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An Excerpt From: WINDHEALER
Book Four of the WindLegends Saga
 CHARLOTTE BOYETT-COMPO, 2006.
All Rights Reserved, New Concepts Publishing
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 out 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 hell 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 damned 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 very first day when he had been taken from the Indoctrination Hut to view the Labyrinth for the first time, he was worked from sun up to sundown. The only times he was not being worked or kept locked away from human contact, were the times 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 had told him. “I want to see the humiliation!”
He had fought them back then. He had managed to keep his dignity for a little 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 a dead man!” The words had come at him time and time again. “A dead man!”
“I am Conar McGregor!” he had screamed at them with mindless fury. “I am alive!”
His defiance had brought with it an immediate reckoning which kept him abed in the medical hut for over a week the beating he received nearly crippled him. When he was well enough to rise from his bed of pain, 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 had threatened him, “and I shall have your tongue removed!”
That had been in the beginning. Over the next year, he learned to swallow his pride, to stamp it down, 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 him and no longer tried to defend himself.
Before long, his pride vanished.
But his heart was still filled with hate and anger 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 and insistent, the only part of him that was 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 identity despite their best efforts to rid him of it.
Now he simply existed.
They long since destroyed his self-esteem and his 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: they had destroyed him. His life was one long tangle of misery.
Even so, he could sometimes feel the small bits of encouragement aimed his way: a fleeting glimpse of a smile he caught in passing; a brief flare of compassion 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 shell of self-imposed isolation.
As each new month passed, as his self-esteem dissolved, he delved deeper into his own private world, tucking his tail between his legs as he tried to bury himself within the confines of his own mind.
“You are nothing!” they kept reminding him until he believed it himself.
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…
CHAPTER ONE
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 over 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 rise 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.
At that moment, there was no one in sight. He laid down the heavy timber he had been using to pry loose the boulder and scanned the immediate area around him. There was nothing but waist high boulders and scrub. He looked down at the leg irons around his ankles, knew he wouldn’t get far if he tried to run, so he just stood there, resting.
The moon was full, riding high in the sky, and he had just a glimpse of a man’s shadow as it moved over his own. He started to turn around, to confront whoever had loomed up at him, when his legs were kicked out from under him and he went sprawling in the sand.
He fell face down in a patch of gravel and felt his cheek and chin scrape over the rough surface as he slid forward, the air rushing out of him as his belly hit the ground hard. Gasping for breath, he felt his arms yanked from beside him and pulled tightly behind his back 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.
Hooking one foot under Conar’s thigh, the man flipped his captive over to his back, effectively pinning Conar’s arms beneath him.
Conar could feel the rocks and shards digging into the bare flesh of his shoulders, back and arms, and he winced as a large stone gouged into the small of his back.
“Am I hurting you?” the man taunted. He was now straddling his victim, sitting on Conar’s thighs.
Hard knees pressed into the bent crooks of Conar’s elbows, pressing them down into the sand, nailing them to the 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 the brute off. 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?” the man crooned.
Conar looked up, past a wide chest and broad shoulders, a bull-like neck, a strong chin and settled on the man’s face lit by the upheld lantern.
Here was evil fetid, rampant, festering. The man’s stare was filled with utter malice, his expression cold and as deadly as a viper’s. A stench rolled off the large, well-muscled body like waves of sewage, but it was nothing in comparison to the unspeakable odor that washed over him from the man’s evilly grinning mouth as he spoke.
“Like what you see, pretty boy?”
The man was huge, hard with layers of muscles that bunched in his massive 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 as he moved up on Conar’s hips and lower belly was crushing. Thighs, corded with steel-like muscle, pressed painfully into Conar’s sides as the man squeezed him between them; large hands, fully capable of pressing the life from a normal sized man, held Conar’s head anchored.
His hair was blond, tightly pressed to his scalp in thick waves. A thin goatee dangled down 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?” he asked Conar.
Shaking his head had been a mistake nearly a fatal one. The guard snarled with rage and before Conar knew what was happening, one giant paw grabbed a handful of Conar’s 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 to him, tugging again, smiling at the scream that was cut short by one of the Labyrinth guards who appeared out of nowhere to squat down above Conar’s head and plaster his hand tightly over the prisoner’s mouth.
He couldn’t breath. The man’s fingers over his mouth were spread up under his left nostril and he was sucking in air trying to bring oxygen into his lungs. Tight little groans of agony were forcing 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 a 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!”
“God!” Conar gasped from the intense pain spiraling through his ribcage. Bright pinpoints of light sparkled all around him.
“No, not God,” the man laughed. The voice turned childish, then singsongish, as he reprimanded his prisoner. “Say my name. You know who I am.”
There was another sharp pull on his ribcage and Conar could feel 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!”
Conar felt tears falling down his cheeks. They were tears of intense agony. “I can’t remem--”
“ “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 now, 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.”
“Good,” the man whispered. “Good.” There was a childish smile plastered on his beefy face then. He let go of Conar’s ribs and put a gentle hand up to a cheek wet with pain-brought tears. Softly stroking Conar’s hot cheek with the back of his rough hand, the man smiled. “I knew you’d remember me. I knew you would.” The smile vanished. “You won’t forget again, will you?”
“No, sir, I won’t,” Conar whispered.
The man cocked his head to one side. “You know, Coni,” he said sweetly, using the nickname Conar’s family and friends had called him long ago, “I like hurting you. I really do. It makes me happy inside to hurt you.” He put a finger on the dual scars along Conar’s left cheek and traced one silent tear down the ravaged flesh. “Are you crying for me because you put me here? For what you did to me?”
“I’m sorry,” Conar managed to say.
“You should be. You know why?”
“No, sir.” His lips were beginning to tremble for his shame and humiliation was complete.
“Because I’ll find you all alone again.” The man leaned over him, put his face in Conar’s. “I’ll get you alone again and I’ll hurt you again for sending me here.”
With infinite care, the man brought his right hand up and put one grimy thumb into the corner of Conar’s mouth, pried his teeth apart, hooked the digit over his captive’s tongue and then swooped down like a vulture and covered Conar’s mouth with his own. He thrust his thick tongue deep inside Conar’s mouth.
Conar struggled, gagging against the vile odor and feel of the man’s mouth on his own, the rape of his tongue. He felt his gorge rising. The vile tongue withdrew, the lips slithered off, the man moved in one lithe bound that belied his bulk and weight and came to his knees as he still straddled Conar’s thighs.
He laughed as his captive twisted violently to one side, doubled over and retched hard into the loose gravel. “Just remember what I told you. I’ll find you alone again, pretty boy. Make no mistake about that. And I’ll hurt you again!”
Conar retched, spitting bile from his mouth, snorting it from his nose as the man stood up. His vomit was smeared over his left cheek as they grabbed him and pulled him to his feet. His arms had gone numb, were useless, and he hung between two of them as his tormentor strode off.
“Walk, idiot!” one of the guard’s snapped at him.
Conar did not sleep that night. “Who are you?” he whispered. “Who the hell are you?”
He wasn’t sure if he was asking his question of the man who had tormented him, or of himself. One thing he was sure of, though, they had not blindfolded him on the way back into the bluffs and he now knew the way out!
That knowledge might one day prove to be his salvation.
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