Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

“I started with air shards,” Trivner says, and she knows what is coming. Many times she has heard his delighted recitation of the tortures he has performed. It’s like listening to a poet’s expression of love for the one thing in life he can never let go. “Into his knees and elbows, then both shins. The first I slipped only into the flesh, but the last selection I pushed through his bones. They’ll never come out. Any movement is agony.”

“Delightful,” Jan Ray says. “Hurry with this, Trivner. And then perhaps I can get some answers from him where you’ve failed.”

The torturer blusters for a moment, but then breathes deeply, calming himself. Remember who you’re talking to, Jan Ray thinks. His voice becomes more businesslike.

“After the air shards, some more basic forms of persuasion. Fingernails extracted. Cuts filled with powdered swine-horn. Fire ants into every body opening.” Trivner’s confidence seems to falter, and the lilt drops from his voice. “No one ever gets past the fire ants.”

“But still nothing,” Jan Ray muses. Bamore turns slightly on the rope and it creaks, wet from his blood. He coughs and vomits something black.

“Leave me with him, both of you.” Trivner goes to protest but she holds up one hand, eyes closed. He knows better than to argue with a priestess.

“I’ll wait right outside,” Trivner says, as if that will be a comfort.

“By Hanharan’s will, he will tell me what I need to know,” Jan Ray says. But as the fat torturer and the thin scribe leave the stinking chamber, she feels a slight shiver of something she does not quite understand.

Soon, she will know it as fear.

Stay here, Jave had told her. Like talking to a child. He had been her most trusted captain for some years, and they had developed a rapport that bordered on friendship, though any hint of closeness between priestess and soldier was vehemently discouraged. But still she felt a tingle of anger at his brusqueness.

“He’s concerned, you fool,” she murmured, and the sounds from outside grew more startling. Shouted orders and screams of pain; panicked cries from the people who had been lining the street; the whip of arrows and impacts of cruel metal tips on stone, wood, and flesh. They’ve come for him. She shivered and leaned forward, pulling the curtain aside.

She had been involved in trouble like this several times before. Eighteen years ago, when Willem Marcellan was assassinated by a breakaway Watcher sect, she had been at his side in the carriage when the murderer climbed in and stabbed him to death. The killer had been moving across to her when a Blade’s sword pinned him to the carriage floor and gutted him before her. More recently, she and several other Hanharan priests had been trapped in a blood-feud riot between two powerful families from Mino Mont Canton, a skirmish that had resulted in the Marcellan Wall running red with the blood of fourteen executions over the space of three moons. Brutal, shocking, but necessary. So she was no stranger to bloodshed and the shock of violence, and fear was tempered by her faith. The spirit of Hanharan, the originator of Echo City, would welcome her down into the One Echo should she die here today.

But her concern was not for herself.

If they take Bamore and hide him away…

That could not happen. He knew too much—he was too much—and the city was nowhere near ready for him and his kind. If Hanharan chose to smile upon her today, it would never need to be.

It took her a few moments to assess exactly what was happening. The Wreckers must have been waiting among the crowd and in some of the buildings they passed by, because the carriage and its escort appeared to be surrounded. Arrows arced in from several directions, and she could hear the vicious thunk of crossbows being fired. Three Blades were already down, writhing on the ground and flailing for the arrows or bolts piercing them. One of them screamed. How unbecoming, Jan Ray thought. It seemed not even Scarlet Blade training was perfect.

The four tusked swine were also down, their tough hides spiked with many arrows and bolts. Two of them still moved, kicking feebly, the network of ropes and timber supports tethering them to the carriage twisted and useless. The first thing the attackers had done was to make sure they couldn’t move.

The crowd was panicking and trying to retreat from the scene, but others behind them pushed forward to see what was happening. The resultant crush denied them any hope of escape, and she saw very quickly that this ambush must be fought and won here. Gaol Ten was two miles away, but might as well have been twenty.