Ran-Del stirred when they laid him down on the sofa. His eyes came back into focus, and he let out a deep breath. It hadn’t been a dream. The pain in his wrists told him that. When he sat up and looked around, the Baron was watching him critically.
“I tried to warn you,” Stefan said. “There’s a force field that extends more than a meter above the top of the wall.”
Ran-Del took a deep breath as he digested this information. Coming out of samad state so abruptly could be disconcerting. Finding out his prison had invisible barriers didn’t help. This place grew more mystifying every minute. “I saw nothing. Is it like the windows?”
“Not really. The windows are made of a transparent, high-grade polymer. You can see through the polymer quite clearly, but it’s solid matter, just like that sofa you’re sitting on. The force field is energy, like sunlight is energy, except that it feels solid. It acts as a barrier so long as it has an adequate power supply.”
The Baron might as well have spoken in an unknown language. How could Ran-Del escape a barrier he couldn’t see or comprehend? He shook his head in confusion. “I don’t understand you.”
“You don’t need to understand everything all at once,” Stefan said. “You’ll get it eventually.”
Ran-Del turned his head so that he faced Stefan, to be certain whether the man was lying or telling the truth. “You’ll use these things to keep me from going home?”
Stefan nodded. “It’s possible that eventually you won’t want to go home.”
Ran-Del recognized not only the Baron's truthfulness but his unconscious arrogance. The man believed he was doing Ran-Del a favor by bringing him to this city. Ran-Del debated his options. This stranger had too many minions, and too many magic-seeming things helping him. Ran-Del was trapped as surely as a timber cat in a pit.
Despair filled his soul at the thought. Confinement among these strangers would be unbearable. To live enclosed by walls, without family or clan, without the forest itself, wasn’t living.
A soul-wrenching fear gripped Ran-Del. What did this Baron plan to do with a Sansoussy of the forest? If the outlander could make a barrier from the very air, what hope did Ran-Del have of resisting his plans? The sense of powerlessness overwhelmed him. His life as a Sansoussy was over. He would be better off dead.
Better off dead. He swallowed. He didn’t want to die. He breathed in the alien air, felt the strange smoothness of the fabric under his hands. His head reeled; he had nothing familiar to anchor himself. Ran-Del glanced at the two armed men. If he tried to kill them, they would fight back. If the choice was between a quick, clean warrior's death and a life of shame and degradation as the Baron’s prisoner, death would be the better choice.
But did the guards have any lethal weapons or could they only make him fall down in pain? The Baron seemed intent on keeping him a prisoner but alive. There was no escape that way.
Then how? Abruptly, the answer came to him. He pushed it away, but it came back, driven by panic and anger. Every Sansoussy learned how to make the choice between death and dishonor. If his family ever found out, they would mourn him, but at least Ran-Del would die a Sansoussy. Not even this stranger could control his mind.
Ran-Del smiled with triumph, leaned back, closed his eyes, and mentally recited the mantra for the Fifth Discipline. He had used it only twice, and both times Great-grandfather had been right there to bring him out of it. This time there would be no one.
He repeated the mantra again and again, each time making more of his muscles relax. He could feel his breathing slowing, his heart rate dropping, his body shutting down, like a flower that closes in the dark. He shut out all sensation outside of his own body—sounds, warmth, touch, smell. In the whole of his universe there was only him, and soon he would be gone.