The King's Justice by Stephen R. Donaldson Page A

Varder’s mouth. While the wheelwright whoops for air, Sought retrieves his supply of Black’s blood. Obeying a silent command, the guard grips Haul Varder’s head and tilts it back. The guard’s fingers gouge Varder’s nerves until Varder’s mouth is forced open.
    The old man pours Black’s blood down his ally’s throat until it has all been swallowed.
    Black feels that he is suffocating in the heat. Sweat runs from his body. His new wounds pump trickles of blood. But he ignores those sensations. While Sought’s attention, and that of his guards, is occupied with the wheelwright, Black works against the bolt that secures his right hand.
    He cannot work long. The hierophant soon returns to him. Sought has much to do to complete his designs. Black endures as best he can, feigning torment, while another of his sigils is destroyed and two more inlays are cut out. As best he can, he fights the bolt. Yet despite his straits, his growing weakness, his imminent betrayal of the King, he finds comfort in Sought’s actions. The old man has not touched the signs he indicated to Haul Varder, the signs that demand the King’s attention. He avoids attracting the King’s notice. Also Sought has not harmed the place on Black’s hip that summons his longsword. The priest believes that Black cannot move his arms. Therefore Blackcannot invoke his powers. Sought has not examined Black’s palms.
    The hierophant’s knowledge is not as complete as Black feared.
    Haul Varder is unconscious now, or he has fallen into the compliance taught by his mother’s harsh love. He does not struggle as he is wounded with Black’s inlays and the wounds are sewn. He does not protest as Sought’s cuts proliferate on his chest and belly, his arms and shoulders. He does not resist drinking Black’s blood.
    While the wheelwright is shaped, Black risks more obvious efforts to loosen the bolt. He knows that he has little time. Sought’s ritual approaches its culmination.
    Still the grit falling from the bolt is not enough.
    For the first time, Black hears Sought speak to his men. “I must pause,” he says. With studious care, he mops blood and sweat from Haul Varder’s torso. “One more inlay will be enough. More than enough. But the last cuts are crucial. I must see clearly what I do, and I am old.
    â€œReady the organs while I rest. Scatter the powders I have prepared on them. Say the words I have taught you. Then bring our harvest out. There must be no delay at the end.”
    Two guards enter the wagon. They do not return quickly. When they do return, they carry between them a large wooden tub crusted with old blood.
    The organs, Black thinks, straining his right arm until the muscles and sinews threaten to tear. The lungs and livers. Toinvoke heat and air. To rule them. Not the fierce heat from the crevice. Not the comparative cool of breezes from the tunnels. Rather the elemental energies themselves, the gods of heat and air. Concentrated here as they are nowhere else in the kingdom, or in the known lands.
    Still Black does not believe that Sought can draw force from air. The hierophant needs lungs only to stoke the fire in the rift, to fan the flames like a bellows. His ritual will evoke the sorcery of heat.
    When the old man stands before him again, Black summons his last desperation.
    Another inlay Sought cuts out of Black, this one from Black’s lower abdomen near his groin. Playing his charade, Black stretches against his bonds like a man on the rack. But he does not exert his full strength. He allows his growing weakness, the effect of his losses, to affect him. When this silver is gone, and his blood has been collected, he slumps in the posture of a man defeated.
    He waits until Sought has returned to Haul Varder, until the wheelwright is being cut, until the old man’s eagerness and the attention of the guards regard only the ruined man. Then Black puts