Rathe roared and scrambled back, legs thrashing. His bare shoulders slammed against brick, and his feet dug grooves in the urine-soaked floor. In trying to escape Cartach’s torch, he managed to stand. It was then that he noticed that his shackles had been taken off.
“Knew you had it in you,” Cartach drawled. He was tall, with a cruel face, his body seemingly made of rawhide stretched drum-tight over corded muscle.
Hunched over, arms clutching his singed belly, Rathe glared at his assailant through lank strings of filthy hair. As soon as it crossed his mind to attack the gaoler, Cartach’s fist rocked his head. Rathe hit the floor, shuddering and spitting blood.
Cartach did not bother cajoling him to stand again. Instead, he grabbed a handful of Rathe’s hair and wrenched him up. With a shove, the gaoler sent him stumbling out of the cell. Companionable Nub and slinking Three-leg had long since darted for cover, but timid Patches looked on from the shadows. You know this game, yes?
Rathe laughed at the madness of holding communion with a rat. Cartach’s fist crashed into the back of his neck, cutting off his remorseful mirth.
“Gods be with you,” a wheezy voice called from deeper shadows, followed by mad, wailing laughter.
Rathe shambled along, head down, heart flopping like a rabbit caught in a snare. He had thought he was ready to meet Thushar in the shadow of Ahnok. Now he was of a different mind. I do this for you Patches….
He spun, reaching for Cartach’s neck. The gaoler struck again, his blow like the kick of horse. Knocking Rathe to the ground did not satisfy him. The torch in his hand thrashed wildly as he stomped Rathe’s skull and put a boot to his ribs and back, and anywhere else left undefended.
When the gaoler ended his attack, he was breathing hard. “Saw it in your eyes, same as I see it in every man’s. Your friend, a trueborn Prythian, was the only one in the last four years who died with dignity. Almost hated to see him lose his head.”
Barely hearing, bloody and dazed, Rathe lay sprawled, too weak to curl into a protective ball.
“Engus!” Cartach shouted. “Get down here.”
A door opened at the end of the long, dim corridor. The second gaoler filled the doorway. The man was huge, head and shoulders taller than Rathe. And simple as a slug, he thought. He hated Cartach for his wanton cruelty, but Engus, trundling toward them with a slow-witted grin stretching his bland features, was a child poured into a killer’s body. He had wielded the blade that struck off Thushar’s head, but to Engus the brutal act had probably been no more momentous than slicing a melon.
Engus shuffled to a halt above Rathe. He said nothing, only grinned his idiot’s grin.
“Pick him up,” Cartach ordered with a strange, paternal kindness.
Engus obliged, silently and easily lifting Rathe and cradling him to his massive chest. Engus’s vapid gaze shone a clear, pale gray in the torchlight. With a gentle touch, Cartach urged the giant forward.
Rathe’s head lolled. Above him, the rotten brick ceiling gave way to firmer masonry beyond the doorway. They wended through twisting corridors for good while. After a last turn, the air cleared and brightened, and then a cloudless blue sky opened above his eyes. The cool air of his last dawn rippled his skin.
High stone walls guarded the executioner’s yard from sight of the citizens of Onareth, but that did not keep a handful of observers from climbing up and taking a seat to watch the fulfillment of the king’s judgment. Jeering calls echoed around the yard, and Rathe wondered if they knew the famed Scorpion was about to die.
“Put him down,” Cartach ordered, and Engus carefully settled Rathe on his feet.
Rathe might well have been floating, for all the lack of feeling in his limbs. Under his breath, he began muttering prayers of supplication to Ahnok, but his heart skipped when he glanced at the block atop a high, broad platform of dressed stone. The block was fashioned from a slab of black granite, with a smooth groove at its center. Beneath the groove sat a stone basin-just large enough to catch a man’s head. It did not catch Thushar’s.
“Where is the priest of Ahnok?” Rathe asked woodenly.
Cartach gazed at him so long that he thought the brute had not heard. “You have no need of a priest.”
“All men of Cerrikoth are granted the right to seek absolution,” Rathe said. “As I draw breath, I demand that right.”
“Demand all you want, but no priest is coming to hear you.”
“This is sacrilege-”
Cartach cut him off with a slap. “Engus, bind this whining maggot to the pole.”
Rathe’s blood went to ice when he looked beyond the block to a tall wooden post stained black with old blood. He had seen the same at every village he had sacked in the last year. By his order, scores had suffered the scourge while bound to such a pole. And so Ahnok passes his judgment in kind.
“I do not understand,” Rathe said, as Engus prodded him forward.
Cartach shrugged. “King Nabar took mercy on you. You will taste the lash to appease Osaant, then you will suffer banishment. Seems too kind to me, but….”
Rathe heard what followed as a distant yammering. The irredeemable were banished to only one place in Cerrikoth: Fortress Hilan. Some said such a fate was worse than death. Besides the shame of banishment, in the forests thereabout lurked creatures forsaken by the gods, stalking nightmares with a hunger for living blood. In the end, life in Hilan was no less a death sentence than losing your head, only slower. Yet, I will live … and Nub will have to find another to sup upon.
As Engus tied a hank of rope around Rathe’s wrists, a tall lanky fellow that might have been Cartach’s brother came out of a darkened doorway. He held a scourge with a dozen leather tongues, their tips glinting with steel barbs.
Singing a tuneless lullaby under his breath, Engus attached Rathe’s bindings to a rope that ran through a pulley at the top of the pole. From the pulley, the rope stretched to a winch. After testing his knot, Engus moved to the winch, caught the handle, and began cranking. Squealing and clattering, the device pulled Rathe’s arms above his head. Engus stopped and threw the locking lever when Rathe stood on his tiptoes.
“Make him dance, Engus,” Cartach called with a grin.
Engus chortled merrily, and started cranking again. Rathe bit back a groan as his bindings dug into the raw skin around his wrists. Engus did not stop again until Rathe’s feet lifted from the ground.
Heart pounding, Rathe vowed to face his penalty with as much dignity as Thushar had. Our places should have been reversed, brother. It is not right that I should live, where you perished.
When the scourge fell, his teeth clenched so hard he thought they might shatter. When the next heavy stroke tore his back, he began to scream.
Chapter 8
As the birth of dawn drove the aged night into the grave of memory, the mounted soldiers followed a dusty road cutting through a sparsely wooded grassland. With the vanishing darkness also faded the glinting stars and the waning moon’s silver curve. Waking birds called from bush, shrub, and the occasional copse of bushy trees. The dewed greenery made for a heady scent, but went unappreciated.
Rathe rode at the head of seventeen outcasts surrounded by forty unkempt, rather malicious-looking soldiers clad in rusted mail and tattered leathers. At the head of the column rose the winged Reaver banner of Fortress Hilan.
It was a farce, that banner, Rathe knew as well as any true soldier of Cerrikoth. The scarlet skull of a fanged serpent hung between a pair of batwings, and rode a field of white above a brace of crossed, half-moon battle axes. There was no reaving in Hilan, the northernmost settlement of Cerrikoth, lying hard against the dark bastions of the Gyntor Mountains. Men sent there tried to survive terrible winters, disease, and the nightmarish creatures that hunted within those rocky crags. And such will be my home and my fate.