14. N
Triana lifted her head, trying to shake off the nightmares.
She was pretty sure they kept her asleep most of the time, waking her only to take a little food, use the chamberpot, and sit for her next interrogation.
She shifted a bit, as the cobwebs cleared.
The latest dream had been her walking between lines of the slaves she’d ordered killed, stretched to the horizon. Bad. But far from the worst.
Her back hurt from the cold stone. When they had first put her in here, she had woken on the cold stone floor, without even a blanket.
She had been chilled to the bone. Haldeen’s minions had run a short chain from her ankle to a ring hastily drilled into the floor, in a room perhaps five paces a side.
She had to give Haldeen credit, though. She guessed this room had begun life as a broom closet, but one that could be quickly fitted with a heavy stone door.
The doomful thud it made as it closed told her it certainly had weight, and even if added as an afterthought, the door certainly sealed out both light and sound.
Whatever Haldeen had meant to do with her had started with the small room.
Here, under the constant mage-lights and the sleeping-collar, she had lost all track of time.
After her first sleep, she awoke to find a second collar, nested below the first.
It was thinner, and it burned her neck and throat when she reached her finger up to touch it.
Periodically, Haldeen, the lord himself, would come, and the questions would begin.
The small table and chair he sat in while he interrogated her were just within her reach.
Most elven lords worth their salt had a torturer available for the difficult interrogations, and she had felt real fear that the practice had started here first.
She had already decided that whatever secrets she held were not worth having her most delicate and precious hide carved, burned, or tormented in whatever creative ways they had found.
She had been quite surprised to find her interrogator was balding old Haldeen himself.
She made a few snide comments about his thinning hair, paunch, and otherwise did her best to show her complete contempt for him.
He had even failed to threaten her properly, and utterly failed at mustering the proper air of menace so needed for the job.
She got a few choice insults in before his face went red with rage.
She thought then that she had overreached and he would strike her, but instead reached for the collar’s control.
She felt the fatigue wash over her, and sleep. The nightmares returned.
They left her that way long enough to place a thin pallet under her, little more than a cloth folded and stitched, but it kept the floor from leaching the heat from her body.
They also gave her a thin and scratchy blanket, so while she wasn’t comfortable, she didn’t wake up with the shivering chills either.
No one laid a hand on her. They didn’t have to.
They kept her asleep, except for the brief period she needed to eat, take a little water, and relieve herself.
The collar might force sleep, but it gave her no rest, and each waking left her wearier as though she had not slept at all.
The nightmares compounded her misery. They grew worse the longer the collar was kept on her, dream after dream of failure, humiliation and death.
After her third waking, she begged them to let her rest, to escape the collar for one night.
After the fifth, she kicked and screamed and had to be restrained when they took away the chamberpot and the Overseer had returned with the rod.
By the seventh, she barely registered when they entered. They asked questions. She answered.
Part of her was ashamed that she had made no effort to resist, though most of her was past caring.
She didn’t even make a pretense of resisting.
When the questions came, she answered them.
She had considered lying, but what would be the point?
Triana roused herself enough each time to see that her interrogator was Haldeen, again, and then settled wearily into the routine.
She was too exhausted to concentrate, and unable to do much more than answer the questions he asked.
Many times he simply confused her, so he had to back up and reframe the query, sometimes to yes or no answers that she could make easily.
After each session, the sleep, and the nightmares.
A dim and fading part of her knew madness lay only a short distance further down the path she trod.
And at last she woke, rousing from a dream she could not recall but which had left her throat raw, presumably from screaming in her sleep, and so drained that she couldn’t even move.
She heard voices, Haldeen’s and another’s, but all she could do was lie there, inert.
Then a light was shown in one eye, then the other.
She couldn’t respond, even when she felt hands at her throat.
They left her to sleep without the collar, blessed and healing sleep.
She woke in her own time to a full bladder and used the chamberpot, the first time she had moved off her own volition, and had some control over her mind.
She laughed bitterly to herself. Her stunt in the food production room had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.
She had most assuredly gotten Lord Haldeen’s attention.
So, now instead of a room with a comfortable bed, or even a dormitory room where she worried about being knifed, she had a stone floor and a thin pallet, even less food than before, and nightmares that were worse than torture.
That cold stone floor just leached the heat out of her bones even through the canvas and left her so chilled that the cold became part of her nightmares.
She heard the rasp of a key in the lock, and the heavy bolt turn. Haldeen entered. Triana propped herself up, ready for today’s interrogation.
He smiled down at her. “You stink,” he said amiably.
She said nothing. What would have been the point?
He sat at the small table he had brought, with its wobbling chair, and started his questions.
Nothing new here. She could vaguely remember answering these before.
Question after question about the elven lords.
Who lorded it over who. Who resented whom (everybody resented everybody, but specifics in this case).
Who was sleeping with whom, or who had been before she landed here.
How clever were the human slaves? Why had they revolted?
Who were their leaders? Why had some elves sided with the slaves?
Those questions about the humans had come before and they had always puzzled her.
Who cared what vermin thought? They were decent workers, and a few were worthwhile bedmates, but a real threat to the elven lords? Rubbish.
Today’s questioning came from an aside she’d apparently made in a previous session, and she struggled to understand.
What were the seldom-glimpsed, but terrible things she called “dragons” and where did they come into the conflict?
She knew that rumor had become fact there, that they existed, but she had never considered that they might ally with slaves.
At least she had satisfied him on one count: that they could not possibly be the things he called the Predators, that were the native monsters here.
The dragons were something else. What, she didn’t know …
but they were not objects of fear. Except to sheep, horses, cattle …
anything big enough to make a decent meal.
It occurred to her as she answered the same question, phrased three different ways, that Kyrtian would have made much more entertaining fodder for Haldeen.
Her mentally defective cousin, who fancied himself a general, might have answered Haldeen’s questions with the depth and detail that she lacked.
She ground her teeth at that. Her attempt to find out what fuckery her cousin had involved himself in had indirectly resulted in her getting caught, and in landing here.
At the moment, she hated him second only to Haldeen.
He reached for the rod. “I asked you a question.”
She quickly put her hands up. “Please, no more nightmares.”
She frantically searched her memory for he had asked her.
“My lord … ummm, the gladiators that are trained can be used as a fighting force, but not easily. Success in the ring, umm, would not, should not, automatically translate into success as a unit.”
He rifled through his sheaves of paper. “Same answer as last time. Good.”
She shook her head. “Then, why did you ask?”
He smiled at her, thin-lipped and full of malice.
“I have learned that subjects will say what the questioner wants to hear to avoid punishment … which may not be the truth. I have your words written down. If you lie to please me, or deceive me, then you have to remember the lie. So, if I reask the question,
and then”—he did touch the control rod then, and she tensed, dreading the dreams—“I reask. Two or three times around, I am most likely to fence in a lie. Then, I can start drilling for the truth.”
He eased his finger away from the rod. She couldn’t speak to his certainty or to his consistency, but she certainly knew that she had come to hate him more than anyone she had met.
She had also learned under the intense interrogations lay an essential truth …
that she had learned as much from his questions as he had from her answers.
She knew now what he wanted. The quickest and fastest route to conquer her people, and take over.
His questions about the politics, relationships, military forces, economies, social organizations …
all looking for the cracks and crevices where an outsider could insert a wedge and split it all wide open.
She recalled the drawing she had seen, and suspected his wedge looked a lot like one of those metal monsters.
She knew the elven lords of her class remained, as a group, slothful and lazy …
but that nothing would rouse them like a direct threat to their prerogatives.
Haldeen knew from her that they were hopelessly divided, each looking to their own interests, and no small number would turn their coats the moment it might mean revenge against a rival, or would bend the knee in exchange for a piece of the pie,
willing to trade in an elven lord for a Evelon elf-overlord if it meant a few more copper bits.