Chapter Eight

 

 

Rion shoved his way out of the door and stumbled from the house, just managing to get far enough to avoid his vomit serving as a welcome mat to anyone unfortunate enough to stop by, before it felt like a hand gripped his guts and squeezed tight. He fell to his knees and began spewing out the contents of his meager breakfast and even more meager lunch and dinner—mostly because neither of them had existed, not today at least—onto the chipped cobbles of the street.

It seemed to go on forever, and every time he thought it was done, every time he thought he’d finally managed to get control of his heaving stomach, he would recall the image of the man, Ed, who had smiled so confidently as he’d assured Rion that he would never tell him anything. Well, Ed wasn’t smiling now, hadn’t been smiling for the last few hours. Screaming, though, sure. There’d been plenty enough of that, and Rion was glad for the thickly-padded walls of the room which almost completely blocked out the sounds of the man’s wails.

Almost, but not all the way, for he could still hear them, or, at least he thought he could, though perhaps the screams he now heard were no more than the echoes of his memory and disgust mingling together. When Rion had brought him to be interrogated, he’d been assured that all men talk, sooner or later, and though he’d doubted it at the time—the man, Ed, had seemed so damned confident, after all—he did not doubt it now. And if he was being honest with himself, the man had held off a damned sight longer than Rion would have, his only answer to the questions asked of him and the punches intended to soften him up a bloody smile.

The smile had remained in place even as Sigan’s torturer, Venner, had laid his leather satchel of tools on the table, withdrawing them one by one and making sure to do so in plain view of Ed. But the smile had faded soon enough once the torturer had begun to use those tools on Ed’s flesh, ripping and rending, twisting and tearing and cutting.

Still, smile or no smile, Ed had refused to talk, the only sound he offered that of a wordless, inarticulate howl as the torturer continued his work. Finally, though, three fingers, several teeth, and two toes later, Ed had agreed to tell everything that he knew, to list the names of all those who had either sought his services or those who had sought payment for the murders requested by Ed’s clients.

Rion was curious about the names, wondered just how long that list was, but he hadn’t been able to stay in that room any longer, that room where the smell of blood and pain was so thick a man could barely breathe, and the floor beneath the chair to which Ed was strapped stained in a crimson pool among which were scattered parts of the clerk’s toes and fingers, parts that had once been attached to him.

No, Rion knew that the names would be written down, would be verified and re-verified, no doubt to the desperate sound of Ed’s screams, and though he tried, he’d been unable to hold back his protesting stomach any longer, had stumbled desperately away and out into the night. The air here felt cool against his sweaty, fevered skin, felt bracing, and that was good for Rion felt wrung out, used up, as if he had been the one who’d spent the last few hours being tortured instead of Ed.

He took a slow, deep breath, giving himself another moment to make sure that his stomach had returned to some semblance of normalcy, then he rose and turned to see Sigan standing behind him. There was a look on the crime boss’s face that was almost sympathetic, an expression that looked decidedly strange, so different was it from the usual menacing scowl to which Rion had become so accustomed. “Hey,” he managed.

“Hey yourself,” Sigan said. Then he glanced around the street, leaning on the side of the building, and if his own stomach protested what they’d both witnessed only moments before, it had the good grace to do so quietly, for he looked as comfortable as if they’d just spent the morning playing cards. “Not an easy thing,” he said, talking as if he was almost talking to himself, “watching a man taken apart like that, watching him being broken.”

Rion agreed with that much, at least, but the conditional trust he placed in his stomach didn’t go so far as to get into a long conversation about it, so he only nodded which seemed good enough for the crime boss who went on anyway. “Not so much the wounds and the blood, at least not for me. Sure, they’re bad enough, but it’s watching him reduced to an animal, little more than a beast who’s hurting and only wishes not to hurt anymore that’s the worst.”

“Yeah,” Rion said. “He…that is…I’m glad, of course. But he seemed…so confident…so…sure. I had thought, maybe, he wouldn’t talk.”

Sigan met his eyes. “All men talk,” he said simply. “If the gods didn’t want them to, they wouldn’t have given them mouths.” He shrugged. “It’s not a question of being brave or being strong. Once the cutting starts, once it starts in earnest, and a man is forced to watch little pieces of himself taken away, pieces that’ll never come back, once he starts to realize he’s physically less than he was, well…in my experience, it doesn’t take long after that.”

Rion cleared his throat. “Got a lot of experience in it, do you?”

Sigan grunted, and if he felt judged or wronged he didn’t show it. “More’n I’d like, you want to know the truth. But then, that’s the job. A clerk has his quills, his papers, a farmer his livestock and crops, and a crime boss…well, a crime boss has his torture.”

“Think I’d…rather be the farmer,” Rion managed. “Better to pull weeds than fingers.”

“Maybe,” Sigan agreed, then gave him a wink. “The pay isn’t as good though.”

Rion supposed that was true enough, but he’d take the farm just the same. He almost wished he’d brought Ed to Alesh, as Katherine and Darl had recommended before heading off to find their next excitement, but Rion had decided to bring the man to Sigan instead. For one, he knew they needed to deal with the traitors in their midst as quickly as possible to have any chance of being prepared when the army came back and attacked in earnest. He’d believed—rightly so, it seemed—that if anyone would be particularly skilled at extracting information from an unwilling informant quickly, it would be the crime boss. Yet, that hadn’t been his primary reason for choosing to bring the man to Sigan instead of placing him in the dungeons to be interrogated under Alesh’s supervision.

Instead, what had prompted him to do so had not been so much pragmatism as an admittedly rare streak of compassion. After all, whatever else he had been, the late Lord Aldrick had been incredibly thorough in the records he had kept about other people in the city. No great surprise, Rion supposed, considering that it was these records which gave the man power to control so many of his peers. Those papers they’d discovered had led to a disturbing number of men and women among the nobility and commoners alike who had allied themselves with the Darkness.

That meant the dungeons were nearly full to bursting with prisoners, and it was Alesh’s job to figure out what to do with all of them. Captain Nordin was a hard man, perhaps from living so long under Tesharna’s tyranny, or perhaps simply in disgust at the number of traitors they’d already discovered. Nordin advised killing them all and letting the Keeper sort them out. It seemed like a reasonable enough solution to Rion as well, assuming they were all interrogated first to see if they held any information vital to the city’s defense or information about what, exactly, they were up against.

Execution might be a logical solution on the surface, but that was before you squared yourself with the fact that you were actually sentencing well over a hundred people to their deaths. Mass executions, to Rion’s mind, at least, might not be the best way to bolster the already flagging morale of people living in a city soon to be under siege. But even that wasn’t the main concern. The main concern would be watching hundreds of men and women, all with families, all with sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, die at your order.

Not that Rion would be the one giving the order, of course. That dubious honor was left to Alesh, for it was he who was the ruler of Valeria—thank the gods—and, in the end, what decision was to be made was his to make. A job Rion didn’t envy him. Ruler of the city or not, able to make fire obey his commands like a puppy dog or not, Rion wouldn’t have traded places with the man for all the gold in the world, not if it meant accepting the burden of that choice. A burden that, it was clear, weighed heavily on the man, growing day by day as more and more men and women were added to the list of prisoners. So many that, soon, the dungeons would be unable to accommodate them. As far as Rion knew, it was a problem Tesharna had never had, but then he supposed when you were a servant of the Dark and willing to sacrifice anyone or anything to serve Shira killing a few dozen people for convenience’s sake was no great difficulty.

“There’s so many of them,” Rion whispered, thinking of the traitors, more names of which had begun to spew from Ed’s mouth before he’d stumbled outside.

Perhaps he should have explained what he meant, but Sigan seemed to understand well enough. “And more before we’re through, no doubt. The problem with goin’ lookin’ for the truth is that sometimes, if you’re unlucky, you find it. Ask Carlen, if you’re curious, what too much truth can do to a man.”

Rion nodded slowly, looking at the man. A huge bastard, no doubt of that, looking as if he’d been carved out of a mountain, with a foreboding visage that the deep, ragged scar around his neck did nothing to soften. His hands were big enough to strangle the life out of a man with little difficulty and, what was worse, they’d done just that on a number of occasions. Yet, there was something frail about him too, a vulnerability that had never been there before but had surfaced in the last few days since Carlen had arrived. “How is Carlen, anyway?”

Sigan grunted, shrugging. “A tough bastard, that one. Still on the mend, of course, and I don’t imagine he’ll be dancing any jigs anytime soon, but the healers tell me he’s out of the worst of it.”

“Well, that’s good news, at least,” Rion said and meant it. He hadn’t had much opportunity to speak to the man since his arrival in Valeria, but if not for Carlen and the message he’d carried, the city would have been overrun by nightlings long before now.

Sigan gave a single nod in agreement. “About as good as any man can hope for after being a nightling chew toy and being hunted down by assassins in the street. Speaking of which,” he said, glancing back at the door to the small, unremarkable house they’d existed. Unremarkable, at least, save for the man being tortured to within an inch of his life inside its walls. “I’d best be gettin’ back. Venner isn’t a particularly patient man at the best of times, and without me around he might start cuttin’ off some extra pieces no matter how much that bastard spills, just for the fun of it.”

It didn’t seem like much fun to Rion, but then neither did Venner’s company, and despite the casual way in which he spoke, despite the hard, cold front he put on, Rion got a sense that the crime boss was troubled. “And what about you?”

Sigan stopped from where he’d been turning toward the door, looked back, and a strange expression, one that reminded Rion of a hunted animal, flitted across his face before vanishing in another moment. “Eh? What’s that?”

“How are you doing?” Rion said.

“As well as always, I suppose,” the crime boss answered warily.

“That the truth?” Rion asked.

Sigan gave him a humorless smile. “I’m a criminal, Eriondrian. We aren’t known for telling the truth.”

Of course he isn’t alright, Rion thought. How could he be? After all, if everything he’d heard was true, one of the crime boss’s old friends had died rescuing Carlen so that he could make it to the city and warn every one of the impending attack. Not only had Sigan lost a friend, but in his sacrifice, the man had saved the crime boss for the second time—not to mention the entire city. Twice then, his life had been saved, and for a man like Sigan who spent a good portion of his time tracking the debts he was owed, the burden of knowing he owed a debt he could never repay must have been heavy indeed.

“But you’re not just a criminal,” Rion said carefully. “Not if everything I’ve heard is true. You’re a Torchbearer. I’ve been surprised a lot lately, but that’s one I never would have guessed.”

Sigan grunted, avoiding meeting his eyes. “It was a long time ago. I’m not that man anymore.”

“Maybe,” Rion said. “But then, the crime boss I knew wouldn’t have wasted any effort trying to save a wounded man from assassins either.”

Sigan did meet his gaze then, his own eyes narrowing dangerously, and Rion thought maybe he’d pushed the man too far but after several tense seconds Sigan heaved a sigh. “No. No, I don’t suppose he would have. I guess I’m not that man anymore, either. At least, I am to those sorry louts who follow me but…”

Rion nodded. “Sigan still to Venner, and the other criminals, then. Glenn, surely, to Carlen. But who are you to you?”

Sigan considered that, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t know. How’s Ernest?”

Rion raised an eyebrow. “Ernest?”

“Sure. Always liked the name. A man like that, with a name like Ernest, that kind of a man could be a farmer, don’t you think? Spend his days muckin’ about in the dirt and bitchin’ about the heat.”

There was almost a wistful look on the crime boss’s face when he said it, as if his life’s dream was spending hard hours in the sun toiling away for little profit, hoping a storm didn’t come through and wash away the year’s work or that crows didn’t decide your farm was a buffet. People, Rion decided, are never as simple as they seem.

“Doesn’t pay as well though, farming,” Rion said. “Or so I hear.”

“Maybe not,” Sigan agreed. “But dirt washes off a damn sight easier than blood—you can trust me on that.”

Rion nodded. “I will.”

Sigan reached for the door again then paused with his hand on the latch, looking back at Rion. “You take care of Alesh, Eriondrian. Help him, if you can. I may be a criminal, but I’d just as soon not see my city overtaken by nightlings and the sort of bastards that follow that Broken fellow, not if I could help it.”

A thing easier said than done, so far as Rion was concerned. Especially since, right now, it wasn’t Alesh’s physical safety he was worried about but instead the mental anguish the man was obviously undergoing while trying to decide what to do with the prisoners. The war he fought now was not one of army versus army or man versus man. Instead it was a war of morality, of necessity versus principle, and as far as Rion could see, there was no winning it.

“Not an easy thing,” Sigan said, as if reading his mind, “takin’ a life. A man does it, he dies a little inside too. A little more each time. Everyone suffers the loss, only thing is some folks are just too damned stupid—or, like Venner, just too damned mean—to recognize what they’re losin’.”

“You think he should let them live then? The prisoners?” Rion asked, surprised, as he would have expected the crime boss to be the first one to advocate killing the lot of them and being done with it.

Sigan shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, lad. Some questions don’t have easy answers, and some, my experience, don’t have any answers at all. All I know is that we’re in the true night now, the darkness is all around us, pressin’ in, and if we’re to make it out, it’ll be Alesh that leads us.” He took a deep breath, and when he spoke again his voice was brisk and businesslike. “We’ll get what information there’s here to get from this Ed fella, and I’ll send a note by the castle for you with the names and places, anythin’ I see might be of some use.”

Rion nodded. It was as clear a dismissal as he was likely to get. “Good luck. Ernest.”

The crime boss grinned as if they’d just shared some inside joke—which, maybe, they had. “You too, Eriondrian. And maybe whisper a word or two in the ear of that god of yours, eh? I got a feelin’ we’ll be needin’ all the luck he can spare soon enough.”

Then he turned and headed through the door, closing it behind him without a backward glance and leaving Rion standing in the street next to the still-steaming pile of his puke. He realized that he was beginning to like the crime boss. An unexpected thing, maybe, but there it was and there was no denying it. And where one unexpected thing might occur, so, too, might another. Or so he hoped. After all, that was just about the only way they were likely to survive the coming days.