The creature grunted. “Want truth, right?” Diero sighed. “He’s telling the truth. He did from the start.”
As far as the wizard was concerned, his fellow Turmian had behaved with admirable good sense. He had nothing to reveal that would cause additional problems for his superiors or his people, so why not speak and spare himself unnecessary pain? It was simply his misfortune that candor couldn’t forestall all of it. Diero had still needed to torture him for a while, just to make sure his story didn’t change as the agony tore away at him.
The dragonkin shook its head. “Lying, I think.”
It verged on being comical, in an irritating sort of way. “You just want to cripple him, so he’s of no use except as food.”
“Well… hungry! Can’t eat beans, peas, and other muck humans grow. Can’t hardly fish, or somebody sailing by sees us. Don’t hardly get any of slaves, when they diedragons always take.”
Diero sighed in grudging sympathy. “I know it’s difficult, being on short rations. I assure you, I have my own problems and frustrations.” Such as the constant need to pander to Eshcaz’s vanity, demeaning work for one of the ablest magicians for hundreds of miles around. “But it will all be worth it when we rule Faerun as the dracoliches’ deputies.”
“Hope so,” the dragonkin grumbled.
“Well, to reach that joyful tomorrow, we must observe some discipline today. Look at the arms and shoulders on this one. He can do a lot of carving before the work breaks him down.” Diero studied the reptile’s lizardlike features. It was tricky to interpret dragonkin expressions, but he was finally picking up the knack. “So I can count on you to give him to the overseers with his limbs still in their sockets?”
The torturer bared its fangs, but in such a way as to convey disappointment, not defiance. “Yes.”
Tu’ala’keth lingered in the niche in the bedrock long after Eshcaz wearied of fishing for her and flew away, and she was still there when night darkened the waters. For she felt she had nowhere else to go.
Her burns, whip cuts, and bruised ribs smarted. She could have eased the discomfort with a prayer, but chose to endure it instead. It seemed a fitting if insufficient rebuke for her misplaced self-assurance and general ineptitude.
The worst of it was that Anton had readily predicted the fiasco, and she’d ignored him. She’d only been able to see one path to her goal, and assumed her constricted vision equated to revelation.
But perhaps Umberlee had never revealed anything. Maybe it was merely Tu’ala’keth’s deluded self-importance that made her believe the goddess had charged her with a vital task or provided aid and guidance along the way.
Perhaps Anton was right, and the powers didn’t care about anything mortals attempted during their brief little lives.
Suddenly, after a lifetime of certitude, Tu’ala’keth was sure of only one thing: She’d failed and survived to rue it. It would be better, perhaps, if Eshcaz had burned her to ash, or torn her apart.
But he hadn’t, and in time, when the emptiness in her belly made her feel weak and ill, the same brute instinct for survival that had made her flee the dragon drove her forth from her hiding place. She glided with the current until she spied a perch large enough to satisfy her hunger then veered in its direction.
Recognizing the threat, the fish fled, but she put on a burst of speed and closed with it anyway. If she’d still had her trident, she would have speared it, but as it was, she had to kill it as one wild thing killed another. She seized it with her hands, sank her teeth into its scaly back, and biting and rending, tore the thrashing creature apart.
Fine bones crunched between her teeth. Blood billowed, tingeing and perfuming the water. Despite her bleak mood, the perch’s raw flesh was sweet, and she knew a sudden exultation at the success of the hunt, at extinguishing another’s life to perpetuate her own vitality.
With that unexpected ecstasy came a renewed comprehension of what every creature ought to understand, but which even priestesses sometimes failed to appreciate. This act of predation was sacred. It was Umberlee.
In grasping anew the essential nature of the goddess, Tu’ala’keth discerned that even if her schemes had been flawed, her intentions had not. If the Queen of the Depths manifested herself whenever one creature devoured another, then plainly, the worship of sentient beings wasn’t too small a matter to engage her interest. She craved it, demanded it, and punished those who denied it, just as her creed declared.
Accordingly, it actually had been Tu’ala’keth’s duty to reinvigorate such worship. She needn’t doubt when the pattern implicit in all that had happenedthe coming of the dragon flight, her discovery of Anton, the convenient vulnerabilities of needy Shandri Clayhill and vain, lecherous Vurgromproved it.
The problem was that she’d ultimately lost her way. She’d misunderstood what was necessary. But that didn’t mean she’d failed, not yet, not while she could still fight, kill, and embrace her goddess in the holy act of shedding blood. She simply had to see more clearly.
Though they hadn’t in fact confirmed it, she remained convinced the cultists had the answer she needed. The flow of events had borne her to Tan for a reason. But the wyrm worshipers refused to help her. How, then, was she to proceed?
It was plain enough: She’d have to wrest their secrets from them. Anton had even told her so, and she now realized he’d still been speaking as Umberlee’s champion, even if he didn’t know it himself.
But obviously, she couldn’t do it alone and had no idea where to turn for assistance. Seros had lost one army to the dragon flight and was frantically piecing together another. In such dire circumstances, it was inconceivable that the Nantarn Council would give her any troops for what they’d view as a purely speculative venture in the strange, irrelevant world above the waves. Nor would Anton’s folk be any quicker to heed a stranger, a member of an unfamiliar race and the cleric of a deity they dreaded rather than loved.
Still, she abruptly realized, that left one possibility. Flicking bits of perch from her fingerstiny fish came rushing and swarming to vie for the scrapsshe silently summoned her seahorses.
Anton’s hands were raw and cramped, his knees sore, his shoulders on fire. He was accustomed to swinging a sword and sailing a ship. He’d performed many sorts of manual labor as he played one role or another. But none of it had prepared him for the grueling work of chiseling unholy symbols in a granite floor.
Part of the problem was the residual ache in his joints. At the wearer of purple’s insistence, the torturer had stopped short of mangling him for good and all, but that didn’t mean he’d escaped unscathed. Maybe, in time, he’d find the toil easier to bear.
Or maybe he’d gradually wear out, starve, and die, as the other slaves did. All things considered, he’d rather not remain a prisoner long enough to find out.
Accordingly, weary and wretched as he felt, it was time to start acting like a spy again. He lifted his head to survey his fellow thralls.
Checkmate’s edge, what a dismal lot they were, slumped in the malodorous little cave that served as their pen. It wasn’t their emaciation or festering whip marks that dismayed him, those were unavoidable. It was the fact that they weren’t even whispering to one another, just sitting or sprawling in silence. Misery and hopelessness had hollowed them out inside.
Still they were the only allies he was likely to find. He pondered whom to approach first, and how, and the wrought-iron grate rasped open. Dragonkin emptied wooden pails of vegetables and hardtack onto the floor.
As the grille clanked shut again and the key twisted in the lock, the slaves lunged for their daily meal. Though desperate to grab as much they could, most stopped short of actually laying hands on their fellows. But a tall man, with a broken nose and a livid ridge of scar on his jaw that even shaggy whiskers couldn’t hide, seized two of the frailest-looking captives by the shoulders and flung them backward, in effect usurping their shares for himself. Maybe it was such merciless theft that had kept him looking vital and strong, and his movements, quick and sure.