Left to his own devices, he would have merely stopped and suffocated. He no longer cared if he breathed or not.
“Blink for me when eyes get dry,” the woman told him after he had lain staring at the spider on the ceiling for an hour. She rapped him across the hands to show how much pain she could cause. And thus he learned to blink, though he did not care if his eyes went dry in their sockets.
Now she stood over him, lecturing. “I not feed you. I not your slave. When you get hungry, must out of bed and eat. Understand? If you not eat until full, I will beat you. Understand?”
Borenson understood, but he made no sign of it. To speak was a waste of energy, to nod a worthless gesture. He merely lay, staring at the ceiling.
The woman rapped him across the face with the rod. “You have tongue. You answer me. You understand?”
“Yes,” Borenson said. He was angry and frustrated. The thought came to him that he could run away. He was not chained any longer. The facilitator had removed the chains so that he could create his tattoo. Yet the desire to flee was not strong enough to move Borenson’s feet.
If I ran, how would I live? he wondered. And the answer was that it would be impossible. He would have to find his horse, a deed that could take hours. He would have to evade or fight the guards, a task that seemed too monumental. Then he would have to travel for days. For what? Everything he needed was here. Food, shelter, water. All he had to do was lie down, and others would bring it to him.
He felt the need to urinate, and announced it by letting his water flow. The urine soaked his pants and pooled beneath him, warming him.
The facilitator cleared his throat in disgust and issued an order to the tormenter. She had been busy across the room with something. She raced back to him.
“No!” she shrieked at Borenson. “You not animal. You not pee on floor or bed. You get up to pee like person. Understand?” She slammed her bamboo rod down. Borenson lamely put a hand over his groin to protect himself.
He heard a deep voice say something in Inkarran. From out of the shadows came King Criomethes himself.
“You well, I hope?” the king asked.
Borenson had no desire to frame an answer.
“Life without will is hard,” the king said. “There no hope, only senseless desire. No real dreams, only longing for goals that one cannot attain. Life become burden, worthless to you. But we teach to live again. We teach to breathe, to eat, to pee. You will live like we tell you to. You will live because it easier than dying.”
“Say ‘Thank you,’” the old woman ordered.
Borenson made no answer, until she rapped him across the chin. “Thank you.”
King Criomethes smiled and was about to leave when Borenson heard the scuff of a shoe across the room. Criomethes whirled to see the cause of the noise. A shadow came out of the darkness. There was a whistle of a swinging blade, and then the thunk of metal cleaving bone.
Blood spattered across Borenson’s face as King Criomethes went down, a fine Inkarran sword blade cleaving down through his neck, into his rib cage.
The facilitator staggered back, and the old woman with her bamboo cane cried out and tried to duck, but the shadow whirled, yanking the blade free from Criomethes’s dead body. The shining blade sliced off the old woman’s head and hit the facilitator in the throat, slashing his windpipe. He fell back against the wall, blood pumping wildly.
Suddenly, in a rush, the will returned to Borenson. He pushed himself from bed, sitting up.
Myrrima stood before him, wrapped in her robes, her hood thrown up to make her one with the darkness.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re getting out of here!”
A moment ago, Borenson had felt empty, almost complacent. Now it seemed that some emotion had to fill that void, and the thing that he felt was rage.
Criomethes lay on the floor, struggling to pull himself up by grasping a chair with one hand. Borenson knew that the man was dead, that his body now only moved by impulse. Yet Borenson struggled against the urge to vent his rage. He watched the dying king as if through a red haze.
He grabbed Criomethes by the hair and lifted him up, raised a fist and would have struck him between the eyes hard enough to crush the man’s skull.
But Myrrima touched Borenson’s raised arm with one finger, and whispered, “Peace be with you.”
It was more than a greeting, it was a powerful spell. Peace washed over him as if it were a flood, and all of the anger subsided.
He had only felt something similar once—at the pool south of Bannisferre, where an undine had kissed him and washed the guilt from his tortured mind.
He dropped the old king, embarrassed by his fury, by his lack of self-control.
A million questions came rushing at once. Where are my boots? Where is my warhammer? How did you escape?
Yet he held them all in, and for a moment just stared down at his leg. The skin burned from the tattoo. The old facilitator had begun at the sole of his foot and worked upward, creating an image of roots on a tree. It was as if Borenson wore a purple sock now, one that covered his foot up to his ankle. But there on his calf lay a rune that he had never seen before, the symbol for will. To Borenson it looked something like the head of a bull, all wrapped within a circle. There were squiggly lines above it that almost seemed to form a word or a thought in his mind. Runes often affected one that way.
Borenson peered about nervously, worried that Inkarran warriors would come storming into the chamber at any moment. Myrrima rushed across the room, stared down some dark corridor.
“Where’s Prince Verazeth?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Borenson said. “I haven’t seen him in hours.”
She growled angrily and stalked back to Borenson. “We’ve got to get out of here!” Myrrima said. “If the Inkarrans find out what we’ve learned the shape of the Rune of Will, we’re dead.”
“Do you even know the way out?” Borenson asked, “This place is a maze.”
Myrrima froze. She had no idea how to get out of the city, much less the country.
In the darkness, Borenson heard a grunt as someone cleared his throat. Then a voice spoke up in mild Inkarran accent. “Perhaps I can help.”
Borenson whirled, ready to fight. In the darkness, against the wall, sat a man in dark robes. He had been so still that neither of them had seen him in the dark. He pulled back a deep hood to reveal skin as pale as milk and eyes that glowed red in the darkness from lack of pigment.
Borenson was about to launch himself at the man when he realized that he was a Days.
No, not just a Days, King Criomethes’s Days, he realized.
“And why would you help us?” Borenson asked. For the Days had been politically neutral from time immemorial. They took no side in any dispute.
“Because the fate of the world sits upon a precipice,” the Days answered. “For two days now, my people have argued whether to intervene. I have made up my mind, and the Council has made up theirs. They will not intervene.” As if to announce his decision, he stood up and pulled off his brown scholar’s robes. He was a tall man, with broad, powerful shoulders. Beneath his robes he wore a plain white tunic, and an Inkarran breastplate. A long Inkarran dirk rode in a sheath on his thigh. “It’s time for any man who hopes to call himself a man to go to fight at Carris.”
“Carris?” Myrrima asked.
“The Earth King has asked every man who can bear a weapon to ride to Carris to fight the reavers,” the Days said. “If we’re to make it, we must do so by sundown. I can get you out of Inkarra, but my kind are forbidden to enter Mystarria. Once we cross the border, my life will be in your hands.”
“Fight the reavers?” Myrrima asked. “Last I saw, Gaborn had the horde on the run.”