Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [73]
One of the Carthaginian prisoners said somewhat to the other, who laughed harshly, spitting on the packed earth of the alley. Although I did not understand the words, I heard the name Fadil Chouma spoken.
The Menekhetan slaver.
"My lord Ramiro speaks the truth," I said to the Captain of the Harbor Watch, speaking Caerdicci, light-headed with anger and despair. "We will have a full accounting. There were three children; three D'Angeline children stolen. Two, we have found. Ask these men: What have they done with the third?"
Vitor Gaitán inclined his head. "It shall be done."
TWENTY-TWO
IT WAS done.
It was done in accordance with Aragonian law, which is harsh and exacting. If I had known, at the time, what I was asking, I do not know if I would have had the stomach to ask it.
Count Fernan put the Carthaginians to torture.
And this, too, I made myself witness, for this too, I had caused to be done. It was carried out in the dungeon of the Count's keep, a room of dank stone and iron.
Nicola L'Envers y Aragon accompanied me.
It surprised me, a little; but it was a different thing, to watch a controlled proceeding, than to observe the mayhem in the harbor. Mayhap she feared to let me observe it alone; mayhap it was only that she had seen the children's condition when we brought them to the Consul's quarters. I do not know. I know only that I was grateful to have her there.
They had names, these men—Mago and Harnapos. First one, and then the other. One was held in chains, while the other was seated on a wooden stool, his ankles in stocks, as two strong men held his arms and the Count's enforcer lowered a burning torch beneath the soles of his bare feet. So did they make their confessions, and a fourth man recorded it all on a waxen tablet, his stylus scratching without cease.
It goes without saying that they screamed, though I will say it anyway. They screamed, as their skin blistered and blackened and split, and the torch sizzled with dripping fluids and the smell of roasting meat filled their cell. It took all the strength of the Count's men to hold Harnapos, the larger of the two, for his chest swelled and his throat corded like iron as he screamed himself raw. I daresay he nearly wrenched his arms from their sockets in his struggle.
My blood beating in my ears, I watched it all in a crimson haze.
Nicola translated for me, her low voice murmuring D'Angeline my only line to sanity. If the words caught in her throat, still, she kept on without faltering, and for that too, I was grateful. I do not think I could have borne it otherwise. For all that I have played at such things throughout my life, in the end, there is little resemblance between the emulation and the reality.
I have known the latter, too. And even I do not care to remember it.
Thus the Carthaginians' story: They had met a man in Carthage, the Menekhetan slaver Fadil Chouma, and fell to drinking pots of beer in a tavern. He told them there were buyers, mysterious buyers with a dire purpose in mind, that there was a fortune to be made for any man who might procure D'Angelines for sale in foreign markets. Mago was mountain-born. He had friends among the Euskerri. He had a map. He had a plan. They would meet in Amílcar.
It was as simple as that.
And Mago and Harnapos had travelled to northern Aragonia, plying on the trade-rights Carthage enjoyed, had evaded the sparse border patrols and gone into the mountains with their map and their plan, crossing into Siovale, picking their prey with cunning. Goat-herds, cowherds, shepherd's children, picking those who would not be missed, those whose loss would be grieved in silence, abducting them in stealth—they used a leathern baton, Harnapos gasped, weighted with lead shot, to strike their victims at the base of the skull. Afterward, quick flight and a careful erasing of tracks, tactics learned from the Euskerri, and tincture of opium to keep the children compliant.