Abramm would not have recognized him had he not seen him in his own bedchamber. Gillard’s reduction in size was every bit as dramatic as it had seemed then, but only now did Abramm have the time to appreciate the immensity of what had been done to him. The fire of hatred in his eyes, however, remained unchanged.
Prittleman called the court to order, and following the High Father’s lead, everyone sat but Abramm and Prittleman. The charges were read and the evidence presented, beginning with his shirt being cut off him to reveal the shield and dragon—two marks of evil—branded into his flesh, and ending with the testimony of fifty men, each of them determined to outdo the other in the heinousness of their claims. Then the verdict—never in doubt—was read: Guilty as charged of heresy, colluding with evil, obstructing the truth, disrespecting the High Father, and a host of other crimes rendered irrelevant when the penalty for heresy alone was death.
Finally it was time for Bonafil to pronounce the sentence—death, of course—followed by the inevitable offer of mercy. “Given your past, and the fact you were once a dedicated servant of the true Flames,” he said ponderously, “if you will renounce your error, allow the mark of evil to be removed from your flesh, and swear to serve the truth forever more, we will let you live.”
“I swear only to serve the truth,” Abramm said. “And that I do not find here today.”
A spark of red flickered in the amulet at the High Father’s throat and was echoed faintly in his bulging eyes. He folded his hands very carefully before him, asked, “You are sure?” And to Abramm’s astonishment he launched a veil of translucent Shadow through the air to wrap itself around him. Coldness caressed his naked torso, crept into his blood, and sought to ignite the fear that lurked at the edges of his soul, reminding him of what would come after this trial—a trip to the dark den of the torturer, blades and whips and implements of glowing iron applied to his flesh in multifarious, unthinkable ways. The pain would be excruciating, the damage to his body worse than anything the morwhol had done . . .
He turned his thoughts from those fearful speculations and affirmed to himself that whatever Eidon asked him to do, he would give him the power to accomplish. The Light rose in him and the cold pressure vanished.
Lifting his chin, he gave firm answer to Bonafil’s question: “I’m sure.”
The High Father leaned back in his chair with a grimace. “Well, you give us no choice, then, but to do whatever we must to deliver you from the evil that has captured your soul.” He glanced at the bailiff. “Take him to Wetherslea.”
Outside the High Court Chamber, the crowd was now openly hostile. People lined the labyrinthine route down to the prison, cursing him and shaking their fists, and he marveled that they could turn so quickly from adoration to hatred.
At the prison, Abramm was marched down a long stair of weathered stone into a nightmare of darkness full of distant screams and dreadful smells. They passed through a series of locked iron gates, then down a long corridor to a dark pillared chamber lit by the flames of a bronze brazier balanced at room center on a waist-high stand. Two men in black tunics waited beside it, and various long-handled iron implements whose purpose Abramm preferred not to consider hung from the upper collar of the stand. Farther out, where the flickering light gave way to shadow, stood a ring of large, freestanding wooden frames—racks to which the torturers’ victims were chained so they might do their work.
Wordlessly, Abramm’s escort stripped away the remains of his slitted shirt and shackled him into one of the racks, pulling his arms out straight to either side and angled slightly upward, tight enough to put an uncomfortable pressure on his stiffened left arm. His legs were shackled likewise but not spread so far apart they couldn’t hold his weight. Throughout this operation not one of them so much as glanced at his face.
When he was secured, the guards took up positions about the room as if they still believed somehow he might escape, while the smaller of the two torturers placed several of the implements into the blaze. Then the other man shook out the small black whip he wore coiled at his waist and, with no more warning than that, came round behind Abramm and started in.
He heard the whip sing through the air half a heartbeat before it struck. The first blow was like fire cutting across the flesh of his back. The second was worse. By the third he was feeling light-headed and queasy. After that he stopped trying to count and concentrated on trying to breathe, for his chest kept wanting to close up, and he found it was hard to think about Tersius anymore, hard to think of anything but the pain which filled up all his senses.
Then it ended and he was left hanging there, gasping and shuddering as his legs trembled beneath him and the dark room spun around him. He hung there for what seemed a very long time, listening as his guards conversed idly with each other and the torturers, and marveling at how pain could so completely command one’s thoughts. His left arm had fallen asleep when he heard a distant clang and the men broke off their talk to reassume their formal positions. Approaching footsteps heralded the arrival of more Gadrielites, marching in to intersperse themselves with his original escort. Shortly thereafter, Master Belmir strode into the room, followed by Gillard and Darak Prittleman.
They filed in behind the brazier, standing in a half circle in front of guards, and stared at Abramm with expressions cold, hard, and grim. For a long time no one moved. Then Belmir stepped up to face him.
“You say Eidon has chosen you. Tell me, then, how has it come to pass that you are hanging here, beaten and bloodied? If we are wrong, why has he delivered you into our hands?”
Abramm stared down at him, the old doubts stirring uneasily.
“And why was your army unable to stop the forces of Shadow?” Prittleman added, stepping up behind Belmir. “Where those empowered by Eidon’s Holy Flames succeeded?”
“Can’t you see how wrong you’ve been?” Belmir asked. “I told you it would be like this . . . when you said that Eidon himself speaks to you. How could you think he would let such blasphemy go?”
“We promised you would feel his wrath,” Prittleman said. “And so you will—”
“Unless,” Belmir interrupted, “you repent of this madness and return to the truth!”
“I already have the truth,” Abramm said.
Belmir’s gaze grew troubled. “Please, Abramm. You know what we have to do if you refuse to bend.”
“And this is how your god must gain his followers?” Abramm asked. “By torturing them into submission?”
And Belmir’s gaze grew more troubled still.
“Bah!” Prittleman cried, stepping in front of him. “Your god lets you fall into the hands of his enemies and leaves you there, helpless against them.” He turned to Belmir. “The Shadow holds him too strongly, Master. We must proceed.”
Looking grieved and reluctant, Belmir stepped back and motioned for the torturers to begin. Immediately the smaller one pulled a pair of tongs from the fire, and in it dangled a black, frog-sized, tentacled mass that Abramm recognized at once. As the larger man daubed white hamar onto the side of his ribs, the other lifted the griiswurm, suckered tentacles already groping toward him.
But it hadn’t even touched him before it was repelled by a flash of Light he did not consciously generate. Both men staggered backward before it, and the griiswurm wound itself so tightly to the tongs that no amount of prying could unfasten it. Only when it was brought back to the flames did it let go, falling into the safety of its bright nest. Grim-faced, the torturer pulled another from the brazier, as his accomplice picked up a second set of tongs and pulled out another.
This time the men hit with a sudden blast of the fearspell before applying the griiswum, seeming to know that if they could just get a little spawn spore into him, it would give them the leverage they needed to eventually break him. It didn’t work, but they kept coming, using griiswurm after griiswurm, as the Light kept driving them off.
Suddenly Gillard strode in among them and bade them stop. “You’re wasting
our time. Ply the whip again. Or else use those tongs and pokers for what they were intended.”
The men looked around at Master Belmir, and Gillard gestured impatiently at the whip dangling from the torturer’s belt. “Here. Give me that and I’ll do it myself.”
The torturer handed the whip over, but as Gillard shook it out and stepped toward Abramm, Belmir stopped him.
“Makepeace,” he said sternly, “you have sworn a vow to do no violence.”
Gillard looked round at him with arched brows. “Yet I can stand here and direct others to do it at my command?” He snorted. “What’s the difference? I’d rather do it myself anyway. Tell Father Bonafil he can grant me another special dispensation.”
And the whip came snapping like fire across Abramm’s belly. He grunted with the shock of it and felt his muscles twitch and contract.
“There. See? He can’t stop that.” The whip sang and snapped again. “Repent!” Gillard snarled. “Give up that stupid mark and yield.” But his insincerity was patent.
“Makepeace, that’s enough,” Belmir commanded. “Give him back the whip!”
Gillard did so, but he then turned to push his face up into Abramm’s. “If you are so sure you are right, why hasn’t Eidon delivered you, brother dear?” Abramm smelled the incense on his robes and the garlic on his breath. “Why has he let your sons die?”
Abramm stared at him, shaken to the core, and Gillard smiled. “My own man threw your youngest into the side of a cliff.” He paused and his smile widened. “Why, it’s just as the Words say we are to do to our enemies, isn’t it? ‘You will dash their little ones against the rocks. . . . ’ Remember that passage? Your other boy I chased off the ledge trail under the white wall—same place I nearly pushed you off twenty years ago. . . .” His face twisted into a smirk. “I guess that means for all intents and purposes I’ve dashed him against the rocks, too.”
Abramm hung there, struggling to breathe but determined not to give his brother the satisfaction of knowing how deeply those lies drove into him. For they had to be lies. The alternative was not something he could consider. Your glory is in your goodness, my Father. And I will trust in that. I do not believe you would take my sons from me in this way.
“I don’t believe you, Gillard,” he said tightly. “Or I guess it’s Makepeace now, isn’t it?” And he smiled a little at that, wondering why in the world they’d given him that name.
Gillard glared at him as if he’d just offered him the gravest insult possible and then attacked like a wild man—slapping, hitting, punching—the blows landing willy-nilly on his face and neck and stomach. . . .
By the time the torturers pulled him off, Abramm’s right eye was swelling closed and his nose, which Gillard had already broken once in their youth, felt broken again. His lips were cut and throbbing, and he spat out the blood that filled his mouth.
Gillard wrestled free of the torturers and staggered back, panting and rubbing his hands as if they stung while he grinned ferociously at Abramm.
“You’re going down, brother. I will take your place and you will never be king again. In fact, I will see that no one even remembers your name.”
And behind him now, Abramm saw another man, who must’ve entered while Abramm was being pummeled. A man with spectacles and a pasty face and long silver-threaded hair. A man with a telltale tic by his right eye. He was smiling.
Abramm blinked and the man was gone, swallowed back up into the shadows.
“Please, Abramm,” Belmir said. “Surely you must see your error. Or if not that, then the futility of resisting. Don’t make us go on.”
“I’m sorry, old friend. I will not renounce what I know to be true.”
“You’re being too soft on him, Master Belmir,” said a new voice.
Abramm expected Byron Blackwell to appear, but instead it was young Master Eudace who stepped through the circle of Gadrielites to join them. He fixed his luminous blue eyes on Abramm, who was reminded weirdly of the kraggin’s great orbs. . . .
“Sentimentality is blinding you, sir,” Eudace said, his voice as cool and hard as his eyes. “He is a servant of the Shadow. You will not save him from himself with kindness. Only the agony of great love will do it.” The young master smiled up at Abramm. “You will thank us in a day or two.”
And then it began in earnest. They used the whip and the hot irons and the griiswurm all together, the pain and shock and constant attempts to infest him with spore along with a steady stream of accusations wearing him down.
“If you are Eidon’s chosen, why are you here? Why is this happening? Why does he not rescue you?”
His responses to the griiswurm grew slower. They began to actually touch him, and spore gained a foothold, was burned away, only to gain another. . . .
“Where is your great power now?”
“Why did he let your sons die?”
“Why has he abandoned you?”
He saw the rhu’ema hovering around him in the shadows above, savoring his pain as if it were fine wine, delighting as the Shadow rose up to take him for longer and longer periods of time.
He kept seeing Blackwell now, among the others, his white wrinkled face, his long silver hair, and the tic working rapidly in his excitement. One of the lenses in his spectacles had cracked, but he seemed not to notice. Sometimes he came around behind to whisper alternate accusations into Abramm’s ear. . . .
“You should have protected Carissa. Now she’s been defiled with the bastard of your enemy, and it’s your doing.”
Darkness and pain and gasping grunts. His throat was raw. His body felt as if it had been turned inside out, as if all his skin had been stripped away.
“You did this yourself. Your sin with Shettai, your audacity in going after another. You’ve ruined Briellen. And Maddie is dead. As are your sons.”
No . . .
“They are! See?” Images flooded his mind, a tiny bundle torn from his wife’s arms and hurled against the rocks, falling to the ground, still and silent. A small figure in a child’s cloak running in terror along a narrow ledge, clutching a bedraggled stuffed horse to his chest. He looked back, a small white, frightened face, then tripped and fell over the edge. . . .
“NO!”
“Dead . . . even as your realm lies in ruin, your people betrayed. . . .”
“Let us cleanse you,” Belmir pleaded. “Let us take the mark and we will stop.”
“So many ways you have failed. You think he would ignore it all? Pretend it did not exist? That is why you are here, you know. Because he has had enough of you and your failures.”
The darkness pressed at him from without and within. Red light reflected off hideous faces, knitted brows, open mouths, and wagging tongues. And on and on it went.
“Let us take the mark, Abramm. Please.”
“Yes, let them take it. You don’t deserve to wear it anyway. . . .”
His sons were dead. His wife taken . . . He had failed them all—family, realm, Eidon. He did not deserve to wear the shield.
Another griiswurm slapped upon him, introducing successive lines of new fire, somehow more excruciating than any of the rest, and he could no longer hold in the screams. As his shrieks echoed off the stone around him, spawn spore raced through his veins, hot and nauseating, flaring blue across his vision as the Shadow took him and held on.
Eventually he ran out of breath and the screams devolved into ragged groans as he hung there, weak and shaking and wanting to die. Surely it would end soon. His body was a bleeding, throbbing agony, his reality a world of darkness and torment into which Belmir now said in a shaking, desperate voice, “Abramm, please . . .”
And he heard himself moan, and then his own voice, dry and raspy, said, “Yes. I don’t deserve to wear it. Take it and make it stop.”
And they did.
————
When he came to again, he was still shackled to the frame, but now Bonafil stood before him with all his High Council, the lot of them staring at him
with bright and avid gazes.
The High Father Bonafil smiled condescendingly. “We knew you would come around, son, and we rejoice in having broken the power of evil on your life. See . . . you are no longer bound.” He gestured to Abramm’s chest.
Abramm looked down at himself, numb and so stupid with pain that it took him a moment to sift through all the welts and slashes cut by the whip, the oozing burn marks, the ugly red bites of the tongs, and the blistering lines of the griiswurm to realize his mark was missing. In its place lay a smooth, pale patch of new skin.
“No.” The word came out a half sob. “How could I. . . ?” He closed his eyes, a wave of grief and despair and searing guilt washing through him. How could he have turned? How could he have allowed them to take it? No. . . ! “No man shall snatch you from my hands.”
The words floated through his mind, stopping the inward wail. And then he recalled the gold shields embossed into the breastbones of the skeletons they’d pulled out of Graymeer’s and the pigskin covers some Terstans used to pretend they weren’t Terstan. Byron Blackwell had pressed Abramm himself to use one of them more than five years ago, when the Table of Lords wanted to arrest him for wearing a shield. His mark wasn’t gone. They’d simply covered it and wanted him to think it was. They’d pressed him and pressed him, and he’d finally said yes. He remembered that now. Guilt welled up in him, sharp, flaying . . . Worse, he had no idea how to remove it and was too ashamed to even seek the one who did, let alone ask.
Which is exactly what they intend.