She takes a step back and frees her arms from my grip with an efficient crossblock, her palms striking my wrists. It leaves her in balanced guard stance, from which she jabs a finger at my face. “Don’t even think you’re going to try this without me.”
“Talann—”
“No. Lamorak is my companion—and my friend. If you say there’s no chance, I’ll go up that rope right behind you. If you’re making a try, I’ll be at your side.”
I study her for a long moment while I entertain a fantasy of beating that hardass look right off her face. Screw it. From the fierce confidence in her eyes, and the memory of the solid cables of muscle in her arms, I might not be able to do it. And, y’know, I can’t force her up that rope.
Besides, I might need the help.
She can read my decision in the shift of the curve of my silhouette.
“How do we find the Theater of Truth?”
“That’s the easy part. We grab a guard and hurt him till he gives us directions. Come on.”
8
“NOW, BEFORE CONSCIOUSNESS fully returns, we make a final check of our equipment. Any gaps in the cage or your suit can have devastating consequences, particularly as—as we are pretending in this case—we have no idea as to the specific abilities of the subject under the question.”
Awareness unfolded in geologic time, a coral island rising beneath a black ocean. Unfocused, undefined discomfort resolved into thirst—desert-parched mouth, mummified tongue, scurf like sandstone baked onto the teeth.
“Adepts—thaumaturges, whatever—present their own peculiar difficulties in interrogation. Many can partially or completely block the pain responses of their bodies; we are forced, therefore, to deal with them on an emotional level, a psychic level, if you will. Rushall, are you listening? Adepts are extremely difficult to acquire; you should pay attention. To continue: Revulsion and horror are potent tools, but alone they are rarely sufficient. Perhaps the most powerful tool in the process of progressive degradation is the subject’s own imagination. It is this which we must always seek to stimulate.”
Restraint—straps cutting cruelly into flesh of wrist and ankle and neck, further straps around knees and hips.
My neck, came the thought. I’m the one feeling this.
A slight shift toward a more comfortable position produced a searing shout of pain from the left thigh, and the instinctive mindview response to block the shuddering agony brought him up to full awareness.
Even as light returned to his eyes, Lamorak remembered who he was.
An instant later, he realized where he was.
His heart began to pound drumbeats that pulsed from his toes to his throat; it tossed him out of mindview, back into the sea of pain.
“Observe his eyes. See the focus return? This indicates that we may now make our first incision.”
The man who stood over him, dispassionately lecturing in Lipkan-accented Westerling, wore a curious costume over his long, gaunt frame: a one-piece suit of bulky, loose-fitting cloth—like a beekeeper’s—networked with fine-drawn silver wire. A large hood covered his head, leaving his features dimly visible through a fencer’s mask of silver mesh.
In one gloved hand, a tiny scalpel gleamed.
The apparatus to which Lamorak lay bound seemed to be some sort of table, or raised bed, covered with layers of cloth and cunningly jointed or hinged so that his back was supported in a position midway between reclining and sitting upright; he had an ideal view of the knife as its gentle stroke parted the cloth of his breeches above his uninjured right thigh.
“Hey,” he croaked, “hey, you don’t have to go to all this trouble, you know? I’m no hero—just ask, huh?” His jaw worked strangely, and his mouth stung—still swollen and pulpy from being slammed against the wall of his cell and from the kicking the guards gave his head when they came to carry him away.
The man in the beekeeper suit gave no sign that he’d heard. He sliced the cloth crosswise around Lamorak’s knee and again up near enough to his groin that Lamorak flinched involuntarily as his scrotum clenched around his testicles.
“Master Arkadeil?” came another voice. “Why isn’t he gagged?”
“A fine question,” replied the knife wielder dryly. “You must allow the subject to speak, even to scream, regardless that nothing he says will have any effect on the interrogation. This is to balance the essential helplessness of his position; this slightest ray of hope that something he may say will earn him mercy prevents withdrawal into despair, keeps his intellect present and active. This is vital, particularly to help counteract shock in the later stages of the questioning. In this way, you draw the subject into willing participation in the process: his hope becomes your ally. Understood? Fine. You may even ask him a question from time to time. For example—” He bent his hooded face toward Lamorak. “—are you thirsty? Do you need water?”
“Water this,” Lamorak croaked, and tried to spit on him, but his mouth was dry as dust. He assayed a weak smile. “How about a beer?”
“Fine, that’s fine.” Master Arkadeil turned back to his audience. “You see? Nothing more than this is required.”
A ring of tripods bearing lamps with white pottery reflectors surrounded the small circular stage on which the apparatus stood; they cast a strong yellow light and left the rest of the room in shadow. Beyond, he could vaguely see a double handful of seated men on raised benches around the stone floor; they all seemed intent on Arkadeil’s lecture. Behind them, more rows of benches climbed toward the shadowed ceiling.
A lecture hall, Lamorak thought; it reminded him of the classrooms at the Studio Conservatory. Halfway between a lecture hall and an operating theater.
He looked within himself next and was pleased to find no stirring of panic. He decided he was handling this pretty well, so far—but it could be that part of his confidence was his inability to believe that this was actually happening, that he really was strapped to a table in the Ankhanan Donjon, about to be used as a medical cadaver in a class for apprentice torturers. Unreality, a sense of dissociation, pervaded the scene for him, like he was second-handing somebody else’s Adventure.
He kept searching, down within his mind, for any hint of a belief that he would die here, and was again pleased to find none. He was persistently, endlessly aware of the recording device within his skull, and he had a morbid fear of looking like a coward—this had driven him to take greater and greater risks to prove himself throughout his career, and he’d done some spectacular things; if the Studio had only put the kind of cash into marketing him as they had, well, Caine . . .
“Remember,” Arkadeil said, “the key is progressive degradation; therefore, we begin with the smallest incision.” The knife descended onto Lamorak’s thigh just above the knee. “Please don’t move, Lamorak. Any movement of the treated areas will only make the cut ragged and more painful. All right? Very well.”
“You don’t want to do that,” Lamorak said confidently and shifted his awareness to mindview. He intended to enforce this suggestion with a substantial nudge at the torturer’s psyche; it’d play like nitro on the cube.
He saw none of the dangling strands of color that were his mind’s metaphor for Flow, but then, he hadn’t expected to: three days of futile experiments in his cell had vanquished that hope. This was part of what rendered the Donjon impenetrable, even to adepts: the minerals deposited in the limestone interfered with Flow, and what little that leaked through was diverted and consumed by the endless fantasies and prayers for freedom of the hundreds of prisoners. Thaumaturgy of any real power was impossible, down here. He knew, however, that the power he needed for such a little nudge he could generate in his own Shell.
The spiny flame-orange matrix of his Shell flared bright, and his vision faded as he fed what power he had into it; he held it prepared as he searched for the Shell that would delimit the outskirts of the torturer’s mind.
He found nothing there; Arkadeil’s hooded form was as blank as a marble statue’s.
He struck anyway, visualizing a thick-jointed insectile arm whipping out from his Shell and anchoring itself to the fencer’s mask that covered Arkadeil’s face. He tried to force it through the silver net, into the torturer’s brain, but some sort of shield appeared, a scarlet counterforce that glimmered along the mesh that covered the queer beekeeper’s suit.
Lamorak poured power into his assault, hoping to overcome this resistance with sudden effort. The scarlet field only flared brighter, matching his power, even as his spiked Shell leached color, fading like fallen leaves bleaching in the sun, going yellow, then grey, and finally shredding like cobwebs in the wind.
The curved edge of the scalpel bit into his flesh, not deeply, a shallow slice about halfway around his knee. Arkadeil used a fabric pad from his nearby tray to swab away the welling blood.
“That didn’t appear very painful,” one of the observers said.
“It isn’t,” Arkadeil replied. “The scalpel should be extremely sharp—obsidian is ideal, if quality steel is unavailable. This slows and sometimes eliminates the onset of shock.”
I’m still woozy from the kicks in the head, Lamorak told himself as Arkadeil brought the knife to the upper portion of his bared thigh. That’s all; I’ve just gotta keep trying. It’ll wear off.
He began again to gather power, but the icy steel of the scalpel sliding easily through his flesh gnawed at his concentration as Arkadeil made his second cut parallel to the first. The sensation—not very painful, as Arkadeil had said—made his skin crawl, and he spent some attention building a grey mist in mindview that fogged his perceptions, a filmy translucent wall behind which he could prepare his attack.
Arkadeil’s third cut was a long vertical slice that connected the centers of the other two. He set the scalpel down in his tray and took up a larger knife with a more pronounced curve, and another item that looked like a pair of fryer tongs.
He said, “It is at this point that you should allow the questioning to begin,” and Lamorak’s stomach plummeted, dragging him sickeningly down out of mindview.
That’s a flensing knife. He’s going to skin me.
Arkadeil used the tongs to lift a corner of skin at the intersection of the cuts and began to work the knife beneath it with long, slow strokes. The skin came up easily, exposing twitching red muscle fibers and the butter-colored globules of subcutaneous fat.
Lamorak fought down panic and slowed the sputter of his heart. Something came back to him, faintly and foggily, something about Shanna, and Konnos, and the silver nets he had his family wear over their heads. He should have paid more attention at the time, been less concerned with posing in the sun-glow and more interested in what Konnos was saying, but it was too late now.
He cast his eye toward the students, but knew this would be hopeless—even if his suggestion could be made strong enough to influence one or two of them against their teacher, the others would restrain them. I should have stuck with thaumaturgy, he thought bitterly.
He’d given up the study of magick in favor of swordplay shortly after his first transfer to Overworld, on the theory that the Adventures of swordsmen were more viscerally exciting and did very well in the long-term secondhand market; so now he was left with only a fading store of minor tricks and a lot of smooth bulging muscles that did him no good at all.
He wondered how long he could keep it up, this good front, this heroic face he showed; in the end, who would care? If he died here, the cube and graver in his head would be lost. The only people who’d know if he died well, or screaming and whining like a coward, were the people present now, here in this room, and none of them gave a shit one way or the other.
He tried to summon mindview for another assault on Arkadeil, but the easy slide of the flensing knife through his flesh shredded his concentration. And he knew, too, that it was hopeless—the torturer must have some Flow source inside that suit, powering the counterforce that resisted his attacks, and nothing he could do would affect Arkadeil in the slightest.
He couldn’t seem to breathe, couldn’t swallow past the panic that clawed at his throat, couldn’t even maintain the block that dulled the pain from his leg.
Arkadeil now had peeled back both flaps of skin, and he turned to his students. “Here, you are faced with a choice. If you are pressed for time, you may gradually slice away the muscle, being careful to avoid the major arteries and veins, of course. This requires a certain amount of expertise, and I recommend finding otherwise valueless individuals upon which to practice, as a mistake here can allow a subject to bleed to death with dismaying speed. Progressive crippling of this sort is crude, but the psychological effect can be potent. Given time for greater subtlety, there is a simpler technique that, in the end, can be extraordinarily effective.”
He lifted a piece of folded parchment, displaying it for their view. “Collect the eggs of any small, swarming insect—certain varieties of wasp are ideal, as are some spiders, and even flies or cockroaches will do in a pinch.”
Lamorak said thickly, “Oh, god,” and he hacked a convulsive retch that slammed agony through his broken leg again.
“Simply sprinkle these eggs directly onto the muscle, and sew the skin over them, thus,” he said, matching action to words. “In a few days, as the eggs begin to hatch, your subject will literally beg to tell you everything you want to know.” He swiftly finished sewing the flaps of skin with coarse black thread, then wiped his hands.
“Now,” he continued briskly, taking up the scalpel once again, “let us move to the consideration of similar techniques as they apply to the intestinal cavity.”
9
I SUCK ON the knuckle I’d split on the guard’s cheekbone, warm copperwire taste of blood on my tongue, while I peer around the corner at the two crossbow-armed guards lounging outside the door down the hall, and I try to remember why I decided to do this foolish, foolish thing.
Those guys have been here for a while; they’re not even chatting anymore. Now one of them slides down the wall to settle his butt on the floor. A single lamp hangs from a peg driven into the stone over the lintel.
Talann whispers at my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
Without looking back at her, I hold two fingers where she can see them.
“We can take them,” she tells me.
Which is true. The problem will be noise. The problem will be getting within arm’s reach of them without eating a couple pounds of steel.
L’audace, toujours l’audace. I think that’s Napoleon. Doesn’t matter—he could have been talking about me.
“Wait here.”
I take from her hand the iron-bound club, heavy as a mace, that we took off the guard we left gagged and tied within an empty cell. Neither of us had any use for his armor, which wouldn’t have fit anyway.
“What about your throwing knives?”
I shake my head. “It’s too far, and they’re in armor—I’d have to take them in the throat, and at this range I couldn’t be sure of dropping one even if I hit him.”
“I can do lots of impressive things,” Talann offers.
“Yeah, sure. Just wait.”
“Caine,” she says, taking my shoulder with a warm hand. “A couple of your knives. Please. If this doesn’t work—if we don’t make it—don’t leave me unarmed. I, I can’t go back to that cell . . .”
The image of her chained naked in her own shit rises vivid enough to make me wince; I can still smell it on her. I pull the pair of throwing knives from their thigh sheaths and offer them to her without a word. She takes them with both hands together like she’s accepting a communion cup. Her attitude has something of awe in it; taking my knives has a significance for her that I don’t understand, and I don’t have time to wonder about it.
“Now don’t move. The way you look, no offense, but if they see you it’ll blow the game.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she tells me.
May Tyshalle grant that this be truth.
I step out into the corridor and start for the t
wo guards with a measured pace. As their heads swivel toward the sound of my boot heels clicking on the limestone, I say with just the right tone of predatory authority, “Is there a reason that a pair of posted guards are lounging on their fat butts?”
The one on the floor scrambles to his feet, and the other pushes off the wall; they both come to attention. They try sneaking looks at me as I approach, but the shadows are still too deep back here for them to see more than my general outline. I say silkily, “Don’t even think about eyeballing me, you lazy sacks of shit.”
I can see the door between them now: it’s closed, and solid, with no viewport. Good. Both guards are bareheaded: a man in armor can get uncomfortably hot, even in the cool of the Donjon. Their steel skullcaps are on the floor beside their feet. All I have to do is get close enough to swing this club, a quick horizontal forehand bash to the first guy’s head, continue the motion into a spin, peg the other guy before he realizes what’s happening—
One of the guards unslings his crossbow and cranks the crowsfoot back to cock it.
My throat clenches, but I never break stride. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The guard slides a quarrel into the groove. “General Order Three, sir,” he says apologetically. “You’re out of policy.”
I keep walking. The crossbow comes up. Now the other guard is toying uncertainly with his bow. Go with it: audacity, always audacity.
“And what’s your problem?” I snarl. “Why isn’t that weapon cocked, soldier? Where’s your quarrel?”
“Sorry, sir, sorry,” he mumbles, fumbling with the crowsfoot.
Ten more strides, that’s all I need.
“Present for inspection.”
It almost works—the fumbler stretches his crossbow out, but the other swings around and levels on me in a smooth motion that speaks of long practice.
“You’re out of uniform, sir. How are we to know you’re not an escaped prisoner?”
Five more strides.
“What did I tell you about eyeballing me?”
Now the other guard levels as well. He sniggers. “Yeah. How was we to know?”
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