Page 36

Chapter 36

Absent Enemies

Two full days passed without my captors renewing my torments or making any attempts to use intimidation or negotiation; instead, they fed me once or twice a day and if the guards didn’t bother giving me a clean bucket in which to relieve myself, neither did they complain when I emptied it out by pushing as much as I could under the small gap between the bottom of my cell door and the floor. As for the food, it was edible, and more importantly, not, so far as I could tell, poisoned. Even the beatings were perfunctory, thanks mostly to the carefully calibrated amount of craziness I demonstrated to keep them worried about shattering my mind permanently.

All this might sound terribly banal– the tedious complaints of a prisoner whose current incarceration offers nothing more noteworthy than an interlude between more significant events– but nothing could be further from the truth.

A captive’s primary aim is to escape, which is accomplished mainly through the acquisition of intelligence, and while two days of apparent monotony might sound like an empty piss-bucket in terms of exciting details, that’s only true if you’re looking at those events from the perspective of the captive, not the captors.

Keeping and torturing someone is expensive and risky. First, you need a place to hold them, and since I hadn’t seen or heard anything suggesting the presence of other prisoners, that meant this whole place was being used just for me. Few people own their own dungeons, and the rent on these places isn’t as cheap as you might hope: guards will need paying, feeding and housing, unless you want them nattering over a flagon or two at their local about their mysterious employers and the strange wonderist they’re guarding in the secret cell no one knows about.

Maybe the expense isn’t exactly bankrupting, but it’s not cheap. The risks, however, are exorbitant. I’m not the popular guy you might have expected, and while my few friends are powerful, that’s not in the political or religious sense, which is what you really need. My captors didn’t know that, but they certainly did know that my friends included a big brute with a reputation for violence that made other thunderers look positively lamb-like, a former sublime with a habit of accidentally draining the blood of entire troops of soldiers, and a vampire kangaroo who did the same, but far more messily and entirely intentionally, if a little more slowly. And every day they were keeping me was one more day when an army marching behind some would-be Ascendant Prince might appear to tear this place apart.

So, two days of nothing ? Cheap for me, expensive for the Pandoral and his little cult. My hours of endless boredom and foreboding were actually two days of freaking out for the captors, wondering what the hells they should do next.

I passed the time comfortably enough, assimilating a mental picture of what was going on outside my cell. I’d been kidnapped ostensibly to use my Pandoral attunement to turn myself into a gate, much as the ill-fated Seven Brothers had done some months ago, and I was pretty sure my little performance had them worried enough about my sanity not to force the issue further. All forms of wonderism do get a bit touchy when the mage isn’t of sound mind or body, but it was reassuring to know that as the Pandoral was concerned about what might happen if a gate– in this case, me – went nuts, the state of my thoughts really could affect any portal created inside me. If all else failed, I would drive myself fully crazy.

The initial torture had been meant to scare me into cooperating voluntarily. No one would bother with an intervening second step, since threatening my loved ones really wouldn’t have got anyone anywhere. But the logical next move should have been to negotiate for my complicity. Two days is a long time to hold a potentially dangerous captive without making a genuine effort to get what you want from them, so it was odd that no one had banged on my door offering me vast riches or untold power to comply.

All of this suggested the Pandoral and his stupidly named ‘Apocalypse Eight’ were getting seriously bad advice, so I had to ask myself: if Tenebris didn’t actually want the Pandoral opening the gate here and now, what was the ultimate aim of the diabolic’s scheme?

This, unfortunately, I still couldn’t answer. My two guards, whom I called Lefty and Righty because they always sat in the same places outside my cell door, were professional enough not to talk to me, no matter how many of Corrigan’s dirty jokes I regaled them with. I couldn’t guess how long they meant to keep me here, since the activity that usually precedes the closing of an illegal prison– namely, executing the prisoners and burying the evidence– would involve only me, which meant I could either wait for the Pandoral’s pathetic cultists to start torturing me again, or I could force the issue myself.

I’ve never been a patient person.

If hearing a prisoner’s innermost thoughts during the dull interludes between being kidnapped and either released or killed is somewhat boring, allow me to say, fuck you for your callous disregard for the suffering of a fellow sentient being, and also, here’s where we get to the good part.

There are five ways a prisoner can affect their captivity: attempted escape, attempted suicide, making oneself unsuitable for the aims of one’s captors (also known as the Cade Ombra Method), negotiation and finally, outright capitulation.

I’d tested means of escape both mundane and mystical upon my arrival, of course, to relieve the boredom and anxiety of my imprisonment– nobody takes a wonderist captive without first making sure they can’t get away. Also, incarcerationists are thorough by nature. Attempted suicide wasn’t my style– well, not unless I could take with me the pricks who’d brought me to such a pass– and in any case, incarcerationists are also experts at weaving wards to make suicide impossible. I’d played the ‘going nuts’ card already and it had done its job. That meant negotiation was next, right?

See, that’s what someone– not my idiot captors, but someone more knowledgeable about the actual conspiracy– would be expecting. If there had been any conceivable scenario in which I would have agreed to be the Pandoral’s portal, he would have already offered me the deal.

And– and this is the important part– someone was missing from this whole episode, and that someone’s absence was making me curious.

That’s why my next move was —

‘I capitulate!’ I called through the filthy little gap at the bottom of the door. ‘I will let my attunement be used to turn me into a gate!’

‘What?’ Lefty asked.

‘It means, “I give up”,’ I clarified. People who take jobs guarding tortured prisoners are rarely the brightest pigs in the sty.

‘Says he’s giving up,’ Lefty informed Righty.

‘So what?’ asked his equally dim colleague.

I hadn’t expected I’d have to explain the intricate permutations of surrender and its value to their employer’s cause, but I can be generous. When I’d finished, I suggested that perhaps now would be a good time to fetch their boss. Lefty complained that it was late and he wasn’t all that keen on waking people up, but I countered by explaining carefully that my moods could be changeable, so maybe this was one of those times when inconveniencing the boss was the right thing to do.

Once he and Righty took off (not the most professional behaviour, to leave a prisoner unguarded, even if they are locked up, but apparently Lefty wasn’t willing to bear the brunt of their employer’s displeasure alone), I set about working to change my destiny.

Clearly pretending to capitulate wasn’t going to get the job done, so I needed to really surrender, to give my body and spirit completely over to these fucksticks so they could turn me into their gate and do dreadful things to the realm of reality I’d sworn– for reasons increasingly passing understanding– to protect at all costs.

It wasn’t easy, but then, I’m a complicated guy.

So I sat there in my dark, dank cell to convince myself that the world was doomed, the Aurorals and Infernals were worse than anything any Pandoral might have in mind for the Mortal realm, so it would be better for my fellow humans to hasten the end of our existence. When that failed, I spent time contemplating how much I absolutely despised the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish, and how ruining their plans for humanity was worth any sacrifice.

Turns out, when you’ve been tortured and beaten and lied to as much as I’d been, you can convince yourself of almost anything, which is why it took only fifteen minutes to work myself into an iron-hard conviction that I was going to cooperate with the Pandoral. My will was firm, my destiny set– and whatever happened afterwards would be someone else’s problem.

Which was when someone else showed up.

‘Hey, sweetheart,’ I said, spreading my filth-covered arms to the shadows where I had no good reason to believe and yet was utterly certain I’d find her. ‘Couldn’t resist one last kiss?’

I couldn’t see her very clearly but I was fairly sure she wasn’t smiling.