The Arch Druid's lips pursed as the candle flame guttered and died.
'What a shame I have to deny you reincarnation,' he said, as the priests withdrew their bloodied cloths and bowls of sweet water. 'You have a warrior's soul that deserves more, but rest assured you will not depart without honour, for I intend your skull to become my libation bowl.'
'Unfortunately for you, I've never had a head for drink.'
The Druid laughed as he lit another candle.
'I admire a man who makes jokes through his pain, because I know how much you are hurting, my friend. I know exactly how much you are hurting.'
Did he? Orbilio thought. Did he really? Did he have any idea of the nausea that accompanied it? The burning, the throbbing, the white flashing lights? The noises inside his head? Did he have any concept at all of how it felt, knowing your life was measured by the wick of a set of candles that never seemed to burn fast enough? Of being completely and utterly helpless? Of the shame of not being able to die? Why bother castrating the victim, he wondered dully, when he'd emasculated himself?
'No, you don't,' he sighed. 'You don't know what pain is, Vincentrix, because you don't know love.'
Emotion flickered behind the Druid's green eyes as he applied the twenty-first sacred cut.
'I know love, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, and because of it — twenty-two — I know pain.'
'Wrong.'
Twenty-three. He gasped for breath.
'You only know the obsession, rejection and humiliation of unrequited love.'
Why was he doing this? Why was he taunting his torturer, the man who could only prolong his death agonies?
Vincentrix frowned as number twenty-four exploded under Marcus's armpit. 'Why do you smile?'
He couldn't answer until twenty-five stopped slicing his inner thigh.
'You wouldn't understand,' Marcus wheezed, as twenty-six brought a torrent of sweat down his face.
The joke was not that he was taunting Vincentrix. That business about obsession, rejection, unrequited love, that was himself he was talking about, and what irony! Bound, whipped, blood pouring from his wounds and with castration and burning to follow… yet he can't resist torturing himself alongside!
'Pain affects people differently,' Vincentrix said kindly, as twenty-seven and twenty-eight went in crosswise. 'For some, humour is their defence mechanism.'
As twenty-nine slid under his fingernail, Orbilio forced himself to focus on his ever-swelling audience. Family and colleagues had been joined by several of the slimeballs he'd tracked down over the years. He noticed a vicious Armenian rapist among the crowd. The baby-faced child killer who'd stalked the city of Rome. The wealthy patrician woman who'd poisoned her family for the simple reason they bored her.
As more herbs were heaped on the fire, the hallucinations changed. Now a unicorn — a white unicorn, to be precise, with a gold horn — came charging into the clearing. With a whinny, it rose up on its hind legs before galloping off in a thunder of hooves. As the cloud of dust settled, a woman was standing where the unicorn had reared up. The woman was dressed from head to foot in white.
Orbilio suddenly became aware of a sense of weightlessness descending over his body. Having conjured up the world and his wife from inhaling the drugs, it was only fair that he conjured up her. Sweet Juno, it was all he had wanted.
To see her face before he died.
'For heaven's sake, Vincentrix, don't pretend you haven't seen me shapeshift before.'
Despite the blood and the pain, Orbilio laughed. Trust Claudia Seferius to induce a better class of hallucination!
The Arch Druid picked up the knife that had slipped from his hand and wiped the blade on his robes. She could read the uncertainty in his piercing green eyes. Unicorns were a myth, he was thinking. They did not exist. Yet he had seen one with his very own eyes, white with a single gold horn, and now the woman who had left him tied and bound to his own chair stood in its place. There was something else glittering in those piercing green eyes, too, she noticed. And that something else was not very pleasant.
'You honour us, Claudia Seferius.'
He bowed.
'Your arrival is impressive by any standards. But to what do we owe this pleasure?'
'Isn't it obvious?'
She forced herself to look at him. Not at the bloodied lump of meat tied to the oak. That only made her legs weaker.
'I've come for a word with Orbilio.'
'A… word?'
'Well, a couple really. It's just that we go back a long way, Marcus and me, and I didn't want us to part on bad terms.'
'You realize you cannot save him, don't you? He is our sacrifice to the gods, and since you are surrounded by Druids and the families of Druids you must understand that there is no escape for this man.'
He didn't wait for her answer.
'I know you are alone here, Claudia Seferius. Your bodyguard is a Gaul and he is terrified of our powers, and your only other ally, Hannibal I think they called him, has gone.'
All the way from the villa she kept telling herself that Vincentrix had been manipulated every bit as much as he manipulated his people today. The minute this lovelorn dupe had stepped ashore in Britain, the Collegiate had seized upon the opportunity of turning a vulnerable youth into an obedient puppet by construing his enforced celibacy as a 'special gift' and twisting his turbulent emotions until he was sucked so thoroughly into the vortex that was Druidism that he couldn't see any other life. Using the same cheap smoke and mirrors tricks he would later employ on his own subjects, they'd taken him on a road he had no desire to travel and brainwashed him so completely that, all these years on, he still didn't realize he'd started the journey. Vincentrix was a victim just as much as his fellow Santons, kept in mental subjugation by his 'superiors' and imprisoned in his religious beliefs. But it did not give him the right to take life for no reason. Especially not in this way.
'Never trust your own eyes, Vincentrix.' She thought of the box left on her bed. 'But that isn't the point.'
Her mind flew back to the short time ago (was it really only a couple of hours?) when Junius, Hor and Qeb were manhandling a struggling Paris up to the villa and the box fell out of the folds of her robe.
'W-where did you get that?' Junius rasped.
'Hannibal left it as a farewell gift,' she laughed, shaking the empty box. 'A pun on the salary I didn't pay him.'
'Go on without me,' Junius instructed the others. 'Lock Paris in the cellar and keep guard.' When he'd turned to face Claudia, his face was grey. 'Hannibal didn't leave this, my lady.' The young Gaul's voice was barely audible in the stillness. 'And the box isn't empty. If you open it — ' his hand was shaking as he lifted the lid — 'You'll find it contains a small pinch of ash.'
'Ash?'
'From the last wicker man sacrifice.'
Her knees had given way. The callous, evil, cold-hearted bastard had left her a message, in the sure and certain knowledge that she'd never find the place where the wicker man burned, in punishment for what she'd done to him in his own house…
'I knew I shouldn't have sheathed that bloody knife. I should have slit his bastard throat there and then.'
There are places in this forest, Hannibal had said, a full day's march from here where the soil is black from scorching and where the stains against the oak are suspiciously sticky.
If only she had demanded proof! If only she'd insisted that he show her, take her to that dreadful place, she could have saved him!
The wicker man is not dead, madam, I assure you. The Collegiate has not given up its ways.
'Hannibal's the only person who knows where the Druids make their vile sacrifice,' she said hollowly, 'and now Hannibal's gone, and even if we could find the place a day's march is too late.'