Stalking Darkness

scanned the fray for Micum’s red mane. As expected, his companion was already across in the thickest of the fight.
    The gods chose you well for the Vanguard
, Seregil thought, shinnying down the ladder and elbowing his way to the rail. Reaching it, he did his best to ignore the foaming chasm that opened and closed beneath him as the two disabled vessels wallowed in the swells. He made his jump, drew his sword, and was immediately confronted by a Plenimaran sailor armed with a cutlass.
    The battle soon spread to both ships. Somehow in the confusion, Micum and Seregil found each other and fought shoulder to shoulder, back to back, as the precariously balanced fight raged on.
    For a time it seemed that it would go on indefinitely, but in the midst of the melee one of Rhal’s seamen killed the captain of the Plenimaran ship. At almost the same moment, Micum struck down the commander of the marines. Confusion spread among the remaining enemy and they finally surrendered.
    A cheer went up from the
Lady
as the surviving enemy sailors and soldiers threw down their weapons in surly submission. Whooping and howling their triumph, Rhal’s men surged forward to loot the vanquished ship.
    Exhausted, Seregil and Micum left them to it and jumped back aboard the
Lady
.
    “By the Flame, that was a proper fight,” Micum gasped, nudging a severed hand out of the way with his foot before collapsing on a bulkhead.
    Looking his friend over, Seregil saw that Micum had come out with no more than a cut over one eye. He’d taken a shallow cut across the shoulder himself. Stripping off his tunic and shirt, he glanced at it, then held a wad of cloth against it to stanch the bleeding.
    “Too close quarters for my taste,” he said, collapsing on the deck with his back to the bulkhead.
    Rhal appeared from out of the surrounding confusion and strode over to where they sat. “Well, we caught your ship for you but there’s still better than twenty of her crew left standing,” he informed Seregil. “I know we don’t want to be weighed downwith prisoners, but I’ll tell you straight that I won’t be a party to the execution of beaten men.”
    “Neither would I,” Seregil told him wearily. “I say strip whatever we need off her, take the sails, and set the crew adrift on her with food and water. How long will repairs to the
Lady
take?”
    Rhal rubbed his jaw, looking around at the damage. “We’ll have to step a new mast and rig the new sails. No sooner than sunup tomorrow.”
    “How many days to Plenimar?”
    Rhal eyed the sky. “Barring foul weather, I’d say three days, maybe four. Running with Plenimaran sails could save us a fight or two.”
    Seregil looked to Micum, but the big man merely shrugged.
    “Do it, then,” Seregil told the captain. “And put the Plenimarans to work, too.”

39
T ORMENT
    H
ands. Hands on him, touching, seeking, tormenting
.
    Alec wrapped his arms around his knees, curling tightly in the darkness of the tiny cabin as he fought to block out the memory of being touched and wishing he still had Thero for company. He’d seen no sign of the young wizard since that first night on board the
Kormados
.
    Mardus and his people were subtle in their methods; in all the terrible time since his capture they hadn’t once broken the skin, or drawn so much as a drop of blood. But inside he hurt.
    Oh, yes. He hurt very much.
    The dyrmagnos Irtuk Beshar, a walking nightmare, had straddled him with her withered hams, flaking fingers scrabbling over him in a grotesque parody of lust as she ripped her way into his mind, raping the memories from him. She’d kissed him afterward, thrusting a tongue like a ragged strip of moldy leather against his clenched teeth.
    The necromancer, Vargûl Ashnazai, assisted her in these interrogations and Alec soon came to fear him on a deeper level than he did the dyrmagnos or Mardus.
    The former carried out her hallucinatory tortures with zest, but as soon as she’d finished,Alec seemed to cease to exist in her mind. Mardus was more difficult to read. It was he who directed the tortures and put the questions to Alec, his eyes flat and soulless, his voice as gentle as a father’s as he named the next obscenity to be carried out. Otherwise, however, he treated Alec with a peculiar mix of distance and solicitude that bordered on courtliness. In the worst moments of torment, Alec sometimes caught himself inexplicably looking to Mardus for rescue.
    Ashnazai was different. In the