Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

She had to stop herself from laughing. The Realm’s deadliest foe had just taken her from the heart of the most heavily defended city in the world of Carna, and she was worried about impropriety. It was laughable—but hardly funny. If she let the laughter start, she was not sure she would be able to stop it from becoming a scream.

Fear was not something she had ever become comfortable with. She had seen others who had—and not simply metalcrafters, either, who could cheat—walling away all of their emotions behind a cold, steely barrier of rational thought. She had known men and women who felt the fear every bit as intensely as she did, and who simply accepted its presence. For some of them, the fear seemed to flow through them, never stopping or finding purchase. Others actually seemed to seize on it, to channel it into furious thought and action. Countess Amara was an excellent example of the latter. Whereas, even closer to her, Araris had always stood as an example of the former…

Araris. She had seen him fly limply across the room. She had seen men dropping a hood over his lolling head. They had, apparently, taken him with her when they left. They wouldn’t have hooded him if he was dead, surely.

Surely.

Isana flew on in her fear, and it neither gave her strength nor poured around her leaving her untouched. She felt like a bar of sand that was slowly and steadily being eaten away by the currents of terror around her. She felt sick.

Well enough, she chided herself sharply. If she vomited in the hood, she’d have a considerably humiliating situation to add to her danger and discomfort. If she could neither use nor coexist with the fear, she could at least force herself to carry on—refusing to let the fear make her stop using her mind to do everything within her power to resist her enemies. She could at least do as much as she had in the past.

She had been blinded before, and been forced to rely upon other senses to guide her. She could not see through the hood, nor hear over the roar of the wind, or feel with her cold-numbed, bound hands, nor smell nor taste anything but the slightly mildewed scent of the hood over her head. But that did not mean she was unable to learn anything about her captors.

Isana braced herself and opened up her watercrafter’s senses to the emotions of those around her.

They came at her in a mind-searing burst of intensity. Emotions were high among the enemy, and intensely unpleasant to experience. Isana fought to sort out the various impressions, but it was like trying to listen to individual voices within a large chorus. A few high notes stuck out, but by and large they blended into a single whole.

The most intense sensations came from the two men holding her arms—and the primary emotion she felt in them was… confusion. They proceeded in a state of bewilderment and misery so acute that for a few seconds Isana could not distinguish her own emotions from theirs. Years of living with her gift had given her an ability to distinguish the subtle weave and flow of emotions, to make reasonably educated guesses at the thoughts that accompanied them.

The men knew that something was badly wrong, but they couldn’t focus on what it might be. Every time they tried, waves of imposed sensation and emotion swept over the thought and washed it away. The only time anything solid held was when Isana heard an inhuman shriek drift up from somewhere ahead of them. Both men immediately concentrated with a ferocious intensity, their emotions perfectly synchronized, and Isana felt one of them rise slightly, the other sink, and guessed that they had just been ordered to bank into a long turn, changing their course in the air.

Isana shivered. They were most likely collared slaves, then, forcibly converted to the service of the vord through the use of slaver’s collars. Once she’d determined that, she was able to feel more from the two men—their hearts overflowed with sadness. Though their minds had been rendered incapable of reason, on some level they must have known what had been done to them. They knew that their skills and power had been turned against their own people by an enemy, even if they could not consciously assemble the disparate pieces of the concept. They knew that they used to be something more but could not remember what it was, and that denial, that inability to reason, caused them enormous emotional pain.

Isana felt herself begin to weep for them. Kalarus Brencis Minoris had collared these men. Only he could free them—and he had been dead for more than half a year. They could never be freed, never be restored, never be made whole.

She made them a silent promise that she would do everything in her power to ensure that neither would live as a slave. Even if she had to kill them with her own hands.

As she pressed her awareness out past her two captors, she sensed other men. Not all of them were as badly disoriented as her escorts. Those who retained a greater capacity for reason harbored their own eidolon of raw terror. Fear so intense and so savage that it was practically a living thing had been forced into their thoughts, and it ruled their decisions utterly, like a watchdog placed within each of their minds. Some of them had lesser degrees of terror—and those men’s emotions made Isana shudder with revulsion. In them, the darker portions of human nature, a lust for violence and blood and power, had been encouraged to grow and had overrun their thoughts like rampant weeds devouring a garden. Those men were nothing less than mortal monsters, terrors held on a psychic leash.

And there was…

Isana hesitated over this last sensation, because it was so faint, and came to her as a trembling vibration that she could barely be sure was real. She could feel the presence of… an innocent heart, one that felt emotions with the purity and depth and passion of a young child.

Then another shriek floated to her, and that sense of the child abruptly sharpened—and beneath the simple surface lurked alien currents of feeling, so strange and varied that Isana found herself wholly unable to tell one from the next, much less fit an accurate name or description to the emotion. They were cold things. Dry things. As they pressed against her, Isana was reminded of the rippling legs of a centipede that had once slithered up her calf.

She realized, with revulsion, that the being she sensed was the vord Queen.

Her two escorts began to descend, and her ears popped several times under the changing pressure.

Wherever her captors were taking her, it had not taken them long—and it seemed that they had arrived.

They landed roughly, and Isana would have fallen without the support of both guards. She was propelled forward, being dragged every few steps, and she stumbled upon a slight rise in the ground, as if their path had taken them over a flat stone a few inches high.

But instead of stony earth beneath her feet, the ground gave slightly with a kind of rubbery tension. Isana forced herself to keep breathing slowly and steadily.

She was walking on the vord’s croach .

None of her captors spoke, and the surface beneath their feet deadened their footfalls to silence. Eerie sounds drifted in the air around her, muffled by the hood. Clicks. Chitters. Once, there was an ululating call that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Very faintly, she could hear booming reports, like distant thunder. She swallowed. Somewhere far away, Alera’s firecrafters had begun their work, filling the skies with their furies.

The ground suddenly sloped down, and a rough hand pushed her head forward, her chin to her chest. She bumped her head against what felt like a rocky outcropping in any case, and it stung momentarily. Then the sounds all faded to silence, and the noise of her captors’ breathing changed subtly. They must have brought her inside or underground.