The chain clattered free, and Flora retrieved her cloak and weapons before they rode up toward the gates of the manor.
‘I’m coming, Bram, Rip!’ Lorrie said grimly. Once spoken, those words seem to vanquish the terrible feeling she had that they should do more before attempting to enter the grounds.
‘Who are you?’ Bram said.
‘Silence,’ the oily voice replied, and a brief stabbing pain came from everywhere and nowhere.
Breath hissed out between his teeth. The room smelled wrong, like a sickroom: old rotten blood and malevolence. There was cold stone under his back, and the mercenaries were fastening him down with leather ties. Oddly, they went around his knees and elbows, not his wrists and ankles.
Oh, gods, he thought sickly. It’s sized for children! This is where they sacrificed the children they stole. Even then, his belly twisted with nausea.
The mercenaries went about their business as briskly as if they’d been trussing a hog for slaughter. It left him stretched out like a starfish, painfully so since the ties were at a slightly lower level than the ridged surface on which he rested. Cold air flowed across his skin as his breeches and shirt were cut away and pulled off. Then fingers fumbled at the drawstring of the bag that covered his head. He could already see a diffuse glow of light through the coarse weave of the cloth. When it was pulled away, he had a brief glimpse of a large richly-furnished room with windows, two doors, and through one a bed on which rested a beautiful, pale-faced woman, apparently asleep.
‘Cover his face!’ a man barked. The voice sounded old and weary, but the command carried authority.
Of him, Bram could only see the back and his clasped hands; there were jewelled rings on the fingers, and his jacket was of rich dark velvet.
‘It is done, my lord,’ the nondescript middle-aged man standing by Bram’s head said.
Nondescript, that is, until you saw his eyes. They were like windows into . . . not emptiness, but a void where even darkness would be snuffed out. Like nothing Bram had seen in his life, they caused fear to visit the pit of his stomach, ice to run up his back, and his arm hair to stand on end. The man’s eyes were windows into less-than-nothing.
He smiled and dropped a long silk scarf over Bram’s features.
‘Wouldn’t want to leave you out of the festivities, boy,’ he murmured as he went about his work.
The silk would hide him from anyone looking, but Bram could see through the gauzy cloth himself—dimly.
During the brief moment his eyes were clear, he’d also seen the inscribed figures drawn around the stone-topped table to which he was bound, and the black candles that guttered at the points; a rug rolled back against one wall showed that they were usually covered. Bram had his letters. He didn’t know what those writhing glyphs were, and had no wish to know. Looking at them made his eyes hurt, and he wrenched his gaze away. At the edges of his consciousness, something giggled and tittered.
‘Let me loose, you bastard!’ Bram yelled.
‘Silence,’ the man said again; and the pain returned, shooting spikes into his gut and groin and joints.
Silence it is, Bram thought, testing the bindings. Strong leather, from the feel of them, far stronger than needed for children, and he couldn’t even rock the stone table; it would take six strong men to lift, or two with a dolly.
Bad, he thought. Very bad. Help!
Astonishingly, something touched his face for an instant—something like a woman’s hand, warm and tender.
Off in the distance something fell with a crash and a clatter. He could hear a distant voice howl in pain, and then: ‘It’s the little bastards again! Get sand, get water, put out the god-damned fire!’
The unimpressive man with the terrible eyes shrugged.
‘Time to commence, my lord,’ he said. ‘It’s only an hour and—’ he looked at a sand-timer, ‘—perhaps five minutes to the time.’
‘Elaine,’ the older man said.
It was more of a croon; there was a longing in the word that made the young man take notice despite the hammering of blood in his temples and the dryness of his mouth.
Bram could see the one with the evil eyes, the magician as Bram now thought of him, pick up a small tool and a pot and he steeled himself for more pain, but there was only a brief wet coolness, touching him just up from where his pubic hair began. The magician was chanting under his breath, in a quick-rising, slow-falling tongue Bram didn’t recognize.
Another touch, just a little higher than the first. Bram craned his head up until his neck creaked, trying to glimpse over the muscled arch of his chest and see what the man was doing. It took a moment to realize what was happening; then he began to tug at the restraints again.
A neat line of red dashes was being painted up the centre of his body, heading for the breastbone.