Darish Venn screamed.
The fingers slid inside his head, pushing through hair and skin and bone as if the whole of it were made of soft clay. Sen Dunsidan’s throat tightened and his stomach lurched. The Morgawr’s hand was all the way inside the skull now, twisting slowly, as if searching. The Captain had stopped screaming and thrashing. The light had gone out of his eyes, and his face had gone slack. His look was dull and lifeless.
The Morgawr withdrew his hand from the Borderman’s head, and it was steaming and wet as it slid back into the black robes and out of sight. The Morgawr was breathing so loudly that Sen Dunsidan could hear him, a kind of rapturous panting, rife with sounds of satisfaction and pleasure.
“You cannot know, Minister,” he whispered, “how good it feels to feed on another’s life. Such ecstasy!”
He stepped back, releasing Venn. “There. It is done. He is ours now, to do with as we wish. He is a walking dead man with no will of his own. He will do whatever he is told to do. He keeps his skills and his experience, but he no longer cares to think for himself. A useful tool, Minister. Take a look at him.”
Reluctantly, Sen Dunsidan did so. It was not an invitation; it was a command. He studied the blank, lifeless eyes, revulsion turning to horror as they began to lose color and definition and turn milky white and vacant. He moved around the table cautiously, looking for the wound in the back of the Borderman’s head where the Morgawr’s hand had forced entry. To his astonishment, there wasn’t one. The skull was undamaged. It was as if nothing had happened.
“Test him, Minister.” The Morgawr was laughing. “Tell him to do something.”
Sen Dunsidan fought to keep his composure. “Stand up,” he ordered Darish Venn in a voice he could barely recognize as his own.
The Borderman rose. He never looked at Sen Dunsidan or gave recognition that he knew what was happening. His eyes stayed dead and blank, and his face had lost all expression.
“He is the first, but only the first,” the Morgawr hissed, anxious now and impatient. “A long night stretches ahead of us. Go now, and bring me another. I am already hungry for a fresh taste! Go! Bring me six, but bid them enter one by one. Go quickly!”
Sen Dunsidan went out the door without a word. An image of a scaly hand steaming and wet with human matter was fixed in his mind and would not give up its hold on him.
He brought more men to the room that night, so many he lost count of them. He brought them in small groups and had them enter singly. He watched as their bodies were violated and their minds destroyed. He stood by without lifting a finger to aid them as they were changed from whole men into shells. It was strange, but after Darish Venn, he couldn’t remember any of their faces. They were all one to him. They were all the same man.
When the room grew too crowded with them, he was ordered to lead them out and turn them over to the turnkey to place in a larger chamber. The turnkey took them away without comment, without even looking at them. But once, after maybe fifty or so, the ruined face and the hard eyes found Sen Dunsidan with a look that left him in tears. The look bore guilt and accusation, horror and despair, and above all unmitigated rage. This was wrong, the look said. This went beyond anything imaginable. This was madness.
And yet the turnkey did nothing either.
The two of them, accomplices to an unspeakable crime.
The two of them, silent participants in the perpetration of a monstrous wrong.
So many men did Sen Dunsidan help destroy, men who walked to their doom with nothing to offer in their defense, decoyed by a politician’s false words and reassuring looks. He did not know how he managed it. He did not know how he survived what it made him feel. Each time the Morgawr’s hand emerged wet and dripping with human life, another feasting complete, the Minister of Defense thought he would run screaming into the night. Yet the presence of Death was so overpowering that it transcended everything else in those terrible hours, paralyzing him. While the Morgawr feasted, Sen Dunsidan watched and was unable even to look away.
Until finally, the Morgawr was sated. “Enough for now,” he hissed, glutted and drunk on stolen life. “Tomorrow night, Minister, we will finish this.”
He rose and walked away, taking his dead with him into the night, shadows on the wind.
The dawn broke and the day came, but Sen Dunsidan saw none of it. He shut himself away and did not come out. He lay in his room and tried to banish the image of the Morgawr’s hand. He dozed and tried to forget the way his skin crawled at the slightest sound of a human voice. Queries were made after his health. He was needed in the Council chambers. A vote on the position of Prime Minister was imminent. Reassurances were sought. Sen Dunsidan no longer cared. He wished he had never put himself in this position. He wished he were dead.
By nightfall, the turnkey was. Even given the harshness of his life and the toughness of his mind, he could not bear what he had witnessed. When no one else was about, he went down into the bowels of the prison and hung himself in a vacant cell.
Or did he? Sen Dunsidan could not be certain. Perhaps it was murder made to look like suicide. Perhaps the Morgawr did not want the turnkey alive.
Perhaps Sen Dunsidan was next.
But what could he do to save himself?
The Morgawr came again at midnight, and again Sen Dunsidan went with him into the prisons. This time Dunsidan dismissed the new turnkey and handled all the extraneous work himself. He was numb to it by now, inured to the screams, the wet and steaming hand, the grunts of horror from the men, and the sighs of satisfaction from the Morgawr. He was no longer a part of it, gone somewhere else, somewhere so far away that what happened here, in this place and on this night, meant nothing. It would be over by dawn, and when it was, Sen Dunsidan would be another man in another life. He would transcend this one and leave it behind. He would begin anew. He would remake himself in a way that cleansed him of the wrongs he had done and the atrocities he had abetted. It was not so hard. It was what soldiers did when they came home from a war. It was how a man got past the unforgivable.
More than 250 men passed through that room and out of the life they had known. They disappeared as surely as if they had turned to smoke. The Morgawr changed them into dead things that still walked, into creatures that had lost all sense of identity and purpose. He turned them into something less than dogs, and they did not even know it. He made them into his airship crews, and he took them away forever. All of them, every last one. Sen Dunsidan never saw any of them again.
Within days, he had secured the airships the Morgawr had requested and delivered them to fulfill his end of the bargain. Within a week, the Morgawr was gone out of his life, departed in search of the Ilse Witch, in quest of revenge. Sen Dunsidan didn’t care. He hoped they destroyed each other. He prayed he would never see either of them again.
But the images remained, haunting and terrible. He could not banish them. He could not reconcile their horror. They haunted him in his sleep and when he was awake. They were never far away, never out of sight. Sen Dunsidan did not sleep for weeks afterwards. He did not enjoy a moment’s peace.
He became Prime Minister of the Federation’s Coalition Council, but he lost his soul.
3
Now, months later and thousands of miles away off the coast of the continent of Parkasia, the fleet of airships assembled by Sen Dunsidan and placed under the command of the Morgawr and his Mwellrets and walking dead materialized out of the mist and closed on the Jerle Shannara. Standing amidships at the port railing, Redden Alt Mer watched the cluster of black hulls and sails fill the horizon east like links in an encircling chain.