Kamal nodded. “Four or five days from now, depending on how fast they travel. I’ll let them ride into a sack and pull the drawstring on them in the morning to have as many hours of daylight as possible. Otherwise some of them might lose themselves in the darkness and escape. It should be easy to time it, with you sitting in the sky keeping track of them. I suggest you attack them before I do, from the air, as soon as they’re aware of us. That should disorganize them and we’ll chop them to pieces with minimum losses of our own.”
Draco smiled and held out his hand. “It sounds beautiful—more like slaughter than battle.”
And when it’s over, old comrade, I’ll drop down and pick you up—to take you where none of your men are at hand. You’re too dangerous—and too powerful now, and possibly ambitious after all. You’ll give me the pleasure you denied me from Ahmed.
“And Kamal,” Draco said, “when the Northmen are destroyed, I want you to spend some time with me in harem. Someone there is hungry to see you.”
XXIII
Nils lay motionless on the stone ledge that was his cot. Because of his wounds, straw had been piled on it and he had a coarse woolen blanket to crawl under. Draco was saving him for something.
For four days he’d lain quietly, rousing only for food and water. He had thirsted often. But mostly he’d been in a trance-like state, his mind focused quietly on healing nerves and outraged tissues. During the last few hours, however, he’d been doing something else.
It was fortunate that the dungeon captain was a psi. Otherwise there’d be no chance at all.
The dungeon captain sat in the guard room at the end of the cell block, monitoring subconsciously while he thought of other things. Occasionally he brought his attention to it, sorting among the emanations of the prisoners, sifting their thoughts, moods and emotions through his critical mind.
Nils’s awareness had entered it too, but undetected, formless, a slight and undefined watchfulness no more than vague smoke at twilight. He could afford no misstep. If the orc discovered what he was doing, there would be no second chance.
He assumed the orc didn’t know of the technique and wouldn’t be on guard against it. Even Raadgiver, shrewd old psi of the Inner Circle, apparently hadn’t known of it. It was Ilse who’d discovered it, used it to murder Ziihtu Hakki and escape the horse barbarians.
Carefully, patiently, he followed the orc’s thoughts, feeling their tone, their hue, absorbing the essence of the man.
Sometimes Yitzhak focused on a specific mind; he could discern details and sense subtleties better that way. Now he turned his attention to the Northman. The aura was subdued, less powerful, but essentially unchanged. Usually a man’s aura deteriorated utterly when he’d been maimed, and blinding was one of the most devastating maimings. When someone was blinded, locked in a dungeon, and facing certain torture without hope of escape, his aura was the aura of death.
Beneath the Northman’s aura was only a soft and meaningless psionic hum. Thoughtfully Yitzhak scratched his cheek, unaware that the impulse was not his own.
His attention shifted to the star man. Until today the mind had been a study in raw sensitivity. Usually it was difficult to keep someone so responsive for long; they became comatose. This one, however, they had returned to delicious rawness repeatedly, by abusing his woman. Then, during Khalil’s watch, he’d been taken away for an hour or so. He’d been returned with his mind deeply collapsed, although they hadn’t used him very roughly. It even seemed he might actually die without serious physical injury.
Something touched Nils’s consciousness softly, and softly he withdrew from the mind of the orc. It had not been a thought; almost it had been nothing at all. A presence, the faintest presence of Ilse. He knew she wasn’t there physically, and grasped intuitively what she had done. She strengthened, and through her he saw himself a supine body beneath the coarse gray wool. A touch from his mind warned her and she drew back to the edge of thereness. Anything either of them transmitted—thoughts, pictures—might be picked up by the dungeon captain. Jerkily Nils transmitted then, gusts of Scandinavian as in a troubled dream, still picturing himself on the sleeping ledge, the image wavering, collapsing.