Hugh Cook - The wizards and the warriors

Description: a dark-haired heavy-jowled man of middle years, looking, incidentally, remarkably like Shen Shen Drax, the leech-gatherer of Delve.

The executioner – such was his title, though he was a gaoler as well – was masked with grey mud. Clay was his face, but his voice was gravel. Shadows lurched as his head swung to face Blackwood. His eyes were black pits.

'Who are,' said the executioner, 'Who are you?'

His breath stank, like dead meat softening underground. Torchlight showed clumsy thumbmarks in his clay mask, from which bits of straw protruded.

'My question was not, was not to exercise my throat. Who are you?'

The executioner's assistants, who were holding Blackwood's arms, shook him. They wore featureless strawman masks.

'Blackwood's my name.'

'Blackwood,' said the executioner. Thoughtfully, he rubbed at bits of straw bristling from his mask, as another man might have rubbed his beard. 'Blackwood. The name has a past, even if it doesn't have a future.'

'I was head of the hunt. Years ago.'

'A hunter. From the sun? How is the sun? These shadows have held me thirty years, you know.'

The executioner lurched toward Blackwood, who pulled back from the stench. The assistants wrenched his arms to agony. The clay face brushed his. Bristles scraped across his skin.

'So. So. How is the sun? Is it thaw yet?" 'It's spring.'

'Ah, the green. What have these bones been doing this green that the dark should claim them? Well?'

Blackwood was silent. Then his arms were twisted. He cried out.

'Don't,' said the executioner, weaving his clay face from side to side, 'Don't try silence. Or excuses. We're all born guilty, all guilty, so don't cry innocent. We've just one newborn today: yourself. Save yourself today and tomorrow may save you yet again. Now answer. What did you do?'

T took meat the prince had killed.'

'Meat. We have a place for meat. Bring him!'

The strawmen forced Blackwood to a room of jaws, hooks, breakers, crunchers, claws. Here was the Warm Mother, the Sharp Sister, the Iron Maiden. And three abandoned bodies.

'Let him look,' said the executioner.

Blackwood was released. He was free, for the first time since his house was raided. Now was his chance to grab a branding iron and run amok, slashing and stabbing until they cut him down. But Mystrel was their prisoner, unless she was dead. He could not die yet! He was not yet free for death.

'Collosnon corpses. They deserved. We'll feed them soon. We'll show. Bring him!'

The strawmen hustled Blackwood through winding dungeon darkness, following the clay man, who sometimes paused to kick the bars of a cell till something inside woke and whimpered.

'Not time.' said the executioner. "The work, not time enough. So kick the door. In the end, in the end, we do the work. The first year we let them walk. The prince might want them. If there's no call that year, he's forgotten. They're ours. The second year, the second we break them to a crawl. Then the third. Down to their bellies in the dirt. The fourth year is the last. Will the prince remember you? Do you want him to?' Blackwood said nothing.

Their footsteps roused snarls from certain cells; others held only stinking silence. This was the underside of Castle Vaunting: stale air, dripping water, rot, fear, decay.

'We feed,' said the executioner, halting where the tunnel opened to an engulfing drop. 'Here! Feed bodies. Listen.'

Listening, they heard nothing.

'It's not moving,' said one of the assistants.

'Silence! Silence! Tongues can be taught silence if they don't teach themselves. Thirty years I haven't seen the sun, but I still have eyes, ah yes. Tongues and eyes -lost if they're not deserved… but you're right. It's not moving.'

The executioner took a torch from a wall bracket and tossed it to the pit. They glimpsed a mountainous gelatinous mass disfigured by warts, craters, ridges. The torch splashed into water and went out. Darkness shifted: sucking, squelching.

'Lopsloss,' said the executioner. 'Lopsloss. It's moving. It's moving now. Now you've seen it. Now into a cell. Wait, wait for us. We'll for you, come for you, soon, not yet, but soon. Wait for us.'

Down on your bones. Down on your knees.

Down on your bones in the dark.

They can break anything they care to. Ribs, collarbone, elbow. They can pick and choose. Knee, ankle, crutch.

Crouched in the darkness, he waited for them to come and choose. Sometimes something coughed, or a chain clinked. Far down a cellblock corridor, a torch guttered low, then out.

Finally, he realised they had no special plan for him. Showing him the torture chamber had been a working routine. It meant nothing. Showing him the lopsloss had been another working routine. That meant nothing, too.

They would remember him in a year.

'Blackwood. Black… wood.' It was Mystrel.

Blackwood sat up on the straw where he had been lying for half of eternity. He listened. 'Black… wood.'

The voice was distorted by echoes. Faint as the beat of the wings of a bat deep underground. 'Black… wood.'

He tried to shout – but fear was strangling him. 'Black… wood.'

He bowed his head and breathed the damp, fetid air, till fear was overcome and he was able to shout: 'Mystrel!'

He had not seen her since a soldier from the raiding party had knocked him to the ground. He had feared her burnt in the blaze when the soldiers had fired the house.

'Blackwood!'

'Are you all right?'

Right ight ight… echechecho through hollow stone, through dank places black as the wing of the bat, the scaffold's drop-hole.

'Yes!'

Suddenly there was a hoot as if from an owl, then a bark as if from a dog, and soon the whole line of cells was clamouring as prisoners jeered, mocked, barked, howled and hammered against the bars. The sound only died away when one of the executioner's assistants arrived, bearing a new torch.

The torch prowled up and down.

Tread of iron-shod boots on stone.

Boots which halted. In front of Blackwood's cell.

Saying nothing.

'Mister,' said Blackwood. 'The woman… the woman is my wife. Can you… can you… can you bring me my wife?'

The strawman mask studied him in silence. Then it nodded.

Blackwood waited… and waited. Then the straw-man came back, unlocked the door and threw inside the battered bloody body of Murmer the fodden. Then locked the door and went away again.

Someone was asleep; Blackwood could hear muttering, and teeth grating together. He sat in shadow, becoming shadow. Murmer huddled silently in one corner of the cell. Blackwood knew the fodden was watching him. What did it expect? To be pulped to death? He was tempted, truly – but knew the fodden was old, its mind addled by age and hibernation. It couldn't help itself. So help it into the darkness, then. Kill it! Yes? No…

Not yet, at any rate.

For if he killed the fodden, the guards might hurt Mystrel. And if he didn't? What then? What would they do to her at the end of a year? He knew the answer. His eyes were hot, hot and burning. The best they could hope for was to die. But, thinking of his unborn child, he knew he could not permit himself to hope for that.

Nin: one of the weakest of the eight orders of wizards, having power over the minds of wild things.

Miphon woke to sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows of the top room of Nin's four-storey tower. Wondering why he had slept so well, he remembered that the castle stones had no voices. For once he had slept without hearing stones, rocks and mountains grumbling and complaining. The process used to build the castle had killed all life in the rock thus employed, letting Miphon sleep without that mournful cry always in his head: 'Lemarl…'