Oddly, the prisoner was grinning.
Turock grunted, twirling a switch in his hand. “You have something to say?” he asked the bound man. He pointed to the map hanging on the wall, the same one they had taken from the man’s tent in the Tinderlands. “What do those red marks mean? Are there other factions?”
The man spit a bloody wad of phlegm onto the floor and said nothing.
“This is unnecessary,” Ahaesarus said. “This is wrong.”
“Spare me your sermons, Warden,” said Turock.
“I will not. You requested my help, and my council comes with it.”
“Bollocks. I asked for your muscle, and your ability to see truth, not your brain.”
Turock stepped up to the prisoner, reared his hand back, and lashed out with the switch. It whistled as it flew through the air, striking the bound man across the cheek. A new gash opened up, another scar to join the others that marred the left side of his face. Still he remained silent. Turock wiped the bloody switch on his robe, which had been lime green before they’d started but was now crisscrossed with red lines.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice a low growl. “Is the camp where my men captured you the only one? If not, where they are on the map?”
Ahaesarus bristled from the knowledge that he was being included as one of Turock’s men. He might be one of humanity’s Wardens, beholden only to Ashhur, yet he had gone into the Tinderlands at the cranky spellcaster’s bidding, and then he’d hastily summoned him as soon as they returned with their quarry. He had stood silently by with his brethren as the humans mocked and ridiculed the captive after draping the womanly garb over his head. You say you aren’t a soldier, he thought. Yet this is how you act?
“How large is your force?” continued Turock. “What are Karak’s plans? When does the real attack begin? Where?”
All of these questions went unanswered, the grin still pasted on the captive’s bleeding face. The spellcaster huffed in frustration, lashed him with the switch again, and then stormed away.
Ahaesarus was like Turock’s shadow as he paced.
“This is a hard man, wholly devoted to his god,” he said. “Look at him, actually look at him. He has endured trials in his life that far outdo any torment you might bring him. There must be-”
“Is that so?” Turock snapped, wheeling on him, a mad gleam in his eye. “You think I couldn’t give him worse? Let us see, shall we?”
“Turock, no.”
The spellcaster brushed aside Ahaesarus’s hand and stomped toward the prisoner. He began murmuring, the tips of his fingers developing a glow. The bound man stared at him, his grin faltering for the first time in four hours. Ahaesarus, his own anger steadily rising, reached out to stop him, but he retreated when Turock shot him a look. Turock was volatile, and there was no telling what he might do if Ahaesarus tried to be forceful. His words would have to do the job for him.
“You are a good man, Turock,” he said, somehow managing to keep his voice steady. “Ashhur has often sung your praises, as have others in Mordeina. Your people trust you. Do not ruin that praise, that trust, by torturing this man. You are better than that. Do not become a monster.”
“A monster?” asked Turock without turning around. He raised his hand, the glow of his fingertips intensifying to bright flames. “Murderers of children, assassins in the night, a man who lets those he loves suffer and die…those are monsters, Warden. This bastard you see before you…he fits two of those categories. I refuse to become the third.”
He tore open the nightshirt’s frilly bodice and pressed his fingers into the man’s chest. Fire crackled across the prisoner’s flesh, not on the surface but beneath, spreading outward in a pattern like cracks in a sheet of ice. One of the glowing veins split the skin, and a thin spiral of black smoke rose into the air. Sweat beaded on the man’s brow, his neck pulled taut, and his smirk abandoned him, but he remained admirably silent nonetheless.
That silence only drove Turock to try harder.
He pressed his other glowing hand to the prisoner’s temple.
“You say I’m a good man,” he said. “That might have been true at one point.” The gray hair on the bound man’s right temple burst into flame. “But we have lived in turmoil for a year, Warden. A year!”
He snuffed out the flames, took a step back, and then offered a few more words of magic. From the cracks in the stone floor rose tiny vines, which danced before the prisoner’s feet, then plunged their pointed tips beneath his toenails. The man squirmed, grinding his teeth in obvious pain as they drove deeper and deeper into the quick, drawing blood.
“Men, women, and children perish while helping to forge the weapons we need to defend ourselves. I have been kept awake at night in expectation of the next assault. Nature was once full of wonder, but now every bird’s caw, every bat’s tweet, every insect’s chirp might be a signal to rain fiery death down on all I created.”
The vines withdrew, retreating into the cracks that had sprouted them. The prisoner huffed for breath.
“I understand how you feel,” Ahaesarus said. “You forget where my kind came from.”
“Yes, you brave Wardens who hid like children in your cages while winged demons slaughtered your loved ones. Forgive me if I don’t have that kind of restraint.”
“That is unfair. We were not given a choice.”
“You’re right,” said Turock. “But we have been.”
With a snap of his fingers, needlelike shards of ice formed in the air around the prisoner. Turock waggled his hands, and at once the shards drove into the bound man’s flesh. He struggled in his restraints, a human cactus prickled from head to toe with crystalline barbs. He uttered the first sound Ahaesarus had heard from his mouth since his capture: he moaned.
“I am a father,” Turock said as he slowly went about grinding his palm against the ice shards, one by one. “I have not seen my three youngest sons for so long, I have forgotten their faces. They were only supposed to be in Mordeina for a month, to tutor under Howard Baedan and spend time with their grandmother. Byron is a man now, eighteen and full of vigor, with Jarak not far behind. And Pendet…our baby…do you know what a year means to a seven-year-old? It is everything. I fear I may never see them again, and even if I do, Pendet might look at me as a stranger.”
“Yet you still have your children here, children who love and need you just as much as they.”
Turock cackled. “Ha! Lauria is married, Cethlynn soon to be, and Dorek is as much my apprentice now as he is my son. I need them, and their partners, more than they need me.”
“Does that not count for something?”
Turock finally turned around, and spittle flew from his lips when he spoke. “Something? Something? I want everything, Warden. I want my children, my wife, my people to be safe!”
“Make it so, then,” Ahaesarus said, a hard edge entering his tone. “If you think your soul is an acceptable price, then so be it. But I will not be an accomplice to this torment. You have turned your back on Ashhur’s mercy.”
“What, you wish me to bake him a cake? Or perhaps draw him a bath and dangle grapes over his mouth?” Turock pointed an accusing finger at the prisoner. “This man would kill us in a heartbeat should we give him the chance, and you wish for me to give him mercy?”
Ahaesarus folded his arms over his chest. “Should he or any of Karak’s children attempt to take the life of myself or any of my Wards, I would strike him down without a second thought. But I would strike him down, Turock, not prolong his suffering. That is the mercy I speak of.”