Page 35

Chapter 35

The Sublime Art of Resisting Torture

Look, if you’d been captured and tormented twice in one week– one fucking week – wouldn’t you want people to know how bravely you’d withstood all those cruel acts of barbarity?

‘Oh, please, no!’ I screamed, crawling along the soiled stone floor, knees and palms slipping on my own urine and faecal matter. I persevered, however, determined to kiss the buzzing swarm of insects forming my beloved lord and master’s feet. ‘Please, I beg you, oh mightiest of the mighty, wisest of the wise, please don’t hurt me anymore! I can’t take it– not another minute, not another second !’

Actually, I could take a little bit more. Like, maybe six and a half minutes more. Seven at the outside.

Most military scholars agree that there are only three real strategies for enduring extended periods of torture without viable prospects of escape or rescue. The first involves physical conditioning. Getting your body accustomed to high degrees of pain limits the degree of stress imposed on the mind and therefore reduces the possibility of breaking under pressure. While I wouldn’t say I was in any way immune to the sensations of my skin being burned by a florinist’s acid spells or being choked repeatedly by an incarcerationist’s bindings, I reckoned I was as conditioned to torture as one could be while still possessing actual nerve endings.

The second method, a combination of duty to one’s cause, loyalty to one’s leaders and smug self-righteousness, allows you to endure for a certain length of time without breaking. I was understandably ill-equipped to employ this approach.

Finally, you can attempt to form a bond of sympathy with your tormentors. Keep eye contact with them while making your reaction as if seeing a trusted friend, or perceiving a genuinely loving soul beneath their hardened exteriors. Try to use their names, tell them about yourself, noting any detail which attracts their unintentional sympathy, then weave these disparate strands into a kind of relationship, heavily suggesting that you are both trapped in this unfair situation and perhaps between you there might be a way out of it.

Me? I’ve never been good at relationships, as evidenced by the fact that my best friends include a lunatic thunderer who threatens to kill me on a regular basis, a blood mage who thinks I’m emotionally unstable and a fucking vampire kangaroo. Oh, and the last woman I kissed is probably going to destroy the entire world.

Damn, though. It was one hell of a kiss.

But I’m not without my own tactical talents, which is why I developed what I hope will one day be termed the Cade Ombra Combination Insanity and Reverse-Torture Methodology. Memorise these techniques and you too can endure extended periods of captivity, suffering horribly but having a few laughs along the way. You might think my approach glib at first glance, but its foundations are strategically fucking brilliant.

As a prisoner, stripped of any supplies, garments, weapons and dignity, you still retain certain priceless resources within your control: a mind, a body and a voice. While the entire point of incarceration is to remove the utility of the prisoner’s body, the mind and voice can be honed into potent weapons for defence and attack.

The mind is a remarkable tool. It can intuit what your captors want from you and then shape itself to deny them their ultimate goal, even while appearing to be shattering exactly as the enemy intends. Suffering and despair are the measurements by which your opponent determines how close you are to breaking, which is why it’s a mistake to put on a brave face at the start and then gradually reveal your weakness. I say, start screaming for mercy as early as possible. It helps if you also sound kind of insane.

‘There is nothing I won’t do for my beloved master!’ I insisted, still crawling towards the Pandoral being under the disgusted glares of his so-called ‘Apocalypse Eight’.

When begging, it’s important never to let up, otherwise your captor could say something suitably clever or cruel and then walk away, leaving you to the less-than-tender mercies of his lunatic cultist mages. The trick is to yammer on and on until listening to you is torturous for them too and the last thing they want is to hear more of your screaming. This is the second aspect of the Cade Ombra method: take all the fun out of the process in the hope that some measure of basic rationality comes into the equation.

Torture is fundamentally idiotic. It’s the lazy person’s persuasion. There’s no piece of information worth torturing someone over that you couldn’t get through some other means. Want to know the secret combination to a royal treasury? Bribe someone, for fuck’s sake. You really think the guy whose job it is to unlock it now and then for the convenience of the monarch is so well paid he wouldn’t rather sell the information to you and then skip off to some other country to be rich? Also, what do you think happens when you kidnap a royal treasurer and torture them for days? You think the palace won’t figure out they haven’t shown up for work in some time and change the combination locks or the spelled wards or even the key itself? Of course they will, which means the longer you’re holding the captive, the less likely the information they’re withholding will do you any good.

Ignore any claims to urgency or the greater good: those who conceive, command, enact or tolerate the abuse of captives are doing so because they like it. Torture arouses them. That’s why your job, my unfortunate fellow captive, is to take all the fucking fun out of the process.

‘I am filth!’ I squealed with a madman’s glee. ‘My flesh is naught but the shit excreted from my arsehole upon this very floor!’ I scooped a little up in my hands and rubbed it on my face, grinning maniacally. ‘My blood is naught but the piss trickling from my pathetic, flaccid manhood!’ I bent my head lower and pretended to lick the floor. ‘My soul is the pus oozing from my wounds, my spirit the foetid breath stinking of bile as I vomit all that I am or ever was upon my wretchedness!’

Okay, fair warning: you may want to skip this next part if you’re squeamish. These fuckers had been hitting me with every kind of incarcerationist spell, tormentor hex and Infernalist nightmare they could come up with, not to mention felinist claws digging under the fingernails and good old-fashioned beatings, all to soften me up so I’d be unable to resist being turned into a Pandoral gate that would destroy my entire world. So, fuck them and fuck anyone who thinks I went too far. They started this torture, after all, and I was going to make them suffer.

‘Strip the skin from my bones, master,’ I begged the Pandoral. ‘Sting my eyes,’ I pleaded, pointing at my face. I opened my mouth wide, mumbling incoherently, ‘Fill my throat with your thick swarming insects.’ I made a hideous gurgling sound before adding, ‘I want to taste you upon my tongue, feel you sliding down my gullet. Let my intestines be the path by which we are united for ever.’

Bipedal swarms of insects aren’t good for producing facial expressions, but I was convinced the Pandoral was starting to look both disgusted and queasy. Certainly his cabal of wonderists appeared to be on the verge of vomiting.

Should I go for the butt? I wondered absently. It was a bit over the top, even for me. Ah, what the hell. Corrigan would appreciate it.

‘Sting me here, master!’ I shouted with more ardour than any desperate suitor outside his lover’s window, legs in the air as I pushed my finger between my arse cheeks. ‘Please, master, I long to be stung here– sting me, master– sting me hard! ’

‘By the Void, someone shut him up!’ complained the cosmist. She was still wearing the mask made from the Auroral Banner over her star-speckled black face; the tiny stars also covered the rest of her skin. Cosmists, being so untethered to the physicality of their own bodies, are especially vulnerable to depression. I figured a few more hours of this and she’d be suicidal.

Advocates of torture claim everyone breaks sooner or later. I was intent on proving them right.

‘It’s an act,’ insisted the felinist.

She really is rather cute , I thought, with that distant amusement that goes along with slowly driving oneself insane. Those desiccated cat ears sticking up from her chestnut curls were just adorable.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, laughing like a halfwit as I rolled around naked in my own filth, ‘it’s all an act! Don’t be fooled by me, master– make me suffer– only through pain can you force me to unleash my Pandoral abilities inwards and turn myself into the gate to your own realm!’

‘It’s not an act,’ said the luminist, whose eyes were glowing a pure white, not because he was somehow peering into my psyche but because he was casting an illusion for himself so he wouldn’t have to watch me writhing in shit and piss. ‘His mind is fracturing.’

See? The first part of the Cade Ombra method was working: I really was on the edge of completely losing my mind.

‘Yyoouu. . .’ said the Pandoral to the Infernalist. ‘Yyoouurr sppelllls aaarrr — ’

Oh, fucking get on with it , I thought. You’ve had six months on this Mortal plane to get accustomed to speaking our language and it still takes you half an hour to ask directions to the toilet?

Surely the Pandoral couldn’t hear my thoughts? Perhaps he was self-aware enough to realise he was becoming a real drag on the evening. He stopped attempting to talk, the thousands of insects making up his body shivered, then swarmed closer together, enabling him to sound a little more coherent.

‘Yyourr spells touch the Mortal mind,’ he said to the Infernalist. ‘Does the prisoner feign madness or have you and your colleagues truly pushed him to breaking point?’

The Infernalist turned to me, an irritated look flashing across his features. As wonderists go, Infernalists are pretty grounded. I’m not saying they’re all salt-of-the-earth types, but when you make your living trading fractions of your soul for spells so that you can be paid to do nasty things to nasty people, you don’t have a lot of time for ego or posturing. He’d been screwing with my mind pretty badly these past several days, but he’d handled the job with a certain professional dispassion I admired more than the whole ‘look how evil we are’ approach of the rest of his lame-arse crew. He’d already infiltrated my thoughts pretty deeply, and every time he had to awaken another one of the Infernal sigils etched into his chest, we both knew he was wasting yet another spell he’d have to pay to replace later. But he was a pro: he knew you couldn’t reason with an extra-dimensional tyrant any more than you could a wanna-be warlord, so he got down to business.

He placed two fingers upon a black sigil just below his ribcage on the left side, a frowning mouth overlaid on a smiling one, looking a bit like two crescent moons placed one over the other. As he murmured the incantation, the inky black sigils floated from his body, drifting through the air to inscribe themselves over my mouth. This particular spell was called a Tongue-Wrester and I had to hide a smirk when I felt it insinuate itself inside me. This guy was clearly sick of wasting expensive spells, so he was now pulling out the cheap stuff.

‘Ask him what you will,’ the Infernalist told the others. ‘His darkest truths will be revealed.’

The florinist decided to nominate himself as interrogator, which was unpleasant. Florinists are kind of like cosmists, only instead of mystically covering their entire bodies with nether-space, florinists cover every part of themselves– including the lining of their throats– in a kind of flexible bark. It may be durable and resilient, but they all sound like bits of wood grinding against each other.

‘Have you lost your mind, Cade Ombra?’ he asked.

Ah, I do love an amateur. The Tongue-Wrester is kind of like a verity potion– if they weren’t just narcotics meant to make you blurt out whatever was on your mind. This spell, however, draws not only truth from you but your darkest, most embarrassing truths. Luckily, I’d done plenty of stupid shit in my relatively short life and I was way past embarrassment. Also, the florinist hadn’t asked if my mind was lost now , only if I’d ever lost it.

‘I have,’ I confessed, recalling those first few weeks after I’d left the Glorian Justiciars, got the shit kicked out of me by my former comrades and been cut off from the Auroral Song. It wasn’t exactly a fun memory to relive, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t try . ‘I am alone,’ I wailed, my tears genuine for once, ‘utterly alone, unloved, unheard– I am nothing but failure made flesh– the worthless remnants of — ’

‘We will have to cease his torments,’ warned the cosmist. ‘I cannot bear any more of his madness.’

‘Great,’ muttered the Infernalist. ‘You made me waste yet another spell for nothing.’

‘Let us delve deeper, then,’ said the felinist, coming closer, head tilted to one side like a curious cat.

You getting sweet on me, kitty? I wondered, then recalled that I was naked and covered in smeared faeces and urine, so probably not.

‘Tell us your darkest deeds,’ she demanded. ‘Reveal to us the secrets you keep from even those closest to you.’ She turned to the others. ‘Once his mind has settled, we can use these against him.’

You could , I conceded silently, if any of you amateurs were remotely competent at this job.

Darkest deeds? Entirely open to interpretation. Nonetheless, I rattled off some particularly nasty things I’d had to do in my career– none of which I’m going to reveal here, obviously.

The secrets I keep from those closest to me? Oh, baby, now you’re really making this fun.

‘I once paid an entire military encampment’s complement of prostitutes to pretend they couldn’t feel Corrigan’s cock when he was fucking them,’ I declared mournfully. ‘Almost half my entire fee for the campaign I spent bribing each of the women to keep saying “is it in yet?” until by the end of the fighting season he was convinced that his penis was getting smaller by the day. . . Oh, woe is me!’

‘What the hell does that matter?’ demanded the cosmist.

I couldn’t blame her; they really can’t feel much of anything so she wouldn’t know what appalling behaviour this was.

‘You’re being too vague,’ the Infernalist informed his comrades. He was looking mildly amused by all this– as I said, oddly decent folks to hang around with.

‘Fine,’ said the florinist. ‘Reveal to us your secrets about the Lords Devilish!’

‘They’re all pricks,’ I confessed.

That was the only secret I knew about the Lords Devilish.

‘The Lords Celestine, then!’ the florinist shouted. ‘Tell us everything you’ve hidden from them and your own coven!’

Better and better . I did in fact, have a secret about the Lords Celestine that I hadn’t shared with my closest companions: something so embarrassing that I’d almost rather die than have Corrigan ever find out.

‘I claimed the night I had sex with the Celestine of Rationality was mediocre,’ I admitted. ‘It was a lie. That night was fabulous– it was magical!’

‘Ennnnouuugh,’ buzzed the Pandoral, evidently as disgusted by the thought of Mortals and Celestines engaging in carnal activities as I would be by the thought of whatever his swarm did when they were feeling randy. Alas for his prudishness, once the Tongue-Wrester has been cast and the question asked, the victim can’t be stopped from giving the answer.

‘I came three times that night,’ I confessed loudly. ‘Three times– I’d never been able to have three orgasms with anyone , not even as a teenager!’ That, too, was sadly true.

‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ shouted the florinist, pairing each command with another wooden-palmed slap that threatened to knock me unconscious– which would’ve been good for me and bad for them.

‘He’ll keep answering the question until you ask another,’ said the Infernalist, visibly hiding a chuckle at the plight of his colleagues. ‘He won’t stop until the spell wears off or he’s no longer capable of speech.’

‘Somebody ask a different question, damn it,’ the luminist shouted, but they were all getting confused and flustered now, so in desperation he said, ‘Reveal for us your secret tactics, Cade Ombra!’

‘I masturbate thinking about her,’ I told him. ‘It’s the only way to get her out of my mind sometimes. You wouldn’t think that Rationality was sexy, but damn it all, there are nights when I can’t get her breasts out of my thoughts– I’m not usually a breast person, either. I mean, I like them plenty, but not obsessively, you know? I think perhaps it’s because I still associate them with my mother, who insisted I keep breast-feeding even when I was five years old and — ’

‘Cease!’ bellowed the Pandoral with the buzzing of thousands of insect wings.

The Infernalist, who could’ve stopped the spell any time he’d wanted, finally banished it. I was really starting to like this guy. ‘Well, what now?’ he asked after I stopped unburdening myself of all the secrets I’d kept from ‘those closest to me’. What a stupid thing to ask. Most people tell their worst secrets to at least one friend. The stuff we don’t admit is almost always the trivial, embarrassing stuff.

‘We kill him,’ said the borinist mage. I always find totemists a little weird, even Aradeus and I’m used to him, but this boar-tusked guy had interrogated me about Temper several times and I was not at all sure the underlying motivation wasn’t sexual in nature. ‘We kill him and find another candidate.’

The cosmist’s laugh was deeply unpleasant. ‘Another Mortal wonderist attuned to the Pandoral realm? Exactly how many of them do you think there are? The Seven Brothers were the first in generations. We could scour the entire world and not find another.’

‘Then we resume the torments,’ said the luminist, finally removing the illusion covering his own eyes and looking down at me with utter disgust.

Good luck with that, pal. You kidnapped me, beat me, burned me, tried to drag me to the edge of madness. Now you’re going to have to find a way to back the hell off before I push myself over the cliff for you.

The luminist reached down and grabbed my jaw, squeezing tightly– but not too tightly, on account of luminists not exactly being paragons of physical fitness to begin with. ‘I will cast such illusions as to drive him to terror and despair heretofore unknown to any — ’

‘That’s how we drove him half nuts in the first place,’ the Infernalist pointed out.

‘Well, what then?’ asked the felinist. ‘You want us to give him a warm bath and soft sheets and read him bedtime stories?’

Kitty-cat, I would seriously consider betraying the entire Mortal realm and turning myself into a gate to the Pandoral plane if you’d join me for that bath and we could recreate my night with the Celestine of Rationality.

Yes, my innermost thoughts had become rather crass– although, in my defence, I was a little on the crazy side after several interminable days and nights of mystical torments. My sense of internal etiquette and common decency were not faring well.

My captors argued among themselves a bit longer while their Pandoral master got more and more agitated, judging by the way his swarm kept threatening to lose cohesion. In the end, they decided maybe discussing in front of me how best to get me to do what they wanted without driving me irretrievably insane was probably not the soundest strategic approach, so they left me there for the night. Somewhat to my surprise, the Pandoral ordered the guards to clean out my cell and bring me proper food and water. They even provided towels so I could attempt to wipe myself clean.

All in all, my fifth day of captivity had been a pretty good one, since I understood a lot more about how my captors were thinking. More importantly, it revealed two important facts about what was going on behind the scenes. The first was that Tenebris was clearly planning to betray these guys. Not only was the diabolic an expert in persuasion and subversion, but he also knew me better than almost anyone except Corrigan. Had he wanted to, he could have given the Pandoral and his Apocalypse Eight a step-by-step guide on how to elegantly and efficiently break my will. Second, the absence of the only other person who might be in a position to force my hand meant the real conspiracy went deeper than I’d ever suspected.

That night, as I kicked back in my cell, I allowed my somewhat crazed mind to settle– not coming all the way back from that dark tunnel of lunacy into which it had retreated, but close enough to enjoy the prospect of seeing Corrigan’s face when they finally tracked my prison down, only to find me already escaped.