Good, Neshok thought coldly. Always best to start with the biggest one, especially when he's one of the noncoms the others will be looking to for leadership. It makes the point so much more effectively for the others.
The acting five hundred looked at one of the two guards, and nodded very slightly.
Javelin Lisaro Porath stepped forward without a word in response to the silent command and raised his heavy infantry arbalest to chest level, then brought its butt down in a flashing, vertical stroke. It struck the top of the petty-armsman's left shoulder like a hammer. It also took the big man completely by surprise, and he grunted in hoarse agony, despite himself, as the vicious stroke landed. Privately, Neshok was impressed that the man had managed not to cry out, although he wasn't about to let any of that show in his own expression.
Pain and the physical impact drove the prisoner forward and down. With his hands behind him, he couldn't even try to catch himself, and he smashed face-first into the rough, split-log floor. Blood erupted from his flattened nose and pulped lips, and Porath reached down, caught him by his hair, yanked him back upright, and then drove a kneecap brutally into his spine. The impact hammered him forward again, his hair "slipping" from Porath's fingers, and he thudded back onto the floor, where the guard proceeded to kick him repeatedly in the ribs.
The second guard watched the other prisoners alertly, his arbalest ready, but they seemed too shocked, too stunned, to pose any kind of threat, and Neshok watched them closely as he let the brutal, systematic beating go on and on. He wanted them to stay shocked, wanted them to reflect upon what could happen to anyone who failed to provide the answers he sought.
By the time the acting five hundred finally waved one index finger gently and Porath stepped back, panting with exertion, the big petty-armsman was unconscious. The arbalest butt had almost certainly broken his shoulder badly, and Neshok rather doubted that he had a single intact rib. His face was a mass of blood, bubbling on his lips as he breathed through his mouth rather than his flattened, broken nose, and his right cheek and lower jaw were a caved-in ruin of shattered bone. Neshok never doubted for a moment that the prisoner also had internal injuries, and a dark, vicious light of purring cruelty glowed in his eyes.
"Drag that garbage out and get rid of it, Javelin Porath," he told the guard. The translating crystal obediently rendered the order in Ternathian for the other prisoners' benefit, and the trooper gave a harsh half-grunting laugh, grabbed the unconscious petty-armsman by an ankle, and dragged him out of the interrogation room. The sliding, scraping body left a trail of blood as the brutalized face scrubbed across the splintery floor, undoubtedly taking still more damage in the process, and Porath paused long enough to administer a final, savage kick to his victim's side before he dragged him the rest of the way out the door.
That door closed behind him, and Neshok allowed his attention to return to the other four prisoners. Or, rather, he allowed them to see his attention return to them, as if he'd forgotten the crystal would translate his instructions to the guard into Ternathian. He smiled coldly at them, then looked up again as the door opened once more.
Javelin Porath stepped back through it. His arbalest was slung across his back, and he was just settling his short sword back into its sheath. He rebuttoned the retaining strap across the quillons as he walked back to stand behind the remaining prisoners without a word.
Very nice, Neshok thought approvingly.
Porath had taken the Intelligence officer's instructions to heart, and he clearly had a thespian bent. Neshok had been half-afraid the trooper would do something like ostentatiously wiping his blade, or something equally obvious. Instead, he'd opted for something understated enough to clearly imply the desired effect without overdoing it, and his satisfied expression was more effective than any theatrically homicidal leer.
As if I had any intention of wasting an intelligence asset that quickly, Neshok thought contemptuously as he watched the prisoners draw the desired conclusion. The wiry senior-armsman's face showed absolutely no change of expression. If anything, his eyes simply hardened even further, but his companions were quite another matter. There was still anger in them, Neshok decided. In fact, their anger burned hotter and fiercer than ever, yet its heat was at least matched by fresh, choking terror. Obviously, they believed exactly what he'd wanted them to believe.
Hard to blame them for that, really, even without that neat little bit of acting, he admitted. Just the beating probably would've killed the bastard in the end, and these fucking barbarians have never heard of proper healers. Even if they had, it might not have occurred to them—yet—just what that implies when it comes to the application of . . . forceful arguments in favor of cooperation. Well, they're going to find out exactly what that means, aren't they? Eventually, of course.
He was going to have to deal with Vaynair first, no doubt. One of the things the Kerellian Accords specifically prohibited was the use of healers in the interrogation of prisoners. Alivar Neshok had no intention of allowing his hands to be tied that way, however. Which was really the main reason Five Hundred Vaynair had to go. Vaynair would almost certainly go ahead and heal the battered petty-armsman this time, but he'd never sign off on the use of torture or allow any of the healers under his command to cooperate by healing the physical consequences of a . . . rigorous interrogation session only to let the questioners begin all over again without accidentally expending their intelligence assets.
In the meantime . . .
"Perhaps the rest of you are feeling inclined to be a little more cooperative now?" he suggested, and one of the prisoners—a young under-armsman who couldn't have been much over twenty—swallowed visibly. Neshok noted the reaction with satisfaction.
"I'm sure, for example," he continued, "that one of you would like to help me out by telling me exactly which of the other portals Viscount Simrath and Platoon-Captain Arthag might have chosen to make for."
No one answered, and Neshok showed his teeth in something no one would ever have mistaken for a smile.
It had become abundantly and painfully evident that whatever else had happened at Fallen Timbers, Narshu's mission couldn't possibly have been a complete success. It was going to be a while before they could prove that conclusively, however. The forest fire which Neshok was personally certain Arthag had deliberately started to cover his tracks was rapidly turning into a demonic holocaust. The tinder-dry autumn forest, with its deep drifts of leaves, had proved the ideal target for the Sharonian's arson. A booming, crackling wavefront of flame was spreading out—it was actually moving upwind, as well as downwind—and there was no possibility of containing or controlling that raging fury. It had already completely blocked the overland route between the swamp portal and Hell's Gate, and unless some divine agency chose to intervene soon, it was going to burn all the way back to both of those portals. Not to mention burning the gods only knew how far in every other direction, as well.
From the Sharonians' perspective, simply blocking the trail would have been completely worthwhile in its own right, especially if they'd set the fire before they discovered the Air Force's existence. It was going to be a pain in the arse for Arcana even with the advantage of dragons and levitation spells; without that advantage, it would have delayed Two Thousand Harshu's offensive for days, probably even longer. The fact that it was going to completely destroy any possibility of tracking the Sharonian fugitives from Fallen Timbers was simply gravy from their viewpoint. But Neshok wasn't about to let them get away with that. If Rithmar Skirvon and Uthik Dastiri were still alive, Neshok wanted them back, and not just because they were accredited diplomats of the Union of Arcana. He wasn't supposed to know just how . . . friendly the diplomats were with Two Thousand mul Gurthak, but he was an Intelligence officer. As such, he had a pretty shrewd notion of how grateful mul Gurthak would be if Neshok could manage to retrieve them.
"Come now," he said almost gently as the silence stretched out. "I'm sure none of you want to be so . . . uncooperative
that you make me angry. Believe me, you won't like me when I'm angry."
"We don't know where they'd go!" the young under-armsman blurted suddenly.
"That's enough, Sirda," the senior-armsman said quietly, almost gently.
The youngster darted a look at the older man, then clamped his jaws with a visible effort and stared at the floor directly in front of him, avoiding any possible eye contact with Neshok.
"No, Sirda," the Arcanan said, his voice almost as quiet as the senior-armsman's, but far, far colder. "It isn't enough. It isn't nearly enough."
The under-armsman—Sirda—clenched his chained hands into fists behind him. His face was pale, and he bit his lip, hard, but he didn't speak.
Neshok nodded to the second of the two guards, and the Arcanan trooper bent over Sirda from behind, twisted his fingers in the young man's hair, and yanked his head back so hard the youngster couldn't quite smother his cry of pain. The pressure on his scalp forced him to look up, meet Neshok's eyes, and the Intelligence officer's smile was cruel and thin.
"Someone is going to tell me what I want to know," Neshok said softly. "Whoever it is, will probably get to live. As for whoever it isn't . . ."
He let his eyes drift to the trail of blood the big petty-armsman's face had left across the floor, then looked back at Sirda. The young man's throat worked, and sweat coated his face.
"In that case," the senior-armsman said levelly, "why don't you ask me?"
Neshok allowed his eyebrows to arch and gazed at the Sharonian noncom thoughtfully.
"I hadn't realized you were so eager to be reasonable, Senior-Armsman," he said. "Very well, which portal did Simrath and Arthag make for?"
The senior-armsman looked back up at him for a moment, then said something in a language the translating crystal didn't understand. The long sentence—or sentences—sounded guttural, yet flowing and edged with a sort of harsh music, but the language certainly wasn't Ternathian, and Neshok frowned.
"Speak Ternathian."
The Intelligence officer managed to bring the words out calmly, suppressing—barely in time—the urge to snap them out. Using anger to generate fear in someone else was a useful interrogation tool, but allowing a prisoner to successfully bait him would be a sign of weakness.
"Oh," the senior-armsman said. "Your rock doesn't speak Arpathian?"
"Speak Ternathian," Neshok repeated almost tonelessly, and the kneeling prisoner shrugged.
"If you want," he said. "I said, he already told you. We don't know the answer to your question."
"And what else did you say?" Neshok asked softly.
"Actually, what I said was, 'He already told you. We don't know the answer to your question, you syphilitic, camel-fucking son of a diseased sow and a hundred pig-fucking fathers,' " the senior-armsman replied . . . and smiled.
"It was, was it?"
Neshok tried to keep his voice calm, level, despite the sudden, savage bolt of white-hot fury which burst suddenly through him, but he knew he'd failed. He heard the anger crackling in his own words, heard the way they quivered about the edges, and saw the satisfaction in the senior-armsman's eyes.
Eyes, Neshok suddenly realized, which, like the cold smile below them, held not a single trace of fear. Which dared the acting five hundred to do his worst. And as he realized that, Neshok realized something else, as well. The senior-armsman had deliberately redirected Neshok's own attention—and anger—to himself, and away from the terrified young under-armsman.
The five hundred glared at the Sharonian in front of him. It would have been inaccurate to say that Neshok reached a decision. That would have implied a deliberate, at least semi-rational process. He told himself, later, that it had been exactly that. That the coldly calculated need to undermine any defiance the senior-armsman might have managed to inject into his subordinates was what inspired him. Certainly a trained, determined interrogator would never allow a prisoner's words—the only weapon the prisoner possessed—to fill him with such sudden, volcanic fury that he acted without truly thinking at all.
Alivar Neshok looked at the guard standing behind the Arpathian prisoner, clenched his fist at shoulder level, and jerked it downward.
The Arpathian must have understood what that gesture meant, but his eyes never flinched and his smile never faltered as the short sword hissed out of its sheath behind him and the guard's free hand gripped his hair and yanked his head back.
"Now . . . Sirda," Neshok heard his own voice say across the coppery stink of the huge fan of blood which had erupted from the senior-armsman's slashed throat to fill his nostrils, "I believe you had something you wanted to tell me."
'Chapter Nine
"Well, isn't this charming," Hulmok Arthag remarked.
It was quite astounding, Dorzon chan Baskay reflected, just how much disgust his fellow platoon-captain could put into a simple four-word sentence.
Not that he could really fault the Arpathian at this particular moment.
The Ternathian officer turned and gazed back the way they'd come. The portal through which they'd passed was far smaller than Hell's Gate. In fact, it measured barely three miles from side to side, which made it even smaller than the swamp portal. And at the moment, it was like a picture window into the very heart of one of the Uromathians' fiery hells.
The fire Arthag had created had rolled right up to the portal's very brink. The furious, heat-driven stormfront of wind had whirled bits and pieces of flaming debris through the portal as the bone-dry northern forest they'd left behind consumed itself in a vortex of searing devastation.
But there'd never been much chance of that fire pouring itself through this portal, chan Baskay reflected. He could feel the fire's heat on his face even here, hundreds of yards away as he and Arthag stood side-by-side in the fork of a towering tree. Their chosen tree reared its impressive height—well over a hundred feet into the air, most of it far above their present perch—atop the same, sharp ridgeline over which Chief-Armsman chan Hathas was leading the other members of their tiny command. Other trees, thousands of trees, stretched away from this aspect of their arrival portal as far as they could see, and those trees were anything but "bone-dry."
As nearly as chan Baskay could estimate, they had to be deep inside the rainforest basin of the mighty Dalazan River, which drained the vast interior of the continent of New Farnal. That meant rain. Lots of rain, in daily, drenching doses. Rain measured not in inches, but in feet per year. In fact, it was raining right this moment, soaking the upper canopy of lush green foliage so completely that even entire flaming branches, borne through the portal in the grip of fire-born whirlwinds, simply hissed into extinction when they landed. When Arthag's holocaust had completed its work, this portal was going to thrust up out of a wasteland of ashes and soot like some surreal slice of verdant greenery.
A very visible surreal slice of verdant greenery.
"It may not be exactly 'charming,' " chan Baskay said now, in reply to Arthag's comment, "but in my own humble opinion, it beats the hells out of the alternative."
"There is that," Arthag acknowledged. "That doesn't mean I have to like it, though. And I don't—like it, I mean."
Chan Baskay snorted, but he had no trouble understanding Arthag's viewpoint. If the Arpathian hadn't liked the northern forest of hardwoods and conifers they'd left behind, their present triple canopy rainforest had to be even worse. On the other hand, the advantages for a small band of fugitives were enormous.
Although equatorial rainforests were undoubtedly home to the most diverse collection of plant and animal life on any world in the multiverse, they were quite different from the image which the word "jungle" evoked in most people's minds. They were composed primarily of trees, not vast, thick-growing thickets of fernlike vegetation. Instead, the surface of the ground tended to be marked by a layer of rapidly decomposing dead leaves, dominated by abundant tree seedlings and saplings. Most of those seedlings and saplings would never reach maturity, since only a minute fraction of the
potential sunlight ever penetrated the upper tree canopies. The topmost layer of leaves reached heights of over a hundred and thirty feet, and additional, lower canopies intercepted any light that got past it. Visibility was still limited in a forest like that, of course, but not nearly so badly as the average Sharonian might have assumed.
But this particular portal sat in the middle of what the botanists would have called a "regeneration zone." Something—possibly even the formation of the portal itself—had killed back enough trees to open an enormous hole in the overhead canopies. The light streaming suddenly into the dim, dark recesses which those canopies had hidden had unleashed an explosion of growth of more light-demanding species. Herbaceous varieties had sprung up everywhere, creating something which truly was very much like the stereotypical idea of a "jungle." By now, the process was far enough along that the fastest-growing shrubs and trees were beginning to shade those varieties back out once more, but the transition was still far from complete. For the moment, the incredibly luxuriant masses of plant life made any line of sight much over ten or fifteen yards all but impossible to come by. The torrential equatorial rains were also able to get through, thanks to the thinner canopies overhead, and the combination of well over seventy inches a year of rain, plus the incredible rates of local plant growth, would quickly conceal any trail they might leave. Perhaps even more importantly, under the circumstances, the limitless possibilities for ambushes would force any pursuer to move with the utmost caution. And if anyone did manage to catch up with them, he would soon discover that not all of the Faraika I machine guns had been sent forward to Company-Captain chan Tesh. Chan Baskay had only three of the weapons, but once they were dug in in properly concealed positions, they would wreak havoc on any opponent.