Across the room, Kantelvar took several deep, hollow breaths, like tearless sobs. Isabelle tried to extend herself into her body, but there was no response from anything between her toes and her tongue. Kantelvar limped slowly to her side. His shadow loomed over her, and her blurry vision could barely make out his hand wrapped around his quondam staff. Its spiny tip smoked with vapors from its discharge.
“The secret passage wasn’t the only reason I chose this room for you. It is soundproof and, to the extent that such a thing is possible, proof against sorcery as well. No one will ever know what has transpired here.”
Bastard! She willed violent death on him, but that was useless. She had nothing left but a mind, so she had to use it. If his trap was so secure, why was he nervously rattling off the details? What was he missing, and how could she exploit it?
Kantelvar flipped her onto her back and she stared up at the ceiling, her mouth agape, very much, she imagined, like a landed fish. Kantelvar bent down and stroked her cheek with desiccated fingers. “You look just like her—Saint Céleste—so beautiful, and you have her mind, sharp as a razor.” His metal fingers traced the line of her jaw.
Isabelle thrashed uselessly inside her own skin, trying to find a way to the surface, even as Kantelvar pressed a stinging cloth to her face. “Breathe this. Things are about to happen that you don’t want to be awake for.”
CHAPTER
Fifteen
Color and sound swirled around Jean-Claude like currents in a raging flood. Smears of red, stripes of gray, and flashes of yellow barked and yowled and buffeted his awareness from all sides. He’d been poisoned. He was not entirely sure he was not dead. This place of vicious, viscous, shapeless colors and cruel sounds seemed a likely candidate for the Halls of Torment.
Through the mud of noises assaulting his awareness something like voices came: “Oove im dow ere.” “Ike a sac v suet.” “Ake is other leg.” “Eave ho!”
He tumbled. Something bashed his shoulder, his head, his poor leg. Pain spread through his body like cracks through drying mud. Pain was good. It meant he still had flesh and life.
He came to rest on a floor, facedown, more or less. His fingers discovered splinters. A wooden floor. He smelled vomit. It might have been his own. That dull thudding noise might have been footsteps. Judging by how he’d tumbled, somebody had thrown him down a flight of stairs. He had to get back to himself, but firm shapes refused to resolve out of his colorful blindness.
“Prop ’im up.”
Two sets of hands grabbed Jean-Claude by the armpits and heaved him upright.
He tried to say, “Good evening, gentlemen,” but his voice was a gurgle. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, but it only lolled like a newborn’s. No wonder babies squalled, feeling this helpless.
“Prop ’im up.” Several pairs of hands lifted him from the floor. “Make this quick.” They dropped him on what felt like a bench. One of them kept hold of him to prevent him from sliding down. He tried to flex his hands, his arms, but they might as well have been sacks filled with mud.
Think. He couldn’t die like this—who would look after Isabelle?—but why wasn’t he already dead? They could have used a lethal poison or stabbed him when he succumbed to a nonlethal one. Perhaps they wanted to interrogate him first. He hoped so, because that meant he would be able to talk.
One of his captors splashed something on his face. It was sticky and tasted like ale.
“You’re wasting good drink!” complained one voice.
“Gotta make it look right,” said another. “Knifed in a tavern, see?”
So it was to be murder, after all, but why bother with misdirection?
“Bah,” Jean-Claude sputtered, barely loud enough to be called a sound.
“I think he’s waking up,” said one of the men. “Stab him now?”
“Still limp,” said another one. Jean-Claude thought he could sift at least three voices, though he was sure he was only picking up about half the words.
Jean-Claude tried again. “Ransom.” It wasn’t the most subtle hook he’d ever thrown into the creek, but he was short on inspiration, and these didn’t seem like the brightest fish.
A wide, blurry face loomed before Jean-Claude. “What did he say?”
“Don’t listen to him.” Someone pulled the wide face away. “He’s addled.”
“Ransom,” Jean-Claude muttered. His voice was becoming steadier, but too slowly. “Worth more alive than dead. Much more.”
“We’re not interested in ransom. Besides, you’re just a soldier. No money.”
Jean-Claude’s pulse raced even faster. His mind was clearing more swiftly than his vision. “No soldier. King’s Own Musketeer. The princess’s favorite. I’m the one who knows where her dowry’s hid.” He willed them to take the hook.
“Dowry?” a third man asked. Stupid. Stupid man.
The blade of a knife, cold and sharp, pressed against his throat. “Tell me about this dowry, and I’d better like what I hear, or it’ll be the last thing you ever say.”
Not much of a bargainer, are you? “The dowry of a royal princess, for the most important wedding in a century. It’s a gift from Grand Leon, three chests of Craton Riqueza gold, Aragothic gold recovered from a hulk of an Aragothic treasure ship. To be returned as a gesture of goodwill.” Would these thugs recognize the acceptable political code for captured booty? Probably not. He mourned an elegant detail lost on a dim audience.
The blade scraped Jean-Claude’s skin. “Where?”
The pain and fear churning through Jean-Claude’s mind slowly cleaned the gunk from his system. The pulsing fog resolved into three vaguely manlike shapes, dark splotches moving against a lighter background. “A shipment from Rocher Royale. Coming in tonight. Ship called the Weirgeld.”
“He’s lying,” spat another, more skeptical thug. “Just gut him and be done with it.”
“You don’t want the password?” Jean-Claude flexed his fingers and they responded, but slowly.
“Tell me,” said the thug with the knife.
“Why? Just so you can kill me afterward? That doesn’t sound like a good bargain.”
“Don’t listen to him,” said the skeptic. “He’s trying to put the wind up us.”
Knife boy said, “Tell me the password or you’ll die slow instead of quick.”
The world of Jean-Claude’s perception slowly congealed toward familiar solidity. “You don’t want to do that. If I give you the right password you will all be very wealthy men, but if I give you the wrong password, bloody chunks of you will be fed to the pigs. The only way you could be sure of getting the right password is if I am there with you to give it.”
The skeptic said, “Joseph, this is not what we’re being paid for. He’s lying, and even if he’s not, you think there’s any way he’ll give us gold once he has his friends around?”
Joseph, the knife man, growled in frustration.
“There’s one way you lads could come out ahead,” Jean-Claude said. “If you could get the password out of me, and one of you kept me under guard, the rest could go collect the gold. One of you approaches the ship while another keeps lookout from a safe distance. If anything bad happens, then the lookout runs back here and you can kill me any way you like.”