by nobody103
Zorian waited for a while to give the Eldemarian investigators a chance to explore Iasku Mansion, and then went to confront Alanic about his concerns.
"What is there to be confused about?" Alanic asked him. "If Sudomir had persisted in his resistance, we would have collapsed his stronghold on top of him and he would have died. Nobody wants to die, least of all a necromancer."
"But the gate we found in his basement…" Zorian began.
"Yes, shocking stuff," Alanic frowned. "It does seem strange that he did not retreat through the gate along with his unknown allies, doesn't it? But you have to remember, just because they cooperated doesn't mean they were actually friendly to one another. It could be that he expects better treatment as an Eldemarian captive than as a long-term guest of his so-called allies."
"Even so, it shouldn't have been too hard to flee from the battle if he was determined," Zorian insisted. "He could have flown out, for instance. Gods know we couldn't have really stopped that pet undead dragon of his if it had simply flown off in a random direction."
"No, but we could have tracked it," Alanic said. "But yes, you are probably right. He could have fled. But that would have meant that we would have leveled this place to the ground. Sudomir seems to be very attached to this place. It seems this is his life's work, and he is loath to see it gone."
He cares about his soul trap thing so much?
"Isn't it destined for destruction anyway?" Zorian asked, frowning. "Surely Eldemar is not going to let a giant soul trap remain intact?"
Alanic stared at him for a few seconds before sighing heavily. "They're definitely going to release the souls trapped within. Too many people know about them by now, and it would be a huge scandal if it became known they let so many innocent souls remain trapped in that thing. At the very least, I'm sure I can get the Triumvirate Church to apply pressure on Eldemar to do so. Unfortunately… I cannot guarantee that the device itself will be destroyed. Sudomir's work is utterly repugnant, but also very impressive to some people. It's entirely possible he can reach some kind of agreement with Eldemar's government."
"Agreement?" Zorian asked incredulously. "How could that possibly work? I know that Eldemar has some secret necromancers under their employ, but Sudomir is…"
"I know," Alanic said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. "But it would be completely in line with Eldemar's previous behavior to retool this place into a secret research facility and then place Sudomir 'under house arrest' here. He would be forced to work for Eldemar, and all manner of restrictions would be imposed on him, some of them ethical in nature, but that is obviously a far lighter punishment than a monster like him deserves. I'm almost one hundred percent certain that this is what Sudomir is aiming for."
"I see," said Zorian unhappily. He knew that Eldemar was no image of perfection and goodness, but he was stilly unpleasantly surprised that they would be willing to work with someone like Sudomir.
Then again, they still didn't know that Sudomir wasn't just practicing illegal magic, but was also actively betraying the country to foreign enemies. Zorian suspected that Eldemar would be a lot less willing to make use of Sudomir once that little fact came out…
"Of course," Alanic continued, "if I were to find out something particularly damning about the man before Eldemar's black divisions have a chance to sequester him to one of their compounds for questioning, then such an agreement might become politically unworkable. There is only so much that can be swept under the rug, after all."
Zorian gave Alanic a suspicious look.
"Meaning… what, exactly?" Zorian asked.
"Your ability to target Sudomir's mind through his bone dragon puppet was very impressive," Alanic noted. Huh, so it was Sudomir who had been piloting that thing. Zorian had wondered about that. "Even if it was for but a moment, you must be a pretty good mind mage to have achieved that."
Wait, Alanic was offering him a chance to root through Sudomir's mind for information? Why yes, Zorian was very much interested.
"Say no more," Zorian told Alanic, trying not to show his enthusiasm. "I'll be happy to help you interrogate him."
"Come with me, then," Alanic said, turning around and motioning for Zorian to follow after him. "Mind you, we'll only have an hour or so alone with him. This isn't exactly an official interrogation and there is only so much I can bend the rules…"
Zorian didn't really care. Frankly, he had a strong feeling he was going to have to terminate this restart prematurely sometime soon anyway, so getting into trouble like that was no big deal. He was just happy this opportunity had fallen so neatly into his lap. He thought he would actually have to try and scheme to get access to Sudomir. He followed after Alanic, mentally preparing a list of questions he wanted Sudomir to answer.
"How come you didn't just pump him full of truth potions and interrogated him that way?" Zorian asked. He knew that Alanic had done that sort of thing in previous restarts, so it was a bit strange to see him hold back in that regard now.
"That leaves too many traces in the victim's metabolism," Alanic said, shaking his head. "I did say I'm bending the rules here, didn't I? I need to be able to play dumb when Sudomir accuses me of using magic to force answers out of him."
"Right," Zorian nodded. "Sorry for being dumb, but I have no experience in things like these, so you'll have to be a little patient with me."
"An expert mind mage that has no experience in things like these," Alanic stated blandly, visibly rolling his eyes. "Right."
Zorian decided not to respond to that. There was no way he could explain how he had really gotten his mind reading skills, so it was best to stay silent and quietly appreciate the way Alanic was not questioning him about that. For now, anyway.
Sudomir looked surprisingly good for someone who had gotten captured by an Eldemarian assault force. He was wearing shaping-disrupting manacles on his wrists and an exploding collar around his neck, but other than that he appeared completely unharmed. He seemed jittery and impatient when they came in, giving Alanic a sour look but not saying anything. Reading his surface thoughts, Zorian found out that Alanic had already been here a couple of times to ask the man questions, and Sudomir was already sick of him. The man refused to discuss anything with Alanic, apparently aware that there was something fishy about him being sent in as an official Eldemarian interrogator.
Zorian shrugged and got to work. He didn't try to be subtle – he immediately performed a powerful mental attack on Sudomir, ruthlessly crushing his mental defenses and sending feelers deep into his mind. Sudomir clutched his head in pain, powerless to resist. This close to Zorian, and with his ability to cast spells suppressed by the manacles he was wearing, Sudomir had little hope to expel Zorian from his mind. He couldn't even scream or shout for help, since Zorian had prevented him from doing that.
The only difficult thing was making Sudomir speak out his answers out loud for Alanic's benefit. He didn't want the warrior priest to know just how effortlessly he could root through someone's memories, but forcing the man to do something was far harder than simply interpreting Sudomir's thoughts and memories… and also, Sudomir was under compulsion not to speak about certain topics. It turned out he had gotten clever and placed a geas on himself before surrendering, placing restrictions on his ability to discuss some things. Stuff like his cooperation with the Ibasans and the planned invasion of Cyoria. This was, of course, completely unacceptable. A big part of reporting Iasku Mansion to Alanic was Zorian's desire to blow the whole conspiracy thing wide open, so the geas definitely had to go.
Zorian was not really a soul mage, so simply removing the geas was out of the question. Fortunately, he didn't have to do that to neutralize it. Mind magic was a known bane of the geas-type spells – a geas couldn't prevent a mind mage like Zorian from lifting information straight from someone's mind, and it could not compel one to follow an order they could not remember ever receiving. One of the reasons why geas were not more popular throughout history was that if the recipient
of the geas was unwilling to play along, they could simply pay a mind mage to purge their memories of the restriction they labored under. The geas would still technically exist, but the compulsion to honor it would be gone.
The geas Sudomir had placed on himself was very fresh, less than a day old, and thus it took less than five minutes for Zorian to make Sudomir forget it ever existed. He didn't even bother notifying Alanic of its existence.
In any case, once the full scale of Sudomir's activities started to come to the surface, Alanic decided that he no longer cared about keeping the interrogation short and covert. The interrogation lasted for hours, and only ended because Zorian was afraid he might permanently cripple Sudomir's mind if he kept rummaging through it incessantly. During those several hours, Zorian found out a wealth of information about the Ibasan invaders, Cult of the Dragon Below and Sudomir. Most of this information involved the identities of collaborators and places where evidence could be found to doom them all – this was the sort of information that Alanic was most interested in, and Zorian saw no reason not to give it to him. In fact, he intended to visit some of these people himself in some future restarts, but for now he would simply step aside and let Alanic go after them.
For Zorian, though, some of the more interesting pieces of information he got from Sudomir concerned the man's reasons for doing what he did. The core of everything seemed to be the fact that his wife died. To be fair, Sudomir was an unscrupulous necromancer even before then, but it was only after his wife contracted the Weeping and passed away that he'd really lost it. Rather than accept her death and move on, he extracted her soul and tried to bring her back to life. He failed, naturally. Apparently it was not a simple thing to make a dead soul think again, to say nothing of actually restoring it to a semblance of life. Eventually he bound his wife's soul to Iasku Mansion, restoring a measure of her mental faculties in the process. That was why the warding scheme of the place could intelligently respond to scans and attempts to bypass it, and also the reason why Sudomir had been utterly unwilling to see it destroyed. He would rather let himself be captured than abandon his wife's soul to eventual destruction.
In fact, the biggest reason why Sudomir agreed to help the Ibasans was that Quatach-Ichl promised to give him the ritual needed to turn his wife's soul into a lich. A normal lich creation ritual required a living person to work correctly, but Quatach-Ichl claimed he could modify it to work on the disembodied soul of Sudomir's wife too. Whether Quatach-Ichl was lying about that was anyone's guess.
The other reason for helping the Ibasans invade Cyoria, the 'politics' part that Sudomir had mentioned in the past, was that Sudomir wanted to legalize necromancy. After all, his wife was soon to come back to life as a lich, and he certainly didn't plan to die of old age if he could help it either, and it was impossible for him to hide things like that in the long term. Especially if he intended to keep his political position, which he definitely did. Thus, he wanted to make Eldemar drop some of the restrictions surrounding soul magic, or at least to make some special exceptions for him in particular. To that end, he felt he needed to make Eldemar weaker (so they would be desperate for his help) and himself stronger (so he could be the savior they were in desperate need of).
The actual details of Sudomir's master plan eluded Zorian, as they were too complex and convoluted for him to figure out in a mere couple of hours. And frankly, Zorian didn't care that much. He found the whole thing crazy to start with, and felt that it was all just an excuse anyway – Sudomir helped the Ibasans because he wanted his wife back. Everything else was just him lying to himself.
Zorian also encountered a couple of other interesting facts while searching Sudomir's mind, such as the means Sudomir had used to control the iron beaks. Apparently it was a mixture of kidnapping their chicks to hold as hostages and dominating some of the more influential members of the flock. Iron beaks were fiercely protective of their young and intelligent enough to understand a hostage situation, and also didn't seem to realize their leadership structure had been magically subverted, so this play worked surprisingly well. Zorian still wasn't sure if it was possible to do anything with this information, but he filed it away for future musings.
Eventually, the topic of the interrogation drifted to the issue of primordial summoning (well, more like Zorian guided it there, but whatever) and Zorian decided to see if Sudomir knew the answer to a question that had been bothering Zorian for quite some time.
"Why does the Cult of Dragon Below need a shifter child to complete the ritual?" Zorian asked.
"Children. Plural," Sudomir said. He had mostly stopped struggling against Zorian's mental probes by now, since it hurt a lot less that way. Currently he mostly focused on trying to shift the interrogation away from sensitive topics. Too bad for him that Zorian knew a great deal about what he and his allies had been doing in the past several months. "The ritual needs at last five shifter children to work. Ideally more."
Zorian frowned. Five children?
"What happens to them?" Alanic asked.
"Sacrificed, of course," Sudomir said, rolling his eyes. His thoughts told Zorian that he considered that a very stupid question. Ask an obvious question, get an obvious answer.
"Why so many?" Zorian asked. "And why children? Why shifter children?"
"There is only so much primordial essence one can extract from any particular shifter," Sudomir said. "And that essence gets progressively more integrated into the shifter's body as they age, making it next to impossible to extract. Only very young shifters have any significant amount of free floating primordial essence in their bodies."
What?
"Explain," Alanic told him.
Sudomir sighed. "Simply splicing a foreign soul into your own won't make you a shifter. At least, not the kind people are familiar with."
A stream of disjointed flashes flew across Sudomir's mind and Zorian dived deeper into his memories to investigate. Sudomir knew this stuff because… he had been doing research into shifters for years now. He had captured dozens of shifters, experimenting on them in a brutal fashion to see what makes them tick. He even made several attempts to produce one, the most successful one being his production of the Silver One. Disturbingly, though, the Silver One wasn't a human granted the ability to turn into a winter wolf, but the opposite – he had grafted a human soul onto a winter wolf, granting him increased intelligence and ability to turn human if it so wished. That… why would he do such a thing!?
Zorian took a deep breath and pushed the thought out of his mind. While horrible, Sudomir's shifter experiments were basically a drop in the bucket as far as Sudomir's crimes were concerned. Asking him about it would just waste the little time he had left with the man.
"In order to make the transformation so flexible and thorough, the ancestors of modern shifters had to use something more," Sudomir continued. "Specifically, they used a bit of primordial blood they had recovered from the creature imprisoned beneath Cyoria. That particular primordial was noted for its shapeshifting prowess, and thus served as a potent catalyst for their own rituals. It is one of the reasons why their shifter rituals are so hard to acquire for outsiders. Even if they can procure the instructions for the ritual, they still need the blood of an existing shifter to perform it, because they're the only ones with primordial essence coursing through their blood."
"The cultists want to use that primordial essence as a key to open the prison," Zorian mused out loud.
"Yes," Sudomir confirmed. Zorian could feel that the man liked talking about this topic, as it shifted the interrogation away from his misdeeds onto someone he didn't much care about. Although he was technically a member of the cult, Sudomir didn't seem to have any emotional attachment to his fellow initiates. "In a way, that essence is still a part of the primordial, and can thus be used as a tool for bridging the gap between our world and the pocket dimension where the primordial has been imprisoned in."
"Pocket dimension, huh?" Alanic said.
"That is wh
y they call it a 'summoning' ritual," Sudomir said. "Technically, the primordial isn't on the same plane of existence as the rest of us. The gods made a special extra-dimensional prison to shove it into. Such pocket dimensions always have a place where they touch our reality, though, and the cult has long ago found where the anchor point for the prison is."
Zorian was forced to terminate the interrogation soon afterwards, but before he did so, he made sure to memory wipe Sudomir of his recent memories. As far as he was concerned, the interrogation had never taken place.
As they left, Alanic commented on the fact Zorian was not using any words or gestures to perform his mind magic. His tolerance for Zorian's peculiarities was probably steadily approaching the breaking point, and he would soon demand some kind of explanation. Unfortunate, but the lack of gestures and chants was not something Zorian could fake – he was pretty sure an expert mage like Alanic would notice if he tried to make something up to mask his ability.
By the time he'd finally gone back to Cyoria, it was already evening and Kirielle was sound asleep. Imaya remained awake to wait for him, which Zorian found a little bizarre – he had already made up an excuse yesterday for the fact that he would be absent for an entire day, and told her not to wait for him. She cared a bit too much about her tenants for a landlord, in his opinion.
As he went to bed, he couldn't help but wonder what kind of chaos was going to follow in the wake of the fall of Iasku Mansion. He supposed he would find out soon.
✦ ✧ ✦
In the next couple of days, Alanic left him alone and refrained from getting him involved in further investigations. That didn't mean that he and the rest of Eldemar's authorities were idle, though – in the days that followed, Cyoria was rocked by one scandal after another as important people started getting arrested and brought in for questioning left and right. Zorian paid close attention to who was getting arrested, even though he actually already knew most of them due to his interrogation session with Sudomir.