THE WINDLEGENDS SAGA.

WINDHEALER.

by CHARLOTTE BOYETT-COMPO.

To Bill Slaughter-.

I will never forget you, sweetie.

Though his children be many, the sword is their destiny. His offspring shall not be filled with bread. He lies down a rich man, one last time; he opens his eyes and nothing remains to him. Terrors rush upon him by day; at night the tempest carries him off. The storm wind seizes him and he disappears; it sweeps him out of his place.

-JOB 27: 14, 19-21.

Prologue.

The beating in the Tribunal courtyard had left Conar McGregor's back numb to the vicious lashings of the guard's whips. The punishment meted out to him in the Labyrinth Penal Colony had severed the nerve endings under his flesh. He lost count of the times he was stretched between the uprights behind the privy ditch and whipped. Such brutality had become a matter of course and he endured it stoically, with detachment.

He resided in a portion of h.e.l.l few men ever knew existed and from which even fewer man had ever returned.

Pain had become a way of life; mental anguish was his constant companion.

From the very first, he began his lessons in just how cruel the human race could be. In the Labyrinth, he learned more about the agonies of the d.a.m.ned than he ever wanted to know. His captors set out to cripple him both in mind and body-to break him, to humble him, to crush his spirit and bring him to his knees.

"You are nothing here!" he had been told. "You are a prisoner of the Tribunal! Nothing more!"

The only safe haven in his dark-stained world was sleep. Only there could he find any semblance of peace, and that only briefly, for his rest was often interrupted by demons and dreams and memories that tormented him, that left him even more alone in his despair.

From the first day when he had been taken from the Indoctrination Hut to view the Labyrinth, he was worked from sunup to sundown. The only times he was not being worked or kept locked away from human contact were when he was ordered to the medical hut for rudimentary care, or when the barber strapped him in a chair and shaved him, whacking off his thick hair.

"I want to be able to see the fear on your face," the Commandant told him. "I want to see the humiliation!"

Then, he had fought them. He had managed to keep his dignity for a while, at least. He was determined to survive, but it had become harder every day when he was forced to grovel in order to do so. Two days without food, without complaint, might be well enough when one was protesting an injustice, for the very act of deprivation can be strengthening, but combined with physical and mental brutality, it was a luxury a man intent on living could not afford.

So, he was forced to give up a portion of his pride, humble himself, beg, in order to simply have enough food in his belly and sufficient clothing with which to cover himself during the cold desert nights.

But by then they had begun to work on his self-esteem, to plunder his very soul. To deny him the right to even exist.

"You are dead!" The words came at him time and time again. "A dead man!"

"I am Conar McGregor!" he screamed with mindless fury. "I am alive!"

His defiance had brought with it an immediate reckoning which kept him abed in the medical hut for more than a week; the beating had nearly crippled him. When he was well enough to rise, they chained him in the center of the courtyard and warned no one to speak to him.

"This man is dead! He does not exist!"

When he had defiantly denied their vicious words, shouted his name to the heavens, he was gagged.

"Say that dead man's name just once more," the Commandant threatened, "and I shall have your tongue removed!"

That had been in the beginning. Over the next year, he learned to swallow his pride, to make it silently through each verbal and physical abuse with a dogged determination to survive, enduring the cruelty and barbarism with the calm acceptance that this was now the way it would be. He took what they gave and no longer tried to defend himself.

Before long, his pride vanished.

But hate and anger still filled his heart, despite what he had been forced to become. Repeated beatings left him with downcast eyes that shifted nervously away from those who abused him, but they could not put out the fire burning in those wounded blue orbs. It burned bright, insistent, the only part of him totally alive.

All that had been in the first year and a half of his imprisonment when he still knew who he was. When he still had an ident.i.ty, despite their best efforts to rid him of it.

Now he simply existed.

They long since destroyed his self-esteem and integrity. They destroyed his belief in himself and in the order of things. No longer did he aspire to leave this terrible place. The man he had been was no more. His life was one long tangle of misery.

Even so, he could sometimes feel small bits of encouragement aimed his way: a fleeting glimpse of a smile he caught in pa.s.sing; a brief flare of compa.s.sion for his misery; a tell-tale look of pity on a hard countenance otherwise devoid of life. It was those small touches of humanity that made his days less hopeless, but it did not stop him from eventually retreating into a sh.e.l.l of self-imposed isolation.

As each new month pa.s.sed, as his self-esteem dissolved, he delved deeper into his private world, tucking his tail between his legs, trying to bury himself within the confines of his mind.

"You are nothing!" they kept reminding him until he believed it.

Now, after six years of captivity, he crawled, slunk like the wounded animal they had molded, into a psychological hole he dug for himself, an insulated haven where the world with all its pain and humiliation could be held at bay. He retreated into a place of his own making, a world where there was still love and laughter, if only in his memories.

"You are nothing!"

But he knew better. He might not be the man he once had been, might not be a man at all anymore, but he was alive.

He did exist.

His loneliness told him that.

His memories told him that...

PART I:.

Chapter 1.

Eight months before the first of his disbanded Elite Guards arrived at the Labyrinth penal colony on Tyber's Isle, Conar McGregor found himself suddenly alone, far from the encampment, the guards miraculously out of sight. That in itself was highly unusual since he normally had five or more guards watching him, intimidating his every move with taunts and jeers and kicks and slaps.

On that evening, though, he had straightened up from his work of digging a large boulder from its resting place and looked around. There was no one in sight. He narrowed his eyes, puzzled, but he made no attempt to move. He was beyond the bluffs, outside the ring of high stones.

He had been taken here many times-blindfolded-so he could not see the way to the outside. They put him to work on large boulders that were later rolled down to the northern section of the island to be used as a jetty at the as yet unused harbor. He never minded the trek outside the bluffs, for the air was cooler, even though the work was harder and he usually paid dearly with more abuse than normal.

He laid down the heavy timber he had been using to pry loose the boulder and scanned the immediate area. There was nothing but waist-high boulders and scrub. He looked at his leg irons, knew he wouldn't get far if he tried to run, so he just stood, resting.

The full moon rode high in the sky; Conar had just a glimpse of a man's shadow as it moved over his own. He started to turn, to confront whoever had loomed up at him, when his legs were kicked out from under him.

He fell face down in a patch of gravel; his cheek and chin sc.r.a.ped over the rough surface as he slid forward. The air rushed out of him as his belly hit the ground hard. Gasping, he felt his arms pulled tightly as a man put a rock-like knee into the small of his back. He grunted as the man forced his arms up and across his upper back, straining the arm sockets.

"I been biding my time until I could get you alone, McGregor," came a rasping, heavy voice.

The man flipped his captive over, effectively pinning Conar's arms beneath him. Rocks and shards dug into the bare flesh of Conar's shoulders, back and arms; he winced as a large stone gouged into his back.

"Am I hurting you?" the man taunted. He straddled his victim, sitting on Conar's thighs.

Hard knees pressed into the bent crooks of Conar's elbows, nailing them to the sandy ground so it was impossible for him to either roll away or free his painfully constricted arms. Two ham-like feet hooked themselves over Conar's knees, making it equally impossible to buck off the brute. He heard the man's menacing voice and cringed at the hatred in the softly spoken words.

"Hoped you'd never see me again, huh?"

Conar looked past a wide chest and broad shoulders, a bull-like neck, a strong chin, and settled on the man's face lit by an upheld lantern.

Here was evil, fetid, rampant, festering. Utter malice filled the man's stare. His expression was cold, as deadly as a viper's. A stench rolled off the large body like waves of sewage, but it was nothing compared to the unspeakable odor from the man's evilly grinning mouth.

"Like what you see, pretty boy?"

The man was hard with layers of muscles that bunched in his ma.s.sive forearms and shoulders, rippled over his chest and striated his flat belly. His neck was so thick his head appeared to have been stuck on as an afterthought. Conar couldn't even begin to guess how much the man weighed, but the solid bulk of him crushed Conar's hips and lower belly. Thighs, corded with steel-like muscle, pressed painfully into Conar's sides as the man squeezed him; large hands, fully capable of pressing the life from a normal-sized man, held Conar's head anch.o.r.ed.

His hair was blond, tightly pressed to his scalp in thick waves. A thin goatee dangled from his chin, and oddly-shaped sideburns made his rounded face seem alien and even more evil. There was a thin scar across his right cheek and a vivid tattoo of a dragon on the left.

"You do remember me, don't you?"

Shaking his head had been a mistake; nearly a fatal one. The guard snarled with rage. Before Conar knew what was happening, one giant paw grabbed a handful of his flesh in the center of his chest. The fingers gripped like steel hooks into his solar plexus, then thrust up and under the lower right side of his ribcage with expert ease. Conar felt a pain so intense he screamed as the man gently tugged on the lower ribs.

"Aye, you do, McGregor," the man cooed, tugging again. He smiled at the scream that was cut short by one of the Labyrinth guards who appeared out of nowhere to plaster a hand over Conar's mouth. The fingers spread under Conar's left nostril; he sucked in air, trying to bring oxygen into his lungs. Tight groans of agony forced their way out of him as the man tugged again, but with less vigor.

"Say you remember me," he ordered.

Conar hurt too badly to make a sound as the man's accomplice removed the beefy hand from his mouth. He could only stare up at his torturer.

When his captive remained mute, the man punctuated his next words with sharp tugs on Conar's lower ribs. "Say...you...remember...me!" "G.o.d!"Conar gasped from the intense pain spiraling through his ribcage. Bright pinpoints of light sparkled all around him.

"No, not G.o.d." The man laughed. The voice turned childish, then singsongish, as he reprimanded his prisoner. "Saymy name. You know who I am."

There was another sharp pull on his ribcage; Conar felt his heart skipping beats. The pain had become so bad he

could see nothing but rushes of red light.

"Say it, dammit!" the man shouted, all reason gone.

"I don't-"

"Say my name!"

Tears of intense agony fell down Conar's cheeks. "I can't remember-"

"Say it! Say my name!" Another vicious tug. "Say Lydon!"

"Ly-"

"Tell me you remember who I am!"

"I think...you're-"

"Tell me you remember me!"

Weakly, "I remember you."

"I didn't hear you." The voice was calm, expectant.

Louder, "I remember you."

"I still didn't hear you." The voice was friendly, pleasant.

With heartbreaking care, "I remember you." Conar looked up, pleading for a cessation to the pain. "I remember you."