The Blade

Chapter 14

"Do you think them stories about what he does to his prisoners are true?"

Laya Ro turned to look at the speaker, chained to the wall beside her.  Danus looked how she felt—battered, forlorn and without hope.  Still, it wouldn't do to let him know that, so she mustered up a smile.  "They're probably just rumours.  How bad can it be?"  Instantly, she knew it had been the wrong thing to say.  Danus was now thinking about exactly how bad it could be.

Stifling a sigh, she tried to find a more comfortable position, and when that proved to be an impossible task, attempted to distract herself by looking around the chamber that was their prison.  Its sole item of furniture was a long wooden table, upon which an array of instruments lay in a neat row.  As a distraction from her discomfort, the tools proved to be spectacularly successful, so much so that after a moment's perusal, she found herself trying to use the discomfort as a distraction from the tools.  She hadn't dreamed of such things in her worst nightmares.

Right from the start, she had known that the rebellion was almost certain to fail—it was the 'almost' that had sucked her in.  The tiniest chance of success had seemed entirely worth the risk, when faced with the alternative of continuing to live under Vardun Ri's tyrannical reign.  Of course, it had been an easy decision to make, standing in the sunlight of the marketplace, surrounded by her fellow villagers, enveloped in their cheers, their enthusiasm, their hope.

And their desperation.

Now, chained to the wall of a monster's torture chamber, waiting to die a horrible death, the decision seemed a little harder to justify.

With an enormous effort, she shrugged off the dark, enveloping embrace of despair.  She wasn't dead yet.  And while she lived, so did the rebellion.  Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to look back at the table.  And to think.

"Danus, do you think you could hook your foot around the leg of that table?"  The torture devices were laid out only a couple of steps away from their intended victims, doubtless to save the torturer the tedious business of having to walk very far to select their next tool.  For the prisoners, with their hands chained to the wall, the table was still beyond normal human reach, but then Danus wasn't really a normal human.  The strapping youth was a head taller than anybody else in the village, which was the primary reason why the elders had insisted on him been appointed alongside Laya, as co-leader of the rebellion.  That and the whole not being a girl thing.

The young woman had fiercely resented both the implication that she wasn't capable of running the rebellion herself, and the assumption that Danus should co-lead, simply because he was seriously big and strong—and had testicles.  While she was still pretty pissed off about the first part, she was starting to come around a little, on the second.

Danus looked at her quizzically.  "What for?"

"Because I bloody said so!" she snapped, feeling instant remorse for the hurt displayed on his usually earnest features.  It was easy to forget that he wasn't much more than a kid, barely older than she was.  "Sorry.  I just thought, if you could drag it towards us, maybe we could knock it over and get some of the...the stuff on it."

He looked at the table, with wide eyes.  "Why in Volanda would we want any of those things?"

"Because," she replied, "if my options are either being chained to a wall, waiting to be tortured to death, or being chained to a wall, waiting to be tortured to death while armed with a horribly vicious spiky thing, then I know which option I'm going for."  She grinned at him.  "How about you?"

Gingerly, Kowolski took a seat, while on the other side of the desk, the Director of the agency watched from over his glasses.  "You look like hell."

Kowolski grimaced.  "Thirty-seven stitches, half-an-hour's sleep on the flight here, and a pharmacy's worth of painkillers rattling around inside of me.  Sir, you're no oil-painting either, but at least I've got an excuse."

The Director grinned.  "Ah, the old Kowolski charm.  You know, you weren't scheduled to leave the hospital for another couple of days."

"Sitting in that hospital doing nothing would have been far worse for my health than getting back on the case.  People got taken on my watch, sir.  I need to do all I can to set that right."

"Fair enough, son, fair enough.  I don't mind saying, as you were the only agent on the scene, we're glad to have you back on deck."

"Have there been any developments, sir?"

"If you mean, have we started to make the slightest bit of sense of this whole shit-storm of seemingly impossible fantasy-land weirdness, then no.  I mean, seriously—giant man-eating birds, robed assassins, multiple deaths by cutlery?  It's like freaking The Lord of the Rings meets Silence of the Lambs meet Masterchef.  But we have got a couple of leads.  For starters, the CSI crew caught a live perp, locked in a wardrobe in the attic."

"Finally.  What's he said, sir?"

"Well, not a lot that's useful, so far.  Frankly, he seems to be a little challenged in the IQ department.  Total cleanskin too, just like all those stiffs at the nursing home.  Fingerprints, DNA, facial recognition, all zip.  The local police handled the initial questioning, but he's being transported here, as we speak.  Our interrogators are a little more...skilled at extracting information."

"And what's the other lead, sir?"

"The bird, Kowolski.  We've just been advised that the air force base at Blaxland picked up an unidentified signal that matches the time and estimated direction of its flight.  They tracked its trajectory, right up until it suddenly disappeared."

"Disappeared?  Disappeared where, sir?"

"Into the side of a mountain, Kowolski.  It seems as though the monstrous thing may have crashed."

"We have to investigate the crash-site!"

"You don't say?  You know I never would have thought of that.  Kind of makes you wonder how I got to be the bloody Director, doesn't it?"

"Sorry, sir."

"Forget it, Kowolski.  There's a helicopter fueled and waiting—are you up for this?"

The agent popped a handful of pills, and swallowed them dry.  "Mr Codeine and his good friend Mr Caffeine say 'yes', sir."