Ten Arrows

Chapter 11

Lances of light stabbed through my eye sockets and pierced my skull, producing a feeling of nausea and a buzzing agony that seemed to begin at the base of my neck and spread out to absolutely everywhere in the world.

I dimly realized that opening my eyes had been a horrible, horrible mistake. I shut them tightly and resolved to avoid opening them again for as long as possible.

My thoughts were so sluggish, it felt as though each was wading through an ocean of winter treacle just to get to my brain. For a long while I did absolutely nothing but lay there, feeling myself breathe, occasionally wondering how it was I could take a breath without actually focusing on the task. As an experiment, I willed myself to take a deeper breath, which resulted in a tiny cough.

It was a disaster. The cough was enough to disrupt the steady rhythm of my breathing, but worse than that, it made me twist my neck slightly and once more try to open my eyes. In addition to the familiar twin lances of pain, it suddenly felt as if my head had fallen off of my neck and been rolled into a fire pit. My sides were sore, like I'd been kicked several times.

Kicked? Feet . . . you 'kicked' with your feet. I could dimly recall what feet were. My sides . . . ribs, maybe broken. I remembered what those were, too. Ribs, feet, arms, body, hands . . . it all came flooding back to me in a rush of understanding.

I remembered who I was. To celebrate, I made a soft moaning noise.

"Finally awake, are we?" a voice asked.

Hey, I knew what those were. Those were words. People used them to talk to each other, didn't they?

That particular discovery seemed to be key, and shortly after that the whole of reality snapped back into place. I acquainted myself with two very important facts.

First fact - it appeared I'd been kidnapped. That seemed fairly important, and I resolved to remember it.

Second fact - I'd been knocked unconscious. I could dimly recall that I really, really hated getting knocked unconscious.

There was a tight soreness at the base of my neck, which meant I'd probably been clubbed there, which in turn made me angry. It usually isn't necessary to hit someone at the base of the skull when knocking them out, but what's more, it can be downright dangerous. There wasn't a big difference between the amount of force required to knock someone out and the amount of force required to kill them. I might very well have not woken up at all.

Despite their objections, I forced my eyes to stay open. The painfully blinding light was coming from a dim, feebly burning torch located on a wall some fifteen feet away from me. There were some bars between me and it, I saw. Familiar bars.

Groaning, I rolled to one side and fought to right myself. My head felt as though an angry badger was burrowing out of it.

"Do you always sleep in this late?" I heard Borshank's voice ask from somewhere. It sounded amused. That pissed me off a little, which in turn made me want to piss him off a little.

Despite being groggy and injured, it probably wouldn't be hard.

"Gods, what in the world did I have to drink last night?" I croaked, sitting up and rubbing my temples. I could make out a smiling, somewhat blurry Preceptor Borshank sitting on a chair by the wall that held the torch, backlit dramatically so that he was little more than a silhouette. The torch at the other side of my cell wasn't lit, shrouding that half of the room in darkness, which I thought was a bit odd. Maybe he'd spent some time fussing with the lighting for maximum dramatic impact.

He smiled at me and chuckled a bit, but said nothing.

I sat there and stared at him, saying nothing as well, patiently waiting until it looked like he was about to open his mouth to speak.