She stared at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, and a single tear trickled down her cheek.
“Unfortunately, Commander Athrawes,” Owl’s avatar said, “I compute that the prison in question is too close to the Temple.”
“Why?” Cayleb asked. “We’ve sent remotes in closer than that before.”
“Yes, we have, your majesty,” the AI replied. “In all of those instances, however, the remote has been placed as a parasite on some individual or vehicle passing through the zone we wished to scan. It has been set for purely passive mode, and the telemetry channels have been deactivated until it leaves the dangerous proximity to the Temple once more.”
“I see where he’s going, Cayleb,” Merlin said. The emperor looked across the study at him, and he shrugged heavily. “Placing the remotes accurately enough to do the job would require two-way communication. We’d have to actually steer them into place, which would be a ticklish maneuver at the best of times, and we’d have to be able to see where they needed to go while we were doing it.” He shook his head. “Those remotes are pretty damned stealthy, but I’m afraid there’s no way we could guarantee a telemetry link that close to the Temple wouldn’t be detected.”
“Oh God,” Aivah whispered, and her pale face seemed to crumple, as if the dashing of Nahrmahn’s suggestion had destroyed her final hope.
Merlin released her hand, to put his arm about her and drew her head down against his chest. She pressed her cheek into his breastplate, and one hand stroked her hair gently. They sat that way for several seconds, and then that hand paused and Merlin’s eyes narrowed.
“What?” Cayleb asked sharply. Merlin looked at him, and the emperor twitched his head impatiently. “I know that expression, Merlin—I’ve seen it often enough! So out with it.”
Aivah sat up, brushed the palm of one hand quickly across her wet face, and looked at him intently from eyes which held a fragile gleam of hope.
“Have you thought of something?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, “and even if I have, it’s not something we’ll be able to do instantly. But if it works,” in that moment, his smile was Dialydd Mab’s, “it should provide Clyntahn and Rayno with all the ‘demonic vengeance’ you could possibly hope for, Nimue.”
* * *
Zhorzhet Styvynsyn shivered uncontrollably and licked cracked and broken lips.
She sat once again in the horrible wooden chair, fastened in place, waiting for them to hurt her again, and felt the spirit—the faith—which had sustained her so far flickering, fading. Guttering towards extinction as it slipped from her desperate fingers.
So far, she’d told them nothing, and she clung to that knowledge, to that fierce determination. But that determination was beginning to fail, to crumble under the unceasing assault—under the pain, the hopelessness, the degradation. The carefully metered beatings, the rapes.
Alahnah had died, screaming, under the Question in front of her, begging her to tell the interrogators anything she knew to stop them from hurting her. Zhorzhet had sobbed, twisting in the chair, fighting her bonds, blinded by tears, but somehow—somehow—she’d held her silence while she watched her friend die.
She’d screamed herself, often enough, over the endless, terrible hours since Alahnah’s death—begged them to stop hurting her when the red hot needles were used, when the fingernails and toenails were ripped away. But even as they made her beg, made her plead, she’d refused to speak the words that might actually have made them stop.
Yet she knew her defiance was nearing its end. Alahnah wasn’t the only innocent they’d Questioned in front of her, and agony wasn’t the only torture they’d used upon her. They’d left her in that accursed chair, keeping her awake endlessly, dousing her with buckets of icy water whenever she started to nod off—or touching her with a white-hot iron, just for a change. They’d taken turns hammering her with questions, again and again—leaning close, screaming in her face, threatening her … and then hurting her horribly to prove their threats were real. They’d held her head under water until she was two-thirds drowned, mocked and degraded her. She’d refused to eat, tried to starve herself to death, and they’d force-fed her, cramming the food down her throat through a tube. And always—always—they’d come back to the pain. The pain she’d discovered they could inflict forever, in so many different ways, without allowing her to escape into death.
And soon, all too soon, they’d return to do that again. They’d promised her, and they’d left the brazier and the irons glowing ready in it to remind her.
Please, God, she thought. Oh, please. Let me die. Let it end. I’ve fought—really I have—but I’m only mortal. I’m not an angel, not a seijin, I’m only me, and I can’t fight forever. I just … can’t. So please, please let me die.
Tears trickled down her filthy, bruised face as she sat in the chair, staring at the irons, waiting, but there was no answer.
* * *
No one ever saw the small, carefully programmed autonomous remotes that crept in through St. Thyrmyn Prison’s barred windows, crawled quietly down its chimney flues, flowed under its doors. They were tiny, no bigger than the insects they were disguised to resemble, and they radiated no detectable emission signature. They only made their way to selected points, chosen from the most painstaking analysis of the prison’s layout Owl’s satellite imagery had allowed. And once they reached those points, they simply dissolved into inert, unremarkable dust and, in the process, released their cargoes.
The nanites which rose from those disintegrated remotes were still smaller, microscopic, their programmed lifetimes measured in less than a single Safeholdian day before they, too, became no more than dust. Yet there were millions of them, and they drifted upwards, freed from confinement, spreading in every direction. It took hours—far more hours than any member of the inner circle could have wished, just as it had taken too many days simply to design and fabricate them in the first place—but they spread inexorably, sifting into every nook and cranny, until they’d infiltrated the entire volume of that brooding, dreadful prison, found every living thing within those walls of horror.
And then they activated.
* * *
Zhorzhet’s eyes widened and she strained desperately, futilely, against her bonds as she heard Father Bahzwail’s terrifyingly familiar stride coming down the corridor towards the torture chamber once again. She heard herself whimpering, hated the weakness, knew that all too soon the whimpers would once again become raw-throated shrieks.
The upper-priest appeared in the arched doorway, smiling at her, drawing the black gloves onto his hands.
“Well, I see you’ve been expecting me,” he said chattily, crossing to stand beside the glowing irons. He stroked one insulating wooden handle, polished and smooth from years of use, with a slow, gloating fingertip, and his eyes were colder than a Zion winter. “Now, where did we stop last time, hmmm?” He drew an iron from the brazier, waving its glowing tip in a slow, thoughtful circle while he pursed contemplative lips. “Let me see, let me see.…”
She moaned, but then the Schuelerite blinked. He lowered the iron and raised his other hand to his forehead, and he looked … puzzled somehow.
Zhorzhet didn’t notice. Not at first. But then she felt something, even through her shivering terror. She didn’t know what it was, but she’d never felt anything like it. It didn’t hurt—not really, and certainly not compared to the terrible, terrible things that happened in this dreadful chamber. But it felt so … strange. And then a gentle lassitude flowed into her—shockingly soothing after so much pain, so much terror. A soft, gray veil seemed to slip between her and the anguish throbbing through her body, and she gasped in unspeakable gratitude as she allowed herself to relax into its comfort. She had no idea what it was, how long it would last, but she knew it was the finger of God Himself. That He’d reached into her horrible, endless nightmare, to give her at least this brief moment of surcease. Her scabbed lips moved in a silent prayer of thanks and her head began to spin. No, it wasn’t her head. The entire torture chamber—the whole world—was spinning around her, and she was spiraling down, down, down, as if the sleep she’d been denied so long was creeping up upon her at last. As if.…