Balthasar

O n the other side of the paper wall, Floria did her morning exercises, while Balthasar read the proceedings of the latest Intercalatory Council meeting and tried not to doze off. He was still weary with the aftereffects of Floria’s stimulant and two days caring for Tercelle’s abandoned twins. Sighted or not, they had the same imperious helplessness of any newborn, and as briefly as they had been in his life, they left a hollow in his heart with their going. Now he listened for the sound of a carriage and the excited chatter of two little girls, knowing that if he did not hear it soon, he would not be hearing it tonight. Telmaine would not bring the children out so near to the sunrise bell.

When the doorbell rang, he was on his feet before he realized it could not be Telmaine; she had her keys. Fleetingly, he was tempted not to answer it, but then carefully laid the papers aside and went downstairs. He had no more than unlatched it when the handle twisted under his hand and the door was hurled open by a man’s greater strength, throwing him back against the hall table. An ornament brushed his leg in falling and smashed beside his foot. By then, the two men were in the hall, the larger pinning him against the wall. “Where are the brats?”

He cast sonn, gaining a blurred impression of a stranger with a thick neck, square features, damaged ears, before a fist drove into his lower belly, doubling him over. “None of that,” his assailant ordered.

He hung in the man’s hands, retching, shocked into paralysis by the violence that had come without forerunning threat or warning.

The second man spoke, his assumed Rivermarch accent not quite masking the distinct aristocratic tones that Bal loved to hear from his wife. “Get him inside. We don’t want to be sonned from the street.”

He tried to draw breath to call for help, but could manage no more than a half cry before the heavy door slammed. He heard broken porcelain crunch under heavy feet.

“Now, Dr. Balthasar Hearne, this can go easy with you, or it can go hard. Where are Tercelle Amberley’s infants?”

He straightened up, struggling against fear more than against pain, because he knew that to defy them would be to invite more violence. “I do not know what you mean,” he said, his voice shaking.

He heard the creak of a heavy jacket, and his sonn burst out involuntarily to catch the man who held him drawing back his fist and the other reaching out to stay his hand. “Not yet,” said the aristocrat. “Not quite yet. We will search the house, and perhaps we will find what we need, or perhaps we will find something that proves to the good doctor that he cannot lie to us. Hood him.”

They jammed a hood over his head, muffling sonn and disorienting him. They lugged him from hall to receiving room to kitchen, thrusting him face-first against the wall while they investigated cupboards, drawers, and cubbies, anywhere that might conceal a newborn child. They found the crib pushed back into the cupboard beneath the stairs, but Bal had drizzled dust from the unemptied dustpan over and around it, craftily enough to deceive Telmaine, never mind these two. They were rough in their search, but not wanton, and that gave him a modicum of hope that they would treat him no worse than they did his household. Perhaps they might yet be persuaded that he knew nothing, that their information was tenuous.

The search ended, as he hoped it would, in the study. There was no sound from behind the paper wall, but keen-eared Floria would surely have heard the incursion into his home. He heard the aristocrat’s footsteps move over to the wall and linger, as though he were examining it, and then return to Bal. “As I said, this can go easy on you, or it can go hard.”

“I have no idea who you—” Bal said.

“Very hard,” said the aristocrat.

The first man drove a fist into Bal’s back, above his kidney, and he thudded to hands and knees. The pain and the need to breathe consumed him for an interminable length of time. He fought not to call out Floria’s name, not to plead for her aid. If she could do something from behind that wall that could not be breached, she would.

“Again,” said the man above him, he did not know which of them, but in answer a boot plowed into the front of his ribs, and he found himself lying on the floor without a recollection of having fallen, clawing at the boards in his struggle for air.

“Just tell us where Tercelle Amberley’s bastards are,” said the man, his true tones more marked in command.

Balthasar curled up, his one feeble strategy to protect himself. He heard heavy feet moving around him. “Not about the head,” the man with the cultured voice said. His voice came closer as he crouched. “Tercelle Amberley gave birth to twin boys here. You had the disposing of them. Where did you send them? Did that sister of yours take them?”

“I haven’t . . . met T-Tercelle for . . . years,” Bal said, his voice a thread.

“Again,” said the interrogator. The kick jarred his whole body; ribs cracked and breath went out of him in a strangled scream. “He,” the speaker said, “could break your spine with one move. You’d end your days a cripple.”

“I . . . don’t . . . know,” Bal gasped.

“Then we’ll wait for your pretty wife and daughters.”

His body answered for him. He started to drag himself up, rising from hands and knees, before his torturer planted another kick in his abdomen, leaving him once more in a retching huddle.

“There,” the aristocrat commanded, directing the toe driven again into his rib cage, the heel brought down on his hands and wrists and ankles, each blow well spaced to allow for the question, “Where are they?” until his, “No, no, no,” was sobbed through his teeth, more plea for cessation than refusal. They did not stop to discern the difference; they battered him until, beyond speech, he writhed like a crushed worm against the base of the paper wall.

“Stop,” said the aristocrat. He felt the hood jerk from his head, and sonn lash his face. “He said this one was soft.”

“He’s faking.”

“He’s not—Who’s that?” There came a small sound, neither thump nor slash, overhead.

Floria’s voice said distinctly, “The White Hand.” It was her mortal challenge, her last declaration to the men and women she killed. The aristocrat stooping over him shrieked. One of them kicked him again, but it was a glancing blow, and there came a second cry, higher and hoarser. “. . . shoot and we’ll burn . . .” “We’re burning anyway—” “Stop! Stop, Lightborn! You’re killing us.” He heard them scrambling away from him, and felt the fever of sunrise on his skin. He felt her spring over him to harry them out the door in pitiless, miraculous pursuit. He struggled to raise his head, to make the last thing he sonned be her, but he was too weak to do more than roll it, and his sonn was a whisper. He heard her say from beside him as he lay against the paper wall, “Bal, Bal, please talk to me!” Burning, he thought, was not so terrible after all.