Within the large, earthen-floored subcellar room once used as a winecellar, a small slice of hell had been constructed and was in use. Brightly lit in its center by torches and lamps, and thick with their smoke and the commingled stenches of sweat, spilled blood, charred flesh, dung and heated metal, there were chairs to make some of the observers comfortable and devilish devices to inflict varying degrees of discomfort upon the flesh and bones of the one female in the room.
Despite the oppressive heat, all five of the men seated in the chairs were voluminously cloaked, with hoods and masks that made identification impossible. The woman, on the other hand, was naked. Her gross, corpulent body hung by its wrists from a rope threaded through a big iron pulley spiked to a ceiling beam. All parts of her fat body showed the marks of whip or sharp knife or heated iron or pincers.
Her name was Yohahna and she had for many years operated and claimed to own a Pahdookahport “business,” the Three Doors. Her swollen and discolored feet and nailless, charred toes hung a few inches above the floor, and blood from various parts of her battered, horribly disfigured body had dripped down to form a clotting pool on the hard-packed earth.
Her hands had been tied behind her back before she had been hoisted up; her immense weight had long since dislocated her shoulders and she now hung, panting hoarsely in agony, her one remaining eye bulging and bloodshot. “Would it not be better to lower the wretch while she ticks off her silent partners for us?” inquired one of the cloaked men, aged by the sound of his voice.
The cloaked man on the far right shrugged. “She’s as comfortable where she is as she could be. She can no longer stand or sit, you see. I suppose that we could put her on the rack again…” The woman’s hoarse panting was suddenly replaced by a low, bubbling whine, and the blood trickling from her burned and mutilated pudenda was briefly diluted with urine. “Aw, don’ hurt me no mo’,” she whimpered huskily. “Pleez don’ hurt me no mo’, mistuh. I’ll tell yawl enythin”, everthin’. Yawl wawn’ gol’? I c’n show yawl where two hunnerd pounds is bur’ed. Jest, pleez, pleez Gawd, don’ hurt me no mo’!”
One of the other cloaked figures, not sounding anywhere near as aged as the first, remarked, “The fat bitch sounds considerably different from when last I spoke with her about that matter some years back of kidnapped girls. This exercise in chastisement has obviously purged her of her unseemly arrogance. She now has recalled how to properly address her betters.” The aged man said rebukingly, “You say too much. She is of scant use to us dead, so it is imperative that she be given no clue to our identities… yet.” Then, to another of the hooded ones, “Are you ready, then? Take down every word from now on spoken in this room. Identify us and yourself as numbers one through five, counting from left to right. Her, you’ll list by the letter Y, but note the full names and ranks or offices of anyone she mentions; there must be no mistakes or omissions to legally trip us up.”
“All right, Yohahna,” said the man at the far right, “you will now repeat for these gentlemen what you told me earlier. First, who are the actual owners of the Three Doors?”
There followed a chorus of gasps and exclamations of incredulity as the tortured woman whisperingly stuttered the list of more than a dozen names—nobles, gentry and commoner-merchants of the duchy.
The man on the right spoke again. “And how, Yohahna, do you usually recruit your whores?”
“I buys me purty slaves, if I can,” she gasped. “But I got me this gang of fellas, goes outa the town and tries to get farm and village gals to run away with ’em. If the gals won’ the mens ushly knocks ’em inna haid and brings ’em back to me. Then I gentles ’em down till they is broke proper.”
“These girls you have kidnapped, Yohahna—are they all the daughters of citizens of this duchy?”
“Yessuh, far’s I knows they is. None the slaves is,” she replied. “I buys them, leegul and proper, I does.”
“And these partners you have named, do they all know just how you obtain your girls? Of your highly illegal methods?”
“Sure they does,” she affirmed. “Lak I done tol’ you, suh, oncet the baron hisse’f tol’ me which gal he wawnted took up and brought to mah place. It ’uz the daughter of some piss-poor gentleman, and the baron, he’d offered her a dang good living to be his mistress and the crazy lil wench’d turned him down flat, and he had the itch, bad, had to get in ’er, he did.”
He of the aged voice growled, “And did you kidnap this gentle-born girl, then, you piece of filth?”
“I got ’er inna place, a’right,” the dangling woman replied. “Bat it won’ no gentling ‘er, and me and my mens tried near everything we knows, short of flat-out raping her—and we couldn’ do thet ‘cause the baron was set on being the firstest man in ’er.
“Fin’ly, the itch got to ‘im so awful bad, he come down and took ‘er by main force. But after he’d done had her, she come to git holt of his dagger and come at him and afore he could git it away from ’er, he’d done kilt ’er.” The man with the aged voice snarled behind his mask like some beast of prey and started up from his chair, his heavy dirk half out of its sheath. But hands on either side gently restrained him, murmuring to him until he had regained his composure and sheathed his weapon.
The man on the right then asked, “And the Ehleen merchant factor, Urbahnos of Karaleenos, Yohahna—is he, too, one of your partners?”
“He useta be, suh, but he just up and sol’ out his shares to me’n the baron, ’cause he ’uz going back eas’, he said, as soon’s he’d done got him back them two lil slaves what had got ’way from him.”
“You mean his sons? The two nomad boys he’d adopted?” her main questioner prodded.
“Aw, naw, suh. That there adopshun was jus’ a way him and the baron come up with to keep from him having to pay part of what-all they costed him to whoever caught ’em. The lil’es’ one he was gonna give to some Ehleen mucketymuck in the place he come from what likes te bugger lil boys as much as Urbahnos does; then this other Ehleen was’s’posed to make it right enough that Urbahnos could go back home.
“He offered to sell me his wife afore he left, but I figgered she’s a mite too old, and b’sides, her paw was to find out she’d done been sol’ to me, that’ll be a purty mess. So I tolt ’im to wait till he got upriver, somewheres pas’ Ehvinzburkport, and then sell her and his kids.”
They went on, the hooded gentlemen, until the scribe had run out of materials. Twice the woman fainted and had to be revived by the application of hot irons to her vulnerable flesh.
At length, the man of the aged voice said, “All right, we have what we need, more by far than was really needed to achieve our aims. Confine the hag closely, but see to it that she is well fed and nursed back to health and strength. For at the conclusion of this, I want to see her last a long time, a very long and painful time, impaled on a thick stake. Then and only then will justice be truly served.”
14
Count Martuhn had been performing one of his periodic inspections of the magazines wherein were kept the garrison’s food and supply stores when Wolf’s messenger found him. As the citadel had been victualed and supplied for the needs of two thousand men—and Martuhn’s command had never numbered more than fifteen hundred, including noncombatants—for a year-long siege, he figured that it would be months still before there was any dearth to consider. But he still checked the magazines every ten days on general principles: it kept the quartermaster sergeant and his staff on their toes. The pikeman Wolf had sent found the count still chewing a chunk of the pickled pork from a cask he had had sprung at random.