Chapter 60: 15.3: Dakheng, Divided III

The gunman was out of bullets, and the other two were downed. Not dead, because Jasmine had those silly little things called morals, but they weren’t going to bother us anytime soon.

Well, I had to reconsider that. I’d been telling myself it was just for Jasmine that I had been holding back, but this time it had felt different. Maybe it had been because we had just spent the night discussing the wrongs of my youth, the reminders of everything House Byron—and by extension, me—had done that had been so harmful to ourselves and others.

I didn’t think just one night’s worth of discussion would have that much of an effect on me, but maybe the whole unconsciously drawing deep on my oath aspect of it had something to do with the effect. That, and perhaps the person I had been discussing my past with. I felt like the most massive burden had been lifted off my shoulders, but it had been replaced with the resurgence of old feelings and the aftereffects of them.

Anyway. That was stuff to think about later, not now. Right now, we had an interrogation to run.

“Don’t bother running,” I told the gunman, returning my attention to the scene now. “You’re not going to make it very far.”

Just because I was willing to hold back for Jasmine’s sake, I wasn’t going to pretend like I wasn’t going to kill or at least seriously injure this guy if he actively tried to mess with our plans.

I intensified the strength of the raw magic in my hands. Not that it would do anything more to the gunman—if he wasn’t an oathholder, he would be proper fucked by even a little bit of my magic—but it was good for intimidation.

Just to add to the effect, Jasmine aimed her pistol at the gunman. “Drop the gun, please. I would heavily advise doing so before you get seriously hurt.”

The gunman dropped the hunting rifle. Smart man.

I advanced towards him, still keeping the magic going in my hands. If it came down to it and he ambushed me as I approached, I would rather have a potential interrogation target dead and me unhurt than me being rather irritatingly injured and the other guy dead anyway.

Thankfully, the gunman didn’t make any sudden moves as we approached. Maybe he recognized the frankly superior firepower we had. If he tried to run, Jasmine’s revolver would gun him down before he could make it out of the square, and if that didn’t work then he would have a fantastic time decaying into nothingness at the hands of my magic.

The mundanes really did lack power sometimes, even when they were skilled enough to have the gunshot accuracy that this man had.

He was brown-haired and short, barely even taller than me. Jasmine stood slightly taller than him, which made his diminutive frame seem even less threatening. The gunman stood with tension in his body, like he wanted to keep his posture ramrod-straight and overly relaxed at the same time and had gotten stuck somewhere in between.

That little detail, along with the countless other things that didn’t quite add up with this attack, were making me awfully suspicious.

“Who are you?” Jasmine began, just a few steps behind me.

I turned to her as she spoke. She still had her gun trained on the man we were going to be questioning. It was easy to miss given how he didn’t even flinch at the sight, but it gave me more reason to relax. I dispelled the threads of oath-magic in my hands. They wouldn’t be needed right now.

“My name is Kal,” the man said, his voice quivering in fear.

I squinted. There was something in the way he spoke that felt vaguely familiar.

Perhaps it was because we’d just spent hours discussing my past, the recollections of Lord Byron much fresher in my mind, or maybe it was just because I had an awfully low tolerance for bullshit right now. Either way, I recognized where I felt that familiarity.

Lord Byron had sounded much the same at my brothers’ funerals. It was a carefully crafted voice, one that could fake being sad or tormented or—in this case—scared so easily and naturally that it could fool any outside observer.

I, however, was no normal observer.

“Your real name,” I growled, summoning magic into my hand again. He didn’t flinch, so I drew a knife from one of the pockets in my borrowed leather armor. When I brought it to his throat, he still remained composed.

“Lily?” Jasmine asked.

“He’s not normal,” I said. “Not a normal commoner, at the very least. Kal, if that’s what you insist on being called, your mask is slipping. Any normal person wouldn’t react to a knife to their throat this fucking calmly.”

“I’m terrified on the inside,” he offered dryly. “Does that help?”

Ah, he’d realized. I’d seen right through him, so the facade need not be held up any longer.

“You think he’s hired help,” Jasmine realized. “Am I mistaken?”

“Nope, you’re right,” I said. “What I’m interested in is who hired him. And his friends, though those are mostly already unconscious.”

“I wasn’t employed by anyone,” he replied immediately.

“You already gave up that you’re no normal commoner,” I said. “I would advise you to carefully consider your next words.”

“Let’s say that, hypothetically, I was employed by someone,” the man said, still completely uncaring of the knife at his throat and the roiling ball of ruin at his throat. “In that case, I would be forced to tell you that the employer’s identity is sacred, and that you wouldn’t get the information out of me while I still lived.”

“In this hypothetical scenario,” Jasmine said, apparently deciding to play along with his little game, “What would it take you to violate that sanctity?”

“Massive amounts of money,” the man deadpanned, his voice so one-note that I was sure that was a blatant lie. “If you have to ask how much, you don’t have enough.”

“You are lying,” Jasmine ascertained. “Given your joke, there must be something deeper tying you to your employer.”

“I never said I had an employer,” the man said.

“This is not court,” Jasmine sighed. “Just because you never explicitly said a very obvious fact does not mean that we are required to pretend that it is untrue.”

“Care to share?” I asked, moving the knife even closer.

It had been so long since I questioned someone who wasn’t willing to just spill the answers to me. Actually, had I ever even done that? Most of the time when I’d been interrogating people as a Byron, I’d had Mother’s drugs and poisons to help me along the way. Besides, most of my training had involved figuring out how to kill people, not how to make them talk.

Jasmine was at least slightly more inclined to the art, at least. I wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, but it was pretty clear that she was picking up more than I was.

“You learn anything?” I asked Jasmine quietly, backing away from the man. It was already evident that my threats weren’t going to do anything to him, and Jasmine’s gun was going to be deterrence enough to prevent “Kal” from attacking us.

“Just a little,” Jasmine whispered. “Not enough to say anything conclusive, but I do think he might be ex-military.”

I winced. Mundanes weren’t treated so great in the military. Then again, they were repeatedly encouraged to obtain oaths when they entered the organization—at least, I was pretty sure they were, from what I’d read on the topic—and very few mundanes who entered remained mundane for long. Was there something preventing Kal from gaining an oath? Personal reasons, maybe, or perhaps he’d just been born with so little magical potential that an oath wasn’t feasible. Given his complete unshakeablesness in the face of two girls who had weapons, oaths, and an ability to absolutely kick his shit in, I was fairly sure that he wouldn’t have a problem committing to gain an oath.

The latter hypothesis, then. I wasn’t sure if Jasmine was thinking along the same lines as me, but from that tidbit she’d assumed, there was a lot more to be extrapolated. Someone with little magic potential that had enrolled in the military would likely not have enjoyed it there. He might’ve been belittled, humiliated, and possibly even ejected from the armed forces as a result, and that tended to make someone bitter.

A bitter man wouldn’t be so unwilling to give up the name of his employer. That meant a few possibilities. First, there was a promise of some sort that the employer offered, one that he knew a minor noble like Jasmine wouldn’t be able to match. That would imply connections with a noble that was higher up the latter, which after the events of last night didn’t seem terribly unlikely.

Other than that, though, he might’ve had compulsions. Once again, this thought might have been spurred by the recollections of my own past that I’d just been having, but it definitely felt like a possibility. Jasmine had said that such actions were taboo amongst nobles these days, but this man was most certainly not a noble. Being physically incapable of even wanting to surrender the identity of his employer would most certainly be a roadblock to us.

“Can you check him for mental compulsions?” I whispered to Jasmine.

“Mental compulsions?” she frowned. A moment later, realization crossed her features. “Oh, I see what you mean. I cannot believe I did not consider that. It is a valid concern.”

Jasmine stepped forward, and I built unstructured magic again. This time, I passed it into the knife I’d been holding. I wanted to protect her if Kal suddenly struck out, but a raw blast of magic to the area had decent odds of killing her as well as the uncooperative maybe-ex-soldier. A knife imbued with ruin would be much more effective at eliminating a potential threat quickly and efficiently.

She made contact with the man, and my heart leapt into my throat. He didn’t move to attack her, but I kept the ruin-enchanted knife at his throat anyway.

“If you make a single movement towards her,” I warned him mildly, “You will die in a manner that I have been informed is exceptionally painful.”

He obeyed. Jasmine muttered something under her breath, magic patterns forming underneath her hand. A light green circle formed, the glow of the magic emanating from her hand casting Kal’s face into sickly shadow.

“I detect something,” Jasmine said after a moment. “I’m not quite sure if it’s a compulsion or an enhancement, though. My oath is not as strong as it once was.”

“Right,” I acknowledged, the grittiness lifting from my voice as I turned my attention away from Kal. “I assume this means you cannot remove it?”

“I am more than a little hesitant to handle this with my oath in its current state,” Jasmine said. “However, I do believe that I could detect if the mental effect activates.”

“Is that a suggestion?” I asked.

“Yes,” Jasmine said, leaning in so that she could whisper to me and go unheard. “If you ask questions that you believe might trigger a compulsion or force him to activate an enhancement, I may be able to track it and thus determine what the conditions to do so are.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Alright then, let’s try this again.”

I didn’t bother forming new magic. Jasmine was still in contact with Kal—it was necessary, if she wanted to continue getting information from her Nacea oath, damaged as it was—and I wasn’t going to risk hurting her if an issue actually came up.

Instead, I brought the knife closer to Kal’s throat once again. I’d already done this once, though, so I needed just a little variance. I drew a second knife from within my armor. This dagger was smaller, more of a hidden weapon to assassinate with than a proper combat knife, but it would get the job done.

I stabbed him underneath his belly button, unceremoniously and without warning. An assuredly non-lethal hit, avoiding any crucial blood-pumping arteries, but a painful one. A special scare tactic that I’d learned a long time ago, one that could be employed if I had to convince the person I was interrogating that I was serious.

Kal barely flinched, though the stabbing was accompanied by a grunt and I could briefly see a flash of pain or some other reaction pass through his eyes.

I withdrew the knife and wiped it off on his sleeve. “Jasmine, could you heal him a little? I’d rather he not bleed out too fast.”

For some reason, those words tasted worse than they might have used to. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I was having some trouble justifying the random stabbing I’d just done. I knew why, too—this was a necessity.

I bet Lord Byron thought that too, a traitorous part of my mind whispered.

I would deal with that later. For now, I would just swallow down that bad feeling and get on with my job. There was still a questioning for me to complete.

“What is your name?” I asked, adjusting my posture and voice to express the image of the threatening torturer. The tone of my voice wasn’t as perfect as it could’ve been, but it was good enough to be serviceable.

Kal’s stabbing wound was already closed. A testament to Jasmine’s prowess, that, though the numerous other minor burns and scratches he’d accumulated remained unhealed. I could respect that.

I turned my eyes to Jasmine belatedly, looking to see if she’d discovered a response to my words. Jasmine shook her head. No compulsions triggered, no enhancements used.

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“I’m going to stab you again if you don’t answer in the next five seconds,” I warned, my voice carefully neutral. Experience told me that people tended to freak out just a little more if they believed their torturer to be a psychotic killer, cold and unfeeling rather than wildly emotional and thus a target to be manipulated.

“Kal Cirman,” the man in question said. “Born and raised in Dakheng.”

Still no nod from Jasmine.

“Have you been trained before?” I asked.

A broad question. Compulsions done by sloppier oathholders often tried to block off entire major concepts, but these sloppy ones didn’t tend to be very strong. I wasn’t expecting much out of this.

“I have been,” Kal replied. “In many things, as I suspect most of us have.”

“Us being?”

“Commoners, of course.”

“Commoners receive military training?”

“That was not the question. You asked if we were ever trained, which I do believe many of us have been.” Kal radiated smug energy. It wasn’t magical or anything, but I could just feel it coming off him, and it grated.

I grazed him with the knife, this time in the shoulder. A wound that might result in long-term injury if left untreated, but not one that was likely to kill him soon. I made it precise and neat, such that he would most likely survive even if he didn’t make it to a hospital before Jasmine’s healing ran out. It really was a light cut, a far lighter touch than I usually would’ve used.

“Don’t play games when under interrogation,” I advised, still keeping my voice neutral. If I got angry here, allowed him to provoke me, it would result in a far worse outcome and likely a far more stubborn target. “Have you undergone military training?”

“No,” he replied. “I have not been trained as such.”

When I looked up, Jasmine was nodding.

I paused in my questioning for a second and moved over to Jasmine.

Whispering might not have been quiet enough to avoid the notice of the man we were interrogating, but I didn’t care all too much. We already had good information to go off of.

“He’s military, then?” I kept my whisper quiet anyway. It was a good practice.

“Most likely,” Jasmine whispered back, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “Either militia or a full member, but he must have been involved in military or at least military-style training of some kind.”

“Anything else I should know before we continue?” I asked.

“It is almost certainly a compulsion, not an enhancement,” Jasmine said. “If it had been an enhancement, he likely would have activated it when you began questioning him.”

“Got it,” I said. “Thanks for your insight.”

“Thank you for being the knife that I can’t be,” Jasmine said, taking one of my hands in her free one and squeezing it momentarily. “And thank you for holding back.”

“Of course,” I said, squeezing back. “Anything for you.”

The words hadn’t been ones that I’d been prepared to say, but they felt right anyway.

We let go of each other and I returned to my subject.

“So, Kal Cirman,” I drawled, still taking pains to sound as uninterested as I could, “Let us continue.”

“By all means, go ahead,” he replied, seeming more resigned than anything else. Military training included interrogation resistance, I was pretty sure. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that this guy was particularly talented at it.

Of all the people that we could’ve left conscious, it was this one. Then again, there was a decent possibility that a good chunk of these people weren’t who they claimed to be, which meant that picking another might have also involved a frustrating series of questions without answers.

“Who are you working for?” I asked.

“Nobody.” A lie.

Just to confirm, I looked up at Jasmine, who still had the detection spell going. She nodded. Compulsion.

“House Alzaq?”

“No.” Another look up at Jasmine told me that there was no compulsion involved there. Interesting.

Did that mean we could find out the true identity of his employer by simply asking about noble Houses until we hit something that triggered a compulsion? It was a pretty obvious strategy and thus probably already strategized against, but it was worth a shot at the very least.

Varga, Lysin, Tempet, Ther, Karte, Dahlia, Ersti, and a whole host of other lesser names that Jasmine provided to me over the course of a few minutes. Not a single one of them returned a compulsion-bound answer.

“Seb?” I tried. “The vagrant leader?”

“Who?”

No compulsion again.

“It may have been a proxy,” Jasmine said. “If this group were never told which House they were associated with, or if their memories were partially altered during the process of the compulsion-setting, I think it’s very possible that they do not know who their true employer is.”

“Well, shit,” I said. “This doesn’t gain us much, does it?”

“It gains us less that I would like,” Jasmine agreed. “However, it does not gain us nothing. We now know that we face a foe who is willing to train commoners as soldiers or have soldiers masquerade as soldiers. We know that our enemy is one that is willing to use mental compulsions.”

That felt uncomfortably familiar, and Jasmine seemed to realize it as she looked at me.

“I’m sorry if I bring up bad memories,” Jasmine said softly. “I know you have just reopened some of those wounds. Do not let me open them up further if they need not be.”

“It’s fine. It doesn’t bother me.” I waved her question off, but I did have to consider that.

I didn’t think the discussion I’d had with Jasmine last night—more of a reflection than anything else, to be honest—had changed that much about me, but then again maybe it had been important. It’d been a long, long time since those events had occurred, and even if I held them deep in my memory it had been a wholly different experience half-reliving them through my oath.

An experience different enough to help the process of my values changing, perhaps.

But that wasn’t something I needed to deal with yet. I’d already gotten to this point in my thoughts, there was no point in looping around in circles.

“What do you think we should do with him?” I asked. “I doubt we’ll get much more information on him.”

“There’s not much we can do,” Jasmine grimaced. “I suggest we continue on for now and get to our planned meeting. There, we can report this incident and discuss how to respond.”

“He’s still awake, you know,” I pointed out. “Might not want to discuss sensitive information in front of him.”

“I did not mention names,” Jasmine dismissed. “Kal Cirman, I would highly recommend seeking medical help later. My healing will wear off in approximately twenty-four hours for these minor injuries.”

With that, she pushed some more magic into her spell, and the indecipherable gunman fell asleep.

“Useful spell,” I commented. “Sleep, right? Naan’ti spell for Nacea oaths?”

“Correct,” Jasmine said. “But not one I can manage on a large scale anymore, and not one that I am supposed to be able to manage at all. I think I may not be able to do much more healing. One or two major heals and that will be all until the next time we can truly rest.”

“That’s fine,” I said, grinning stupidly despite the seriousness of the dialogue. Jasmine is so talented. “Off we go, then?”

“Not quite,” Jasmine said. “I may not yet be able to remove his compulsion, but others will. Help me out, yes?”

She moved to grab Kal under his shoulders, and I understood. I assisted her, taking him by the ankles. Heavier than I expected, but with the two of us both putting in effort it was light work. It wasn’t too hard to drag him into the carriage, and then we were off.

We left the plaza behind, with the fountain at the center crumbling under its own weight as pieces that had been weakened by the explosion fell apart and with over a dozen freshly unconscious, lightly to moderately burned commoners.

We had barely made it to an exit when I felt it. The pull of another oath, oh so similar to mine. I recognized it, this time.

It was faint, as if it had been sent from across the great sea, but it was there. A [QUERY], clear and bright.

“I’ll be right back,” I muttered under my breath, quiet enough that Jasmine wouldn’t be able to hear me.

I hadn’t known what was happening last time, and I suspected that Nishi had required the use of the primordial to forcibly pull me in, but this time I could understand what to do.

That [QUERY] was flavored differently to the one I had used. Less of a call for help and more of an invitation. I could feel the tug. It was ever so slight, barely there at all, but it was there and that was more than I’d been able to sense even just a week and a half ago.

I considered it for a moment, and then I built up my response, travelling along the threads of my own oath.

I could feel myself pulling away from baseline reality even as I formed my reply.

This time, I didn’t want to be as loud with my message. Last time had informed a whole city, and this time I only needed one person. I modified my message, fiddling around with the fragment of divinity embedded in my mind, and while I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it would work, I was willing to take a risk.

Nishi had asked me to meet again, and I’d be damned if I didn’t give that invitation my [ACCEPTANCE].

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