The Raven Warrior Read Free Page B

keep ahead of the two golems, running down the shallow steps into the large room.
    Even though night was falling outside, it was filled with light. The roof was a glass dome of fitted pieces, as were the windows of the first room she had been in. Above the dome, the sea crashed and boiled frighteningly.
    Once the domed room had been a small bay, carved from the cliffs above by wave action. But someone, something, had enclosed the bay in glass, smoothed the floor—it was polished gray basalt—and pushed out the encroaching sea. Now it thundered and roared as if in mad frustration at this usurpation of its powers.
    Yes, this was a place of awesome power; she recognized that. Not sea, not land, and she stood there at the moment of not day, not night, not darkness, not light.
    Igrane whimpered with terror.
    Merlin wasn’t interested. He whispered an incantation and a symbol flared into life on the mottled gray floor. It was a Saint Andrew’s cross, an X. It was set in the floor among the remains of sea creatures that lived long ago and left their images pressed into the rock caught in stone. Not dead completely, yet not alive, either.
    “Hurry,” Merlin snapped. “The light is fading! Tie her.”
    She screamed when the golems seized her. They hustled her to the glowing cross-shaped marking in the center of the floor, then tied her arms, fastening them at the wrists to two lines that vanished into the shadows above. Then one of them kicked her legs apart and placed her feet on the glowing X she stood on, so that her body formed another X above that on the floor.
    She tugged and found she couldn’t move her feet. They adhered to the glowing lines beneath.
    She screamed again.
    Behind her, she heard Merlin test the whip. It cracked across the chamber with the sound of snapping wood. Light filled the room and Igrane looked up and around into what seemed a thousand mirrors, all reflecting both of them.
    He was standing behind her, whip in hand. Oddly, she felt relieved. She had been afraid he was going to kill her. But a whipping wouldn’t do that. He had whipped her before and seldom lasted beyond two lashes. By then his desire to see her suffer was at war with his overwhelming need to possess her, and the need to possess her won.
    She felt the surge of power from the symbol she stood on; erotic need consumed her. She was almost ready to beg for the lash.
    She saw in the thousand mirrors around her the movement, snakelike and savage, of the thing in his hand. A second later, it coiled at her loins.
    Her response was a shriek of uncontrolled pain. God, it had never felt like this before.
    She saw a weal leap up a finger’s breadth and width across her buttocks and down to her thigh, the tender part just between her legs. Then, as the agony faded into a more tolerable ache, the wound began to leak blood from its center.
    “No!” she screamed as the next one came coiling around her body above the buttocks at her waist. The tip flicked her nipple and split it like a ripe cherry.
    She watched transfixed with horror as blood from her breast flowed down her belly and thigh, and dripped down on the floor. She didn’t scream again, but fought the ropes that tied her wrists and whatever power that caused her feet to cling to the floor like a madwoman.
    Then she went limp with almost unspeakable relief as she realized he was walking toward her . . . he’d had enough . . . oh, God! A few seconds later, she felt his arms around her waist and his lips on her neck.
    “That was worse,” she whimpered. “Worse than all the other times. Please, please cut me down.”
    “My poor dear,” he whispered in mock sympathy. “Hold yourself in readiness. It’s going to get worse still.”
    But he did release the ropes holding her arms and forced her to the floor, positioning her on top of the X-shaped symbol. The light in the room died, and, above through the glass, she saw the green and churning sea. It was almost nightfall outside, and