Too many questions, blurring together too quickly . . . He leaned across, seizing her wrist in a brutal grip. “Answer me!”
She cried out in mortal terror, struggled to pull away from the swamping horror of what she sensed in his soul. “Artemis, help me . . .” The plea was instinctive, choked out through the blackness flooding across her mind. His face swam into focus, very close to hers.
“Artemis?” he whispered, shock blazing through his eyes once more. “What do you know of Artemis, the Many-Breasted Goddess of Ephesus?”
The pain of his nearness was unendurable. She lapsed into the language of her childhood, pled with him not to hurt her, so . . .
He left her side, allowing relief to flood into her senses, but was gone only for a moment. He returned with a leather case, which he opened, removing a heavy, metal tube with a needle protruding from one end. “If you are unable to speak with what I’ve given you already,” he muttered, “no power of hell itself will keep you silent with this in your veins.”
He injected something into her arm, tore the sleeve of her dress to expose the crook of her elbow and slid the needle in. New dizziness flared as the drug went in, hurting with a burning pain. The room swooped and swung in agonizing circles.
“Now then, Miss Cassondra,” the voice of her jailor came through a blur, “you will please tell me who you are and where you come from and who the man was with you . . .”
Ianira plunged into a spinning well of horror from which there was no possible escape. She heard her voice answer questions as though in a dream, repeated answers even she could not make sense of, found herself slipping deep into prophetic trance as the images streamed into her mind, a boy hanging naked from a tree, dying slowly under this man’s knife, and a pitiful young man with royal blood in his veins, whose need for love was the most tragic thing about him, a need which had propelled him into the clutches of the man crouched above her now. Time reeled and spun inside her mind and she saw the terrified face of a woman, held struggling against a wooden fence, and other women, hacked to pieces under a madman’s knife . . .