They hit him with something, square over the skull. A chunk of time was lost as Reschauld blotted between the dark of unconsciousness and the dark inside the burlap. As he did, his feet were dragging, floundering, occasionally mimicking full steps across rough stone that he did not recognize, even when recalling the incident in safer times.
Sense was returning as his captors drug him thither, wherever it was they were going. With sense came the fear, but Reschauld found his arms and legs too sluggish to resist the nameless muscle that held him. They were certainly too strong at the best of times—now was certainly not one of those. If he were freed that very moment, he felt as though he’d simply flop to the ground, a boned fish. Where were they going?
Testing, Reschauld flexed, his muscles tense; immediately the hands on his arms tightened and yanked him onward. To where? The river? To the harbor, to be tossed into the raging sea?
With a strangled cry, Reschauld threw himself forward, trying to loosen their grip. For a second, just a second, he seemed to succeed, but they seized him again immediately, and he was struck again. This time, the world vanished in a painful whisper of sound. A candle, puffed out.
For the second time that night, Reschauld found himself rudely awakened, this time with a bucket of cold water. They must have pulled it straight from the freezing ocean; it felt like being slapped with a sheet of ice, and the breath was snatched out of him as Reschauld arched, gasping, against the manacles that held his arms out at his sides.
The whippers were the first thing he saw; dungeon-rats, torturers, whatever name they went by, in whatever part of the world they were found, they all had the same look. Some were grim, some were almost excited, some were fully mad. But they all had the stain of other men’s pain about them, and Reschauld recognized it instantly. They were standing about, here, in the dark and dank dungeons, with an ominous hearth backlighting an array of handles and spikes, chains and flails. In the orange half-light, the ceiling and walls were a void, but the collection of interrogation instruments were lit as if by the very eye of the Nameless God.
The second thing he saw was Lord and Lady Revenhjar, and Jessiah, rounded up nearby.
Reschauld shocked himself by thinking immediately of the children, of the Revenhjar girls. Were they safe? Did they know? How long had he been unconscious?
He stared, his thoughts racing. The Lord and Lady both had faces of stone. Lord Revenhjar had been haggard, he’d been exhausted before, but never like this. Never… defeated. And Reschauld had never seen Lady Revenhjar without her cosmetics and her hair done. She looked afraid and small, and she looked far older than even her true age. Her gaze fell heavy on the floor, listless and without the magnificent shine that had always made her black eyes glow like gems.
Seeing his movement, Jessiah looked his way. His hands were tied behind his back, and from the look of it, he had been unsuccessful in wringing them free. Their eyes locked, and in an instant, a quivering, shivering instant, it was clear.
Reschauld had never known fear so blinding nor so paralyzing. All their careful planning, all his Lord and Lady’s craft, it had dissolved to nothing in an hour. He had fallen asleep dreaming of the future; now, he prayed breathlessly that he might be fortunate enough to have one.
