Chapter 45: Chapter 45 – A Path Defines a Wilderness

“Does either of you know where I can find a toilet?”

My question practically echoes in the silence. There’s a look on both the faces of the women I’m asking it of, not exactly a confused look but more like a totally blank one, and a bunch of noise from behind me that I manage to ignore.

I have a plan, after all.

I walk forward a few steps into the room, glancing around in the moment I’ve bought myself. My party - well, our parties is probably more correct - file into the room behind me, spreading out in a wide arc with Zidanya and Amber flanking me, two steps back and two steps to the side.

There’s space for it, here in this grotesque, cavernesque torture chamber.

“You’re here -”

“Have you come to play?”

“- it’s not too late, we can still -”

“I’m so glad you came.”

Their voices overlap, and I clear my throat. “I asked you two ladies a question. It’s not an idle one, I assure you.” I take note of how their voices go silent while I talk. It’s not in the way that most people do, where I’m taking the expression-space away from them and it takes them that split second to adjust and stop; this is like a mute button being pressed, the moment I start the process of expressing myself, they’ve already gone silent. “I’m a man in my middle age, I don’t have time to bandy about; where can I take a shit?”

Their faces go blank again. It gives me a long moment to look around, taking in the loathsome sights. It’s very much a torture chamber, straight out of a historical horror-drama, a particularly tawdry one going for shock-via-schlock; there are recognizable implements of torture, there are bloodstains in strategic locations on furniture designed to strap people down, and there are - huh, those are new runes, runes I haven’t seen before, and it itches in my that I’m not pulling out the Visor to take a look at what they are, but no, focus.

“Please.” The one woman is… she’s strapped to one of the pieces of furniture, and I focus on her words rather than on her situation. Her body language is a far cry from the uncanny dissonance of the people we’d seen in the plaza; down to the vulnerable shiver that crosses her skin and the prickling of her follicles, she’s perfect, or at least perfectly human. “Please, she’ll just betray you, they’ll all just betray you. We can win this tonight, and put things to rights.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” The other’s voice is sardonic, the lash of a whip, appropriately. Her body language is no less smooth, no less polished, though in a totally different direction. “Why would we betray them? Why would I betray them? They’re obviously here to take the Kingdom’s side against your little traitorous rebellion. And why wouldn’t they? They’ll get the Sky King’s favor, a nation’s ransom in rewards, and the… pleasures of breaking you with me.”

“The Kingdom is its people, and the Kingdom’s side is the people’s side. There’s no reward the Sky King can offer you that the Heir wouldn’t; no reward they can offer you that we wouldn’t give you freely. Kill her, free me, and -”

“I thought,” I say softly, “I was clear the first time, and the second.” I say the words into a renewed pool of silence as the two automata go suddenly silent once more, not programmed to properly handle interruptions. It’s extremely convenient for my conviction and state of mind. “I asked you once, I asked you twice, and I am asking you a third time. Are you capable of pointing me to a toilet, or telling me there isn’t one? Are you flexible enough to process free-form input and come up with a reasonable answer in response?”

Something shifts in their body language, and Amber is there with her shield out in time as the standing woman’s whip flicks out. It slams into her shield with enough force to shove the shield into my face hard enough to bruise, and there’s a bright white light as the other woman’s hands clap together and form a brilliant burst of something that burns.

It cuts out after a heartbeat, leaving me with the tingling feeling that I know presages a substantial amount of pain. Tim and Sara are there, flanking her, hands out, and she moves her hands in a complex motion that does nothing as the two of them make various effortful noises.

With that, the fight is over. I didn’t see Knives even move, or Rei, but the latter’s swords are both buried in the torturer’s chest and the former’s blades have cut most of the way through both the front and back of her neck. Amber’s sword has just about bisected the… the other woman, the prisoner, and Zidanya’s bow is being lowered, having loosed an arrow into the woman’s eye.

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I raise an eyebrow at Stella. “Can I ask you to lower that crossbow, please?”

“You didn’t do anything.”

“I understand and accept that that’s what it looked like.” I look past the razor-tip of the quarrel with some difficulty. “That’s not actually the case. Please lower the crossbow. I didn’t bring us here just to kill you while you were dealing with the two of these, and if I had, it’s too late anyway.”

I’m worried for a moment that my ending clause is buying me no favors, but she does lower the crossbow. I breathe a sigh of relief; I can feel my inventory of Motes and orbs, and I’m down about half of them, a pair of orbs and some boosts having fired to slow down the loyalist and suppress the rebel’s spell. The entire fight had happened faster than my mind could process, but I’m fairly confident that if those hadn’t fired, I’d be somewhere in the vicinity of death’s door, and Amber would be busy trying to heal me.

“This is…” Rei is chewing on one of his cheeks, sucking it in and then working his jaw before puffing it out. The worry on his face makes him look vulnerable, and the vulnerability looks damn good on him. “Open skies, I’d never’a guessed either of them for anything short of a complete person. Well, I guess that’s the skiffs burned behind us. Ground-bound, the lot of us; what’s next?”

I don’t answer him immediately. Instead, I look around, trying to do the geometry in my head. I had wondered if either of the women was going to turn out to be the controlling spirit of the scenario, in which case it would have been a very different plan we’d have been executing. Still, I’m a little surprised at just where we are, if my guesses are right. “Zidanya.”

“The foci?”

“The foci.” I turn to Sara. “The glyph’s power flows all come down into an ellipse where each focus should be somewhere in this room, we’re not sure where. Can you…” She nods, a spark of something in her eyes, and walks rapidly off to start talking in a low-voiced, terse stream with my companion. “Right. OK.”

“Adam.” Rei’s face is tight, brow showing creases and lines. He shakes his head, and the lines smooth away as he smiles. “Talk to us, please. I understand that you wouldn’t have chosen the easy path, but … what was that? Why not the rebellion’s path?” His voice is formal, his diction perfect; something about that bugs me, or unsettles me, and I wave it aside.

“I told you, didn’t I? I find this entire scenario to be offensive.” I realize I’m staring, staring at some sort of hybrid between a wheel and a cross, with an arrangement of straps that makes it clear how it’s meant to be used. It doesn’t seem pleasant. It doesn’t even seem potentially pleasant in the ways that people can freely consent to, if they swing that way; I break my staring contest with the inanimate object, which I think means I lose it. “We could have gone with the rebellion, but that would have granted legitimacy to the context of the choice. Would you really have chosen the Sky King?”

“It’s not like they’re people, Magelord.” Rei shrugs. “No true mind, much less a soul. They’re no more real than a Bard’s imaginations; if they feel pain and seem to respond, it’s only as one might find the same in an illusion or a dream.” He looks like he’s about to say something else, but then just shrugs again.

“Maybe. I’ll grant that they’re not people. That’s what the point of the questions was.” I nod towards the two corpses. “But what we do to them reflects on us, like I said; even to engage with the rebellion treats as valid the decision to subject us to the environment.” I do my best to avoid even in my head what what we do in this case represents, and don’t entirely succeed, but I at least manage not to say it out loud. “Anyway, there’s this whole thing in interaction design, but the short version is that the more clearly you define what someone’s options are, the more clearly you’re also defining what you don’t want them to do.”

“And so your…”

“Third option.” I nod at Rei. “They gave me two options, and they were pretty clear that whichever I chose, there was a straightforward path to a well-structured, well-defined victory. So I chose the third option.” There’s a break in the ambient conversation, as Sara and Zidanya walk over to Tim and Amber, respectively. “Looks like something might be about to… happen, whatever happen even means right now.”

“It does, at that.” Rei is frowning, for whatever reason. He’s not looking at me; he’s looking at Sara, or maybe at the two corpses; they’re in pretty much the same direction from him.

“Everyone off the floor!” Amber’s voice cuts across the room a few moments later, sharp and commanding. Tim’s perching on a chair, hands glowing and moving in strange motions, and I find myself scrambling up onto a piece of furniture that I put some effort into not thinking about. The floor is starting to glow, or rather, a glow is spreading, pooling, across the floor; it’s nice, it’s pretty, it distracts me from thinking about the thing I’m standing on. The glow flares, making me avert my eyes, and a few seconds later, a different glow wraps itself around Amber’s wrists and slithers down to her weapon.

[Sunder], I hear through the shivering of the world, and she brings a hammer down.

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