“The other is mine,” Tammad said very quietly, with his usual calm. “That one must answer to me.”
The second man turned back to look at Tammad, his mind measuring the barbarian and his own chances for winning against him, but he had seen the larger man fight and knew himself no equal to him. His teetering emotions indicated indecision and discretion.
“Very well,” he said, finally lowering his weapon. “The second one is yours. We will, however, seek others of the guard of this place, to see if their swords are as quick as their whips. Have either of you any further objections?”
“None.” Tammad laughed as Cinnan grinned agreement. “Should you find any still among the living, speak to them of our own displeasure with them.”
“The pleasure will be ours, brothers,” the man answered, but his mind was still too grim to find amusement in anything. Tammad and Cinnan each stepped to one side of the door and the three men passed between them, turning left when they were in the corridor. Cinnan waited a moment before leaning out into the corridor to make sure they were gone, then came back in to nod at Tammad and close the door behind him. With all the preliminaries taken care of they turned to look at us, and their expressions were friendly when compared to their minds.
“So you mean to torture me!” Aesnil suddenly blurted into Cinnan’s lowering stare, her back hard against the wall beside me. “Do as you will, beast of a maul I am the Chama, and will not beg for my freedom!”
“Do you hear the foolish wenda, Tammad?” Cinnan asked without taking his eyes from Aesnil. “She would have us believe she is Chama, when it is clear to any with eyes that she can be no more than a common wenda, one who has undoubtedly come to the vendra ralle without her father’s permission. Would the Chama be clad in a torn and dirt-stained gown, with hair so fly—about in disarray? Would the Chama be found without her guard, foolishly alone in a place where her life might be lost in a trice?”
“Certainly not,” Tammad said, regarding Aesnil as Cinnan spoke. Until then he had been staring at me, and it was all I could do to keep from trembling.
“Therefore she must indeed be no more than a common wenda, her presence here an obvious disobedience,” Cinnan said, tossing his sword to the floor beside the wall with the hanging chains. “I feel it my duty to correct the disobedience, to insure that it will not be repeated. She must have a good strapping.”
“Cinnan, no!” Aesnil whispered, paling as she shook her head at the slowly advancing man. “It is not permitted to treat the Chama so! You know this as well as I!”
“That dictum will soon be changed,” Cinnan said grimly, stopping in front of us to look down at an Aesnil who was trying to crawl into the rock wall behind me. “Had you been properly seen to before this, much grief would have been avoided. Perhaps I will strap you each morning before you hold audience, to allow the ache in your body to remind you that punishment must often be tempered with moderation. Come here.”
He put his hand out to take Aesnil’s arm, but her trembling fear affected me so strongly that I began beating at Cinnan with my fists, to drive him away from her. A faint annoyance flashed briefly in Cinnan’s mind and then I was being taken by the arms and pulled out of the way, to be pushed slightly before being released. The push sent me stumbling backward, but instead of falling I found myself crashing into another hard male body.
“There has been enough interference from you,” Tammad said, taking a fistful of my hair with such force that I cried out in pain. “So you would run others’ lives to suit your own comfort, eh, wenda? It pleased you to betray me, to take amusement from me as you have done other times in the past. You will regret having done so, wenda, for this time punishment will not be withheld from you.”
The bitterness in him cut at me deeply, but unlike Aesnil I had nothing to say. He no longer held his sword, but he had no more use for it than Cinnan did. Aesnil yelled and cursed as Cinnan dragged her around by one arm, looking for a strap, but I made no sound at all when Tammad took me by the hair and headed for the stairs into darkness, pausing only to take a torch from the wall.
The stairway leading downward was rough-cut stone, but smoothed by the passage of many feet. I stumbled down the stairs in Tammad’s grip, the torch in his other hand throwing shadows all around, desperate to know what he was going to do with me but unwilling to ask. The air temperature lowered the farther down we went; by the time we reached the bottom it must have been twenty degrees cooler. The flickering torch bounced glares of light off the damp stone walls and floor, illuminating the beginning of a long row of cells stretching left and right away into the darkness. The area before the immediate set of cells was wide enough for a number of people to stand abreast, and didn’t narrow until one walked right or left away from that area. Tammad turned right into the narrowing, continued on at least twenty feet, then stopped in front of one cell to put the torch in a sconce on the wall.
“You may have the cell that was mine,” he said, swinging the slatted metal door wide and propelling me through. “Though you cannot hope to open a door I was unable to open from within, I have another gift for you. Here.”
He forced me down to the stone floor at the rear of the tiny cell, then crouched to reach beside me and lift something metallic that flashed dully in the dim glow from the torch across the corridor. The metallic something turned out to be a collar with a short chain let into the wall down near the floor, and he closed it about my neck with a good deal of satisfaction.
“This trinket is used upon whatever female slave a vendra earns,” he told me, standing straight again to stare down at me. “Should the vendra earn more than one slave, he must use them only one at a time and before the guardsmen for their amusement. This indignity, however, was not mine to suffer; I am l’lenda, and do not use slaves. You will remain here till I see fit to release you, to think upon what you have done and what further punishments I shall find for you. May you find the joy here that I did.”
He turned away then and left the cell, closed the door and slid the locking bar across, then took the torch and went back the way we had come. As feeble as the torchlight had been, it had been better than nothing, a fact proven to me as soon as the darkness closed in. My hands went to the narrow metal collar around my throat, but there was no removing the thin, stubborn band. I was locked in place and locked in the cell, in the empty, damp darkness where I had been left. I leaned back against the stone of the wall with a shiver, trying to tell myself I was lucky just to be left like that. When dealing with Rimilian barbarians, there are worse things than just being left alone in the dark.
And then I sat straight again, suddenly realizing that I wasn’t alone. With the darkness had come the approach of half a dozen tiny minds, simple minds filled with simple desires, like roaming and procreating—and eating. That last seemed to be the major mover, the one that made the other desires possible. Each of those small minds shouted with hunger, needing food, wanting it, desiring it with all their might. They were very cautious in their approach, sensing danger surrounding the food they wanted, but their approach was nevertheless sure and steady, not to be denied by anything less than an actual attack against their lives.
I shivered again from the damp, wrapping my arms about myself, wishing I could believe those creatures were no more than company in the darkness. I knew, though, that they would attack me if they got the chance, using my flesh and blood to sustain them and their desires. I sighed shakily with the necessary decision to protect myself, then reached toward their minds—only to recoil again in shock. The fear I’d projected had done nothing more than ripple through their minds, passing like water through a net but with considerably less effect. A net is wet by the water that touches it, but those small, hungry minds had been totally untouched by the emotion of fear, not recognizing it as an emotion! Fear, love, hate, lust, greed, kindness, generosity—all were unknown to those tiny beings, and all were therefore useless against them. Numbly I tried again by projecting satiety as though they’d just finished the best meal of their lives, but that, too, was unknown to them. They had no concept of being full and satisfied, indeed would probably eat themselves to death if ever given the opportunity to do so. They advanced again even as my mind tried to fend them off, totally untouchable, totally unstoppable.