His teeth clenched again as he thought about that wound and all the pain their so-called "healers" had inflicted upon him. Butchers?barbarians! He'd been right about them all along, and he cursed Sir Jasak Olderhan in vicious mental silence as he remembered the other hundred's precious "shardonai."
I should've fed the pair of them to the nearest godsdamned dragon! he thought savagely. Them and all their fucking friends!
He'd long since figured out that that sneaky little bitch with her bruised face and pitiful "poor me" eyes had somehow managed to get a message out to her butchering friends. He still didn't know how, but the way they'd flung her name at him again and again in their questioning proved she had … and the way they kept battering at his own mind suggested several ugly possibilities as to how she had.
The whole time that fucking idiot Olderhan was standing there 'protecting her,' she was busy telling her friends where we were and how to come find us and kill us! It's the only way they could've known she was still alive!
His molars ground together. It was all her fault. She was the one who'd brought the attack in on Thalmayr's command. It wasn't his fault. There was no way he could possibly have known what the little bitch was doing, that she'd managed to bring an entire godsdamned regiment down on him! If it hadn't been for her, his men would still be alive. Magister Halathyn would still be alive.
And Hadrign Thalmayr wouldn't be the half-paralyzed prisoner of the butchers who'd started all of this by massacring that brainless incompetent Olderhan's men in the first place. The butchers who'd somehow transported him over what had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of miles without his remembering a single thing about the journey. The butchers who cut open the flesh of helpless captives in some obscene pretense of trying to "help them," and then, when they were weakened by the pain, tried to rape away any useful information in their minds.
Well, they might break him in the end. Any man could be broken by enough torture, enough cruelty, and he had no way of knowing what other, even more horrendous powers of mental destruction they might yet be able to bring to bear upon him. But they wouldn't find it easy. He swore that to himself yet again, repeating it like a precious mantra of defiance, while despair poured over him with the gentle, soothing breeze.
"Frankly, Sir," Company-Captain Golvar Silkash said, "I'm at a loss." The Healers' Corps officer shook his head, his eyes unhappy. "I've done all I can, and Tobis is still trying, but I've never had a patient with this man's attitude. I just don't know what else we can do to get through to him."
Namir Velvelig grunted unhappily. It wasn't the first time Silkash had reported the same things to him, but the regiment-captain kept hoping that somehow, some way, something would change. But it didn't, of course, he thought moodily, playing with the mug of tea on his desk. Silkash had a matching mug in his left hand, but the Healer had been ignoring it ever since he sat down.
"Is Tobis right, do you think?" he asked.
"What? About the man having at least a trace of Talent of his own?"
"Yes. Could that be what's going on?"
"I suppose it could," Silkash said with a grimace. "Tobis knows a lot more about that sort of thing than I do, but I think even he's shooting blind on this one. We just plain don't have any experience with people who've never even heard of Talents!"
Velvelig grunted again, gazing out his window, where the steadily setting sun sank slowly behind the Sky Bloods, as if he imagined he could somehow find the answers he needed out there in the bronze and copper glow gilding the mountains. Company-Captain Silkash was the finest surgeon and medical doctor with whom Namir Velvelig had ever had the pleasure of serving. But, unlike the majority of the Healers' Corps's commissioned officers?or Platoon-Captain Tobis Makree, his assistant surgeon, for that matter?he had no Talent at all. That put Silkash at a distinct disadvantage when it came to trying to analyze the Arcanan prisoner's reaction to Makree's Healing Talent. And, as Silkash had just pointed out, no one had ever had to deal with a patient who didn't even know what the Healing Talent was!
"How's chan Tergis coming with their language, Sir?" Silkash asked, as much for a frustrated change of subject as out of genuine curiosity, and Velvelig grunted yet a third time. It was remarkable, the surgeon reflected, just how expressive his CO's grunts could actually be, and he wondered if all Arpathians were like that. Velvelig's first grunt had expressed unhappiness; the second had expressed both agreement and frustration; and the third had expressed frustration and anger. Which, now that Silkash thought about it, was a logical enough progression whenever it came to dealing with these maddening "Arcanans," whether collectively or as individuals.
"Not well," the regiment-captain amplified after a moment. "We're keeping him so damned busy relaying messages up-chain from chan Baskay and chan Tesh that he really doesn't have a whole lot of time to devote to the project. And even when he does, he's running into the same sort of non-cooperation Tobis seems to be encountering with this Thalmayr idiot."
The regiment-captain paused, then forced himself to be fair.
"I suppose, if I'd been captured?especially after the sort of massacre these people got put through?I wouldn't be in any hurry to cooperate with my jailers, either. After all, they're probably as imbued as our own people with the idea that it's their duty to refuse to give the enemy any useful information. And despite the total incompetence of their commander, it's obvious these are elite troops."
"If you say so, Sir," Silkash said dubiously. Velvelig raised an eyebrow at him, and the surgeon shrugged. "I know I've only seen them since they got here, but they don't exactly look like 'elite troops' to me."
"No?" Velvelig gazed at him speculatively, then snorted. "They seem a bit demoralized to you, do they? Sullen? Uncooperative? Silently resentful?"
"Yes, Sir. All of those." Silkash cocked his head to one side. "Why?"
"Because that's exactly the reaction I'd expect out of elite troops who'd suffered the sort of pounding these men survived. Think about it, Silky. From chan Tesh's reports, it's obvious they never even suspected we could fire on them through a portal. Their CO?such as he was, and what there was of him?went down in the first volley, which decapitated their entire command structure. The mortar rounds coming in on them must've been the most terrifying thing they'd ever experienced. chan Tesh was massacring them?literally?and they couldn't even shoot back. So how did they react?"
Silkash's perplexity was obvious, and Velvelig waved his tea mug for impatient emphasis.
"They charged, Silky. They came out of their fortifications, got up out of their protective holes under fire?which is harder than hells for anyone to do, trust me?and they charged straight into the fire that was killing them." He shook his head. "Whatever we may think of what they did to the Chalgyn crew, and however stupidly they may have been commanded when chan Tesh hit them, these men were magnificent soldiers. In fact, I'll absolutely guarantee you that that idiot Thalmayr didn't have a thing to do with training them. Not these men. They were so much better than he was that there's no comparison. And that's exactly why so many of them got killed. Instead of turning around and running away, instead of breaking, they charged in an almost certainly spontaneous effort to get their own weapons into action on the far side of the portal. It's probably the bloody-minded septman in me, but I'm prepared to forgive men for a lot when they show that kind of guts."
"I guess I hadn't thought about it quite that way," Silkash admitted after a moment.