Page 64 of The Malevolent Eight

Most military scholars agree that there are only three real strategies for enduring extended periods of torture without viable prospects of escape or rescue. The first involves physical conditioning. Getting your body accustomed to high degrees of pain limits the degree of stress imposed on the mind and therefore reduces the possibility of breaking under pressure. While I wouldn’t say I was in any way immune to the sensations of my skin being burned by a florinist’s acid spells or being choked repeatedly by an incarcerationist’s bindings, I reckoned I was as conditioned to torture as one could be while still possessing actual nerve endings.

The second method, a combination of duty to one’s cause, loyalty to one’s leaders and smug self-righteousness, allows you to endure for a certain length of time without breaking. I was understandably ill-equipped to employ this approach.

Finally, you can attempt to form a bond of sympathy with your tormentors. Keep eye contact with them while making your reaction as if seeing a trusted friend, or perceiving a genuinely loving soul beneath their hardened exteriors. Try to use their names, tell them about yourself, noting any detail which attracts their unintentional sympathy, then weave these disparate strands into a kind of relationship, heavily suggesting that you are both trapped in this unfair situation and perhaps between you there might be a way out of it.

Me? I’ve never been good at relationships, as evidenced by the fact that my best friends include a lunatic thunderer who threatens to kill me on a regular basis, a blood mage who thinksI’memotionally unstable and a fucking vampire kangaroo. Oh, and the last woman I kissed is probably going to destroy the entire world.

Damn, though. It was one hell of a kiss.

But I’m not without my own tactical talents, which is why I developed what I hope will one day be termed the Cade Ombra Combination Insanity and Reverse-Torture Methodology. Memorise these techniques and you too can endure extended periods of captivity, suffering horribly but having a few laughs along the way. You might think my approach glib at first glance, but its foundations are strategically fucking brilliant.

As a prisoner, stripped of any supplies, garments, weapons and dignity, you still retain certain priceless resources within your control: a mind, a body and a voice. While the entire point of incarceration is to remove the utility of the prisoner’s body, the mind and voice can be honed into potent weapons for defence and attack.

The mind is a remarkable tool. It can intuit what your captors want from you and then shape itself to deny them their ultimate goal, even while appearing to be shattering exactly as the enemy intends. Suffering and despair are the measurements by which your opponent determines how close you are to breaking, which is why it’s a mistake to put on a brave face at the start and then gradually reveal your weakness. I say, start screaming for mercy as early as possible. It helps if you also sound kind of insane.

‘There is nothing I won’t do for my beloved master!’ I insisted, still crawling towards the Pandoral being under the disgusted glares of his so-called ‘Apocalypse Eight’.

When begging, it’s important never to let up, otherwise your captor could say something suitably clever or cruel and then walk away, leaving you to the less-than-tender mercies of his lunatic cultist mages. The trick is to yammeron and onuntil listening to you is torturous forthemtoo and the last thing they want is to hear more of your screaming. This is the second aspect of the Cade Ombra method: take all the fun out of the process in the hope that some measure of basic rationality comes into the equation.

Torture is fundamentally idiotic. It’s the lazy person’s persuasion. There’s no piece of information worth torturing someone over that you couldn’t get through some other means. Want to know the secret combination to a royal treasury? Bribe someone, for fuck’s sake. You really think the guy whose job it is to unlock it now and then for the convenience of the monarch is so well paid he wouldn’t rather sell the information to you and then skip off to some other country to be rich? Also, what do you think happens when you kidnap a royal treasurer and torture them for days? You think the palace won’t figure out they haven’t shown up for work in some time and change the combination locks or the spelled wards or even the key itself? Of course they will, which means the longer you’re holding the captive, the less likely the information they’re withholding will do you any good.

Ignore any claims to urgency or the greater good: those who conceive, command, enact or tolerate the abuse of captives are doing so because they likeit. Torture arouses them. That’s why your job, my unfortunate fellow captive, is to take all the fucking fun out of the process.

‘I am filth!’ I squealed with a madman’s glee. ‘My flesh is naught but the shit excreted from my arsehole upon this very floor!’ I scooped a little up in my hands and rubbed it on my face, grinning maniacally. ‘My blood is naught but the piss trickling from my pathetic, flaccid manhood!’ I bent my head lower and pretended to lick the floor. ‘My soul is the pus oozing from my wounds, my spirit the foetid breath stinking of bile as I vomit all that I am or ever was upon my wretchedness!’

Okay, fair warning: you may want to skip this next part if you’re squeamish. These fuckers had been hitting me with every kind of incarcerationist spell, tormentor hex and Infernalist nightmare they could come up with, not to mention felinist claws digging under the fingernails and good old-fashioned beatings, all to soften me up so I’d be unable to resist being turned into a Pandoral gate that would destroy my entire world. So, fuck them and fuck anyone who thinks I went too far. They started this torture, after all, and I was going to make them suffer.

‘Strip the skin from my bones, master,’ I begged the Pandoral. ‘Sting my eyes,’ I pleaded, pointing at my face. I opened my mouth wide, mumbling incoherently, ‘Fill my throat with your thick swarming insects.’ I made a hideous gurgling sound before adding, ‘I want to taste you upon my tongue, feel you sliding down my gullet. Let my intestines be the path by which we are united for ever.’

Bipedal swarms of insects aren’t good for producing facial expressions, but I was convinced the Pandoral was starting to look both disgusted and queasy. Certainly his cabal of wonderists appeared to be on the verge of vomiting.

Should I go for the butt?I wondered absently. It was a bit over the top, even for me.Ah, what the hell. Corrigan would appreciate it.

‘Sting me here, master!’ I shouted with more ardour than any desperate suitor outside his lover’s window, legs in the air as I pushed my finger between my arse cheeks. ‘Please, master, I long to be stung here– sting me, master–sting me hard!’

‘By the Void, someone shut him up!’ complained the cosmist. She was still wearing the mask made from the Auroral Banner over her star-speckled black face; the tiny stars also covered the rest of her skin. Cosmists, being so untethered to the physicality of their own bodies, are especially vulnerable to depression. I figured a few more hours of this and she’d be suicidal.

Advocates of torture claim everyone breaks sooner or later. I was intent on proving them right.

‘It’s an act,’ insisted the felinist.

She really is rather cute, I thought, with that distant amusement that goes along with slowly driving oneself insane. Those desiccated cat ears sticking up from her chestnut curls were just adorable.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, laughing like a halfwit as I rolled around naked in my own filth, ‘it’s all an act! Don’t be fooled by me, master– make me suffer– only through pain can you force me to unleash my Pandoral abilities inwards and turn myself into the gate to your own realm!’

‘It’s not an act,’ said the luminist, whose eyes were glowing a pure white, not because he was somehow peering into my psyche but because he was casting an illusion for himself so he wouldn’t have to watch me writhing in shit and piss. ‘His mind is fracturing.’

See? The first part of the Cade Ombra method was working: I really was on the edge of completely losing my mind.

‘Yyoouu. . .’ said the Pandoral to the Infernalist. ‘Yyoouurr sppelllls aaarrr—’

Oh, fucking get on with it, I thought.You’ve had six months on this Mortal plane to get accustomed to speaking our language and it still takes you half an hour to ask directions to the toilet?

Surely the Pandoral couldn’t hear my thoughts? Perhaps he was self-aware enough to realise he was becoming a real drag on the evening. He stopped attempting to talk, the thousands of insects making up his body shivered, then swarmed closer together, enabling him to sound a little more coherent.

‘Yyourr spells touch the Mortal mind,’ he said to the Infernalist. ‘Does the prisoner feign madness or have you and your colleagues truly pushed him to breaking point?’

The Infernalist turned to me, an irritated look flashing across his features. As wonderists go, Infernalists are pretty grounded. I’m not saying they’re all salt-of-the-earth types, but when you make your living trading fractions of your soul for spells so that you can be paid to do nasty things to nasty people, you don’t have a lot of time for ego or posturing. He’d been screwing with my mind pretty badly these past several days, but he’d handled the job with a certain professional dispassion I admired more than the whole ‘look how evil we are’ approach of the rest of his lame-arse crew. He’d already infiltrated my thoughts pretty deeply, and every time he had to awaken another one of the Infernal sigils etched into his chest, we both knew he was wasting yet another spell he’d have to pay to replace later. But he was a pro: he knew you couldn’t reason with an extra-dimensional tyrant any more than you could a wanna-be warlord, so he got down to business.

---