Shadow War - Deborah Chester [113]
His voice was a ruined croak, as though his throat had been crushed long ago. His accent was strange, his words barely understandable. He seemed to speak an odd mixture of Lingua and pidgin. And although the man was no longer quite in focus, Caelan would never forget his first sight of him. The torturer’s ears came to slight points that jutted up through his greasy hair. His fingers had delicate webs between them.
A shudder ran through Caelan. This was some kind of demon-spawn, a creature half human and half of shadow, as horrifying in its way as a moag or a lurker. To find it here in the heart of the city, clothed and employed, had shocked Caelan deeply.
Yet why should he be surprised at anything in Irnperia? After all, the gladiators consorted with the monstrous Haggai—female creatures with siren voices and the bodies of huge, slug-like worms. The Vindicants exercised an official religion for the public, and a very different kind of blasphemous observance for private ceremonies. The empire was based on hypocrisy, and the emperor himself lived only through some kind of unholy bargain with the darkness itself.
But such things were hidden away for the most part, not talked about openly, concealed from all except those who actively sought them.
The torturer, however, was an official of the palace— no matter how lowly his status. Corruption was spreading; truly the end of the world must be nigh.
Even to look on the creature’s pallid face filled Caelan with revulsion. As for the torturer, he knew Caelan was afraid and why.
Baring his teeth, the torturer laughed softly in Caelan’s face, close enough for him to feel the creature’s warm, fetid breath on his skin. Caelan averted his face, but the torturer gripped his jaw with viselike fingers and wrenched him back.
“Speak some!” he said angrily. “Man die slow. Man die hard way. Speak some, man die not. No speak, man die hard.”
Caelan met the thing’s eyes. They were human eyes, green and round, fringed with lashes as thick as a woman’s. But the light in them was madness. Gathering himself. Caelan spat in the torturer’s face.
“Gah!” Howling, the torturer struck him across the mouth.
Caelan’s head rang, and the world melted into dizzying colors, shapes gone crazy against his half-closed eyelids. He swung back and forth by his shackle-chain, and his wrenched shoulder sockets screamed in agony.
A sharp command rang out, and the icy water dashed over Caelan, bringing him back yet again. Coughing and shivering, he sputtered and squinted against the water dripping into his eyes from his matted hair.
Time had become lost to him. He did not know how long he had been here. As yet they had not put him on the rack or in the glove, a large wooden vise that could crack him like a nut.
The dungeons were a foul, gloomy maze of holes sunk in the floor and fitted with iron grates. The unfortunate inhabitants were dropped into the holes like rats down a well, and left in the dank coldness and filth until they were dragged out for questioning or until they died. Food was dropped in on top of them. They lived without light or warmth or hope, miserable wretches forgotten by all save their jailers. Their wailing went on all the time, an eerie, primal sound of raw anguish that never diminished.
Overlaying that were the screams of the tortured. A man currently lay stretched on the rack, babbling in delirium. A woman, recognizable as such only by her long, matted hair, sobbed in a cage that swung high from another rafter on the other side of the forge. The round stone pit glowed a dull red, hot with hissing coals, the smoke curling forth to blacken the ceiling. A short time past, some convicted thieves had been brought in, kicking and screaming for mercy, to be branded with the hot iron.
The torturer had picked up one of the irons, its tip white-hot fading to a dull red higher up the shaft, and he had held it close to Caelan’s face, so close Caelan could smell the hot metal, could hear it singing and hissing, could feel its scorching warmth against his skin.
“Want this?” the torturer asked,