The next three days, Jaluth seemed quite busy. Bishop saw no reason to complain, as that meant he saw very little of her. His meals were brought by varying guards, and besides those small diversions, all that was left for him to do was to contemplate Jaluth's words – and the implication of the scene she had shown him.
He kept taxing his brain, trying to drag at least some shreds of memory out of the darkness that shrouded the time after Garius' Geas had set in, but it was of no use. The wall seemed impenetrable. Trying to break through constantly - and ineffectively - threatened to drive him mad. Bishop even caught himself wishing Jaluth might return, to show him another glimpse, or at least give him something else to think about.
His wish was granted the evening of the third day, when she entered the room, her usual poisonous smile on her face, and an air of purpose around her that immediately set Bishop on alert.
"Missed me, little one?", she asked sweetly.
He leaned against the back wall of the cage, outwardly as unconcerned as he could manage while fear crept up in him.
"Sure", he drawled. "Like I would miss a sore tooth."
She chuckled, but continued: "You know, I've been thinking. It's such an inconvenience to have to keep you in that cage all the time. Plus, if you just sit in there, it would not be good for that tempting body of yours. Can't have you grow fat, you know? So I've got a treat in store for you."
She snapped her fingers, and six guards entered the room.
"Get him out", she ordered, and the magical humming of the bars stopped, as she snapped her fingers again.
The guards moved to the door of the cage, and Bishop felt panic rise in him. What was she planning? What had she been up to those last days?
"Stay away from me", he snarled as the guards opened the door, clenching his fists in a mixture of fear and rage.
But if the guards feared him, they feared their mistress even more. There was not a moment of hesitation as they entered the cage. Bishop snarled again and threw a punch at the face of the first one, sending him staggering back, dazed, but the others just continued to advance, seemingly unimpressed.
Bishop spit and fought, with fists and feet, but in the end, with two guards holding on tightly to each arm, he was dragged out of the cage, panting and sweating, bruises on his face and probably a few on his body as well, too exhausted to keep fighting.
He drew some satisfaction from the fact that the guards were panting as well, more than one eye swollen shut and a few lips split from his punches. But that satisfaction was short lived when Jaluth stepped up, smiling, a hungry glint in her eyes.
Once more, Bishop tried to break free of the hold of the guards, but he was tired, and they were six.
"Now, hold him still", Jaluth commanded.
"What", Bishop wheezed, still short of breath, "no magic left to subdue me? Have to resort to those clowns?"
Jaluth smiled, reached out and picked up a drop of blood that was seeping from a cut on his cheek with her finger. Daintily, she licked it off, and her smile broadened. "Don't you worry, little one", she purred. "I will always have enough magic left to deal with you. But I just love to watch you struggle."
She giggled as he glared at her, then grew serious abruptly.
"Hold out his arm, palm up", she coldly ordered one of the free guards, turned and picked up a small golden bowl and a golden dagger from one of the tables.
The guard obeyed without hesitation, grabbed Bishop's wrist, turned his arm so that the underside faced upwards, and held it fast.
"What the...", Bishop yelled, and tried to yank his arm away once more. "Let go, you son of a bitch! Let go, or I'll rip your balls off!" He kept struggling against the combined grip of five of the guards, panic lending him unexpected strength as the guards had to fight to keep their grip on him.
He bucked and kicked and cursed, until a body pressed into his, and Jaluth's voice whispered into his ear, the sweet tone scantily concealing the threat in her words.
"Bishop", she said, "I said I love to see you struggle, but that's quite enough. Keep still now, and I promise I won't hurt you much. If you continue like that, I can guarantee no such thing. But you know me, to me, that will only add a bit of spice."
Bishop froze, and Jaluth stepped back. "Now hold out his arm", she repeated.
This time, Bishop kept still as she put the ornate dagger to the tender inside of his arm. Fear was gnawing at his insides, but he knew that he could not stop her right now, and he could not afford to get seriously hurt. Not if he was waiting for an opportunity to escape. Sooner or later, she would make a mistake. And then he would be ready. But for that, he had to be healthy and preserve his strength.
"Good boy", she murmured, the mocking tone of her voice making him want to wring her neck. He clenched his teeth, but managed to keep silent. She chuckled at his helpless rage, and slowly traced the line of his vein with the tip of the dagger, obviously enjoying herself very much.
Bishop forced himself to relax, knowing he only added to her amusement if he let her see his fury. "Well then, get it over with, will you?", he said with a cold indifference he was far from feeling. "Or do you want me to fall asleep from sheer boredom?"
She laughed. "Oh Bishop", she said, "it will be so much fun to break your spirit." With those words, she sliced deeply into his vein. Bishop could not help to flinch slightly at the sudden pain, then watched helplessly as his blood welled up and splashed into the small golden bowl Jaluth held under the cut.
Bishop realized that this was no ordinary bowl, but that the insides were covered with ornate runes, now being concealed bit by bit as more of his blood collected, starting to fill up the bowl.
Seeing the bowl, Bishop's stomach clenched as his fear rose up some notches. Obviously, she needed his blood for some obscure arcane procedure, and this was not simply one more game, not just another torture. He felt his palms grow moist. After what little he had picked up from Sand about magic, using blood was always a very powerful could not be good, that much was certain.
"That should be enough", Jaluth said, satisfied. She dropped the dagger, murmured a couple of words and traced the heavily bleeding cut with her finger, effectively sealing it. Bishop stared at his arm, where no trace of the injury was left behind.
Jaluth took a couple of steps back and put the bowl down on the table, with a look of deep satisfaction on her face.
"See?", she said. "I promised I would not hurt you much if you were a good boy. Now, put him back into the cage", she ordered the guards.
Bishop's gaze stayed on the bowl as he was dragged back to the cage, too exhausted from the previous struggle and the blood loss to put up a fight. The thought of trying to get to the bowl, to spill his contents, shot through his mind, but he dismissed it. After all, if she wanted his blood, she could always get more, couldn't she? And if she had to, she would bleed him dry. He had no doubts about that.
As soon as the door of the cage fell shut, the magic humming was back. Bishop sat down against the back of the wall, trying his best to make it look nonchalant instead of exhausted, while Jaluth dismissed her guards with a flick of her head.
"Now what?", he sneered, keeping up the brave facade.
"Now", she smiled as she opened a box, made from gleaming and highly polished wood, and took out what looked like a piece of red chalk, "I will show you the surprise I promised you."
Bishop watched as Jaluth used the red chalk to draw lines on the floor, her movements fluid and firm. It was obvious she knew very well what she was doing. His uneasiness grew while the shape on the floor took form, turned into a heptagram surrounding a double circle, the space between the inner and outer circle covered by intricate runes.
Again and again his gaze was drawn to the small golden bowl, sitting on the table not three yards away from him. So close, yet completely out of his reach. What was she planning? What was she about to do?
Jaluth took a step back from her work and regarded it critically, her eyes narrowed as they followed the lines, searching for mistakes. Now and then, she muttered something unintelligible under her breath and crouched to correct a line, or to wipe away a rune and re-draw it. After a while, she smiled, obviously satisfied, and turned to pull a plain wooden chest out from under the table holding the bowl with Bishop's blood.
She opened the chest and took out seven thick, blood red candles, all of them already well burned. She looked at them for a moment, calculatingly, then went back to the heptagram to place one of them at each point of the pattern. A softly whispered word, and the candles flickered on, then burned with a steady flame.
Bishop's hands balled into fists, impotent anger battling with ice-cold fear in his stomach when, with a poisonous smile around her mouth and not a glance in his direction, Jaluth took the bowl from the table, and a long-handled brush from the chest, and cautiously stepped into the center of the pattern, careful not to disturb the lines she had drawn.
She crouched and started chanting a strange, alien sounding litany in a harsh language Bishop could not begin to understand. Dipping the brush into the bowl holding his blood, she let a thick drop fall on each of the runes she had drawn between the circles, in no order Bishop could determine. One after one, the runes started glowing an eerie red.
The nagging fear in Bishop's stomach continued to grow while he watched. Still chanting her litany, Jaluth's voice gained in volume, and the candles started to flicker, the flames whipped about as if by a strong wind.
Dipping the brush into the bowl again and again, Jaluth traced certain lines of the pattern, seemingly closing gaps and connecting the runes with one long, curvy line. Bishop slowly grew aware of a strange tingling in his toes and fingertips that soon started to spread upwards through his hands and feet to reach his arms and legs, growing from a tingling sensation to a tugging, that soon turned into a wrenching, tearing feeling, accompanied by a strange weakness that left his limbs trembling. Cold sweat broke out on his face.
"Stop that!", he croaked, his voice not strong enough to yell. "What are you doing to me, bitch?"
But Jaluth did not even look up from her work. She continued chanting, and completing the pattern with quick, sure brush strokes from his blood, the smile gone from her face and replaced by an expression of strain and utter concentration, a sheen of sweat making her skin glint in the wildly flickering light of the candles.
Bishop started to get up, to hurl himself against the bars of the cage, to shout at her, rattle the bars, whatever he could do to make her stop, to break her concentration, but his limbs would not support him any more. He ended up falling to his side, only able to curl up into himself to ease the violent trembling of his body a bit.
The wrenching feeling spread through his entire body now, making it increasingly hard to breathe, and he gasped for air desperately, the feeling of suffocating increasing his panic even more. His heart hammered in his chest, which felt as if an iron band around it drew tighter every second, until it seemed his wildly beating heart would be crushed from the sheer pressure. He wanted to cry out with pain, but could do no more than moan weakly, seemingly no breath left in his lungs.
The thought that this was it, the end, that he was dying now, here, this moment, caged by the woman he hated most in this world, which for him was saying much, flashed through his mind, and suddenly, out of the blue, he wondered if that would be such a bad thing. If he died, it would all be over. Everything. His pain, his fears, the vast emptiness that was his life, he would all leave it behind.
Most of all, he would leave Jaluth behind. Would be free of her, and her torture. Maybe death was the only way to escape her after all.
He rolled to his back, trying to relax as much as possible while his body shook with pain and exhaustion, and fear battled with resignation in his chest, and stared at the ceiling. She was killing him. Soon, it would all be over.
He thought back to his life. His childhood in the Mere, his years in Luskan. The years afterwards, always on the run. The time he had spent with the circus troupe the Captain had assembled, and the time afterwards, on the run again. In hindsight, it had all been a succession of pain, of betrayal, of flight, of struggle. All his life, he had fought like a cornered rat to stay alive, to hold on to this miserable existence.. And he had never been picky about the means he employed to do so. A survivor, he had been called. Although sometimes, he could not help wondering why he struggled so much.
But now, the decision taken out of his hands, no options left, no way to fight... it was a strangely peaceful feeling. Liberating, in a way. There was no use in struggling anymore, nothing he could do, besides lying here and letting it happen.
In that moment, Jaluth's voice reached a crescendo, and the flickering candles flared for a moment before they went out. The wrenching in his body and the pressure in his chest vanished in an instant, and Bishop sat up, coughing, feeling an odd mixture of relief and regret that obviously, he was not going to die after all.
That he would still be at Jaluth's mercy.
Seems like I'm not going to escape so easily after all. Well, since when has it been the easy route for me?
He lifted his head with effort and glanced at Jaluth, who was still sitting in the middle of the pattern, which looked like it had been burned into the wood of the floor sometime during the ritual. She was crouching, her weight leaning heavily on her trembling arms, her head down, her hair loose from her usual intricate coiffure, with wet strands clinging to her sweaty neck.
"What have you done to me?", Bishop croaked, his throat tight with weariness, the remnants of the pain, and freshly rising fear. The near-peaceful feeling of resignation just a few moments ago seemed like a distant dream already, now that it was clear that he would have to live.
She looked up at him, her face white from exhaustion, shiny with sweat, dark smudges under her eyes, but her usual poisonous smile in place.
"Why, I have bound you to this place, of course", she said, her voice slightly hoarse from chanting.
Bishop could feel the blood drain from his face as her meaning slowly seeped through the haze in his tired brain.
"You... you did what?", he asked, hoping against hope he might have misunderstood.
Her smile widened while she climbed to her feet with a bit less than her usual grace and went over to the table standing against the wall. She sat down heavily on a chair and poured some water from a jar into a washing bowl.
Bishop gnashed his teeth as he watched her taking her time, wiping her face and neck with a wet cloth, and re-arranging her hair carefully. But he kept quiet, because he knew she was just waiting for him to lose his temper.
In the end, she turned and smiled at him.
"As I told you, my little one, I would not want to keep you in that cage until you grow fat and flabby. On the other hand, I also do not want you to run away again. Chasing after you might be fun for a while, but it sure starts to grow tiresome. So I spent the last couple of days working out this ritual you just witnessed. Basically, it's a binding. You will not be able to leave here. Ever."
If Bishop thought he had hated her up to now, he now realized he had been wrong. The hot wave of murderous fury and black despair that welled up in him gave a whole new meaning to the word hatred. His jaw clenched so much it hurt, he stared at her with burning eyes as she continued talking, and the amused glint in her eyes told him she knew very well what he was feeling right now.
"You will be able to move freely within the house. You will also be able to go outside for a bit. But stray too far, and you will feel the binding pull you back. Ignore it at your own peril. I've bound you with your blood. If you fight against it, you will be hurt, and you will eventually die. Painfully. Personally, I think the pain will drive you back quickly. I would advise you against trying to run, but I'm sure you've got your own mind on that. Do what you like. But remember, you'll only hurt yourself."
With that, she snapped her fingers, and the magical humming of the bars stopped.
Bishop stared at her in disbelief. "You are really going to let me out of this cage? Let me wander about freely?", he asked, and could not prevent an ugly smile from tugging at his lips.
Jaluth shrugged, unconcerned. "Certainly", she replied, waving her hand about in an airy gesture. "Why shouldn't I?"
The smile on Bishop's face widened as the thought of all the reasons why she shouldn't.
She noticed his expression and chuckled. "Oh, but what will you do, little one? Get your fingers on a weapon? You surely will, I don't doubt it. And what will you do with it? Kill my guards? Well, go ahead. I don't care. I can always get more, and honestly, I do not need guards in the first place, except maybe to do some heavy lifting. Or kill me? You're welcome to try, but I don't think you can do it. As you well know, I don't die easily. But on the off-chance you managed – what would you do? You'd still be bound to this place, trapped here for the rest of your life, which would be rather short, since you'd starve soon. I am the only one who can lift the binding, so you'd do good to try and keep me alive." She giggled. "Well, you might kill the cook, or my maid. I admit, that would be an inconvenience. But I'm prepared to take the risk."
She winked at Bishop in a way that made him want to strangle her. His eyes had narrowed, listening to her speech, but he kept his mouth shut, not letting her provoke him into an answer. He also did not move, even though the way outside the cage was free now.
He knew that this might be a good moment for him to attack, since Jaluth was exhausted after the ritual and probably had used up most of her magical energy, but on the other hand he was at the end of his strength as well. And if what she said was true, if he would be able to move freely within the house now, he would wait. Wait until she was at a clear disadvantage, tired, distracted, whatever, while he himself was at his full strength.
Also, he had her other words to consider. Thinking about it made the bile rise in his throat. What if it was true? What if he really would not be able to leave after he got rid of her, if he had to stay here and starve? Was she really the only one who could lift the binding? He needed to think carefully before he acted.
His thoughts were interrupted when Jaluth got up from her chair and stepped to the cage. When the door opened and she entered, he just kept sitting, stubbornly refusing to look up, to acknowledge her presence.
She laughed softly, the sound making him want to smack her face, but he forced himself to keep still, although he could not prevent himself from flinching when her hand touched his hair.
"Here's some reward for a good boy", she said sweetly, and suddenly both her hands touched his temples, and again the room vanished from before his eyes, to be replaced by a quick flurry of images.
There was him, watching the Captain while she was lying, sleeping next to a fire, her red hair open and cascading around her face, cuddled up against a peacefully dozing Karnwyr. Then both of them, sitting at a campfire, talking and laughing animatedly. Himself, in a bed, the Captain in his arms, snuggled up against her back, his face buried in her hair. Their bodies entwined under a starry sky, his face screwed up in ecstasy, while her nails left deep gashes on his back, her head thrown back in a silent scream. And at last, both of them asleep again, naked in each other's arms.
When Jaluth's hands were removed from his face, he was surprised to find the image of the room blurry before his eyes. Then he noticed the tears streaming down his cheeks.
"Dream of that, my little one", Jaluth said, mockingly. "Dream of what you had, and lost. I'll see you in the morning."
With that, she left, but Bishop did not even notice the door falling shut as he wiped the tears from his face, and stared at the wet back of his hand, not understanding where they were coming from.
