Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

‘You might be useful yet,’ I said.

Our prison looked to be a fissure running for fifteen yards or so, three yards across at its widest where we fell into it.

I searched the idiot and found not one but two daggers, one for brawling, one balanced for throwing. I let Sunny have the bigger of the two.

‘What now?’ he asked. I could feel his fear but he kept it controlled. Holding a sword always leaves you with a little slice of hope.

‘Now we wait for them to figure out how to kill us.’ Anger kept my fear at bay. I wanted to take as many of them with me as could be managed. Dying in a dusty hole in the middle of nowhere hadn’t figured in my plans and knowing that I was going to do just that left a sour taste in my mouth. How the hell did we manage to run into a hole with all this space around us in any case?

‘You in the pit!’ A shout from outside. No heads peeping over this time.

I kept silent. Two more torches arced in, trailing sparks and smoke across the pale sky. It seemed pointless given that five hadn’t done the job. The sharp jab in my shoulder came as I was bending down for the closest brand.

‘What?’ I heard Sunny’s exclamation. If the word ‘what’ had been taken away from him he wouldn’t have had much to say that day.

I could have told him it felt like some kind of venom, but he’d probably worked that out by then. A numbness had spread over my shoulder before I managed to stand, turn, and throw my knife at the dark face behind the blowpipe on the far edge of the pit. I missed. Another dart hit me in the chest, a little black thing half a finger in length.

‘Fuck.’

The third dart set me slumped over my sword, without the strength to look up. It might be said it’s never too hot for armour, but I’d have run slower than Lesha if I’d kept it on.

Men dropped into the pit and they hauled us out of there like meat, ropes round our chests, limbs trailing without sensation. It’s not so hard to keep fear at arms’ length with a sword. When you’re helpless and in the grip of men for whom your pain is the only decent entertainment for miles around, you’d be mad not to be terrified.

Two men had hold of my arms, and the creature that darted me followed along where my heels dragged trails in the dust. My legs were red to well above the knee, dust caking onto the wet blood. The creature looked like a girl, eleven maybe, almost skeletal, burned dark by the sun. She grinned and waved her blowpipe at me.

‘Ghoul darts. From the Cantanlona.’ She had a high clear voice.

‘Hard come by,’ said one of the men on my arms. ‘You’d better be worth it.’

They dragged us three hundred yards or so to a campground. Our horses and Balky were already there, tied to a rail. The horses tugged at their ropes, nervous, thirsty maybe. Balky just looked bored. The encampment seemed semi-permanent, with a few lean-to shacks in even worse condition than those in Carrod Springs, a cart, some water barrels, a chicken or two and in the middle, four thick posts set into the ground. It said a lot about the Perros Viciosos that they had put more construction material and effort into their infrastructure for torture than into their own living arrangements.

I counted about thirty men, as various in their origins and appearance as my own road-brothers, but with a predominance of dark-haired men, Spanards from the interior, an older and more pure bloodline than found in the coast regions, most of them lean and with a dangerous look to them. By my reckoning we’d left five of them dead. None of those in sight bore fresh wounds.

Two men strung Sunny up to one pole then came back for me. The rest watched, or ate, or squabbled over our possessions, or all three. Several men had reached for the box at my hip, but always their hands had fallen away, their interest gone. None of them offered so much as a kick or a punch, as if wanting to keep us in as good health as possible until the fun started.

‘That’s Jorg Ancrath,’ Sunny told them. ‘King of the Renner Highlands, grandson of Earl Hansa.’

The Bad Dogs didn’t bother to reply, just tightened our ropes and set about their business. Waiting is part of the exercise. Letting the tension rise, like bakers’ dough in the tin. Sunny kept talking, kept telling them who I was, who he was, what would happen if we weren’t let go. The girl came over to watch us. She held out a hand filled with a large beetle scrabbling to get away.

‘Mutant,’ she said. ‘Count the legs.’

It had eight. ‘Ugly thing,’ I told her.

She pulled off two of its legs. The bug was big enough for me to hear the crack as the limbs came free. ‘All better.’ She put it down and it took off across the dust.

‘You killed Sancha,’ she said.

‘The big ugly idiot?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like him.’

The men set a fire in the blackened space before the poles. A small one, for wood is rare in the Iberico.