _chak_
grunt with effort as I was hauled upward until my feet barely, on
tiptoe, touched the floor.
"Blindfold him," said Dallisa languidly, "so that he cannot watch the
ascent of the sun or its descent or know what is to come."
A dark softness muffled my eyes. After a little I heard her steps
retreating. My arms, wrenched overhead and numbed with the bite of the
cords, were beginning to hurt badly now. But it wasn't too bad. Surely
she did not mean that this should be all....
Sternly I controlled my imagination, taking a tight rein on my thoughts.
There was only one way to meet this--hanging blind and racked in space,
my toes barely scrabbling at the floor--and that was to take each thing
as it came and not look ahead for an instant. First of all I tried to
get my feet under me, and discovered that by arching upwards to my
fullest height I could bear my weight on tiptoe and ease, a little, the
dislocating ache in my armpits by slackening the overhead rope.
But after a little, a cramping pain began to flare through the arches of
my feet, and it became impossible to support my weight on tiptoe. I
jarred down with violent strain on my wrists and wrenched shoulders
again, and for a moment the shooting agony was so intense that I nearly
screamed. I thought I heard a soft breath near me.
After a little it subsided to a sharp ache, then to a dull ache, and
then to the violent cramping pain again, and once more I struggled to
get my toes under me. I realized that by allowing my toes barely to
touch the floor they had doubled and tripled the pain by the tantalizing
hope of, if not momentary relief, at least the alteration of one pain
for another.
I haven't the faintest idea, even now, how long I repeated that
agonizing cycle: struggle for a toehold on rough stone, scraping my bare
feet raw; arch upward with all my strength to release for a few moments
the strain on my wrenched shoulders; the momentary illusion of relief as
I found my balance and the pressure lightened on my wrists.
Then the slow creeping, first of an ache, then of a pain, then of a
violent agony in the arches of feet and calves. And, delayed to the last
endurable moment, that final terrible anguish when the drop of my full
weight pulled shoulder and wrist and elbow joints with that
bone-shattering jerk.
I started once to estimate how much time had passed, how many hours had
crawled by, then checked myself, for that was imminent madness. But once
the process had begun my brain would not abandon and I found myself,
with compulsive precision, counting off the seconds and the minutes in
each cycle: stretch upward, release the pressure on the arms; the
beginning of pain in calves and arches and toes; the creeping of pain up
ribs and loins and shoulders; the sudden jarring drop on the arms again.
My throat was intolerably dry. Under other circumstances I might have
estimated the time by the growth of hunger and thirst, but the rough
treatment I had received made this impossible. There were other,
unmentionable, humiliating pains.
After a time, to bolster my flagging courage, I found myself thinking of
all the ways it might have been worse. I had heard of a _shegrin_
exposed to the bite of poisonous--not fatal, but painfully
poisonous--insects, and to the worrying of the small gnawing rodents
which can be trained to bite and tear. Or I might have been branded....
I banished the memory with the powerful exorcism; the man in Daillon
whose anticipation, alone, of a torture which never came, had broken his
mind. There was only one way to conquer this, and that was to act as if
the present moment was the only one, and never for a moment to forget
that the strongest of compacts bound them not to harm me, that the end
of this was fixed by sunset.
Gradually, however, all such rational thoughts blurred in a semidelirium
of thirst and pain, narrowing to a red blaze of agony across my shoulder
blades. I eased up on my toes again.
White-hot pain blazed through my feet. The rough stone on which my toes
sank had been covered with metal and I smelled scorching flesh, jerking
up my feet with a wordless snarl of rage and fury, hanging in agony by
my shoulders alone.
And then I lost consciousness, at least for several moments, for when I
became aware again, through the nightmare of pain, my toes were resting
lightly and securely on cold stone. The smell of burned flesh remained,
and the painful stinging in my toes. Mingled with that smell was a drift
of perfume close by.
Dallisa murmured, "I do not wish to break our bargain by damaging your
feet. It's only a little touch of fire to keep you from too much
security in resting them."
I felt the taste of blood mingle in my mouth with the sour taste of
vomit. I felt delirious, lightheaded. After another eternity I wondered
if I had really heard Dallisa's lilting croon or whether it was a
nightmare born of feverish pain:
_Plead with me. A word, only a word and I will release you, strong man,
scarred man. Perhaps I shall demand only a little space in your arms.
Would not such doom be light upon you? Perhaps I shall set you free to
seek Rakhal if only to plague Kyral. A word, only a word from you. A
word, only a word from you...._
It died into an endlessly echoing whisper. Swaying, blinded, I wondered
why I endured. I drew a dry tongue over lips, salty and bloody, and
nightmarishly considered yielding, winning my way somehow around
Dallisa. Or knocking her suddenly senseless and escaping--I, who need
not be bound by Wolf's codes either. I fumbled with a stiff shape of
words.
And a breath saved me, a soft, released breath of anticipation. It was
another trick. I swayed, limp and racked. I was not Race Cargill now. I
was a dead man hanging in chains, swinging, filthy vultures pecking at
my dangling feet. I was....
The sound of boots rang on the stone and Kyral's voice, low and bitter,
demanded somewhere behind me, "What have you done with him?"
She did not answer, but I heard her chains clash lightly and imagined
her gesture. Kyral muttered, "Women have no genius at any torture
except...." His voice faded out into great distances. Their words came
to me over a sort of windy ringing, like the howling of lost men, dying
in the snowfast passes of the mountains.
"Speak up, you fool, he can't hear you now."
"If you have let him faint, you are clumsy!"
"_You_ talk of clumsiness!" Dallisa's voice, even thinned by the
nightmare ringing in my head, held concentrated scorn. "Perhaps I shall
release him, to find Rakhal when you failed! The Terrans have a price on
Rakhal's head, too. And at least this man will not confuse himself with
his prey!"
"If you think I would let you bargain with a _Terranan_--"
Dallisa cried passionately, "You trade with the Terrans! How would you
stop me, then?"
"I trade with them because I must. But for a matter involving the honor
of the Great House--"
"The Great House whose steps you would never have climbed, except for
Rakhal!" Dallisa sounded as if she were chewing her words in little
pieces and spitting them at Kyral. "Oh, you were clever to take us both
as your consorts! You did not know it was Rakhal's doing, did you? Hate
the Terrans, then!" She spat an obscenity at him. "Enjoy your hate,
wallow in hating, and in the end all Shainsa will fall prey to the
Toymaker, like Miellyn."
"If you speak that name again," said Kyral very low, "I will kill you."
"Like Miellyn, Miellyn, Miellyn," Dallisa repeated deliberately. "You
fool, Rakhal knew nothing of Miellyn!"
"He was seen--"
"With _me_, you fool! With _me_! You cannot yet tell twin from twin?
Rakhal came to _me_ to ask news of her!"
Kyral cried out hoarsely, like a man in anguish, "Why didn't you tell
me?"
"You don't really have to ask, do you, Kyral?"
"You bitch!" said Kyral. "You filthy bitch!" I heard the sound of a
blow. The next moment Kyral ripped the blindfold from my eyes and I
blinked in the blaze of light. My arms were wholly numb now, twisted
above my head, but the jar of his touch sent fresh pain racing through
me. Kyral's face swam out of the blaze of hell. "If that is true, then
this is a damnable farce, Dallisa. You have lost our chance of learning
what he knows of Miellyn."
"What _he_ knows?" Dallisa lowered her hand from her face, where a
bruise was already darkening.
"Miellyn has twice appeared when I was with him. Loose him, Dallisa, and
bargain with him. What we know of Rakhal for what he knows of Miellyn."
"If you think I would let you bargain with _Terranan_," she mocked.
"Weakling, this quarrel is _mine_! You fool, the others in the caravan
will give me news, if you will not! _Where is Cuinn?_"
From a million miles away Kyral laughed. "You've slipped the wrong hawk,
Dallisa. The catmen killed him." His skean flicked loose. He climbed to
a perch near the rope at my wrists. "Bargain with me, Rascar!"
I coughed, unable to speak, and Kyral insisted, "Will you bargain? End
this damned woman's farce which makes a mock of _shegri_?"
The slant of sun told me there was light left. I found a shred of voice,
not knowing what I was going to say until I had said it, irrevocably.
"This is between Dallisa and me."
Kyral glared at me in mounting rage. With four strides he was out of the
room, flinging back a harsh, furious "I hope you kill each other!" and
the door slammed.
Dallisa's face swam red, and again as before, I knew the battle which
was joined between us would be fought to a dreadful end. She touched my
chest lightly, but the touch jolted excruciating pain through my
shoulders.
"Did you kill Cuinn?"