Chapter sixteen
The army of Hiclantung marches outIf you choose to think my actions at this time — and, indeed, for some time past — had been irrational, I could not argue the point with you.
Truly, I now feel that the belief my Delia was dead had deranged me. I know I had acted in ways completely outside my usual fashion, and, yet, too, in ways I have been told are typical of me, as witness that wild moment when I defied the Queen of Pain to rush out from the windlass room in the corthdrome upon the indigo-haired assassins of Umgar Stro. I must have been in a state of shock that allowed me to walk and talk and act and yet held me all the time in a kind of mental stasis.
The ancient Chinese, we are told, had perfected the art of torture by water, the expected drop of liquid crashing ont
