Cold, freezing water, shocking him awake to a world of pain. His whole body throbbed with agony, every breath its own individual torment. He coughed, fire lancing through his side, awareness creeping back from the faded edges of his recall.
Ethine!
Adrenaline spiked through him, he remembered the sound of her screaming. It jerked him fully awake, the pain receding as his body struggled to ready itself to fight. Where was Ethine? His eyes opened, tried to sit up, failed.
The room about him was dimly lit, overly warm. A low brick roof hidden above in shadows, he could sense heat coming from a large brazier not far from his head. He was tied to some kind of bed, or cot, his wrists above his head, his ankles stretched below him. He was naked.
A leering face loomed above him - a goblin with sallow skin, one side of his head covered with puckered scar tissue, one eye obviously useless. "Ahh, you're awake, good," Tinklethwaite said. "I know Sorrow asked for some special treatment for you."
Near a door below his feet Calan could see a couple of suited knights loitering in the shadows, not paying much attention to either him or the goblin. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, tasted blood, the sour flavour of vomit, bile.
The goblin leaned over him, pressing the side of his head to his naked chest, obviously listening.
"Hmm. Remarkable. Your heart beat is strong, even after the beating you've had - I imagine you're quite something in a fight, eh?"
Calan smiled, spitting a mouthful of blood and vomit into his face. "Let me out and I'll show you - cut your other little eye out you capering little fuck," he said, coughing.
Tinklethwaite wiped his face clean with a rag. "I don't think so," he said. "Let's see how you feel when I dislocate your shoulders, shall we?"
With that he moved to a large wheel set into the side of the cot, turning it slowly with a ratcheting sound, its progress a series of clicks. Calan felt the ropes on his wrists and ankles pull taut, taking the slack, pulling him rigid.
"You'll like this," Tinklethwaite said, speaking as if to a favoured student, "as I turn this wheel the ropes get tighter, you get longer. Eventually you'll hear some loud popping sounds, that will be your cartilage breaking as your joints separate."
The wheel ratcheted onward. Calan felt himself pulled from both ends - pain creeping into his wrists, his ankles, his shoulders and knees.
"Eventually your joints will separate completely so that they are absolutely useless to you. But, long before we get there, your muscles will all be torn," he continued.
The wheel turned again.
His body was on fire, the pain from the beating receding as a new pain was heaped onto it - burning pain across his joints, his muscles stretching beyond their normal extreme. He felt himself groan - a long sigh of pain.
"Not many people realise it, but once your muscles get stretched beyond a certain point - they can't recover, they stay stretched, useless. So even if you survive my little toy, you'll probably never walk, or hold a sword again."
Tinklethwaite chuckled softly, his little clawed hands gripping the wheel in a fond caress. He turned it again.
Calan screamed.
******
"He's late," Monster whispered, drawing away from the gathered exiles.
"I know, I know," Terror whispered. "We have to wait, he'll call...he will."
"We're running out of time, Terror."
"Okay, I know. He'll call." Don't let me down, Calan, he thought, don't let me down.
Behind him he could sense the unease in the gathered exiles - the constant tension was getting to them all. Waiting, knowing you were going to fight but not knowing when. Before long nervous exhaustion would set in, their fighting edge would start to dissipate. Not long after that they'd start to drift away.
Come on, Calan! It has to be soon, or not at all, he thought.
******
Gilraen drank his second bloodwine. He'd done the right thing, he had. He was one of Sorrow's knights, he'd told Thorn like he was supposed to. He'd done the right thing.
So why did he feel like a heel?
He swallowed the bitter-sweet liquid slowly. As usual he was alone, none of Sorrow's knights wanted to drink with him, he wasn't 'cool' enough for their company. Which is what made him feel so bad, perhaps. Calan was the first; no, the only knight to call him friend in as long as he could remember. And what had he done? Betrayed him. For what? So he could end up drinking bloodwine on his own again. If he fell down tonight, would any of those bastards pick him up and carry him home?
Well he knew the answer to that. It wouldn't be the first time he'd woken up on the bar floor.
He wasn't going to give them the chance, he was going home to bed while he still could. With a baleful glare in the direction of the knights gathered restlessly about the dais he stood up, picking up his own sabre from the bar. Calan's sabre was there next to it.
For a time he looked at it, guilt suddenly choking him. Finally he picked it up, cradling it next to his own. He set off for his room, each footstep like a lead weight - his heart screaming at him to do something, anything to put things right. Maybe with more bloodwine he could drown it out.
******
The mist cleared slowly, first drifting back so that their small group stood at the centre of a circular clearing in the mist, then lifting back towards the gully - opening a path towards the far end. As it peeled back it revealed figures gathered about them - hunched and crooked shapes shrouded in black, each one staring toward them with hidden eyes. At first sight they appeared to be scattered almost randomly throughout the cleared area but, despite their apparently haphazard arrangement, Ethine didn't fail to notice that they still managed to be positioned so that their group was entirely surrounded.
Above the strange scene a mad skirling of pipes drifted - the clash of cymbals and the sound of voices raised in song clearer now that the mist had drawn back - still distant at first but obviously coming closer, approaching from the edge of the gully. Gradually, as the mist drew back and the music approached, sound and perspective came together - the source of the music and the furthest point visible in the gully coalescing into a single point. Impossibly, appearing from the darkness and mist at this point was a building - a low, single-storey house apparently made of bleached wood, surrounded by a crooked fence - moving steadily along the gully towards them.
Ethine stood transfixed, Sorrow and his crew equally immobile. Preceded by a mass of dancing figures, throbbing and swaying like the tendrils of an anemone, the house worked its way towards the mouth of the gully, moving along the narrow valley as if the gully itself was giving birth to it, as if peristalsis was responsible for its impossible movement. With its approach the sound grew louder: a mad, chaotic coming together of sounds that both excited and chilled the listener, making hairs stand on end even as it made feet tap.
Closer now, the dancing figures were revealed to be satyrs and nymphs, dryads and nereids - swaying and skipping, eyes unseeing as if they moved in a trance. From this close it was also possible to see what moved the building: legs. Grafted to the bottom of the building were hundreds of legs, moving like cilia, as if a hundred people were wearing the palace about their waists. Looking at it, Ethine knew instinctively that this wasn't the case - the legs were part of the building, the flesh of some poor unfortunates somehow crafted into the fabric of the house itself. It was horrible.
The dancers were around Sorrow's crew now, the knights forming a tight knot with the glass at its centre as the faeries capered and spun just beyond the perimeter. Ethine looked again at the dancers, from this range she could see that their eyes weren't lost in the music - they were tormented, their faces tortured, desperate, damned. With sudden clarity she realised that they couldn't stop dancing - like automatons - the thought adding to her unease.
Ethine watched as the house came to a stop, settling like some massive insect on the hundreds of legs that extended below it so that it rested some four feet above the ground. Gathered around it were more of the sinister, crooked, cloaked figures - forming a barrier between Sorrow's group and the building. Ethine stared at it in horrible fascination - dotted over its bone-white surface she noticed mouths, their lips opening and closing mindlessly, eyes, limbs - the flesh of living beings fused into the structure as if it was itself a massive living being. She felt sick.
As soon as it was still the music stopped, silence falling as completely and as suddenly as death itself. Around them the capering faeries dropped to the ground with a collective groan of exhaustion and despair.
Slowly the door of the house swung open. For a moment there was nothing more than a dark hole in the surface of the repulsive house, then, slowly, Hafgan the Hag emerged. She rode on a chair made of dark, hairless flesh - four limbs propelling the hideous seat out onto the platform before the house, a massively muscled torso rising behind her so that she was overtopped by a huge ogre's head, its plate-like eyes staring about horribly. The chair's arms were exactly that - clawed and massive, the hands opening and closing spastically - its four legs the lower parts of some faerie. From this throne of the damned - wrapped head to foot in a thick, black robe, the hood puddling at her neck - Hafgan looked down at them and her gaze was utterly inhuman.
To Ethine's surprise she appeared to be a mortal - or partly mortal at least, Ethine thought. Her head was the aged head of an old woman, wrinkled and marked by age, twisted and malign - but the rest of her appeared to be a chimera of different body parts: one exposed forearm pale, elegant, the other thicker with a ruddy complexion; her neck was thicker than her shoulders; her breasts appeared to be different sizes. It was as if she had replaced her mortal body with different body parts harvested from fay, perhaps in some repugnant effort to prolong her life beyond its allotted span.
With a feeling of overwhelming revulsion Ethine realised what Sorrow had been trading - they were spare parts!
******
He screamed until his voice was hoarse, all the while that blasted goblin's voice wittering away as if he was making some kind of presentation.
Calan's body felt as if it was on fire, the pain sweeping over him in waves, each worse than the last. The damned goblin leaving just enough time between turns to allow him to accommodate the new level of agony before turning it again. He couldn't stand much more before he suffered permanent damage and he knew it - already his arms felt as if his shoulders were about to tear free, his hips and knees strained to the point where he doubted he could move them even if he was freed.
"Now, let's explore the next tier shall we?" Tinklethwaite said, patiently. "Where you start to suffer permanent damage, each turn disabling you. Psychologically I'm told that has a great effect. Did you know that?"
"When I get out I'm going to burn you in your own fucking brazier - know that, goblin," he spat, his voice thick with blood and phlegm, croaky through screaming and weak with strain.
