Closest to the door, Ceris drew breath on a panicked scream but the woman silenced her with a slap. The frail blond crashed back into the stone wall to slump whimpering to the floorboards. Eresken goaded Ceris’ startled father to attack, seizing on his impulse to protect his child. With an inarticulate roar, the man swung at the whore’s back. The elder of the traitors with her stepped in to block the vengeful fist, equal violence bolstered by the energy of youth. Eresken took a moment’s thought to weave the attacker’s face into an image of Jeirran’s foulest lust, with Ceris the weeping victim beneath the heaving body. He rammed this into her father’s mind, burning it into his consciousness, heedless of the damage he did.
“See what they—” He had no time to reinforce the vision with words. The second man, the skinny one with savage eyes, was a scant pace away, knife in his grasp. Eresken seized Ceris’ brother with hands and wits, throwing him bodily onto the gleaming blade. In the instant of agony distracting the boy, Eresken grabbed hold of his mind. He tied the lad’s wits tight in a web of chaos, isolating him mercilessly from all conscious thought and memory. Working faster than ever before, Eresken denied him any perception of pain from the myriad blows and cuts the frustrated attacker inflicted. Ruthlessly ripping out any instinct for defense and protection, he set alight every unconscious fury and hatred the boy harbored, turning each involuntary movement into aggression, tying the whole into a storm of mindless violence.
Eresken snatched himself from the maelstrom of the boy’s ruined mind just in time to see the shorter attacker go down under that insane rage. The father was laying into the other one with a chair leg, wood splintering as the agile man dodged and feinted and blows crashed into the wall behind him.
What of the whore? Eresken saw her biting her lip with vicious intent, halfway across the room with an upraised dagger. Eresken overturned the table, the stout oak board a futile defense, but it gave him long enough to drag Ceris’ body to its feet. With a frantic reach of his mind, he crushed the girl’s feeble volition with one explosive curse, leaving the girl’s eyes vacant pools of darkness. Barely an instant before the Forest bitch reached him, Eresken flung Ceris onto the whore’s back, uncoordinated limbs flailing, dead weight clinging, gray cloth hampering, dragging the murderous slut down.
Echoes of agony reverberated around Eresken’s mind as the brother died. Illusion of invulnerability was no defense against being bodily broken into a bloody mess, joints shattered, sinews cut, throat cut with a savagery that all but severed the head. The traitor was already moving forward, teeth white in a rictus of savagery against a mask of gore, reddened knife thirsty for Eresken’s blood. Kill or be killed, the simplicity of this one’s mind rang louder than any other thought in the room. A simple mind and one with no defenses worth the name.
The Elietimm felt the hardness of stone at his back, floorboards slick beneath his feet, the reek of blood, ordure and hatred thick in the air. The drug was tainting his senses, colors distorting, sounds both deafening and distant in the same moment. Eresken gritted his teeth, forced the turmoil from him with a shouted incantation and plunged his razor-sharp intellect, honed over so many years, into the naked reason of his assailant.
That much was easy. The Elietimm exulted in the sudden success before a sense of wrongness undermined him. Where was the shock? What of the recoil from sudden invasion that Eresken had learned so painfully to resist and then to redouble, turning panic back against the assaulted mind? All sensation and sound faded from Eresken’s consciousness as his world shrank to the confines of the mind he sought to capture. Why was he the one ripped from reality, when he had the chains of his iron will to bind this madman? Where was the flaw or weakness offering up the consciousness within? The Elietimm redoubled his efforts, but in a baffling reversal this domain, where he knew himself the master, turned itself inside out. Now Eresken found himself frantically seeking escape from a mental maze. How could this be? The man had no discipline, no training in the manipulation of mind and memory.
The enchanter found himself in the center of a nightmare world of blood and barbarism. The destruction of Ceris’ brother whirled past him in a dizzying circle of images. Scarlet life blood foamed up into a mouth already broken from teeth ripping into ragged lips. Bluish cords of throat and gullet were laid bare with a sweeping downward stroke from a red-streaked silver blade. Dark loops of gut bulged from the belly, a deadly gash oozing unheeded filth. A pale gloss of bone was overlaid with a tracery of blood as an elbow was split, the merciless knife piercing linen, skin and sinew, a calculated move to cripple for life had the boy not already been dead, kept moving only by the will Eresken had sent into madness without limit. Horror surrounded the enchanter in a seamless sequence as each vision came again and again, ever more vivid, ever more threatening. There was nothing beneath his feet, no sound in his ears, just this endless parade of horror and he had no eyes to close to it.
But where was the fear? Where was the desperate seeking for justification, the noisy reasoning as the mind sought to excuse the inhumanity, to distance itself from responsibility and the freezing grip of guilt? There was none. With an intense effort, Eresken managed to force a small stillness for himself in the midst of that abominable array of consciousness. With a sinking horror, he realized he was hemmed in on every side by a hard, hot exultation, reveling in the intensity of physical perception, surging rapture in that unfettered release, overarching ecstasy at facing the ultimate challenge of mortal battle and winning through.
The memories stopped, frozen images fading into crimson darkness. The limits of the enchanter’s refuge of sanity began to buckle and bend beneath an inexorable pressure.
“Who are you?” yelled Eresken into the blood-blackened silence oppressing him.
“My name’s ’Gren, at least that’s what my friends call me,” a cheerful voice echoed all around the enchanter, incongruous against the deepening sense of menace. “But you don’t really need to know that because I’m going to kill you.” Now the threat was all in the voice, hard and bright as steel.
“Do you know who I am?” demanded Eresken, incredulous, forgetting in that instant the inexplicable burden constraining his powers.
“Not really,” admitted the voice. “Livak and Halice both say you and your kind are scum-sucking bastards. Let’s find out.” With uncomplicated brutality, a single-minded curiosity ripped through every defense Eresken had ever learned beneath the blows of his father’s cane and the lash of his scorn. Dragged helpless and unresisting to the furthest edge of memory, Eresken saw people and places he thought long forgotten. That mewling slave girl his father had brought back from one of his earliest forays across the ocean, once he had recovered the lost art of defying currents that swept ships to oblivion. Eresken scarcely recalled his mother, always turning her face from her child of rape, pulling long brown hair across her branded face. Her tears and thinness of unrelenting misery shifted, face swelling, blackening, tongue protruding and eyes bulging in the aftermath of hanging.
His father’s harsh face loomed large in Eresken’s mind’s eye, eyes so brown as to be nigh on black, pale skin crowned with dead white hair. “She was weak, disloyal, of neither use nor ornament. What purpose did her life serve, when so many need food and warmth?”
Nor had she been the only one condemned to die in that harshest winter of his childhood, sacrifice to his father’s wisdom. Fiefdoms ruled by lesser men had fallen to disease and dissension. There was no food to spare in that hungry season when the scant harvest had rotted green in the fields, when the seabirds had flown early and the sea-beasts had come late and few in number, bony and diseased when the hunters’ harpoons had finally reeled them in. The grudging streams had frozen solid, the vital heat beneath the earth seemingly withdrawn for good, and people had murmured in corners that Misaen had finally forsaken them.