Panic nearly swamped her again. She was in the hands of warriors of Trawn, with all their viciousness and cruelty. She was in the hands of perhaps the only people in all of Gleor who would kill her more painfully than Neena might. There was nothing she could do about it. THERE WAS NOTHING SHE COULD DO ABOUT IT!

«Yes, there is something you can do about it,» said a voice from behind her. She gasped, realizing that she must have spoken her thoughts aloud.

The scar-faced nobleman sat cross-legged on the floor of the cave, staring at her. He wore only a short kilt and boots, and carried only a short sword. He held one of the long five-stranded whips of Trawn across his tanned knees. Involuntarily Sanaya's eyes focused on those knees and the man's muscular legs. Then she caught herself and quickly shifted her gaze. The man smiled, and Sanaya shivered as she realized that her little slip had not escaped his notice.

«Would you like to know what can be done about it?» he asked, his smile broadening. It was by no means a friendly or reassuring smile. It was more of an unpleasantly triumphant gloating over a prize.

Sanaya hadn't expected anything else from a warrior of Trawn. Her lips were trembling so badly that she could not speak in reply, but only nodded.

«You can start by telling me who you are,» the warrior said. «You are clearly a woman of high rank in Draad. Yet you are in a most strange place and in an even stranger condition for one such. Who are you, and how did you come to be here?»

Now Sanaya could not even move a muscle, let alone speak coherent words. Behind the panic flickered one faint trace of rational thought. Nothing this man could do to her for keeping silent would be as horrible as he would do if she lied, or admitted who she was.

The warrior grunted and approached her until he could reach down and put a hand under her chin. He lifted it gently until her eyes met his. Then suddenly he tightened his grip so hard that his long dirty nails stabbed through Sanaya's skin into her flesh. She gasped at the sudden pain. Then the warrior drew back his other hand and brought it across Sanaya's face as hard as he could. She gasped again. If her head hadn't been held still, she would have sprawled backward.

The warrior spent a good deal of time working Sanaya over with slaps, punches, kicks, and pinches on any and every part of her body he could reach. She quickly lost track of the individual blows. They all blended together into one long torment that seemed as though it would go on forever.

Much to Sanaya's surprise, it did not. Eventually the warrior stopped and stepped back, leaving her lying on the round. Gradually her mind cleared until she could recognize all her different sensations.

She could not have spoken now if she'd wanted to-her lips were a swollen, ragged, bloody mess. More blood trickled from her aching nose and from where several teeth had been knocked out. Her eyes were swollen and watering so that everything around her seemed to be swimming through a thick bloodshot fog. Her nipples and thighs throbbed and burned where they'd been pinched, her fingers and toes ached where they'd been twisted, and large patches of skin felt as though they'd been burned. She wouldn't have dared to touch most of her own body, even if her hands had been free.

Yet somehow she did not feel as totally wretched as she'd expected. Other sensations were lurking behind the pain and exhaustion, like the hunters of the mountain clans lurking in the forest. She could not easily put a name to these other feelings. She could make a comparison that somehow made them comprehensible. She felt as she did with a lover, as his hands moved over her skin and cupped her breasts, and his lips pressed warmly against hers. She could almost imagine that Blade was here now, arousing her, and she closed her eyes to see if that would make the image more vivid.

Before she could find out, the warrior cursed. Then he grabbed her by the hair and jerked her to her feet. She opened her eyes to see that he was dragging her toward a tall, heavy wooden stake driven into the floor of the cave.

The warrior tied her ankles tightly to the stake. Then he pulled both her arms high up over her head, and tied her wrists to the stake. From chin to knees she was pressed hard against the rough wood, unable to writhe or twist, barely able to breathe. She had to stand nearly on tiptoe to keep her arms and wrists from being pulled out of joint, and wondered how long she would be able to hold that position. Her weary legs and ankles already throbbed and ached enough.

The warrior picked up the whip and stepped to one side, where she could easily see him. Then he swung the whip several times at the empty air, flicking his wrist each time so that the tips of all five strands cracked like snapping branches. Sanaya could not take her eyes off the whip and the arm that was wielding it, which was no doubt exactly what the warrior intended. It was the vicious torture whip of Trawn, and the arm wielding it was thick and knotted with muscle. Once the warrior started in on her, he could doubtless go on for hours. If Sanaya's stomach hadn't been totally empty, she would have vomited at the prospect. At the same time she felt a faint curiosity to feel the whip on her flesh. The strange feeling that a lover was at work arousing her was still there, and the combination would be-well, oddly interesting, as well as horribly painful.

«Now are you interested in telling me who you are?» said the warrior. He seemed indifferent to whether she answered or not. She suspected he would be quite happy to have an excuse to go to work with his whip.

A moment later she knew she was right. A broad grin spread across the warrior's face, and his arm stretched out. The grin broadened as the whip lashed back, then forward. The whip came down across the small of Sanaya's back, and she never saw what happened to the grin after that. The world around her vanished as pain exploded up from where the whip fell, into her brain and out to every part of her body. She screamed. Before she finished screaming the whip came down again, this time across the backs of her thighs.

Five, ten, fifteen times the whip struck, each time a little bit harder, each time in a more sensitive spot. The pain was passing onward into something which Sanaya's reeling mind could find-no words to describe. Each time she told herself that she could stand no more, that the next stroke would kill her. Yet the next stroke always came, and she always found herself alive.

She might have died or fainted eventually, except that before long she was feeling more than pain. The feeling that a lover was at work on her came again, more vividly. Now it was no longer just tongue and lips and hands that she could imagine. Now it was a swollen, rigid, thrusting maleness driving deep into her, forcing her desire to a higher and higher pitch, making her more and more of an animal. The pain of the whip remained. But now each time it fell there was more than pain. There seemed to be a long thrust by her phantom lover, driving deep into her, withdrawing slowly, tantalizing her, torturing her in a way that was almost more agonizing than the whip.

Her lips began to move, and incoherent sounds that were not at all human came from her throat. She drove her groin and breasts against the stake, feeling more pain as tender flesh met bard rough wood. Yet she also felt as if her lover's own passion and his own vigor were steadily increasing.

All her pain and all her pleasure combined to fog both her eyes and her mind until she could no longer see anything or make any sense of what she felt. She was hardly aware of coming to her climax, writhing and shrieking and howling so loudly that all the men on guard outside leaped up and grabbed weapons, thinking that the camp was being attacked. She was even less aware of the warrior cutting her down, stripping off his kilt, and taking her furiously as she writhed on the floor. She fainted completely before she could see the warrior's face above her. That face was twisted by the release of a terrible passion, but also by a cold and calculating satisfaction.