Oathbreaker: The Knight's Tale (9 page)

The Tale of the Excruciations

Morning, early spring, and the chill had not yet left the air. The courser’s motion was smooth, even as it leaped rocks, streams, logs. Pelagir sat atop his mount, cradling the child. His face was dirty with the dust of the countryside.

Spring, Month of the Metal Dog, CY 581

The dormitory of the senior squires was quiet, moonlight from the high windows streaking across the midnight floor. The boys and girls slept in their bunks, some snoring softly. A spring breeze sighed in the open windows behind the moon, and on the back of the breeze came the hooded men. There were twenty of them, and they moved without sound as they clambered through the windows. They dropped to the floor, and in teams of two they spread across the bedchamber. They took their positions, and at once, they struck.

Seven boys and three girls were clubbed, gagged, and stuffed into black sacks within moments. The twenty men and their burdens were out of the room with such efficiency that none of the other squires had awakened.

Their destination was Devilsfoot. They were to begin the excruciations.

Pelagir awoke draped unceremoniously across a saddle, and he could feel the courser moving smoothly underneath him. Its smooth gait told him that it was no natural beast. This likewise told him he was in the custody of a high-ranking officer of the Empire, which in turn suggested any attempt at escape would be noticed and dealt with harshly. Furthermore, he deduced, those squires who had made it to the fourth year—and with a record like his, no less—would be among the most carefully guarded assets of the military, and therefore he was one of the ten squires to have been chosen for the Elite. Thus it was that, like so many who had come before him, he was borne unprotesting and unresisting into Devilsfoot. Thus it was that he came to the place where the humanity had been torn from so many of his predecessors.

Like the other recruits, Pelagir was blessed and cursed with a memory that rarely failed him. Yet had he been pressed on the matter, he would never have been able to give a clear account of his time in Devilsfoot. The ride to the ancient cavern was brief, not more than twenty to thirty minutes from the dormitory, yet he had never seen the place before.

His first impression was of the sound, muffled through the heavy sack that covered him. The open air through which they had ridden suddenly became much closer, and the hooves of the metal steeds began to echo from stone walls. The air became warmer, and then hot. At last the coursers halted, and the ten squires, still in their sacks, were pitched to the rough stone floor. A quiet susurrus of clothes, then, as of robed men moving toward them, and a slight clatter as the steel steeds rode back out. And for the first time that night, voices.

“These kids get heavier every year. Are they feeding ’em more meat or something?”

“I dunno, but you’re right. They’re building ’em solid these days.”

“We should install tracks here, put in some carts, something.”

A third voice, drier: “Or maybe the two of you are just getting old. Stop complaining and pick one of ’em up… and the rest of you, stop dawdling.”

Rough hands, then, and hot breath through the sack: “I know you’re awake, boy, so mark me well: rest while you can, because you’ll need your strength.”

The hands on Pelagir then were the kindest he felt for five days.

Images of an excruciation:

First come the rituals. The ten, strapped naked to cold steel tables and wheeled under bright lights. In the darkness beyond, an amphitheater and the murmurs of dozens of students. The Archmagus donning a horned mask, black velvet filigreed in white gold and jewels. Ceremonial words in an arcane tongue pour from the Archmagus, delivered in a monotone, and the responses of the students in the shadows. It is a calming intonation, a call-response-call rhythm that soothes and focuses, but the young squires on the table are terrified beneath their carefully impassive faces. The Archmagus’s students, his mages-in-training, file down the stairs and take up the instruments that lie on cloth-covered carts near each of the knights-to-be. Priests wait in the corners, their heads bowed, waiting the call to grant the final blessings on souls departing.

And then: blood. Pain. Steel.

Pelagir’s arm, strapped to the table, stripped to the bone, and scalpels moving above it like fireflies. Tiny troughs funneling molten metal into cast channels along his tendons and muscles.

Agony.

Legs, feet, arms, neck. His face. His eyes. Screams from nearby tables. Anguish pours. His throat has torn. He can feel metal wires being affixed to his muscles, anchored to his bones.

The eyes of the Archmagus through the holes in the man’s mask. They glitter with joy above the bloodstained face and gloves. His apprentices, who rush through the chamber.

Through it all, the quiet, murmured chanting of the apprentices and the quiet sound of metal on flesh. The priests begin to move, looking into his eyes, then the eyes of the others.

The ceiling of the cavern, the lights beaming down, halos around the heads of the surgeons. Pelagir has moved beyond pain and into a hazy realm. He watches the movements of the Archmagus as a detached observer now, watching the man’s hands move surely through the violations of his body. Each second the young man chooses to live or die, and each second he chooses life. Each choice is an act of will, each one harder than the next.

The Archmagus’s hands, inside his skin, manipulating him. His fingers jerking open and closed. His legs twitching. Sutures and bandages, soaking through with a deep crimson.

The chamber quiets. At two of the other tables, legs drum out a final beat as their owners succumb. From the seven remaining, Pelagir hears quiet and rasping moans. The Archmagus’s apprentices wheel their patients from the room. The priests murmur their benedictions above the bodies of the dead and depart.

Behind them, pools of blood glisten wetly under the lights. Shiny metallic things crawl from slats behind the walls and suck these pools efficiently from the floor, then scurry back to their holes to await the next experiments.

And then came the graduations.

The first was private, and hardly a ceremony, held in the recovery room of the Tower of the Archmagus, one week after the ordeal. It was a dim room, with shutters on the high windows and a stout oak door at the head of the stairs. The eight young knights could hear the wind and birds outside with incredible clarity, and even the soft lights mounted high above them seemed almost too bright for comfort.

The new knights were healing quickly, far more quickly than they had ever seen their bodies heal before. They had been ordered to remain in their beds for a week by Lieutenant Caltash, who had appeared in his shining armor before his new compatriots. He kept his helmet tucked under his arm as he delivered this order, and the cast of his face brooked no dispute. He took no questions as he stepped about the room inspecting the wounded, but he did place a mailed hand on each shoulder in welcome before he left, and he gripped Pelagir’s a little harder than the rest. And he told them two secrets:

“You are no longer competitors. You are companions. Look into yourselves and find the lessons the pain has taught you. You have been bound together in pain, and you are now entwined. Your old lives have fallen away. You are new beings now, and what came before is dust. You are no longer human, and your kind exists only in the knighthood. Remember this when humans try to oppose you.

“Your second secret is this: you have gifts within you that you will discover, yet behind all those gifts, you will find joy only in dealing death. Since you have survived the excruciation, your human emotions have been buried deep within you. Should you try to recover them, you will surely die.”

The lieutenant left the knights to their silence, and they began to talk among themselves shortly thereafter, as he knew they would.

The second graduation came at the expiration of the week, when the Archmagus himself came to their room, trailed by a pair of magi. The Archmagus was a wiry man with wiry hair, black and shot through with strips of iron. He wore a steel, grilled mask across the lower portion of his face—vanity, it was said, a cover for the horrific burns he had received while defending the tower on Clarkeshill from the sky reavers—and over it his hard, calculating eyes shone at the newly minted knights.

“You are more than human now. More than us. Through my art and my craft, you are faster, stronger, and you heal more quickly. You have been enhanced, from bone to muscle to sinew. Your eyesight and hearing have likewise been improved. We have done this for you, as we have done for your chapter since the founding of the Empire. Because of us, you have entered into the halls of the legends. Because we have done this for you, you will remember us. You will remember that your first loyalty is to the Empire. Your second is to your commander. But remember by all you hold dear that your third loyalty is to the Guild of the Magi, for without us you would be merely human.

“You can get out of bed now,” he said. “Your commander is coming to see you, get the measure of the new improvements. I want you standing for him, and you’ll want to be used to your abilities before he comes.”

The Archmagus turned, paused, and turned back. “One more thing. Tell my apprentice Trellaise what sort of weapon you prefer. She will make one specifically for you, and it shall become your salvation.”

He swept from the room, and that was their second graduation.

The third came a week past that. They had been exercising their new abilities (under close observation from their commanders and from the magi who had operated on them) during this week, sparring with one another, and testing their limits—by catching arrows, among other things. It had taken them some time to adjust to their hugely advanced strength and speed. At first, they fell frequently, but they quickly learned to balance themselves. They moved in a near-constant blur until Trellaise informed them that such movement reduced their healing factor and would eventually place such strain on them that their sinews might snap, which would require an operation similar to the excruciation to repair them. They began practicing ordinary movement immediately.