Tal cried out in shock, and his head swam. The Governor looked at the wound, then took up the iron and seared a bleeding artery. Then he tossed the iron back into the fire. He picked up the bottle of brandy and took a long drink. “This sort of work upsets me, Squire.”
Tal could barely stand, and the pain that shot up his arm was excruciating. He felt faint, and the Governor said, “I’d offer you a drink, but we can’t give strong drink to the prisoners. Rules are rules.” Then he poured some of the brandy over the charred stump of Tal’s arm and said, “But I did happen to discover, purely by accident one time, that if you pour a little brandy over the cut, it’s less likely to fester.” He nodded to the two guards. “Take him away. North room, third floor.”
Tal was dragged away by the two guards and fainted before they reached the first flight of stairs.
Tal lay in agony. The stump of his right arm throbbed constantly, and he was wracked with fever. His mind lapsed in and out of consciousness, and at times he was lost in dreams and visions.
He occasionally got lost in memory, thinking he was once again feverish in the wagon on its way to Kendrick’s, after being found by Robert and Pasko. Other times he dreamed he was in his bed in Roldem or Salador, trying to wake up from a nightmare, knowing that once he was awake, he would be fine.
On other occasions he came wide-awake with a sudden start, his heart pounding, and then he would look around the cold room with the grey light and cold wind coming in through a high window. Then he would relapse into unconsciousness.
After some period of time, he awoke, drenched in perspiration, but clearheaded. His right arm throbbed, and for a moment he could feel the fingers on his right had. He tried to stretch and move them, then saw there was only a bloody stump, encased in rags and some sort of unguent.
He looked around, trying to make sense of his surroundings. He had seen the room before, many times, but now it was as if he was seeing it for the first time.
The cell was fashioned from stone, containing no furnishings. His only items of comfort were a mattress filled with old straw and two heavy blankets. His bedding was sour with the smell of sweat and urine. He saw a single door, wooden, with a small viewing hole, locked from the other side. Opposite the door, at slightly more than his own height, a single window with two iron bars admitted daylight. In the far corner a hole in the floor, its edges crusted with filth, showed where he was to relieve himself.
Tal stood up, and his knees threatened to buckle. Reflexively he put out his right hand, and was betrayed by the memory of a hand no longer there. He stumbled and fell, his stump hitting the wall, and he cried out, then fell back to the mattress, his head swimming.
He lay gasping for breath, tears running down his face as his entire body echoed the agony he felt in his arm. Shock ran up his arm to his shoulder and up his neck. The entire right side of his body felt as if it was afire.
He forced himself to breathe slowly and attempted a meditation taught him at Sorcerer’s Isle, one that would help him master pain. Slowly the pain moved farther away and became smaller, until it felt as if he had somehow put it in a box that he could hold away from himself.
He opened his eyes and stood up, this time carefully using his left hand to steady himself. His knees wobbled, but at last he got his balance. He looked around. There was nothing to see.
He staggered to the window and reached up. He tested the bars and found them deeply set in the rock. The one on the left he could twist a little in the socket drilled into the rock. He gripped it hard with his left hand and tried to pull himself up so that he could see, but the effort caused his entire body to hurt, so he decided that investigating the view could wait.
An hour after he had awakened, the door to his cell opened. A very dirty man with unkempt shoulder-length hair and a ragged beard entered, holding a bucket in front of him. He saw Tal and smiled. “You’re alive,” he said. “That’s a bit of all right, in’it? Thems who’s been cut don’t usually survive, you know?”
Tal said nothing, just looking at the man. He could hardly see any of his features, under the dirt and hair.
“I know how it is,” he said, holding out his left arm, which also ended in a stump. “Old Zirga cut it off when I got here, ’cause it was festerin’.”
“Who are you?”
“Name’s Will. Thief by trade until I got caught.” He set the bucket down.
“They let you come and go?”
“Oh, they do with some of us which has been here a while. I’m here ten years next spring. They’re a lazy lot, so they let us do some of the work if they think they can trust us not to cut their throats when they’re drunk, and besides, there’s not much to do around here, so fetchin’ and carryin’ a bit here and there is all right. Besides, I get a little extra food, and if they’re not paying close attention, I can nick a bottle of wine or brandy every year or two.
“And you get to haul out the dead, which is a bit of all right.”