“I cannot tell you what I do not know. What only Ouriána herself knows.” A meaty fist drove into his stomach; another knocked him from his stool. As Cuillioc curled up in agony on the floor, the slaves kicked him repeatedly.
Yet, the beating was a surprisingly brief one. After only a few minutes they hauled him to his feet and escorted him back to his room. Such was his infirmity, to subject him to too much violence would have killed him—and Lord Vaz was willing to be patient after all.
Every two or three days, when the bruises were fading, when the ache in Cuillioc’s belly began to subside, they took him before Lord Vaz again. The Prince of Persit always asked the same question, and Cuillioc always replied that he could not answer him. Then there was another beating. It would have been amusing if it were not so painful, for no amount of abuse could force him to give answers that he did not have.
“I could geld you,” the Mirazhite said one day.
With a sigh, Cuillioc studied the cool marble floor at his feet. He did not discount the threat, nor was he unmoved by it. But what did that matter? “Then I would be gelded,” he said wearily, “and you would learn no more of Ouriána than you knew before.”
The threats continued, at irregular intervals: I could put out your eyes. I could have you hamstrung. I could tell my slaves to break your back. Naturally, none of them achieved the desired result. Even had Cuillioc been inclined to speak, nothing he could have said would have brought Vaz any closer to the truth.
One day it pleased his tormentor to increase his discomfort by having a woman present during the interrogation. She was standing by the Prince’s chair as Cuillioc entered the room: one of the loveliest women he had ever seen, with smooth copper skin and hair like liquid shadow. A straight, sleeveless garment, very simple but of sumptuous materials, fell from her neck to her feet, and she wore a necklace of many pendant diamonds.
“I wish to know Ouriána’s secret,” said Vaz, coming directly to the point.
Until now, Cuillioc had felt no real hatred for Vaz or any of his people—viewed in a certain light, any revenges the Mirazhites took against him were just and right—but at this new humiliation he was enraged.
So enraged that he did not even deign to give his usual answer, but stood silent and seething.
“Why are you so foolish as to defy me? Do you like being kicked and degraded by slaves? Or are you one who take pleasure in pain?”
Still Cuillioc did not reply.
This time his silence had an unexpected effect. “I have decided to be merciful,” said Vaz. “You are, after all, a prince of a noble line—though not the son of a goddess as you pretend. Give me your friendship, tell me what I want to know, and I will not only grant you your freedom, I will give you my sister in marriage.”
The glorious creature beside him on the dais turned toward Cuillioc with a dazzling smile. He had been so long without even the sight of a woman that he might have been enchanted, were it not for his aching wounds and his strong suspicion that it was all a trick. Was she even a princess? He did not forget the deceit they had practiced on him months ago in Xanthipei.
“Your sister is incomparable.” It was one thing to provoke Vaz, another to insult a woman, be she princess or pleasure slave. “But I am, as you have said, a prince of a noble line. I have been offered wives of great beauty and high lineage many times before—and not as a bribe to betray my mother.”
The slaves moved in, and he expected the usual hard blows to follow. But Lord Vaz was not finished with him yet. “Do you think I cannot make your life infinitely more unpleasant than it already is? Believe me, I can and will.”
So it had come to this, as Cuillioc had known it would eventually. His stomach cramped. He hoped it was only a weakness brought on by his sickness, his injuries, not ordinary cowardice. He hoped he would somehow retain some measure of courage and dignity under torture.
Something in his face must have betrayed him. “Ah, you think I am about to hand you over to my torturers,” Vaz said with a ghastly smile. “But a man may die under torture if he is stubborn—though the ordeal may be cruel, he knows it has its natural limits—and a dead man is useless. There is but one ordeal I know that will break even the strongest man: a daily taste of the lash, the unremitting degradation of slavery. I am sending you to the mines.”
This time, after a beating more lengthy and vicious than any before it, they stripped him of his borrowed clothes, leaving only the loincloth to cover his nakedness, then attached heavy chains to his wrists and ankles.
As they led him off, he caught a last glimpse of the Princess up on the dais; she seemed mightily amused by his plight. Probably he thought he would not have liked being married to her anyway.
They paraded him through the streets, in his nakedness, in his chains. His bruised white skin instantly attracted attention, and everyone seemed to know who he was. People stopped what they were doing in the marketplace and turned to stare at him. There were catcalls and curses. Some of them mocked him with obscene gestures.
A stone flew through the air and hit him on his forehead; another hit him in his chest. One of his guards drew a scimitar and disappeared into the crowd. After that there were no more stones, but the rain of verbal abuse continued. He kept his head high and his eyes forward, scorning to recognize any of it. Let them see how the son of the Empress comported himself under the worst circumstances.
He was still so fragile that he believed he would not last many months as a mine slave, but he found he could contemplate that prospect with perfect equanimity. He would welcome death when it came. Dead, he could not disappoint Ouriána. The one thing he feared most was being returned to Phaôrax—and that was the one thing Lord Vaz would never do.
26
A second trip through the caverns, by the light of a pair of pale blue lanterns, was no less convoluted and bewildering than the first trip had been. If Sindérian had tried to count and remember all the turns, the ascending and descending tunnels, she could never have done it. But she made no such attempt. Once she and her companions left King Yri’s realm behind, she had no plans—indeed, no wish—to ever return again.
And that was why she never guessed that Prince Tyr was taking them by a different route. Not until a door in the cavern wall swung open, letting in a draft of fresh air, and they came out in a glen on the lower slopes of the mountain, to find their horses already saddled and waiting for them.
Sindérian looked around her, trying to gain her bearings. The sun was low in a sky the color of pearl. A few faint stars bloomed near the opposite horizon where it was darker. Never, she thought, had a glimpse of the stars been more welcome. “The day is new,” said Prince Tyr. “You will be able to ride a long way before nightfall.” And with a brief farewell, he and the other dwarves disappeared back into the tunnel.
The door had already closed behind them, melting back into the mountainside so thoroughly that there was no evidence it had ever been there, before she grasped the meaning of his words. If the sun was in the east and Penadamin at her back—“We are south of the Fenéille Galadan—on the far side of the mountains.”
The faces of the others brightened immediately. “Then we are days, not weeks, behind the Furiádhin,”
said Kivik. “Our encounter with the dwarves was more fortunate than we knew!”
Sindérian nodded. It was far more than she had ever expected. Even at her most optimistic, the most she had dared hope for was to be shown some hidden path known only to the Corridon. “I think that King Yri meant to help us all along—though whatever happens as a result, he means it to take place far away from his own country.” He had been kind, but he had also been canny.