Novels

The screams intensified as she descended along the scabrous corridor. A chorus of agony and desperation. Of mewling pleas punctuated by shrill howls and spine-rattling shrieks. Echoes clawed at the tunnel walls as they scrabbled past. Flush with despair. Urgent with need. Seeking escape, only to wither in the coring void.

A song of torment.

Succulent to the ear.

She turned the corner at the base of a crude stair. Dathus and Horvus, together serving sentry, stiffened as she entered their view, sable faces gleaming in the torchlight like burnished blackwood. Horvus moved to open the ironbound door they warded. Dathus flattened himself to one side. Both clapped fist to heart and dipped chin to chest as she brushed by, her brisk passage stirring the flames ensconced along the walls.

Through the door, a stench assailed her. Of burning hair and seared flesh. Of sweat and blood and entrails. Of rancid hopes and festering fears. Deeply, she inhaled.

The aroma of conquest.

As she neared the bank of cells, the song reached its crescendo. Wails and bellows underscored now by plaintive moans and pitiful whimpers. Amid these chords of frailty and cowardice, the means of their suffering. The snap of bone. The hiss of hot iron. The clangor of spikes and chains. The wrench and squeak of rope and pulley. Harsh, discordant, yet all part of the same tune. Strains of a melody that hailed her triumph, that sent chills of victory worming through her flesh.

In a cavernous chamber to her right, Baccus and Pirrus were tending their garden of human wreaths—Addaran landsnakes lashed naked to spinning wheels, struck by hammer until their broken limbs were mashed and twisted in grotesque angles amid the spokes, then left to writhe and moan in a withering torment meant to endure for days.

At this particular moment, Baccus carried the hammer, while Pirrus inspected the wilted victims. Watering those in need. Sussing out the dead by slapping at mangled appendages or tugging at their hair. Few resembled human form.

“This one’s dead,” he announced, when a senseless wretch, unspeakably gnarled and knotted, failed to respond.

“Ivory fist says he’s breath in there yet,” Baccus argued.

“Wagered.”

She paused, observing as Pirrus withdrew from the tangled ruin, and Baccus hefted his hammer. The strike splintered an already pulverized forearm—and raised a ragged yowl from the victim.

Baccus grinned fiercely, while Pirrus frowned and shook his head. In doing so, he caught sight of her—quickly nodding and thumping a sharp salute. Baccus rounded and did the same.

“You owe him a fist,” she said.

Pirrus bowed again. “Yes, my kiros.”

“Half pay for dead wreathes,” she reminded them, and left them to their work.

“Overlord,” they replied in unison, offering a parting salute.

Venturing forward along the central hall, she found more of the same. Chambers to either side filled with Addarans put to various forms of torture. Some were being actively tended with saws, peelers, screws, or vices. Others had been abandoned to cradles or collars, some of which teased the victim with survival so long as their own stamina held. Still others had been encased with insects, crabs, or agitated vermin, to be slowly stung, torn, or gnawed to death.

Several were being actively interrogated. Others lay beyond questioning, their horror persisting merely to be witnessed by others. Regardless, each treatment seemed crueler than the last, the agony of each victim more severe. As she had commanded. A menagerie of pain. One to fill this hole with every conceivable stench and ear-splitting cry. Burns, bruises, lacerations. Shattered bones and severed appendages. Men awash in one another’s blood, bowels, and vomit, or slathered in their own.

But it was their gazes she sought, from which she derived a richer pleasure. Red-veined eyes shuttered by bruising or swollen with tears. Where she could peer past the carnage and into that purer well of raw anguish. Where their prayers for death burned with increasing fervor.

And went unanswered.

Deeper within the den, she found at last her chief inquisitor, overseeing Samrus’s application of a knee splitter. The landsnake strapped to the chair dared look to her arrival in hope.

“Thrassus,” she said. “I would see the general.”

“Overlord,” he acknowledged, and rose to lead the way.

“Proceed,” she bade Samrus, and smiled as the pathetic hope curdled upon the snake’s pale face.

Overwrought. Petty. Unnecessary. She cared not how others might describe this effort. A long time had she and her people sought retribution against their Addaran betrayers. Generation after generation, over the course of one hundred and ninety-two years. Here at last, victory. The annals would record that it was she, Sabrynne Stormweaver, Great Grendavan the Eighth, who had finally restored the Grenarr to their ancestral homeland. How she had conceived and then executed a daring, multifaceted plan that had repaid the landsnakes’ treachery and seen them driven from their stolen nest. The city of Avenell was now hers, and with it, the heart of the isle of Grenah.

As such, she had no intention of repeating the mistake the Addarans had made by merely driving her people from the isle’s shores. Her forces had held the city for more than two weeks now. But not two hours had marked its fall before she had turned eye to those who might later rally against her.

Determined not merely to supplant her hated enemies, but to eradicate them.

“Have we gleaned nothing of value?” she asked of Thrassus, as he plucked a lantern from the wall and led her even deeper into the torture grounds.

“Only chaff,” her hulking inquisitor huffed. “Kernels aplenty, but naught more than empty husks.”

Sabrynne nodded, seeing no reason to question his assessment. She hadn’t charged him with oversight of this task for either his stomach or imagination—formidable as they were—but for his uncanny ability to measure and sift truth from lie. His previous reports had established already the relative ease with which these landsnake tongues were loosened. But the whole of their hissing and wagging had thus far proved contradictory and disjointed. Most of these rags and wretches simply lacked the information she required, and so offered up tales in the desperate hope of appeasing their tormentors.

“Word from Grenathrok?” Thrassus asked.

“East of rudder. Barkavius and the fleet are en route.” Having overcome some minor complications, she might have added, as detailed in the steward’s message. Regrettable, in some respects. But the overall gains would seem to far outstrip their losses. Either way, her faithful inquisitor need not be troubled, for all the bearing such dealings had upon his task.

Thrassus swelled with the news, turning his head—spattered in Addaran blood—to offer her a grateful smile. His wives and children would be among the arriving colonists. To be reunited after nearly a year’s separation. Because of her foresight and tenacity.

Their stroll through the blood-soaked warren ended at another ironbound door. The rusty latch bolt shrieked a lament as Thrassus wrenched it free of its housing. The door squealed a similar protest, but relented to his powerful shove.

His lantern pushed back the veil of shadows to reveal the lone figure housed within. The figure stirred. General Ohrma. A man for whom her father had borne a grudging respect. A once-worthy adversary who had repelled countless Grenarr landing attempts over his decades of service to the Addaran crown—including the ill-fated spring invasion hailed as the Blood Tide, now more than twenty years past, in the One Hundred Sixty-Seventh Year of Exile.

Of stark humiliation to her proud people, as most of the blood that season had been their own.

It had culminated not long after in her father being deposed by the Clamcrusher, Uruthus, who had seen his great vessel burned to cinders, her elder siblings butchered, and herself, a mere waif, escaped with her infant brother to become outcasts. The tribulations that had followed . . .

To think on them now caused her to smile. So long ago.

She admired her father to this day through the foolish eyes of a devoted young daughter. Nonetheless, she found it difficult to reconcile his description of the Addaran general with the decaying remnant of a man before her. Immersed in a tub to his shoulders. Force-fed milk and honey, until steeped in a stagnant stew of his own liquid excrement. His face lathered with the excess, to draw the mask of flies he now wore—a nest to maggots and their larvae. A breeding ground he was, for filth and disease, taking root in every orifice. Another rag who prayed vainly for death.

“Raise him,” she commanded.

Hanging his lantern on a hook, Thrassus circuited the tub, loosing the cords whose cinched lengths—attached to a neck collar—anchored the former general in place. The inquisitor then worked his way to a whim at the back of the chamber and wound it in a steady circle, reeling in a length of chain looped through an overhead ring, which in turn drew Ohrma skyward by a set of cuffs binding his wrists.

Sabrynne snorted at the putrid stench given rein as the general was hefted from the foul soup. Clouds of flies, disturbed by the unfamiliar tremors, flew free, buzzing their distress. A handful found their way to her. Brushing them aside, she stepped closer, defying her own disgust.

Ohrma scarcely stirred. Stripped and pale. Riddled with worms and rot. Seeming more than half dead, if not completely so.

“Softened, was my command,” she said, filling her voice with irritation.

With all but the general’s feet pulled from the tub, Thrassus latched the whim and took a nearby spear in hand. Exuding a cheerless confidence, he raked the spearhead against the top of Ohrma’s shins, just below the knee. Sagging skin tore away in strips under its own swollen weight, sloughing from the exposed meat and bone. The general twitched. Then coughed. Then roused, bucking and kicking as if his legs had been set afire.

“Feeble will, overlord,” Thrassus muttered, his own tone lacking apology.

The general opened his eyes, blinking against the sweet paste that had soured there, and against the maggots clinging to it. His kicking steadied. Not for lack of pain, given the rictus of his face, but for a lack of sustainable strength. Beneath leathery skin that had taken on the shriveled texture of rotting plums, the fruit of aged muscles had gone slack.

Sabrynne smirked. “He fought lustily enough when seeking to repel our incursion.” She titled her head, angling her gaze to meet his. “Or is it that he overtaxed himself, having expended so much strength already in the course of his own revolt?”

She had triggered her long-brewing assault with a fleet of her warships, sent south through the Gorrethrian Sound. A retaliatory strike, it had seemed, for the Addarans’ murder of a decoy they had believed to be the Grenarr overlord, Great Grendavan. In truth, a feint that had served to lure the bulk of King Kendarrion’s forces north to reinforce the city of Indranell—thereby depleting those forces dedicated to defending the home city of Avenell.

Those who remained? Divided from within. Portraying herself as the Grenarr emissary assigned to oversee Kendarrion’s adherence to the accord that would see his abducted heir returned unharmed, she had won open admission to the Pretender’s court. A lamb among wolves, it would seem, were she not the one stalking them. Teasing, taunting, and otherwise flaunting herself among them, she had plowed a field of disgust and opposition in which to sow the seeds of civil discord. While the king himself protected her from those dissidents who would sooner see her killed or used for sport, her seeds had taken root, casting irrefutable light upon Kendarrion’s incapacity to lead during this personal crisis involving his royal children.

Spurring his critics toward insurrection.

Once Avenell had been weakened by the deployment of the bulk of its military, an uprising was sprung by the opposing “Loyalists”—those who would see a stronger leader raised in Kendarrion’s stead. A leader who would refuse the Grenarrian accord, built as it was upon an act of ransom. Who would sacrifice Prince Dethaniel and whomever else if it would deny the loathsome tar-skins so much as a toehold upon Addaran shores.

Ohrma, the retired general retained as Kendarrion’s chief advisor, had served as that leader.

“Are you savoring your treatment?” she asked him, coaxing in her tone.

The faithless general fought to raise his head. A loll, he managed, as he swayed there in his shackles. Twice his mouth twitched as if to speak before words finally worked themselves free. “It is . . . no more . . . than I deserve.”

Sabrynne scowled. For his sorrow and self-loathing, she brooked no sympathy. This, they had discussed already. “I asked you not to weep at me over the injustice wrought by your own hand. You might have quashed any attempt to betray your king, yet chose to spearhead the rebellion against him instead. That much was not my doing. Nor is it why you are here.”

He tensed, shifted. An understanding, stripped from something she had said, emboldened him, lending him a spark of will. It glinted in his eyes and caused his lips to tighten with the barest hint of a mad smile. “My lord . . . is yet . . . beyond your reach.”

“Nothing is beyond my reach. Time is all I require. The only thing your stubbornness serves is to prolong this ordeal.” She flicked a knife from the sheath at her wrist, and used it to remove a leech from his thigh. “Where is Darr?”

Ohrma blinked, then looked away, clinging to his silence.

“You should know I’ve received word that your Princess Denariel is en route.” The general’s gaze lifted again, reflexive concern shaded by suspicion. “Captured by my chief steward,” she explained. “If you will but inform me of your king’s whereabouts, I will not only end your suffering, but I will spare her—his daughter and only surviving child—a torture less pleasant than your own.”

“His Highness . . . Prince Dethaniel—”

“Dead. Slain upon my order, given wing the moment the city fell.”

A penetrating sorrow crept across the general’s brow, even as he strained to ward it off with desperate denial. A vein emerged along his reddening temple. His lower lip quivered.

“If you have any love for your king or his bloodline, you will do this.”

She believed that love genuine, inasmuch as a treacherous landsnake was capable of it. By all accounts, Ohrma—keenly aware of the internal outcry to which his king was unwilling to listen—had been opposed to her people’s ransom proposal from the outset, and advised Darr against it. Yet his personal loyalty had led him to stubbornly resist the notion of taking the crown by force, even as those within his city’s hierarchy increasingly demanded it. It had taken considerable goading to realign his thinking, as she’d heard it. And that bolstered in no small measure by a professed belief that he might at some point restore power to Darr once the conflict had settled.

While this last may have been but a lie to assuage his guilty conscience, she believed—from his lips and others—that it was only with a heavy heart that he had, in the end, succumbed to their mounting pressure. His justification for personally advising Kendarrion to send the bulk of Avenell’s garrison north? Not only to defend against the Grenarr landing at Indranell, but to execute his own takeover with minimal struggle and loss of life.

Convinced he was acting in his people’s best interests.

She could see him struggling with a similar decision now. If her claims were true, did he owe it to his ruler and longtime friend to do what he could to spare the last of Darr’s royal progeny some measure of pain? Surely, his confusion was bolstered by the effects of his own torment. As glimpsed in the gazes of his abused countrymen, she sensed the weaker part of him grasping at any thread of hope for ending his present anguish.

After a long moment of teary-eyed distress, his expression smoothed, a sheen of clarity overcoming his addled senses. “What drop of venom . . . from your tarred lips . . . can I take as truth?” He managed at last to heft his chin from his chest. “I will be no pawn . . . in your games. The best I can serve . . . is to die in His Majesty’s stead . . . and greet my grave . . . knowing my people . . . still had a chance.”

Vexing, truthful as it was. The Loyalist uprising had served well its primary purpose. During the mass confusion of the revolt, the city effectively torn in two, Sabrynne had sent a small, secret force to infiltrate and sabotage the Seagate. A battery of Grenarr ships, standing by and teeming with warriors, had thus been able to enter the bay and assault Avenell from within. Making possible her victory, where so many other forays by her people had failed.

But the attack had foundered in its secondary objective: to capture Kendarrion himself. Upon recognizing the Grenarr sneak attack through the bay, Ohrma had released the freshly deposed king with his deepest apologies, and mobilized instead a rearguard defense while Darr and a sizable contingent of city soldiers fled north. The fickle general’s feeble rally had scarcely slowed the Grenarr invasion, but had succeeded in buying the Pretender’s escape.

Scouts sent to track them had returned in failure or not at all. While fighting to secure the city, she had lacked numbers sufficient to the task. Bolstering those numbers in the days since had made no difference. Hers were warriors of the sea. Masters of wind and swell. Men and women who speared fish and wrestled sharks. Yet ill-equipped to scale mountain, meander through canyon, or slog through jungle while seeking sign of cowering landsnakes.

She had patrols scouring the main roads, of course, but had fully expected Darr to avoid those—to slink instead along some series of back trails like a harried animal. Well known as an enthusiastic explorer in his youth, he would seek in this hour of defeat to grasp at every perceived advantage, his knowledge of the surrounding landscape being chief among them.

Even now, with reinforcements pouring in, she was loath to spend Grenarr lives by sending them thrashing into the wilderness in vain pursuit. Like casting seeds into the wind and expecting them to take root. She had other tasks for which her warriors would be needed, and so had focused from the outset on a more targeted approach. With Ohrma and a host of fellow captives delivered to Thrassus and his inquisitors, she had expected to mine the information necessary to locate Darr and his flock. To pinpoint the royal rebel before he could reunite with his northern army at Indranell. To decapitate the most likely source of resistance and thereby strengthen her as-yet tenuous hold upon these shores.

Unable to sustain its weight, the general lowered his head. A crawling maggot fell from his matted white hair, only to join those infesting his beard. Sabrynne eyed its wriggling struggle, and considered. By now, she might be too late. It might be that the Pretender had already slipped through her loose net and found his way to that bastion of his in the north. And once empowered with his reserve army . . . A pitiless ruler. An aggrieved parent. Army? Were Darr more a man, a stick in hand would be sufficient with which to seek his revenge.

Her armada in the sound would continue to demand their attention, of course. Should the bulk remain at Indranell, she was inclined to let them rot, rather than waste lives trying to flush them out. But she harbored little doubt that they would mount a return. She knew too well what a dispossessed people, driven by a sense of vengeance, was capable of. Whomever their leader, they would at some point rally southward in an attempt to retake the capital. She could press to take some of the land between them now, but those who resisted would be experienced ground fighters who outnumbered her, knew the terrain better than she, and who would fight her every step of the way. Better to let them come to her so that she could ambush them at a time and place of her choosing.

To that end, the more she could learn about their movements and intent, the better prepared she would be to receive them. Unfortunately, her few spies amid that army were all but useless, with no easy means of contacting her from the field—and, more critically, no way to receive payment. For this and other reasons, she had placed the bulk of her confidence in Ohrma.

Quickly proving a wasted effort.

Sabrynne tapped her blade, still in hand, against her lip. Perhaps mistaking it as a sign of hostility, the general summoned another defiant breath.

“My pain . . . is well earned,” he rasped. “Your torments . . . just punishment . . . for my foolish treachery.”

A muted whisper of the same, tired refrain. As irksome as the persistent buzzing of flies or the pervasive stench of his bowels. Sabrynne had scoffed at his attempt at nobility in the beginning, and was unimpressed by it now. “An honorable man does not absolve himself. Nor laden his deeds with justification as you have.”

“Honor . . . or not . . . you will kill me . . . before I betray my king . . . a second time.”

Sabrynne eyed him dispassionately, as again his momentary strength failed. How much more could his wasted form tolerate? What chance that he might be swayed?

She glanced at Thrassus. Sensing her question, he shook his head.

It chafed her, the thought of his suffering gone numb. She had half a mind to have him hauled fully from that tub and nursed back to health, that she might begin again. But that could take weeks, time better spent devising a new plan. There were others she might use to track the craven king and his rebels. Others of a heartier constitution and more willing persuasion. None as well trusted by Darr, perhaps. But with Denariel set to be delivered . . . that would seem to open any number of possibilities. And Kronus . . . Kronus had proven malleable, and would be put to use, one way or another.

If her thickening patrols hunting along the northern road could continue to wall the Pretender off from his army, she might yet achieve her aims sooner rather than later, the fleshy pustule before her be damned.

She marked the blood dripping down his shins, as distant screams raked at the wells of her ears. A rivulet tracing a ridge of exposed bone spurred her decision.

“Thrassus. Deliver this festering sack to Baccus and Pirrus. Let us weave another wreath with which to welcome the princess’s return.”