Shadowdance 01 - A Dance of Cloaks

first guard slapped him across the face, and then finally the man startled. She listened as the guards mocked him, grabbed his arm, and then marched him toward the front.
    “He’s to be punished,” Kayla whispered, suddenly feeling very foolish.
    “Go, now,” Will said.
    The three of them ran behind the soldiers and to the back of the now-unguarded prison. They made not a sound. Senke knelt beside the center of the wall and unrolled the scroll from the pocket in his cloak. He pressed it against the stone and whispered the activation word. The scroll sank inward, dissolved, and then, with an audible pop that made all of them wince, it vanished.
    Senke slowly pressed his hands against the bare stone, a grin spreading across his face as it passed as through a desert mirage. His arm sank in farther, and after a wink to the others he dove headfirst inside.
    After a deep breath to collect her courage, Kayla followed.

CHAPTER
7
    R obert Haern remembered his comment to Thren Felhorn about the cruelty of King Vaelor’s dungeon, and his dry, bleeding lips cracked a smile. How prophetic those words seemed now. His arms were chained above his head, each shoulder pulled out of its socket. The tips of his toes brushed the ground. Every few hours a guard came in and raised him higher, so that despite the stretching of his skin and his dislocated joints, he never supported himself with them.
    He’d come to fantasize about those toes. He wanted to feel the weight of his body on them, to flex and curl them in grass while his back lay comfortably supported on solid ground. Robert sipped soup from a spoon at midday, which was held by a small boy who went from cell to cell carrying a little wooden stool.
    What madman lets such a young child work in this pit?
he had wondered the first time the door opened and the dirty-haired boy stepped in. Now he didn’t wonder. Instead he tilted his head back, opened his lips, and waited for the soothing liquid.
    Dreams came and went. They did so easily enough with old men, and the boredom only increased their vividness and frequency. There were times when he thought he stood at the king’s bedside, telling humorous stories to scare away the nightmares that pierced his mind. Other times he was with his wife, Darla, who had passed away of dysentery a decade ago. She hovered before him with startling brightness, looking as she had when they first met. Light streamed through her blond hair, and when she touched his face he pushed against her hand, only to have soup spill across his cheek.
    “Stop it and hold still,” the boy told him, the only time he’d spoken.
    Robert drank the soup while tears trickled down the sides of his wrinkled face.
    Now it was night again, although he only knew because of the changing of the guards. The bars were thick around him, and there were no windows. He remembered men Edwin had sentenced to ten, twenty, even thirty years. Often the punishments had little to do with the crime and more with the look of the man and his inability to grovel convincingly. Robert wondered what his own punishment might be. No matter how much he hoped, he knew his imprisonment would last until death. He was old; it wouldn’t be long.
    The bars rattled, and he heard a soft bang on the door. His head tilted backward almost instinctively. Part of his mind thought it was too early for soup, but perhaps he had dreamed, or maybe he was just too hungry and thirsty to care about the time of day.
    Just don’t let it be time for another stretching
, he pleaded.
No more, please, no more…
    Arms wrapped around his waist. When he opened his mouth to scream, a hand rammed over it to stifle the noise.
    “Silence, old man,” a deep voice rumbled in his ear. Robert opened his eyes to look, but they were full of tears. Through blurred vision he saw three strangers, cloaked and almost invisible in the darkness.
    “This will hurt,” said another voice, this one feminine. Then fire erupted through every joint in his body. His shoulders felt like the center of the inferno. He might have screamed again, but if he did he wasn’t aware. All he knew was that the giant hand across his mouth pressed tighter. The chains rattled above his head. He heard a click. A sudden lurch followed, and though his whole body flushed with pain, he felt a wonderful, delirious satisfaction in the sudden feel of his weight resting no longer on his dislocated arms but instead on the chest of another.
    “We don’t have