“You poor ass, did you really think you could get away from me that easily?” Altiokis asked. “Did you really have any idea of what you’d be up against when you accepted the commission of that fool, whatever his name was—the man who hired you? One of the Thanes, I think we said. Not that it matters, of course. I know who my enemies are. We’ll have them gathered in...”
The Dark Eagle’s bright blue eyes widened with alarm. “My lord, we don’t know—”
“Oh, be silent,” Altiokis snapped pettishly. “Cowards—I am surrounded by cowards.”
“My lord,” the Dark Eagle grated, “if you arrest without proof, there’ll be trouble among the Thanes...”
“Oh, there’s always trouble among the Thanes,” the Wizard King retorted angrily. “And there always has been—we needed only the excuse to put them down. Let them come against me—if they dare. I will crush them...” The dark, little eyes glittered unnaturally bright in the gloom. “... as I will crush this slave.”
He had risen from his chair, his eyes holding Sun Wolf’s, and the Wolf saw in the wizard what had struck him before. There was very little that was human left of the man. The fire within was eating it away, his soul literally rotting, like the minds of the nuuwa. Like them, the Wolf realized, Altiokis existed almost solely to devour.
Sun Wolf fell back a step as the Wizard King raised the staff with its evil, gleaming head. At a distance of several feet, he could already feel the searing pain that radiated like waves of heat from the metal. Altiokis raised it, and the Wolf retreated until he felt the sword points of the guards press his back.
“Are you stupid,” the Wizard King whispered, “or only a nerveless animal? Or don’t you believe what could happen to you here?”
“I believe you,” Sun Wolf said, keeping a wary eye on the staff, which hovered a foot or so in front of his throat. His voice was a dry rasp, the only sound in that hushed darkness of perfume and sweat. “I just don’t believe that anything I can say will stop you from doing what you choose.”
It was as polite a way as any he could think of to say that he made it a policy never to argue with a crazy man.
A sneer contorted the greasy face. “So it has wisdom, after all,” the wizard said. “Pity you did not exercise it sooner. I have lived longer than you know. I am versed in the art of crushing the soul from the body, while leaving the brain time for reflection. I could put the blood worms on you, until a month from now you would be nothing but a crawling mass of maggots, begging me for the mercy of death. Or I could blind and cripple you with drugs and find a job for you hauling bath water for my mercenaries—eh? Or I could wall you into a stone room, with only a cup of water, and that water filled with anzid, and leave you to choose between slow death from poison and slower from thirst.”
Sun Wolf fought to keep his expression impassive, knowing full well that the fat man had both the power and the inclination to mete out any one of those fates, merely for the entertainment of seeing him die. But, sickened as he was by horror, two things remained very clear in the back of his brain.
The first was that Altiokis had never passed the Great Trial. He clearly had no idea that anzid was anything other than a particularly loathsome poison. And that meant that he had derived his power from some other source.
It would explain some things, the Wolf thought, his mind struggling to grasp that awareness. The power that pervaded the lower level of the tower and that filled the mines was then not entirely from Altiokis’ attenuated personality. It was something else, something foul and filthy, not like Yirth’s academic sorcery, nor what the Wolf felt of the wild magic that seemed to fill his own soul. Was the power only channeled through the Wizard King from the darkness that the Eagle had spoken of, the darkness that dwelt in the innermost room of the tower? A power that had no ambitions, but that Altiokis had seized upon to fulfill his own?
The second thing Sun Wolf realized was that, like a cruel child, Altiokis was simply telling him this, not to learn any information, but in order to see him break. He knew from his own experience that a screaming victim was more satisfactory to watch. He did not doubt for a moment that they would get down to the screaming sooner or later, but he was damned to the Cold Hells if he’d give the Wizard King that pleasure now.
Altiokis’ face changed. “Or I could give you worse,” he snarled. He snapped his fingers for the Dark Eagle and his men. “Downstairs,” he ordered. “With me.”
The mercenaries closed in around Sun Wolf, dragging at his wrist chains, thrusting from behind with their swords. A door opened in the wall, where no door had been; the blue brimfire that floated over Altiokis’ head illuminated the first steps of a stair that curved down into darkness. The Wolf balked in sudden terror at the power, the evil, that rose like a nauseating stench from the pit below. The blackness seemed filled with an alien, hideous chill, like that from the demons he had seen in the marshes of his childhood—a sensation of seeing something that had risen from unknowable gulfs of nothingness, a sensing of something that was not of this earth.
Someone shoved a blade against his ribs, pushing him through the door. The soldiers seemed unaware of what lay below; they could not know what he knew and still be willing to go that way themselves. He almost turned to fight them in the doorway, but Altiokis reached forward with his staff and used the glowing head of it to drive the Wolf forward down the stairs. The men surrounded him again, and the eldritch cold rose about them as they descended.
The descent was less far than he had thought. The stair made one circle, then leveled out; the floor, he saw, was rock and dirt. They must be at ground level, at what had been the top of the crag, close to the cliff’s edge. At the end of the short, lightless vault of the hallway was a small door. Even as his soul shrank from it, he thought, I have done this before.
The room beyond was like the one Derroug Dru had shown him in the prison below the Records Office in Mandrigyn. It was small and dank, furnished with a huge, carved chair whose black velvet cushions boasted bullion tassels. The white glow of the witchlight gleamed oilily on the wall of glass before the chair. The only difference from that other chamber was that there was a door beside the wide window that looked into darkness.
Something like a restless flake of fire moved in that dark beyond the glass.
Sun Wolf had known this was coming to him, all the long road up the mountain. In a way, he had known it since Derroug Dru had first shown the abominations that Altiokis had given him, in the cell beneath the Records Offices. Horror went through the Wolf like a sword of ice; horror and despair and the terrified consciousness that in that room, not in the fat man chuckling throatily beside him, lay the center point of the evil power that pervaded the Citadel. Whatever was in there, it was the source, not only of the creatures that turned men into nuuwa, but of the power that had let Altiokis become the swollen and abominable thing that he was.
Behind the glass, the bright flake of fire zagged idly in the air, leaving a thin fire trail in the stygian dark. It was waiting for him, waiting to devour his brain, to make him one of the mewing, slobbering things that were filled, like the dead stones of the Citadel, with Altiokis’ perverted will.
Swords pressed into Sun Wolf’s back, forcing him toward the narrow door. All of his senses seemed to have dulled and concentrated; he was conscious of no sound but the frantic hammering of his own heart and of no sensation but the cold of sweat pouring down his face and breast and arms. The sharpness of the steel was driving him forward. His vision had shrunk to that idle flake of fire, to the dark door, triple-barred with iron, and to the hands of the men unbarring it.