He tried to lash out at them as they freed his arms, tried to leap to his feet. If I can injure one, the other will run and I can hold the injured one and make him take off the hood_
Visions of escape flashed across his mind.
He flung out his taloned hands with a strength only slightly less than that of an unfledged eyas; he got as far as his knees before he threw himself off balance and tumbled in an ungainly sprawl across some hard surface.
The men both laughed, as he sought for a reservoir of strength and found it empty. "I see what you mean," said the other. "Still_we can't keep him around for too long, or our client is going to hear about the new artifacts in the market and is going to wonder where all those vials of blood and feathers are coming from."
"He gave us permission to take what we wanted_" the first man argued.
"But you don't get fresh blood from a week-old corpse," the other reminded him.
Artifacts, T'fyrr thought miserably, as the two men threw him on his stomach, pinned his wing and arms effortlessly, and plucked another handful of secondary feathers. I am nothing to them but an object, to be used at their pleasure. They harvest me as if I were a berry patch.
Each feather, as it was pulled, invoked a stab of exquisite pain; he squawked involuntarily as his tormenters extracted them. Finally they left him alone.
They were only after feathers this time, not blood. Just as well, every talon ached where they had cut each one to the quick to collect blood. Now I know how human victims must feel; why they deem having nails pulled out to be such a torment. If he got free, he would not be able to walk comfortably for weeks. And I will not fly for months until the feathers grow again.
"Shall we truss it back up again?" the first man asked when they finally left him alone for a moment, and he decided that they were done with him for the nonce. "We'll be gone all evening, with no one here to watch him."
The second one prodded him with a toe, and all T'fyrr could do was groan. "I don't think so," he said. "He isn't going anywhere. All those bindings were breaking feathers anyway; we need to get as many perfect feathers from him as we can. Only the perfect feathers are any good, magically. Now that makes me wonder, though_we need to do some research and see if the down and body feathers could be used for anything."
The sounds of their feet receded. "Considering what we're getting for feathers and blood, can you imagine what the heart and bones will be worth?" the first one said, greed and awe in his voice. "Not to mention the skull and the talons?"
"We will be able to purchase mansions and titles, at the very least," the second chuckled over the sound of a door opening. "And as many_"
The door closed, cutting off the end of the sentence.
The heart. The skull. His people did not have much in the way of ceremony to mark one's passing, but the idea that he would be parceled out in bits to the highest bidder made him so sick to his stomach that he started to gag.
And that was when the despair he had been holding off finally swooped down on him and took him.
I am going to die here, alone, in the dark, half-mad and utterly forgotten! Nightingale will never find me; I will never see her again_
He couldn't sit up, he was too weak and dizzy; he could only curl into a shivering ball and clutch his legs to his chest, shaking with despair. No one would ever find him. There was no rescue at hand. Probably no one had even bothered to make the attempt.
No one cared.
No! I can feel her out there; I know she hasn't forgotten me! If no one else tries, she will! She will come to me by herself if she must!
But it was hopeless. How could one woman, however resourceful, find him hidden away in this hive of a city? How could anyone find him, even with all the resources of the King? Lyonarie was too big, too impersonal, for anyone to search successfully.
Even clever Nightingale. There were too many places even she could not go.
He could not weep, but his beak gaped as much as the muzzle would permit, and he keened his despair into the uncaring darkness.
Oh, I would rather that Tyladen were doing this.
The moon shone down on rooftops encrusted with ornamental false towers and crenellations, on chimney pots shaped like toadstools, flowers, trees, tiny castles_anything but a chimney-pot. Nightingale crouched in the lee of a chimney, bracing herself on the slanted slate roof, and took Harperus' device off her belt, holding it before her like a hand-crossbow. She braced herself a little more, then cupped her hand around it to shield it, as she would have shielded a lantern, and felt for the little raised bump near where her thumb fell.
Magical guards above and physical guards below. If this was not where T'fyrr was being held, then there was something very peculiar going on in the old mansion upon whose roof she now perched, less like the bird she was named for than a chimney swift.
A square area lit up inside her shielding hand, giving off a dim, red light. It represented a square space, twenty feet on a side, with herself in the middle.
The little bright dot that was supposed to represent T'fyrr was just a little to the left of center_a dot that had not appeared on this "screen" the other times she had used the device.
She smiled tightly; he was here. Getting him out_well, she would save the rejoicing for the moment that happened. She pressed the thumb-point again, and a set of numbers appeared.
Roughly fifteen feet below her; that would put him in the top floor, just below the attics. That made sense; they were probably thinking of him as a big bird. They wouldn't want to put him in a basement where he might catch a chill and die of shock. In these town mansions, unlike those in the country, the master and mistress had their private rooms at the top of the house, where you might get a breath of a breeze in the summer, and where all the heat rose in the winter. In a town mansion like this, the rooms at street level, next to the kitchens, were ovens themselves in the summer, and in winter, no amount of fuel kept them warm.
Her heart had led her here; it had once been a wealthy district, with huge homes showcasing the wealth of their owners. Now the area was shabby-genteel at best, and whoever lived here was usually out of favor, the tag-end of a once-prosperous family now running out of money, or the last of a long line dying out. As the homes were lost to their original owners, they were bought by other, less "genteel" folk. She knew of at least three brothels here, and more ominously, one of the houses was rumored to belong to a dealer in illegal goods_very illegal, because someone had to die in order for those particular "goods" to come on the market.
She had hoped she had the right district when she realized that mages tended to need buildings with a great deal of space to practice their art. She knew she had the right district when her street-urchins traced the blood and feathers showing up on the mage-market to this very area. People really didn't pay any attention to what children overheard.
If we survive this, perhaps I shall set up an information service and live off the results of that.