Page 66 of The Malevolent Eight

‘Cease!’ bellowed the Pandoral with the buzzing of thousands of insect wings.

The Infernalist, who could’ve stopped the spell any time he’d wanted, finally banished it. I was really starting to like this guy. ‘Well, what now?’ he asked after I stopped unburdening myself of all the secrets I’d kept from ‘those closest to me’. What a stupid thing to ask. Most people tell their worst secrets to at least one friend. The stuff we don’t admit is almost always the trivial, embarrassing stuff.

‘We kill him,’ said the borinist mage. I always find totemists a little weird, even Aradeus and I’m used to him, but this boar-tusked guy had interrogated me about Temper several times and I was not at all sure the underlying motivation wasn’t sexual in nature. ‘We kill him and find another candidate.’

The cosmist’s laugh was deeply unpleasant. ‘Another Mortal wonderist attuned to the Pandoral realm? Exactly how many of them do you think there are? The Seven Brothers were the first in generations. We could scour the entire world and not find another.’

‘Then we resume the torments,’ said the luminist, finally removing the illusion covering his own eyes and looking down at me with utter disgust.

Good luck with that, pal. You kidnapped me, beat me, burned me, tried to drag me to the edge of madness. Now you’re going to have to find a way to back the hell off before I push myself over the cliff for you.

The luminist reached down and grabbed my jaw, squeezing tightly– but not too tightly, on account of luminists not exactly being paragons of physical fitness to begin with. ‘I will cast such illusions as to drive him to terror and despair heretofore unknown to any—’

‘That’s how we drove him half nuts in the first place,’ the Infernalist pointed out.

‘Well, what then?’ asked the felinist. ‘You want us to give him a warm bath and soft sheets and read him bedtime stories?’

Kitty-cat, I would seriously consider betraying the entire Mortal realm and turning myself into a gate to the Pandoral plane if you’d join me for that bath and we could recreate my night with the Celestine of Rationality.

Yes, my innermost thoughts had become rather crass– although, in my defence, Iwasa little on the crazy side after several interminable days and nights of mystical torments. My sense of internal etiquette and common decency were not faring well.

My captors argued among themselves a bit longer while their Pandoral master got more and more agitated, judging by the way his swarm kept threatening to lose cohesion. In the end, they decided maybe discussing in front of me how best to get me to do what they wanted without driving me irretrievably insane was probably not the soundest strategic approach, so they left me there for the night. Somewhat to my surprise, the Pandoral ordered the guards to clean out my cell and bring me proper food and water. They even provided towels so I could attempt to wipe myself clean.

All in all, my fifth day of captivity had been a pretty good one, since I understood a lot more about how my captors were thinking. More importantly, it revealed two important facts about what was going on behind the scenes. The first was that Tenebris was clearly planning to betray these guys. Not only was the diabolic an expert in persuasion and subversion, but he also knew me better than almost anyone except Corrigan. Had he wanted to, he could have given the Pandoral and his Apocalypse Eight a step-by-step guide on how to elegantly and efficiently break my will. Second, the absence of the only other person who might be in a position to force my hand meant the real conspiracy went deeper than I’d ever suspected.

That night, as I kicked back in my cell, I allowed my somewhat crazed mind to settle– not coming all the way back from that dark tunnel of lunacy into which it had retreated, but close enough to enjoy the prospect of seeing Corrigan’s face when they finally tracked my prison down, only to find me already escaped.

Chapter 36

Absent Enemies

Two full days passed without my captors renewing my torments or making any attempts to use intimidation or negotiation; instead, they fed me once or twice a day and if the guards didn’t bother giving me a clean bucket in which to relieve myself, neither did they complain when I emptied it out by pushing as much as I could under the small gap between the bottom of my cell door and the floor. As for the food, it was edible, and more importantly, not, so far as I could tell, poisoned. Even the beatings were perfunctory, thanks mostly to the carefully calibrated amount of craziness I demonstrated to keep them worried about shattering my mind permanently.

All this might sound terribly banal– the tedious complaints of a prisoner whose current incarceration offers nothing more noteworthy than an interlude between more significant events– but nothing could be further from the truth.

A captive’s primary aim is to escape, which is accomplished mainly through the acquisition of intelligence, and while two days of apparent monotony mightsoundlike an empty piss-bucket in terms of exciting details, that’s only true if you’re looking at those events from the perspective of the captive, not the captors.

Keeping and torturing someone is expensive and risky. First, you need a place to hold them, and since I hadn’t seen or heard anything suggesting the presence of other prisoners, that meant this whole place was being used just for me. Few people own their own dungeons, and the rent on these places isn’t as cheap as you might hope: guards will need paying, feeding and housing, unless you want them nattering over a flagon or two at their local about their mysterious employers and the strange wonderist they’re guarding in the secret cell no one knows about.

Maybe the expense isn’t exactly bankrupting, but it’s not cheap. The risks, however, are exorbitant. I’m not the popular guy you might have expected, and while my few friendsarepowerful, that’s not in the political or religious sense, which is what you really need. My captors didn’t know that, but they certainly did know that my friends included a big brute with a reputation for violence that made other thunderers look positively lamb-like, a former sublime with a habit of accidentally draining the blood of entire troops of soldiers, and a vampire kangaroo who did the same, but far more messily and entirely intentionally, if a little more slowly. And every day they were keeping me was one more day when an army marching behind some would-be Ascendant Prince might appear to tear this place apart.

So, two days ofnothing? Cheap for me, expensive for the Pandoral and his little cult. My hours of endless boredom and foreboding were actually two days of freaking out for the captors, wondering what the hells they should do next.

I passed the time comfortably enough, assimilating a mental picture of what was going on outside my cell. I’d been kidnapped ostensibly to use my Pandoral attunement to turn myself into a gate, much as the ill-fated Seven Brothers had done some months ago, and I was pretty sure my little performance had them worried enough about my sanity not to force the issue further. All forms of wonderism do get a bit touchy when the mage isn’t of sound mind or body, but it was reassuring to know that as the Pandoral was concerned about what might happen if a gate– in this case,me– went nuts, the state of my thoughts really could affect any portal created inside me. If all else failed, I would drive myself fully crazy.

The initial torture had been meant to scare me into cooperating voluntarily. No one would bother with an intervening second step, since threatening my loved ones really wouldn’t have got anyone anywhere. But the logical next move should have been to negotiate for my complicity. Two days is a long time to hold a potentially dangerous captive without making a genuine effort to get what you want from them, so it was odd that no one had banged on my door offering me vast riches or untold power to comply.

All of this suggested the Pandoral and his stupidly named ‘Apocalypse Eight’ were getting seriously bad advice, so I had to ask myself: if Tenebris didn’t actually want the Pandoral opening the gate here and now, what was the ultimate aim of the diabolic’s scheme?

This, unfortunately, I still couldn’t answer. My two guards, whom I called Lefty and Righty because they always sat in the same places outside my cell door, were professional enough not to talk to me, no matter how many of Corrigan’s dirty jokes I regaled them with. I couldn’t guess how long they meant to keep me here, since the activity that usually precedes the closing of an illegal prison– namely, executing the prisoners and burying the evidence– would involve only me, which meant I could either wait for the Pandoral’s pathetic cultists to start torturing me again, or I could force the issue myself.

I’ve never been a patient person.

If hearing a prisoner’s innermost thoughts during the dull interludes between being kidnapped and either released or killed is somewhat boring, allow me to say, fuck you for your callous disregard for the suffering of a fellow sentient being, and also, here’s where we get to the good part.

There are five ways a prisoner can affect their captivity: attempted escape, attempted suicide, making oneself unsuitable for the aims of one’s captors (also known as the Cade Ombra Method), negotiation and finally, outright capitulation.

I’d tested means of escape both mundane and mystical upon my arrival, of course, to relieve the boredom and anxiety of my imprisonment– nobody takes a wonderist captive without first making sure they can’t get away. Also, incarcerationists are thorough by nature. Attempted suicide wasn’t my style– well, not unless I could take with me the pricks who’d brought me to such a pass– and in any case, incarcerationists are also experts at weaving wards to make suicide impossible. I’d played the ‘going nuts’ card already and it had done its job. That meant negotiation was next, right?

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