THE VOYAGE OF THE JERLE SHANNARA : Morgawr (BOOK THREE)

The fingers slid inside his head, pushing through hair and skin and bone as if the whole of it were made of soft clay. Sen Dunsidan’s throat tightened and his stomach lurched. The Morgawr’s hand was all the way inside the skull now, twisting slowly, as if searching. The Captain had stopped screaming and thrashing. The light had gone out of his eyes, and his face had gone slack. His look was dull and lifeless.

The Morgawr withdrew his hand from the Borderman’s head, and it was steaming and wet as it slid back into the black robes and out of sight. The Morgawr was breathing so loudly that Sen Dunsidan could hear him, a kind of rapturous panting, rife with sounds of satisfaction and pleasure.

“You cannot know, Minister,” he whispered, “how good it feels to feed on another’s life. Such ecstasy!”

He stepped back, releasing Venn. “There. It is done. He is ours now, to do with as we wish. He is a walking dead man with no will of his own. He will do whatever he is told to do. He keeps his skills and his experience, but he no longer cares to think for himself. A useful tool, Minister. Take a look at him.”

Reluctantly, Sen Dunsidan did so. It was not an invitation; it was a command. He studied the blank, lifeless eyes, revulsion turning to horror as they began to lose color and definition and turn milky white and vacant. He moved around the table cautiously, looking for the wound in the back of the Borderman’s head where the Morgawr’s hand had forced entry. To his astonishment, there wasn’t one. The skull was undamaged. It was as if nothing had happened.

“Test him, Minister.” The Morgawr was laughing. “Tell him to do something.”

Sen Dunsidan fought to keep his composure. “Stand up,” he ordered Darish Venn in a voice he could barely recognize as his own.

The Borderman rose. He never looked at Sen Dunsidan or gave recognition that he knew what was happening. His eyes stayed dead and blank, and his face had lost all expression.

“He is the first, but only the first,” the Morgawr hissed, anxious now and impatient. “A long night stretches ahead of us. Go now, and bring me another. I am already hungry for a fresh taste! Go! Bring me six, but bid them enter one by one. Go quickly!”

Sen Dunsidan went out the door without a word. An image of a scaly hand steaming and wet with human matter was fixed in his mind and would not give up its hold on him.

He brought more men to the room that night, so many he lost count of them. He brought them in small groups and had them enter singly. He watched as their bodies were violated and their minds destroyed. He stood by without lifting a finger to aid them as they were changed from whole men into shells. It was strange, but after Darish Venn, he couldn’t remember any of their faces. They were all one to him. They were all the same man.

When the room grew too crowded with them, he was ordered to lead them out and turn them over to the turnkey to place in a larger chamber. The turnkey took them away without comment, without even looking at them. But once, after maybe fifty or so, the ruined face and the hard eyes found Sen Dunsidan with a look that left him in tears. The look bore guilt and accusation, horror and despair, and above all unmitigated rage. This was wrong, the look said. This went beyond anything imaginable. This was madness.

And yet the turnkey did nothing either.

The two of them, accomplices to an unspeakable crime.

The two of them, silent participants in the perpetration of a monstrous wrong.

So many men did Sen Dunsidan help destroy, men who walked to their doom with nothing to offer in their defense, decoyed by a politician’s false words and reassuring looks. He did not know how he managed it. He did not know how he survived what it made him feel. Each time the Morgawr’s hand emerged wet and dripping with human life, another feasting complete, the Minister of Defense thought he would run screaming into the night. Yet the presence of Death was so overpowering that it transcended everything else in those terrible hours, paralyzing him. While the Morgawr feasted, Sen Dunsidan watched and was unable even to look away.

Until finally, the Morgawr was sated. “Enough for now,” he hissed, glutted and drunk on stolen life. “Tomorrow night, Minister, we will finish this.”

He rose and walked away, taking his dead with him into the night, shadows on the wind.

The dawn broke and the day came, but Sen Dunsidan saw none of it. He shut himself away and did not come out. He lay in his room and tried to banish the image of the Morgawr’s hand. He dozed and tried to forget the way his skin crawled at the slightest sound of a human voice. Queries were made after his health. He was needed in the Council chambers. A vote on the position of Prime Minister was imminent. Reassurances were sought. Sen Dunsidan no longer cared. He wished he had never put himself in this position. He wished he were dead.

By nightfall, the turnkey was. Even given the harshness of his life and the toughness of his mind, he could not bear what he had witnessed. When no one else was about, he went down into the bowels of the prison and hung himself in a vacant cell.

Or did he? Sen Dunsidan could not be certain. Perhaps it was murder made to look like suicide. Perhaps the Morgawr did not want the turnkey alive.

Perhaps Sen Dunsidan was next.