Malark turned the wheel. "Talk!" he snarled, meanwhile silently urging, Don't. You only have to hold out a little longer.
"Master-" the torturer began.
Malark turned the wheel. "Talk!" Up and down the length of the rebel's body, joints cracked and popped as they pulled apart.
"Master!" the torturer persisted. "With all respect, you re giving him too much too fast!"
Doing his best to look as if the Rashemi's recalcitrance had angered him, Malark kept on twisting the winch. "Talk, curse you! Talk, talk, talk!"
The prisoner's spine snapped.
Malark rounded on the torturer. "What just happened?"
Once again, the fellow made a visible effort to cloak his irritation in subservience. "I'm sorry, Your Omnipotence, but his back broke. For what it's worth, he might live a little while longer, maybe even a day, and he won't enjoy it. But he can't talk anymore." He hesitated. "I tried to warn you."
"Damn it!" Still pretending to be furious, Malark ended the prisoner's ordeal by chopping his forehead with the blade of his hand. The blow broke the man's skull and drove scraps of bone into the brain within.
The torturer sighed. "And now he won't even suffer."
An impish urge took hold of Malark, and he glared at the other man. "This rebel possessed vital information, and now we'll never learn it. Szass Tam will hear of your incompetence!"
The torturer paled. Swallowed. "Master," he stammered, "I beg you, forgive my clumsiness. I'll do better next time."
Malark grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. "It's all right, my friend, I'm only joking." He made a gold coin appear between his thumb and forefinger, one of the petty tricks that had come to amuse him since he'd mastered sorcery, and pressed it into the torturer's hand. "Have a drink and a whore on me."
The torturer stared after him in relief and confusion as Malark climbed the stairs connecting the pocket hell of the dungeon with the guard station overhead.
Outside the small keep, under a gray sky fouled with smoke and ash from one of High Thay's volcanoes, the Citadel went about its business. Much of the kingdom was desolate now, particularly in the highlands, but Szass Tam's capital city still thrived. Masons slowly carted blocks of marble and granite through the streets, eliciting shouted imprecations from the traffic stuck behind them. Legions of vendors cried their wares, and beggars their afflictions. The naked thralls in the slave markets shivered in the cold mountain air.
People scurried out of Malark's way, then peered curiously after him. He supposed it was only natural. He was, alter all, the only one of Szass Tam's zulkirs not Mulan nor even Thayan-born, the only one not undead, and the only one who customarily walked around without a retinue of lackeys and bodyguards.
He realized his station all but demanded the latter, but he just couldn't persuade himself to endure the inconvenience. Over the course of a long, long life, he'd discovered that clerks and their ilk rarely did anything for him that he couldn't do more efficiently and reliably for himself. And to say the least, a man who'd learned combat from the Monks of the Long Death scarcely needed soldiers to fend off footpads and assassins.
He turned a corner and the dark towers and battlements of the true Citadel, the fortress from which the surrounding city took its name, rose before him. Though Szass Tam had claimed it for his residence, he hadn't built it. The structure predated the founding of Thay itself and, according to rumor, was a haunted, uncanny place, with secrets still awaiting discovery in the caverns and catacombs beneath.
Malark had seen indications that rumor likely had it right, but it didn't much concern him. From his perspective, the important thing about the castle was that it was the focal point for the enormous circle of power defined by the Dread Rings, the place where a mage must position himself to perform the Great Work of Unmaking.
Pig-faced blood orcs, lanky gnolls with the muzzles and rank fur of hyenas, and stinking corpses with gleaming yellow eyes, soldiers all in Thay's Dread Legions, saluted Malark as he passed through the various gates and courtyards, and he acknowledged them all without breaking stride. He was eager to reach his quarters and resume his study of a certain grimoire Szass Tam had given him.
But when he saw the raven perched on his windowsill, a tiny scroll case tied to one of its claws, intuition told him the book would have to wait.
The huge keep at the center of the Citadel had a round, flat roof. The wind flapping his scarlet robes, Szass Tam floated some distance above it. The elevation afforded him a good view of both the city spread out below him and the peaks of the Thaymount beyond. And, his sight sharpened by magic, he looked for the flaws in everything he beheld.
It was easiest to find them in people, ugly in body with their legs too long or too short, their wobbling, sagging flab, their moles, rotting teeth, and general lack of grace. Ugly in spirit, too, squabbling, cheating, every word and deed arising from petty lusts and resentments. And even the few who could lay some claim to comeliness of person and clarity of mind carried the seeds of disease and decrepitude, senescence and death.
The peoples' creations were simply their own failings writ large. Some of the buildings in the city were filthy hovels, and even the finer ones often offended against symmetry and proportion or, in their ostentation, betrayed the vanity and vulgarity of their owners. All would one day crumble just as surely as their makers.
It was perhaps a bit more challenging to perceive the imperfections in the mountains, snow capped except for the fuming cones with fire and lava at their cores. Indeed, another observer might have deemed them majestic. But Szass Tam took note of the gaping wounds that were gold mines, and the castles perched on one crag or another. Men had marred this piece of nature, and even had it been otherwise, what was nature, anyway? An arena of endless misery where animals starved, killed, and ate one another, and, if they overcame every other obstacle to their survival, grew old and died, just like humanity. As they always would, until the mountains too wore away to dust.
Szass Tam turned his regard on himself. Except for his withered hands, he might look like a living man, and, with his lean frame, keen, intellectual features, and neat black goatee, a reasonably handsome one at that. But he acknowledged the underlying reality of his fetid breath, silent heart, and cold, leathery flesh suffused with poison. The idiot priests were right about one thing: Undeath was an abomination. He was an abomination, or at least his physical form was. He could scarcely wait for the moment when he would replace it.
A compactly built man in maroon and scarlet clothing climbed the steps to the rooftop. He had light green eyes and a wine red birthmark on his chin. In his altered state of consciousness, Szass Tam needed a moment to perceive the newcomer as anything more than another bundle of loathsome inadequacies. Then he recognized Malark Springhill and drifted back down to stand before him.
Malark bowed. "Sorry to interrupt whatever you were doing."
"I was meditating," Szass Tam replied. "Preparing for the ritual. When the time comes, I have to be ready to let go of everything. If I feel even a flicker of attachment or regret, it could ruin the casting. So I'm cultivating the habit of viewing all things with scorn."
The outlander grinned. "I hope knowing me doesn't put you off your game. I mean, since I'm indisputably such a marvelous fellow."