Juliet McKenna - The Assassin's Edge

The woman barked some order and the pirates advanced.

The prisoners scattered in futile terror like penned sheep who’ve just found a wolf in their fold. One lad ran for the gate but two pirates wrestled him to the ground. Seeing him pinned in the suffocating mud, the second Elietimm man laid a hand on the boy’s rancid hair. After an angry shake of his head, the enchanter caught a cudgel from a pirate and smashed the lad’s skull in brutal frustration.

I could see Naldeth and Parrail. Both were trying to keep as many people between themselves and the hunting Elietimm as possible but so was everyone else. It was like watching a flock of geese harried by a pack of dogs. As the prisoners struggled with each other, the weaker stumbled away, easy prey for the waiting pirates. His innate gentleness betraying him, Parrail soon fell victim.

A pirate, his nose rotting from some pox, dragged the lad to the waiting Elietimm woman. The scholar was filthy; shirtless, ribs showing and bruises charting the daily round of brutality. Parrail tripped but the bullying raider wouldn’t let him find his feet, hauling him bodily over the foul ground. He threw Parrail face down before the woman, kneeling on the back of the lad’s legs, pinning his hands behind his back. Parrail twisted his head from side to side, trying in vain to escape the woman’s questing touch.

To my inexpressible delight pain racked her face as soon as she laid a hand on him but her cry only brought her fellow enchanters running.

“Who are you? Where do you come from? Who do you speak to?”

I don’t speak the Elietimm tongue but I heard their harsh demands echoing all around my thoughts, their voices mingled.

“I will not say.” Parrail wrapped himself in defiance.

“Who has taught you?” Fear and hatred tainted the Elietimm’s questions but his skill with Artifice cut Parrail like a knife.

Like the glimpse of a page in a book opened and shut, I saw Mentor Tonin, Parrail’s tutor in distant Vanam.

“You cannot defy us.” Vicious gratification coloured the Elietimm’s chorused thoughts. That instant of unity passed and all three attacked the scholar with ruthless interrogation.

“Who are you?”

“Where are your friends?”

“Who has betrayed Muredarch?”

Was there nothing we could do? I wanted to shake Guinalle by the shoulders, insist she get the lad out of there, do something, anything, but what if I alerted these bastards to our eavesdropping? Fear for myself as well as fear for Parrail soured my throat like bile.

Colourless fire lit the shadows with reality for an instant, the distant stockade fading as I saw the Eryngo more clearly. The sick agony of a broken bone ached in my wrist even thought I knew it wasn’t my injury.

“Curse them!” Guinalle’s bitter words tied me tight to her will again. Vivid once more, I saw the stockade, saw the brutal pirate twisting Parrail’s discoloured forearm this way and that. The lad sobbed, banging his head on the ground, tears streaming from his screwed-up eyes.

All three Elietimm crowded round the boy like buzzards not even waiting for their prey to die. The pirate man scrambled away, plainly terrified of these slightly built strangers. Parrail curled into a helpless ball, cradling his injured arm, knees drawn up, head tucked down, his defiance as futile as a tiggyhog’s.

The Elietimm joined hands and, as plainly as they did, Guinalle and I saw Parrail’s life laid bare. Cherished memories fluttered past me like so many coloured pages torn from a child’s precious chapbook and scattered on the uncaring ground. He’d been a beloved child, all the more when childhood frailties had carried too many of his brothers and sisters to Poldrion’s tender care. His father, humble clerk to a merchant house, had scrimped and saved to send his promising son to Vanam, mother wiping away her tears and consoling herself that such sacrifice was for her darling’s good. No idle student, nor yet a rich one, Parrail had run errands for wealthier scholars to pay his way but even then, going hungry when some tempting scroll or parchment emptied his purse. Mentor Tonin’s pride had warmed the young scholar, bolstering his confidence in his abilities, spurring him on to tease threads of meaning out of the tangle of superstition and garbled litany that was all that the Chaos had left of aetheric lore.

The Elietimm ripped such memories apart, desperate for whatever Parrail might know that they did not. With the burning agony of his broken arm consuming him, he lay helpless, unresisting. They held recollections of his first visit to Kellarin up to cold scrutiny. They saw him nervous and excited in Master Tonin’s party, thrilled to see his studies turn from dry theory to flesh and blood reality before being terrified by Elietimm assaults. With friends and mages dead all around, Parrail was left the most likely to succeed in reviving the sleeping colonists. Travelling to the hidden cavern of Edisgesset, he summoned steely determination to defeat his frail self-doubt.

To my surprise, I caught a fleeting notion that Parrail had been scared of me but that vanished like smoke in the burning light of his devotion to Guinalle. His wonder at her beauty held her sleeping face before us all, frozen in the dimness of the cavern when Parrail had first seen her. That first rapture deepened to an abiding admiration where he saw her every word as grace, her every action proof of her nobility and virtue. Even his return to Vanam hadn’t shaken that devoted loyalty and when the chance to return had come, Parrail’s longing to be of service to his lady coloured his every thought and action.

I was enraged, repelled, outraged as if I’d seen the poor lad stripped naked for some howling mob’s amusement. The Elietimm woman’s head snapped up and she stared straight at me.

“Darige, Moin!” The bitch could see us both, no question, eyes boring right through whatever veil of enchantment Guinalle had used to cloak us.

They abandoned Parrail and moved towards us.

“Guinalle?” Surely she could see the danger as easily as me?

“You foul the very aether with your touch.” Guinalle’s contempt lashed out and the Elietimm trio recoiled. “I should sear that corrupt knowledge from your very minds. What tainted lore do you think you can use against me?”

She raised her hand, an insubstantial wraith but the Elietimm stumbled backwards as if they faced some mythic warrior all tricked out with a blazing sword and shining armour.

One of the men, the one called Darige tripped over Parrail. Quick as a biting fox, he grabbed the lad’s hair. “If we cannot touch you, he’s in our hands.”

He kicked Parrail viciously in the groin. The second man, Moin, stamped on Parrail’s broken wrist. The scholar barely reacted and I felt Guinalle’s sick worry echo my own concern.

This unholy world of illusion flickered around me. The man Moin smiled with feral satisfaction. “Are you strong enough to maintain your magic in the face of his pain?”

“Yalda!” Darige didn’t take his eyes off Guinalle as he beckoned the woman forward.

She caught up the pirate’s club and with a venomous smile brought the solid oak down on Parrail’s head. Blood oozed from his nose and ears. She swept it down again and again as Darige kicked him in the gut, Moin taking nailed boots to his unprotected back.

The innocent lad’s final torment faded like a dream but I knew this was no nightmare even as the Eryngo ’s deck grew solid and reassuring around me once more. Guinalle covered her face with shaking hands and fled to the stern cabin, racked by shuddering sobs.

Allin was wide eyed in consternation. “What happened?”

“They’ve got Elietimm enchanters,” I told her. “We have to get out of here.” I realised I was soaked with sweat, my shirt stained dark and my breeches clinging to my legs. The wind chilled me but I was already as cold as ice inside.