He came back. Almost the last, even after Masty and Jack. Leaning on Lidlet for the shock, but not a scratch on him. Unable to answer questions. Unable to understand why he wasn’t dead. And Banders had been glad to see him, but when she’d hugged him he’d heard the echo of his torn-up flesh and not been able to enjoy it. And then he’d gone to the workshop to do his job and found it was worse.
Turning the winches was old school, of course. Prassel wasn’t going to be about that kind of barbarism. A modern Inquirer had more sophisticated tools but, because of that, they needed a more sophisticated assistant. Someone with a bit of training in artifice and mechanisms. Which, in Prassel’s department, meant Cosserby.
He had it all laid out now, in one of the tents specifically set aside for this sort of thing because nobody wanted to spend any time in a part-time torture chamber. He had the regulation chair strewn with cords and tablethi, clamps and probes and hooks. The whole toolkit that allowed you to subject someone to extreme excruciation without actually hurting them, really. No need to pull out the fingernails or go to work on the teeth, not with modern science. Just harnessing a few magical currents was enough. It didn’t even drain the tablethi all that much. You were barely doing anything at all.
Cosserby sat in the darkness like a terrified bride awaiting a brutal groom and tried to stop his hands from shaking.
He had a problem. It was going to kill him. He’d already run into it, but this, here, now, would be the test. Everything else had been behind closed doors and, until the fighting broke out, nobody would be in a position to find out that he couldn’t do his job any more. He could have trod water until hostilities resumed, if it hadn’t been for this.
Prassel came in then, brisk, almost bright. Not looking forward to this, perhaps, but she had her quota to make and, if there was one thing the Palleseen army liked, it was hitting quotas.
“Cohort-Monitor, excellent. All ready. Initiative.” She rubbed her gloved hands together in an excess of energy. “We’re down for three today and hopefully that’s our lot. Early lunch, after.”
Cosserby nodded quickly and kept nodding for too long as he tried to show what a dutiful soldier he intended to be. Then stopped nodding, so that the motion shifted down to his hands, which shook. He tried to say something two or three times, but his throat was too dry.
Prassel noticed none of it. She just called out, and a couple of soldiers brought someone in. A lean, starved-looking man in uniform shirtsleeves and breeches. His unshaven jaw worked, and his eyes flicked from Prassel to the chair.
“I swear,” he said thickly. “I don’t know. You got the wrong man, magister.”
And that was quite possibly true. If they could be certain of everyone’s loyalty then this whole circus wouldn’t be necessary. You always ended up damaging some good metal, if you were diligent enough about stripping out the broken pieces.
“Strip,” Prassel instructed. The man didn’t want to strip, but the soldiers shoved a truncheon in his face until he got the message and obeyed.
“Just sit down,” Prassel told him then. “The sooner this is over, the sooner we can give you a clean bill of health.” As though anything about the process related to health.
When the man proved unwilling to sit down, the soldiers kindly assisted him into the chair. Then it was Cosserby’s job to tighten the straps, and his hands trembled as he reached for them, waiting for the pain. Waiting for the shortness of breath, the taut grind of all that physical ruin in potentia. But he was gentle, with the buckles. Nothing pulled tight. He filled his mind with thoughts of it all being for the man’s own good, to stop him falling out of the chair and hitting his head. And apparently that was fine, somehow.
Maybe I can do this, he told himself. Maybe I can get through it like that. It is all for his own good, even if it hurts. He’ll be better off later, his allegiance sealed and confirmed. It’s like we’re doing surgery on his loyalty, and surely that’s allowed.
He could even press the cold tablethi to the man’s bared chest, to his groin and the tender skin of the inner thigh. To the sides of his head, right up close to those rolling, panicked eyes. Not so much as a twinge. For his own good.
“Now,” said Prassel, “we’ve had several people confirm that you were an intimate confidante of one Cohort-Invigilator Ullers. Why don’t you tell me about her?” Ullers, presumably, having served her own turn in a chair like this very recently.
The man in the chair stared at her, eyes very wide. “I don’t know any Ullers,” he rasped. “Magister, you’ve got the wrong man.”
“This is going to be tedious for me if you start with blank denials,” Prassel told him. And maybe she did have the right man, and maybe he was lying, or maybe she had the right man but the wrong name and Ullers had been someone else. Or he was telling the truth and this whole business was just cruelty for its own sake, to keep everyone else scared of Correct Speech.
“Cohort-Monitor,” Prassel said. “Give him a taste, please.”
All for his own good, Cosserby told himself. Nothing to see here. Just someone being improved. Perfected. Hurts us more than it hurts him. Regrettable but necessary. He made the connections, charging the web of tablethi. Just a sequence of carefully enunciated words to unlock the power in them. Discharge it through the man’s nerves so that his brain told him his body was on fire. Hardly anything.
He drew breath, and felt the lance of pain through his shoulder, the razor edges of every shard of displaced bone. Like ghosts, hanging within his flesh, waiting to become real. A punishment, except not even that, really. Just a creditor collecting on a debt. He’d taken a loan of a whole body, on the battlefield, because it was that or die. Now someone was knocking at the door for it.
“Magister,” Cosserby said. He was staring into the prisoner’s appallingly wide eyes, and the man was staring back. “I can’t.”
“Well double-check your connections and get it working,” said Prassel. Cosserby could conceivably have wasted considerable time pretending to do just that, but it wouldn’t help forever, and right now he felt like he was going to be violently sick. Sick from all the pain that was loitering there, just waiting for him to open the door to it.
“Magister, I… I need to talk to you. I… am not fit for this work. I can’t do it any more. I can’t… hurt… anyone…”
Her face set. Understanding absolutely what he meant. In a moment she’d grabbed his arm and hustled him out of the tent, prisoner and guards both abandoned.
“When did he get to you?” she demanded.
“Magister?” But she was treading on the heels of her first question with the next.
“Who else was there, besides you and Jack?”
“Magister?”
She shook him. She still had that freedom. “Who, Cosserby? Who else did Jack get to?”
He stared at her, wide-eyed. “Jack? Maric Jack? He wasn’t there, magister. It was when we were—”
“He wasn’t there?”
“This is nothing to do with him.”
He got her to listen, in the end. Told her his tiny fragment of story. Not understanding why the details struck her so hard. Why an absence of Maric Jack was so much worse than a presence.
“It’s worse,” she said, at the end and mostly to herself. “It’s spreading. He’s worse than I thought.” And then she was striding off, so that he called plaintively after her, asking about the prisoner.
She turned on her heel, looking so bleak he thought she’d storm into the tent and cut the man’s throat herself. Instead she said, “Cut him loose. Probably he’s nobody. Cosserby, you can carry messages still, I take it?”
He nodded, even though he wasn’t really sure. Give him a death warrant and ask him to deliver it to the provosts, would he drop dead when it left his fingers? Or when the sentence was carried out? He didn’t know.
“Find Fellow-Inquirer Sherm. Tell him this man knew nothing. Tell him to find me at the department.” Her own territory where all the eavesdropping ears were at least beholden to her. “And then go to Mother Semprellaime. You know her wagon?” And he did, and she plainly noted that in his face, which was more mortification still. “Tell her it’s done. Obligation discharged,” Prassel instructed him. “And then not a word about any of this to anyone.”