First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera 6)

Isana braced herself and opened up her watercrafter's senses to the emotions of those around her.

They came at her in a mind-searing burst of intensity. Emotions were high among the enemy, and intensely unpleasant to experience. Isana fought to sort out the various impressions, but it was like trying to listen to individual voices within a large chorus. A few high notes stuck out, but by and large they blended into a single whole.

The most intense sensations came from the two men holding her arms - and the primary emotion she felt in them was... confusion. They proceeded in a state of bewilderment and misery so acute that for a few seconds Isana could not distinguish her own emotions from theirs. Years of living with her gift had given her an ability to distinguish the subtle weave and flow of emotions, to make reasonably educated guesses at the thoughts that accompanied them.

The men knew that something was badly wrong, but they couldn't focus on what it might be. Every time they tried, waves of imposed sensation and emotion swept over the thought and washed it away. The only time anything solid held was when Isana heard an inhuman shriek drift up from somewhere ahead of them. Both men immediately concentrated with a ferocious intensity, their emotions perfectly synchronized, and Isana felt one of them rise slightly, the other sink, and guessed that they had just been ordered to bank into a long turn, changing their course in the air.

Isana shivered. They were most likely collared slaves, then, forcibly converted to the service of the vord through the use of slaver's collars. Once she'd determined that, she was able to feel more from the two men - their hearts overflowed with sadness. Though their minds had been rendered incapable of reason, on some level they must have known what had been done to them. They knew that their skills and power had been turned against their own people by an enemy, even if they could not consciously assemble the disparate pieces of the concept. They knew that they used to be something more but could not remember what it was, and that denial, that inability to reason, caused them enormous emotional pain.

Isana felt herself begin to weep for them. Kalarus Brencis Minoris had collared these men. Only he could free them - and he had been dead for more than half a year. They could never be freed, never be restored, never be made whole.

She made them a silent promise that she would do everything in her power to ensure that neither would live as a slave. Even if she had to kill them with her own hands.

As she pressed her awareness out past her two captors, she sensed other men. Not all of them were as badly disoriented as her escorts. Those who retained a greater capacity for reason harbored their own eidolon of raw terror. Fear so intense and so savage that it was practically a living thing had been forced into their thoughts, and it ruled their decisions utterly, like a watchdog placed within each of their minds. Some of them had lesser degrees of terror - and those men's emotions made Isana shudder with revulsion. In them, the darker portions of human nature, a lust for violence and blood and power, had been encouraged to grow and had overrun their thoughts like rampant weeds devouring a garden. Those men were nothing less than mortal monsters, terrors held on a psychic leash.

And there was...

Isana hesitated over this last sensation, because it was so faint, and came to her as a trembling vibration that she could barely be sure was real. She could feel the presence of... an innocent heart, one that felt emotions with the purity and depth and passion of a young child.

Then another shriek floated to her, and that sense of the child abruptly sharpened - and beneath the simple surface lurked alien currents of feeling, so strange and varied that Isana found herself wholly unable to tell one from the next, much less fit an accurate name or description to the emotion. They were cold things. Dry things. As they pressed against her, Isana was reminded of the rippling legs of a centipede that had once slithered up her calf.

She realized, with revulsion, that the being she sensed was the vord Queen.

Her two escorts began to descend, and her ears popped several times under the changing pressure.

Wherever her captors were taking her, it had not taken them long - and it seemed that they had arrived.

They landed roughly, and Isana would have fallen without the support of both guards. She was propelled forward, being dragged every few steps, and she stumbled upon a slight rise in the ground, as if their path had taken them over a flat stone a few inches high.

But instead of stony earth beneath her feet, the ground gave slightly with a kind of rubbery tension. Isana forced herself to keep breathing slowly and steadily.

She was walking on the vord's croach.

None of her captors spoke, and the surface beneath their feet deadened their footfalls to silence. Eerie sounds drifted in the air around her, muffled by the hood. Clicks. Chitters. Once, there was an ululating call that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Very faintly, she could hear booming reports, like distant thunder. She swallowed. Somewhere far away, Alera's firecrafters had begun their work, filling the skies with their furies.

The ground suddenly sloped down, and a rough hand pushed her head forward, her chin to her chest. She bumped her head against what felt like a rocky outcropping in any case, and it stung momentarily. Then the sounds all faded to silence, and the noise of her captors' breathing changed subtly. They must have brought her inside or underground.

One of her guards pushed her roughly to her knees. A moment later, he removed the hood, and Isana blinked her eyes against the sudden invasion of soft green light.

They were in a cavern, a large one, its walls too smooth to have been formed by nature. The walls, the floor, and a pair of supporting pillars were all covered in the croach. The waxy green substance pulsed and flowed with unsettling light. Liquids flowed beneath its surface.

Isana craned her neck, trying to find Araris, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs.

A second pair of guards dragged him into Isana's line of view. They jerked the hood from his head and dropped him in a heap to the cavern floor. Isana could see that he'd suffered a number of abrasions and contusions, and she felt a physical burst of pain in her heart to see the bruises, the blood - but he had sustained no obvious critical trauma. He was breathing, but that was no guarantee of his safety. He could be bleeding to death internally even as she stared at him.

She never made a conscious decision, but she found herself suddenly straining against her captors, trying to go to Araris. They pushed her brutally to the floor. Her cheekbone dimpled the croach.

It was humiliating, how casually, how easily they had taken away her choice. She felt a blaze of anger, suffered a sudden urge to respond in earnest through Rill. She fought the impulse down. She was in no position to resist their strength. Until she had a better chance - until she and Araris had a better chance - to succeed in escaping, it would be wisest not to resist. "Please!" she said. "Please, let me see to him!"