Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [164]
At dusk, he turned the machine around and headed back to the transmitting station. He had no doubt that the old man would by now be armed and waiting for him, but Granger decided to take that risk. He had so much more still to learn.
Two soldiers strapped the Unmer man to a chair, then ripped off his blindfold, revealing the leucotomy scar on his forehead. He was a rag of a man, skeletal, limp-haired and savage-looking. He glanced feverishly around the room, before his gaze settled on Ianthe.
Briana paced behind Ianthe’s chair. ‘Just do what you did with Caroline, but tone it down a thousandfold.’
‘Constance,’ Ianthe said.
The man’s eyes filled with fury. His cheeks moved rapidly behind his gag. His naked chest rose and fell. Sweat dripped from his forehead, causing him to blink. Behind him, the Guild soldiers retreated to the far wall. One of the pair brushed a speck from his blue uniform sleeve and then stood to attention. The other man yawned. They were young, these two, but their blank expressions verged on boredom. They’d seen torture before.
Mirrors covered the three walls of the room facing the prisoner. Ianthe could see nothing in them but the room’s reflection, and yet she sensed dozens of figures waiting behind those huge panes. She cast out her mind . . .
. . . and found herself among a group of old women seated on tiered benches, their faces rapt as they studied the young Evensraum girl in a room behind a glass wall. The mirrors worked in one direction only. Ianthe flitted between the minds of her hidden observers, watching them through the eyes of their own peers. They were ancient, older than any Haurstaf Ianthe had seen. She sensed expectation, perhaps even excitement, in that secret room. She could see it in their eyes, in the twitching of skeletal fingers, the pursed lips.
‘Start with . . .’ Ianthe returned to her own body, ‘. . . a point behind his eyes,’ Briana said. ‘Sometimes it helps to picture a tiny tuning fork located there. Concentrate on the image until you begin to hear the fork vibrate. Haurstaf use such techniques to visualize and manipulate unconscious processes.’
Ianthe tried to picture a silver fork between the Unmer man’s eyes. Immediately, he began to struggle against his restraints, thrashing his head left and right. Had he been sensitive to that simple act of visualization? She wasn’t convinced. She imagined the fork vibrating, and she imagined the sound it made, but it didn’t seem to affect him in any way. ‘What do I do next?’ she said.
‘Visualize pain in your own head,’ Briana said. ‘You can imagine someone driving a nail into your skull. As soon as you start to feel it, push the sensation across into the tuning fork. If you’ve made a connection with the subject, he’ll feel that pain, greatly amplified.’
Ianthe found it hard to comply with the witch’s instructions. No matter how many imaginary tortures she inflicted on herself, she couldn’t spark the merest glimmer of a headache. After a while, she gave up. Thankfully, the Unmer prisoner appeared not to have suffered any ill effects from her efforts. She looked up at Briana. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘You did it with Car . . . Constance.’
‘That was different.’
‘How?’
‘She angered me.’
Briana snorted. ‘That’s easy enough to fix.’ She nodded at one of the two Guild soldiers. ‘Remove his gag.’
The soldier untied a knot at the back of the prisoner’s head.
The Unmer man spat out his gag. ‘Mutants,’ he said. He spoke Anean clearly, but with a heavy accent. ‘This is what happens when entropy is retarded.’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘Unsterilized, unchecked, a rotten branch poisoning the whole tree. Your own deformity prevents you from recognizing the truth!’ For a long moment he regarded Ianthe with narrow, cynical eyes. And then his expression softened. ‘Little girl,’ he said. ‘Look at yourself. Look at them. Do you want to be like these old women?’ He was almost pleading with her. ‘For the sake of the cosmos they should all have