Robert Adams - The Patrimony

Setting a foot against the girl’s back, Gaios jerked his short sword free, propelling Widahd’s body facedown on the thick carpets, which quickly became soaked with more blood than one would have thought so small a body could contain. A glance showed Gaios that his master, Myron, had taken no notice of the brief, bloody affair, being completely absorbed in the disfigurement of his own victim. Grinning, the former cook dropped his clotted sword, rolled Widahd onto her back, hurriedly shredded off the front of her skirt and set about raping the dying young woman, heedless of the spurting gushes of blood that soon soaked his shirtfront.

Myron took his time on Giliahna’s right cheek, deliberately prolonging the agony. Tears poured from the suffering woman’s blue eyes to water the blood on her cruelly slashed face, but she had set her teeth and her will and no slightest sound came out to meet the barrier of that thick, dirty hand mashing down on her lips.

All the while he carefully marred Giliahna’s beauty, Myron hissed his plans for her and for Tim in a half-whisper. “The way you barbarians searched this hall was comical. Gaios and I could have departed anytime we wished, and we can still, unseen and unsuspected. I only remained to deal with our barbaric brother, Tim, and with you.”

“I know that he will come here, soon or late, intent upon doing more of his sinful incest with you. He certainly will be alone and unsuspecting and, like as not, unarmed, so Gaios and I should have no trouble dealing with him.”

“By all that is holy, I should be Thoheeks and chief of Sanderz-Vawn, but simply because I am a good, Christian man, my patrimony, my very birthright, is denied me. But if I cannot be chief, he will not sit in my place. As God is my witness, he will not!”

Showing his teeth in a grin of pure, evil malice, he went on, “Your barbarians will not have as new chief any maimed or crippled man, so when once we have immobilized dear Tim, I mean to dig out his right eye. I’d take them both, but I want him to have one so he can forevermore gaze upon what I’ll have done to you, sweet sister.”

“Then, when I’m done gelding him, I mean to hack off his right hand and his right foot and char the stumps in yonder fire.”

Widahd was not yet dead. She knew what the man was doing to her body, though she could not feel her defilement or much of anything else. But she was come of a warrior race and refused to die leaving her foe a chance of life. If the arm she had stabbed was removed quickly enough, he might just live. What she must deliver before she surrendered to oncoming death was a wound impervious to treatment.

Awkwardly, her numbing left band sought and found the hilt of her second little dagger, but the cold unfeeling fingers kept slipping off the abbreviated hilt and it seemed for long and long that she would not summon the strength to draw it. Then, at last, it was free, but she found she had used too much of her waning power. She could not stab up.

Haltingly, she worked her small hand and the knife between their two close-pressed bodies. As her ravisher raised himself slightly in preparation for a deeper thrust, she maneuvered the blade to an upward slant so that the straining man impaled himself on it, taking the length of it in his belly, between navel and crotch.

There was nothing strangled about Gaios’ second scream. It rang loud and long … and it served to alert Tim, just approaching the suite, and Sir Geros, who had bid his young lord goodnight and was about to descend the stairs.

Myron ignored the scream for the very good reason that he knew from the earlier sounds that his cohort was raping the Zahrtohgan and was wont to make loud noises in transport of pleasure. While a woman’s scream within the hall would have been sure to bring unwanted visitors tramping through the corridors and banging on doors and barging into suites, a man’s would not, not with wounded men and prisoners under the roof.

He had done at last with Giliahna’s right cheek. Turning her ravaged, gory face back, he hissed, “Hold still now. I’m going to carve a pi for Porneea on your brow, so that all will know you for the arrant whore you are.”

Tim and Geros, broadswords bared and ready, kicked open the bedroom door and burst into the room. Myron left off his carving of Giliahna’s ruined face and slid himself down her body far enough to get an inch of his blood-slimy dirk blade into her left breast, then he half-turned to face the armed men.

“Take one more step toward me, pagan bastards, and I’ll drive this blade into her heart!”

He had taken his hand from her mouth, and his weight now was on her belly rather than her chest and arms. Giliahna swallowed a mouthful of thick, hot blood, then shouted, “No! I am already hurt, terribly hurt. Take the swine alive, for Archduke Bili and my brother. Tell Tim I love him.” Then she grasped Myron’s knife hand and wrist with both her own hands and forced her body up violently, so that half the length of the wide, thick blade sank into her chest.

Tim was at the foot of the big bed in a single leap and the flat of his sword crashed against Myron’s temple, hurling his body to the floor in an unconscious heap. But then the young captain’s sword dropped from fingers suddenly gone cold and nerveless, and, as hot tears ran, he could but stare in grief and horror at what had been wrought upon this, the only woman he ever had loved … or ever would.

Her face was a mask of blood, with jaw, teeth and white bone winking through the slashed cheeks. Just above the red-pink nipple of her full right breast, the hilt and part of the blade of a heavy war dirk jutted up.

Geros glanced at what lay on the bed, then averted his eyes and stalked quickly to where Gaios had rolled off the body of Widahd and, his trousers still bunched about his knees, was sitting in obvious agony with a handful of cloth from her skirt pressed against his lower belly.

Geros sheathed his sword. “What ails you, bum boy? Bellyache, is it? Mayhap six feet or so of oaken clyster will, if not truly ease you, at least serve as a counterirritant.” He chuckled, then added, “That’s what you get for eating your own cooking, of course. You should’ve known better.”

Giliahna said weakly, “Tim … my love. Please … it hurts … so much … please take … it out.”

Tim walked on wooden legs up to where he could grasp the hilt of that cruel dirk that had robbed him of so much, of so many happy years. Quickly, he jerked the steel from his sister’s chest. He did not bother to try to staunch the blood-flow that followed the blade out, for he had seen many death wounds, and from its location, this could be nothing but such.

But she should have been dead long since. He was too experienced a warrior to deny that incredible, astounding survivals occurred now and then. And with the flare of a spark of hope, some of the leaden enervation left his body and his mind.

“Sir Geros,” he snapped. When that man stood close beside him, he said, “There may be a chance to save her. Go fetch Master Fahreed. At once!”

Even as he raced across the deserted balcony toward the north wing where several adjoining suites had been temporarily converted to a hospital and surgery, Geros knew himself bound on a fool’s errand. No mortal man or woman could survive a war dirk in the heart. But if fetching the Zahrtohgan physician would ease young Tim’s grieving mind, that is what he would do.

In the hospital, Geros had to pull his rank and almost his sword before Master Fahreed was finally summoned from another room. The tall man’s white robe was liberally spotted and smeared with fresh blood. He was scowling and his manner was brusque.

“Say your piece quickly and begone, Sir Geros. I’m in the middle of a chancy bit of emergency surgery on a brave young Ahrmehnee, whose skull was cracked in a drunken brawl. You Kindred are all mad. When all your enemies are slain, you turn on each other like starving wolves.”