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Chapter Twenty-Three
"Well, well, well," Alivar Neshok murmured as he walked down the line of sullen-faced Sharonian prisoners assembled on the captured fort's body-strewn parade ground. Some of them were lightly wounded; all of them had their hands manacled behind them; and if the look of anyone except a combattrained magister could have killed, Neshok would have been a smoldering corpse.
The thought rather amused him, actually.
"Those five," he told Javelin Porath. "And ... that one," he added, pointing at an overweight, blue-eyed senior-armsman.
"Yes, Sir!"
Neshok nodded and walked off, hands clasped behind him, whistling softly. He knew he could count on Porath to deliver the selected prisoners suitably.
His whistling faded as the one major flaw in his present sense of satisfaction floated to the top of his mind once again. The fact that his interrogations had revealed the presence of Arcanan POWs here at Fort Ghartoun was going to be a major feather in his cap, since that was the only reason they hadn't been killed right along with their captors instead of being liberated. But the fact that the attack had gone in on the ground to rescue them meant the Intelligence section had gotten in further behind the lead combat elements than they had during the previous operations.
Which meant the fort's badly woundedSharonian commander was out of Neshok's reach ... for the moment, at least.
Neshok growled a mental curse at the thought. Commander of Five Hundred Vaynair had the bastard safely squirreled away in the casualty queue over at the field hospital. Personally, Neshok would have preferred to let the son-of-a-bitch die from his wounds—which he certainly would have done, probably fairly quickly, without Gifted healing—as an example to the rest of the prisoners. Or, failing that, Neshok could at least have shot him himself for the same purpose. Vaynair wasn't going to let that happen, though, and Neshok spared another mental curse for the officious Andaran Scouts commander of fifty who'd hustled the wounded Sharonian off to the healers before Neshok could get his hands on him.
Well, I'll just have to do the best I can with what I still have to work with and settle up with the troublemakers later, he told himself. And at least this time around, I've got a lot more people to get answers out of.
He stepped into his chosen interrogation site. It had been a stable, but the unaugmented horses who had been housed here no longer required its stalls. Dragons and gryphons—especially battle dragons and gryphons—had active metabolisms, and horses and mules tasted just as good as cattle and sheep as far as they were concerned.
And watching gryphons and dragons feed was probably an eye-opener for the Sharonians, especially after what the gryphons did to so many of their buddies. He chuckled nastily to himself. That alone ought to loosen a few tongues.
He strolled across the front of the stable, considering the stalls. They'd do as holding cages if he needed them, he decided, while the tack room he'd had cleared would give him the sort of privacy and ... intimacy he'd found so effective in the past.
He glanced up as Porath and two other troopers kicked and cuffed their prisoners into the tack room.
"Now, now, Lance Porath," he chided gently, following them inside. "Surely there's no need for all that roughness ... yet, at least."
"Yes, Sir. Whatever you say," Porath replied with exactly the right edge of disappointment, and the five hundred shook his head and wagged one finger admonishingly. Then he turned his attention to the Sharonians.
"Now then," he continued, addressing them through his translating PC. "My name is Neshok, Five Hundred Neshok of the Army of the Union of Arcana. You and I are going to become very well acquainted, and in the process, you're going to tell me exactly what I want to know."
None of the Sharonians replied, of course, and Neshok smiled thinly.
"You may not think at this moment that you will," he told them, "but if you do, you're wrong. Trust me, you're wrong."
Folsar chan Tergis looked at the smiling, thin-faced Arcanan and felt a cold stab of terror. This Neshok was radiating his emotions so powerfully that even a half-Deaf Voice—and chan Tergis was anything but half-Deaf—couldn't help picking them up, physical contact or no.
Not any more than he could help realizing that the Arcanan was the next best thing to certifiably insane.
He's enjoying this, chan Tergis thought. Really, really enjoying it. It's not just about power for him; there's something almost erotic about it as far as he's concerned, and he's looking forward to killing.
Triad, how many more of these people are just like him?!
"Now," the smiling lunatic's voice was almost caressing, "suppose one of you tells me who your assigned Voice might be?"
Chan Tergis' blood seemed to freeze in his veins, but his brain raced with feverish speed. Obviously, these people knew a lot more about Sharonian Talents than anyone had thought they might. Which made the reason for the silence from the down-chain Voices suddenly and terrifyingly easy to understand.
In that moment, Folsar chan Tergis could see what was going to happen as clearly as any Calirath, and a fresh thought hammered through him. He hadn't made any secret of Syrail Targal's awakening Talent.
Indeed, he'd been proud of the boy, bragged about the strength of his Voice. If this Neshok was as ... thorough as chan Tergis was afraid he might prove, someone who knew about Syrail was going to break and tell him. And when that happened ... .
"Syrail!" he Shouted. "Syrail, Listen to me!"
For an instant, there was no response. Then he Saw a flash of vision, someone else's hands scooping sweet feed from a burlap bag for eager, velvet-nosed horses.
"Folsar?" Syrail's Voice came back as the vision disappeared. The boy sounded startled, and more than a little apprehensive. Obviously, more of chan Tergis' side trace emotions were coming through than he'd intended, but maybe that was a good thing. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"It's the Arcanans," chan Tergis Said urgently. "They've taken the fort."
He sent flashing mental images—horrific images, of the striking gryphons, the horned, lynx-eared unicorns, and the terrifyingly enormous dragons—with the speed and completeness possible only for a highly trained Voice. The thirteen-year-old at the other end of the Voice link gasped at the raw brutality of everything he was Seeing and Hearing, and chan Tergis allowed himself a moment of bitter regret for having inflicted that upon him. But someone had to know.
He felt a brief instant of stu
"What's happening now?" he Asked after a moment, his Voice amazingly steady. "What do you want me to do?"
"For right now, just hold the link open," chan Tergis Said. "Listen and Watch."
"Do you want me to try and get through the portal? Contact the Failcham relay station?"
"No!" chan Tergis practically Shouted the single word. Then he shook himself mentally, managing somehow to keep his expression from revealing what was going on inside his—and Syrail's—heads. "If they've gotten this far up-chain without anyone getting a warning out, then they've been taking out the Voices as they come," he went on in a calmer, more normal Voice. "That means they know what to look out for, and it probably means they're going to take pains to locate that relay station. If you try to get across the portal and contact anyone, it's just going to draw their attention, and that's the last thing you need to do. Believe me, Syrail."
"All right. " Syrail sounded much more subdued, even frightened, and chan Tergis' jaw tightened as he realized the boy's fear wasn't for himself. He wanted to tell Syrail how proud he was of him, how much the boy had come to mean to him, but there wasn't time. Nor was there really any need—not for two Voices as deeply linked as they were in this moment.
"It's going to be—" chan Tergis began, then broke off as the man who'd introduced himself as Alivar Neshok walked over to stand four feet in front of the line of prisoners.
"It may be," Neshok said reasonably, "that some of you—maybe even all of you, at this point—don't believe me. Perhaps you believe that by keeping your mouths shut you'll manage to deprive us of some critical piece of information. But, you see, there's a problem with that particular line of logic. We've captured quite a few of you this time. Believe me, even if you manage not to tell me something when I ask, someone else will answer the same question before it's over. Someone else always will. It's just a matter of how many people get hurt first."
None of the Sharonians replied, and something inside Neshok purred like a huge, hunting cat.
He clasped his hands behind himself again, letting himself bob gently up and down on the balls of his feet as he studied their expressions. They seemed less shaken than most of his earlier interrogation subjects had been, he decided. That was interesting, something to bear in mind. Apparently seeing their fellows ripped apart by gryphons was a less shattering experience than being strafed with fireballs or strangled in a cloud of gas. Our perhaps it was simply that the casualty count had been so much lower this time?
"Come now," he told them almost caressingly. "Don't pretend you don't understand what I'm telling you.
And think about this. You six have the unfortunate privilege of being the first people I'm going to be asking these questions. There are a lot more where you came from, and, the truth is that you'll be almost as useful as ... examples, shall we say, as you'll be as information sources. To be perfectly frank, I don't really care whether you answer my questions or not."
Still no one spoke, and Neshok unclasped his hands to reach out and take the Sharonian revolver from Porath.
"Now to return to my first question," he said with a bright, friendly smile. "Who's your assigned Voice?"
Chan Tergis' spine stiffened. He didn't even have to turn his head to know that none of his fellow prisoners as much as glanced in his direction. All of them stared straight ahead, jaws clenched.