Thy Father's Shadow (Book 4.5) (13 page)

“Lucky me, I get to stick around for the blood and beatings portion of the show,” Terian muttered under his breath. Xem gave him a sympathetic look as he exited. “Save me a drink,” he said as Xemlinan walked out.

“You’ll be conducting this interrogation,” Amenon said without preamble as Grinnd, the last to leave, shut the door behind him with a clank. There was a small stand just to the side of the table, covered over with a small white cloth. Terian’s father pulled the cloth off delicately, revealing all manner of instruments beneath. There were short ones and long ones, but the commonality was that they all had points on them, in spite of the hooks and claws that some seemed to sport.

Terian raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think I’ll need those.”

Amenon let just the faintest hint of a smile show. “Good. I worried that perhaps your long absence would cause you to forget what a dark knight can do to bring pain and terror.”

Terian let his face twist naturally with the hard emotion that bubbled up from within him at his father’s words. “I trust if ever I forgot, you’d remind me in the most painful way possible. You know, like you did yesterday.” He took a step toward the inert body of Sert Engoch, heretic. “Time for a rude awakening.” He pulled his gauntlet off and brought his fist down on the man’s cheek, hard, rocking his head back and causing his eyes to snap open.

“Oh, good, you’re up,” Terian said, burying the tentative feelings that were worming around inside deep within.
I will not fail this most basic of tests now that it’s been laid in front of me
. “I thought maybe I’d have to start gutting you while you were still sleeping.”

The heretic’s expression showed only a moment’s worth of fear before it became straitlaced. “I have long expected this moment to come. Gutting me would be a sweet end to what I’m certain will be a long and tedious process that I have prepared for.” He gave a nod as he looked around the room. “Very well then, go on with it.”

Terian took his helm off by grasping one of the points. He set it gently on the ground and shook his long hair to let it breathe. He could feel the sweat causing the strands to stick together and ran his gauntleted fingers through to loosen it up where it was matted. “I don’t think you understand,” Terian said, looking to his father, not the prisoner. “I’m not here to torture you to death because you’re a heretic.” He leaned an armored elbow rather uncharitably into the soft space below Engoch’s sternum. “The Sovereign wants information that you possess,” Terian said, and pressed down, causing Sert to grunt with pain as the small, jutting spike on Terian’s elbow joint penetrated the skin, “and you’re going to share it with me.”

Engoch’s face was at peace, his expression staid. “No, I shall not.”

“Yes, you will,” Terian said with a calm assurance and just a tinge of sadness. “The only question before us is how much blood you’ll lose, how many bones will be broken, and ultimately how much suffering you’ll experience before we’re done.” He leaned over to look Sert in the eyes, and the heretic’s pupils were dilated and fixed, trying to remain centered.
There’s fear in him yet. He’d have to be afraid to hide in that hole in Kortran
. “You must know we have healers. I can cleave you limb from limb and then restore you, drain you nearly dry of blood and then replenish it, kill you and bring you back to life time and again.” He adjusted his elbow so that it no longer drove into Engoch’s sternum. “You will, eventually, tell me what I want to know. The only question is how much you’ll suffer before you do it.”

Engoch watched him for a moment, his eyes no longer fixed and staring straight ahead, but instead looking at Terian’s for brief glances, then darting back to where they began.

“You know I’ll do it, don’t you?” Terian said, leaning over him, almost conversational. “You’re a heretic, so you’ve studied magic? Some of the process of it?” Engoch gave only the faintest of nods. “Then you know about dark knights. Who we are. What we do. What defines us.” Terian did not wait for an answer. “Let me tell you something about me, make my introduction.” He eased off Engoch and took a few steps away, beginning a slow, loping walk around the torture chamber. His father stood by the door, watching him with narrowed eyes, assessing him. “My name is Terian of House Lepos, and I’m a failure of the worst sort.” He didn’t look at Engoch as he circled the man. “I left my house to the shame of my father just after I became a dark knight—after the ritual, you know,” he glanced and saw Engoch watching him, but the heretic turned his gaze away upon seeing Terian look back at him, “and I joined a guild out in the wide world outside Saekaj. I failed at that, too, though. I’m a disgrace as a son, and every woman I’ve ever cared about has run screaming away from me.”

He hooked a slow arc around the table and ended up by Engoch’s face again. “I have failed at nearly everything up to this point. Guildmate, lover, son. The only thing I’ve never failed at—the only I’ve ever been good at—is being a dark knight. Fighting using the spells darkness has bestowed on me, the weapons that make me a knight of the shadows.” He dangled a hand over Engoch’s face. “And now I have a second chance. To not fail as a son. As a subject of the Sovereign. And all it will take is me using my skill as a dark knight.” He twirled his finger around the face of Engoch in a slow circle, bringing it lower and lower. “What do you think, Sert?” He felt the hoarseness creep into his tone. “Is there enough at stake for me?” His voice got coarser, and lower, and he took a long breath as he leaned over the heretic. “Do you think I’ll fail this time?”

He touched his gauntleted finger to the pale, damp blue flesh of Engoch’s chest and the heretic screamed, a short, sharp shriek that was followed by breath after excited breath, drawing frightened panic out of the dark elf. “I will tell you …” Engoch croaked, “… everything I know.” His breath came in hurried gasps, one after another.

Terian didn’t smile, and there was no satisfaction as he touched his cold finger to the inside of his gauntlet, left it dangling, pressed against Engoch’s chest. He said nothing, felt nothing, and simply stayed there, still as a statue, as the heretic began to speak a long, breathless tale that flowed right over Terian’s shoulder and into ears behind him. He stood there all the while, though, unmoving, finger still poised to deliver his first torture.

Engoch, meanwhile, only cried the same word, over and over again, as he reached the end of his tale.

Aurastra
.

Chapter 15

“That was excellent work,” Amenon said as they reached the door to his office and his father shouldered it open. “A bit more talkative and less action-focused than
 
I would have employed, but undeniably effective.”

Terian walked without any spring in his walk; his father seemed to have boundless energy. “Yes. Now that you’ve gotten what you want from him, I suppose he can die. Or go to the Depths, or whatever.”

“Indeed,” Amenon said, easing behind his desk where a stack of parchment awaited him. He ran a finger over the topmost piece of paper before picking it up and crumbling it before tossing it into the hearth. “His final fate remains in the hands of the Sovereign.”

Terian hesitated as his father went to the next piece of parchment in the stack. “What Engoch was talking about, these books that he was declared a heretic for reading …”

“Hm?” Amenon looked up after balling up another parchment and tossing it into the hearth where it began to crackle and smoke. “Oh, yes. Trifling details. We recovered the volumes from his rat’s nest, and he’s confessed to what they’ve told him, so barring any sort of disposition from the Sovereign to the contrary, I believe this concludes our business with him.”

“I didn’t know that the Sovereign cared enough about heretics to send his elites after them,” Terian said, trying to word his statement as carefully as he could.
Best not to raise his ire if I want an answer.

“He generally does not,” Amenon said without looking up. “But this one was one of the Sovereign’s own librarians, who escaped in his absence. I suspect it was a personal grievance in addition to being, most probably, an area of wounded pride for the Sovereign.” He paused. “I sometimes forget—you have not stood before him in the past, have you?”

“No,” Terian said, standing his ground near the edge of the desk. “He was gone long before I was born.”
Which you should know, being my father.
He left that unspoken. “If he took affront to this Engoch stealing his books—”

“And knowledge,” Amenon said, tossing another piece of paper into the fire. The stack of correspondence that had accumulated while he was gone was now down to half the size it had been only moments earlier. “The Sovereign has plans, strategies. Whatever business he had with this Sert Engoch goes beyond simple heresy. You should know that by what he told us after you tortured him.”

Terian flinched. “I didn’t even hurt him.”

Amenon looked up, watching him carefully. “But you would have, and he knew it.”

Terian kept his gaze locked on his father’s. “I would have.”

“I will speak to the Sovereign about this Aurastra,” Amenon said, glancing back to the desk and its contents. “Though I confess I am not familiar with it.”

“It’s a dwarven village,” Terian said. “Close to the northern reaches of the Dwarven Alliance, far up in the mountains. Mining town, about three weeks beyond Fertiss.”

Amenon narrowed his gaze at Terian. “Indeed. Then it would appear that there is something of interest in this … Aurastra, something that the Sovereign will want to get his hands on.”

“I’d be interested to know what it is,” Terian said as Amenon crumpled the last of the parchment and tossed it into the fire.

“No, you wouldn’t,” Amenon said, rising from the desk and walking toward his son. He laid a hand awkwardly on Terian’s shoulder. “We don’t wish to know the secrets of the Sovereign unless he desires us to assist with them. Then, and only then, do we take information. Even then we take as little as possible.” He drew Terian a little closer, the better to look him in the eyes, unflinching. “We serve the Sovereign, but believe me, you do not want any more of his secrets in your mind than the bare minimum necessary to do his bidding.” Amenon’s grip on Terian’s shoulder loosened, and Terian felt it grow slack as his father clinked a gauntlet against the small, un-spiked area on Terian’s pauldron. “They would weigh you down.”

Terian looked up and met his father’s gaze. “What would you have me do now?”

“Nothing,” Amenon said, and his reserve was slightly lessened. “You have done adequately well this day, and so the night is yours. I would advise sleep, but I doubt you shall heed that advice, so I shall only say that I desire for you to return by the break of day, in case I have need for you.”

“Very well,” Terian said stiffly, and his father clinked his hand against the pauldron once more before leaving, without another word.

Chapter 16

Terian found himself lying on the bed, listless, staring up at the ceiling of his room. It was beige, a plaster construct built over timbers brought in from the forest above. All the facades of the houses of Saekaj were built like this, not made of the cheap and plentiful dirt and kiln-fired mud and clay of Sovar homes. Saekaj homes were the showpiece of opulence, of surface materials, just as the diets of their residents were. The lessers ate the food of below. Terian could barely remember the taste of fish from the Great Sea, so long had it been since he’d had any of the Sovarian delicacy. It was considered a poor meal in Saekaj.

There were noises of House Lepos all around him; the creak of floors as servants crossed them going about their work. It was a distinctive noise, far different from the sounds his father made when he was about. His armor was heavy, and the thunk of metal boots on the wood was audible even through the plaster.

Terian’s room was not small; it befit an heir of Saekaj, the furniture finely crafted by artisans who were masters of woodworking and metallurgy. Knobs of burnished bronze, one of the rarer metals found in the Depths, were knitted into the front of his dressers and the nightstand. He ran a bare hand against the crafted wood headboard of his bed; it had not changed since he was a child. House Lepos had known prosperity all the days he had been alive, but the difference was between the affluence of his youth and the accumulated wealth that had come to them now.
Father has saved his monies all these years, in spite of Mother’s puffery, her best efforts at making us look wealthy by spending copiously. Now our fortunes have grown along with our incomes
. He spared a thought and a bit of disturbance at the realization that he had included himself in that assessment by saying “our.”
But truly, it is ours, if I am heir.

There was a sound in the foyer below, the clunk of the door being opened, and then a squeak of a door hinge unmitigated by oil, unnatural and piercing. He listened for more, and the familiar clatter of metal boots on wood floors came to him and he sat up, bringing to mind the times when he was a child and had awakened to find his father arriving home at an unanticipated hour. He quickly put his armor on, knowing that if he showed up unprepared that he would be dressed down for his lack of preparation and formality, and stepped out onto the second floor balcony.

He could hear the hushed voices below and looked down. His father was there, speaking quietly into the ear of his mother, his dark blue face buried beneath her pale white hair, whispering in her ear. Terian could not hear her and wondered at what his father might be saying. It could be the idle pleasantries a man and woman long married might express, or news of a political nature.
It could even be that he simply does not wish to wake the entire household, though that seems unlikely
.

His father looked up at the squeak of a floorboard under Terian’s weight, and there was a subtle hint of a smile that rounded the corners of his mouth. “Ah, good,” Amenon said, and walked straight past his wife as though he had finished. “I had thought that you would be out this evening.”

“No,” Terian said carefully, a little guarded. “I didn’t … feel up to it,” he lied, just a little.