Master Jojonah looked down from an inconspicuous balcony at the large chamber, bare of any furnishing but for a few practice riggings sitting against the far wall. In the center of the room stood the stocky young man, his face haggard from lack of sleep. He wore only a loincloth and stood defensively, shoulders hunched, arms crossed to cover his belly and loins. Even his head was bare, for his superiors had shaved it. He uttered a chant repeatedly, using it to bolster his failing strength, and De'Unnero, the new master who had taken Siherton's place, stalked about him, occasionally stinging him with a riding crop. Behind Quintall stood a tenth-year immaculate.
"You are weak and useless!" De'Unnero screamed, smacking Quintall across the shoulder blades. "And you were part of the conspiracy!"
Quintall's mouth moved to form the word "no," but no sound came forth, managing only a pitiful shake of his head.
"You were!" De'Unnero roared, and he whipped Quintall again.
Master Jojonah could hardly bear to watch. Quintall's "training" had been going on for more than a month now, ever since Father Abbot Markwart, looking old and tired indeed, had seen a vision of Avelyn alive.
Avelyn! The very thought of the young brother sent shivers along Jojonah's spine. Avelyn had killed Siherton -- the body, or what remained of it, had been found only late that spring, almost a year to the day since the tragedy. And worse, if Markwart's vision was true, Avelyn had survived and had run off with a substantial supply of the sacred stones.
Jojonah closed his eyes and remembered all the times Siherton had warned him about Avelyn's almost inhuman dedication. Avelyn would be trouble, Siherton had promised, and the master's words had proven true. But why? Jojonah had to wonder. What had precipitated the trouble, a fault of Avelyn's or the man's lack of fault in an order grown perverse? Indeed, Brother Avelyn Desbris was trouble, a dark mirror that the masters of St.-Mere-Abelle could not bear to gaze into. Avelyn, by any measure that Jojonah could discern, was what a monk was supposed to be, the truest of the true, and yet his manner could not agree with the increasingly secular ways of the monastery. That the Order should be threatened by the piety of a young monk was something Master Jojonah could not come to terms with.
And yet, the master was too tired, too wrapped up in a sense of loss, both for Siherton and Avelyn -- and for himself -- to try to make some peace within the monastery. Markwart had become almost feverish in his desire to see Avelyn and, more particularly, the sacred stones, brought back, and the Father Abbot's word was sacrosanct.
The crack of the crop brought Jojonah's attention back to the scene at hand. He hail never held any love for brutish Quintall, but still he pitied the man. The conditioning ranged from sleep deprivation to long periods of hunger. Quintall's strength, both physical and mental, would be torn away piece by piece and then brought back under the guidance and control of the training masters. The man would be reduced to an instrument of destruction, Avelyn's destruction. Quintall's every thought would be focused on that singular purpose; Avelyn Desbris would become the source of all his ills, the most-hated threat to St.- Mere-Abelle.
Jojonah shuddered and walked away, trying hard not to picture the scene when Quintall finally caught up to Avelyn.
The cave seemed a gigantic caricature of a king's throne room. A huge dais, three steps up; centered the back wall, sporting a single obsidian throne that two large men could sit in together without touching each other. Twin rows of massive columns, each carved into the likeness of a giant warrior, lined the room. Like the throne, they were formed of obsidian, with graceful but somehow discordant lines swirling about them like the fibers of interlocking muscles. The floor and walls were clear of the black rock, showing the normal dullish gray of Aida's stone, and the single set of doors was made of bronze.
No torches burned within, the room's light coming from either side of the great dais where a continual flow of lava issued from the back corner of the wall and descended through holes in the floor, diving down into the tunnels of Aida, then reaching out along the mountain's black arms, engulfing more and, more of the Barbacan.
Small indeed did Ubba Banrock and Ulg Tik'narn, powrie chieftains from the distant Julianthes, and Gothra, the goblin king, seem in that tremendous room. Even Maiyer Dek of the fomorian giants felt small and insignificant, eyeing the statue-columns as if they would come alive and surround him, dwarfing his sixteen-foot height. And Maiyer Dek, among the largest of his giant kind, was not accustomed to being dwarfed.
Still, even if all twenty of the columns, and a dozen more besides, surrounded the giant, it would not have been more imposing than the single creature reclining on the throne. All four of the dactyl's guests felt that imposing weight keenly. They were each among the most powerful of their respective races, leaders of armies that numbered in the hundreds for the giant, in the thousands for each of the powries, and in the tens of thousands for the goblin. They were the darkness of Corona, the bringers of misery, and yet, they seemed pitiful, groveling things before the great dactyl, mere shadows of this infinitely darker being.
Goblins and giants often aligned, but both races traditionally hated the powries almost as much as they hated the humans.
Except on those occasions when the dactyl was awake. Except at those times when the darker forces bound them together in singular purpose. There could be no struggles for power among the mortal leaders of the various races when the dactyl sat on its obsidian throne.
"We are not four armies," the dactyl roared at them suddenly, and Gothra nearly fell over from the sheer weight of the resonating voice. "Nor three, if the powries consider their respective forces to be allied. We are one army, one force, one purpose!" The demon leaped from its throne and tossed a small item, a fabric patch, gray in color and with the black image of the dactyl sewn in. "Go out and begin the work on these," the demon ordered.
Maiyer Dek was first to inspect the patch. "My warriors are not stitch women," the fomorian leader began, but as soon as the words left Maiyer Dek's mouth, the dactyl leaped down to stand before the giant, and seemed to grow. A feral growl escaped the demon's lips as its hand shot out, slapping the behemoth across the face with enough force to knock Maiyer Dek to the floor. Then the dactyl began a more insidious attack, a mental barrage of images of torture and agony, and Maiyer Dek, the proud and strong leader, the strongest mortal creature in all the Barbacan, whimpered pitifully and squirmed about on the floor, begging for mercy.
"Every soldier in my army shall wear such an emblem," the dactyl decreed. "In my army! And you," the beast said to Maiyer Dek, reaching down and easily lifting the massive giant to its feet. "Bring to me a score and four of your finest warriors to serve as my house guard."
And so the meetings went, through the days. The demon dactyl had been awake for several years, watching, feeling every slaughter of humans in the Wilderlands, tasting the blood of every corpse into which a powrie dipped its infamous cap, hearing the screams of sailors and passengers as each scuttled ship went under the swells of the merciless Mirianic. The darkness had grown; the humans had become ever weaker. Now the creature saw the time to organize its forces fully; to begin its unified attacks.
Terranen Dinoniel was dust in the earth; the dactyl meant to win this time.
To the twenty-four giants Maiyer Dek brought in, the dactyl presented suits of armor, demon-forged in the twin lava flows of the throne room, full plated, thick and strong. And the dactyl made even finer protection for its four chieftains, great magical bracers, studded with spikes, that would protect the wearer from the blows of any weapon. Among the three evil races, none had earned any reputation of loyalty or honor, but now, with the bracers, the dactyl could hold faith that its four chosen generals would survive the not unexpected treachery of their underlings.
And those ranks were considerable indeed. Outside the cave, on the tree- covered slopes of Aida, thousands of goblins, powries, and giants milled about their respective camps, glancing up the southern face to the gaping hole that marked the main entrance to the demon's lair. All three camps were between the mountain's newest "arms," two black streaks of cooling lava, red-tipped as the stuff continued its slow roll from the bowels of the mountain, reaching out, southeast and southwest, as if they were extensions of the demon's own reach. There was no sign of tree or brush within those black lines; all life had been snuffed out beneath the darkness, burned away by the fires, and covered by the cooling lava. Even those creatures closest to the center of the area between the arms felt the residual heat, and on that shimmering air was brought the tingles of promised power, the itchy anxiety to go out and kill.
All for the dactyl.
"What is your name?"
"Quintall."
The man groaned as the whip struck him again, tearing a red line across his back.
"Your name?"
"Quintall!"
The whip cracked.
"You are not Quintall!" De'Unnero screamed in his face. "What is your name?"
"Quin --" He hadn't even gotten the word out before the whip, handled expertly by the tenth-year immaculate, ripped all sounds from his body.
Up on the balcony, unseen by the victim and his pair of torturers, Master Jojonah sighed and shook his head. This man was tough, admirably so, and Jojonah feared he would die from the beatings before he would relinquish his identity.
"Fear not," came a voice behind him, that of Father Abbot Markwart, "The treatises do not lie. The technique is proven."
Jojonah didn't really doubt that -- he just wondered why in the name of God such a technique had ever been developed!
"Desperation breeds dark work," the Father Abbot remarked, coming to Jojonah's side just as the whip cracked again. "I find this as distasteful as do you, but what are we to do? Master Siherton's body confirms our fears. We know the tricks Avelyn used to escape, and his cache of magic stones is considerable. Are we to allow him to run free to the detriment, perhaps even the downfall, of our Order?"
"Of course not, Father Abbot," Master Jojonah replied.
"No living monk in St.-Mere-Abelle knows Avelyn Desbris better than Quintall," Father Abbot Markwart continued. "He is the perfect choice."
As executioner, Jojonah thought.
"As the retriever of what is rightfully ours," the Father Abbot said, reading Jojonah's thoughts so clearly that the master turned to regard him closely, Jojonah honestly wondering if Markwart was using some magic to peek into his mind.
"Quintall will serve as an extension of the church, an instrument of our justice," Father Abbot Markwart said grimly, more determination in his normally quivering old voice than Jojonah had ever heard before. The master understood the man's desperation, despite the fact that Avelyn's crimes and subsequent desertion were not without precedent. Nor did the stolen stones present any real danger to the Abellican Order; Jojonah knew that twice the number Avelyn had taken were sold at fairly regular auctions, that the powers of those stones possessed by merchants and noblemen far outweighed the cache Avelyn held. The only concern any in St.-Mere-Abelle's hierarchy held about the stolen stones was for the giant amethyst crystal, and that only because it was a stone whose magic they had not yet deciphered. So foolish Avelyn wasn't really any serious threat to the abbey or to the Order. But that wasn't the point, wasn't the source of the Father Abbot's desperation. Markwart would be dead soon, taken by that greatest enemy: time. And he did not desire to leave behind any legacy of failure=including the existence of the renegade Avelyn.
"We will put him on Avelyn's trail very soon," the Father Abbot remarked.
"Unless he continues to resist," Master Jojonah dared to say.
Markwart issued a coughing laugh. "The techniques are proven: the lack of sleep, of food, the rewards and punishments exerted by the eager young masters. Quintall's concepts of right and wrong, of duty and punishment, have been systematically replaced by the tenets given him at times of reward. He is a creature of singular purpose. Pity him, but pity Avelyn Desbris even more." With that, Markwart walked away.
Jojonah watched him go, shuddering at the sheer coldness of the man's aura. His attention was caught by yet another crack of the whip.
"What is your name?" De'Unnero demanded.
"Quin . . . "
The man hesitated; even from the balcony, Master Jojonah sensed they were near a breakthrough.
De'Unnero started to prompt the tortured man again, but he stopped, and Jojonah recognized that the young master had seen a change in Quintall's demeanor, a strange light in the man's eyes, perhaps. Jojonah leaned over the rail, listening to every inflection, every whisper.
"Brother Justice," the battered man replied.
Master Jojonah settled back on his heels. He still wasn't wholly convinced that he agreed with the technique -- or the purpose -- of Quintall's training, but he had to admit that it seemed effective.