Chapter 23: Chapter twenty-two

“No, I wouldn’t say scarred prisoners are any more difficult to keep than non-scarred ones. Why would they be?”

“Oh, skard prisoners. Well then, yes, they are a real pain in the arse. We just execute them and have done.”

“I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

• From the transcript of Warden Fathening’s testimony before the Royal Salitian Prisons Inquiry.

 

Darrian had a problem, he believed Ferrous’s story. It fit with what he knew of him and it had a ring of sincerity about it that was hard to fake. This was a problem because Darrian thought of himself of a man of principles, and in Salitos a man who rapes a princess is to be put to death. Looking at it that way, Ferrous had done only what was required of him as a Justice. Moreover, Darrian had trouble punishing a man for putting a rapist to death, regardless of their station. Perhaps he had his year in Inveritus to blame for that.

Of course, Darrian wasn’t an idiot. He thought Ferrous was probably telling the truth, but he wasn’t just going to take the shapeshifter’s word on it.

“Keep him here,” Darrian said to his men as he mounted his horse. “I need to confirm some intelligence he gave me. I shouldn’t be more than a day or two. Make sure he doesn’t die in the meantime. Arnos, you’re in charge till I get back.”

Arnos snapped off a salute and then Darrian was on his way. He rode for the nearest Shadow intelligence hub. He needed to know whether Ferrous was telling the truth before deciding what to do with him.

 

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Now that Darrian was gone, Ferrous had to escape. Darrian had seemed to believe his story, which was good as it had been true. He had left, presumably to verify it. That was all very well, but Ferrous had killed the king, and no amount of sympathy was going to let him escape punishment for that.

But actually escaping would.

Ferrous began by freeing his arms and legs, which was a matter of shifting his limbs to have accommodating holes in them such that they hugged the bolts like little mouths, rather than being impaled on them. This took a while as the bolts were piercing bone, which took longer to alter than flesh. When he was done he was free of the bolts, but still stuck inside a metal box with no discernible way out.

At least, not for a human.

Ferrous started the long and arduous process of becoming a snake. Most people he had talked to about becoming a snake, which admittedly wasn’t many, thought the difficult part was keeping your internal organs from getting squished as you elongated from a six-foot man into a fifteen-foot, much thinner, reptile. This wasn’t the case. Ferrous simply made a second set of organs sized to fit and then switched over to them one at a time. The tricky part was all the ribs. Snakes have ribs all down their bodies and the process of shifting leg and arm bones seamlessly into ribs without injuring oneself is no mean feat. Of course, if he had a wide-open space, he could shift into a big fleshy mass first and then change to a snake from there, which would make it much easier. But most of the advantage of becoming a snake was that he could slip through smaller openings, which meant that he often didn’t have a lot of space to do it in. The trick here was to shift a way of bracing his legs and then turn into a snake piecemeal from the top down. That way, his human body never crushed his snake body. Of course, this took quite a bit of time and some very precise shifting.

So, with great skill and an awful lot of patience, Ferrous changed into a snake and pushed his scaly body out through the bars of the metal box.

There was an older man waiting for him when he got out. Ferrous didn’t want to kill the man, and hadn’t bothered shifting venom glands anyway, so he turned to slither away. The man raised his right hand and splayed his palm.

Pain exploded through Ferrous. He was blind with it. Everything hurt. He writhed on the ground, barely able to think. He managed just enough awareness to release the pain-killing chemicals into his spine, but they did nothing.

Hands were picking him up, holding his mouth closed. He was being fed back into the metal box. Someone was sealing over the bars, leaving only the tiniest of gaps to allow air in.

Then the pain stopped, as quickly as it had begun.

Painshaper, Ferrous thought, fuming. He had expected guards, obviously, but he hadn’t expected that. There wasn’t anything he could do to counter painshaping. So long as the shaper had enough pain stored up, he could unleash it on Ferrous no matter what shape he was in. He could shift to have no nerves at all, it wouldn’t matter.

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He wasn’t sure why it worked that way, except that it was some kind of magical horseshit that made no logical sense whatsoever. Someone had tried to explain it to him once. Something about the pain staying in vis-state until it hit something conscious and then some kind of magical nonsense happens and Ferrous ends up writhing on the floor in agony, or something like that. How someone could even absorb pain was a mystery to Ferrous. It wasn’t like heat or light. It wasn’t a physical thing. It was in someone’s head. Might as well have loveshapers or surpriseshapers for all the sense it made.

Ferrous grumbled to himself in the dark box, though the grumbles came out as hisses as he hadn’t made himself human vocal cords.

After a few minutes Ferrous stopped feeling sorry for himself and got back to planning his escape.

 

Ferrous had figured a way out of the metal box. It actually wasn’t that difficult. The box was sturdy, and didn’t have any hinges or visible seams, but had been assembled around him in a relatively short time. This meant that Darrian’s men had to put him in a box and then attach a lid to it somehow. Since he was pretty sure he would have noticed the burns he would have suffered had they gotten the box hot enough to melt it into one piece, that meant they had used some kind of adhesive and tight-fitting lid. That they had stuck another metal plate in front of his bars so quickly confirmed it. In Lhint they made a substance for sticking metal together from the saliva of the man-eating wump-wump tree. It was sticky, fast-setting once applied, and dark enough to blend into the iron box Ferrous was in right now. He was betting that’s what Darrian had used. And, if that was the case, all Ferrous had to do was mimic the secretions the wump-wump used to break apart its hardened saliva to get at its prey, and he would be out.

Of course, he didn’t know the chemical makeup of those secretions. Plus, once he got out he would still have to deal with the painshaper who had incapacitated him previously, but one problem at a time.

So, Ferrous shifted back to the body he called Tarmigan and started trying different chemical combinations in his spittle. It was unpleasant, many of them burned his mouth and none of them tasted good, but it was less awful than some of the other things that had happened to him in the past day. It didn’t take Ferrous all that long to cobble together a compound that dissolved the adhesive. He hadn’t studied the wump-wump specifically, but he knew plenty about biological adhesives generally, and there’s only so many ways to achieve that effect without poisoning the organism itself.

Once he was sure that his concoction would do the job, having tested it on one corner of his box and felt the adhesive dissolving there, Ferrous focused on the next part of his escape plan.

The effective range of a painshaper was shorter than any other shapers, maxing out at just over ten feet, so all he had to do was get away from this one and he would be free to escape. Of course, he could barely think when that pain hit him, let alone run. So, the trick was to escape without thinking.

After another twenty minutes of shifting, Ferrous was ready and he started dissolving the wump-wump saliva all the way around his prison. With the adhesive gone he just gave the thing a solid shove and it fell to the ground, letting in the early-morning light from outside.

The painshaper pointed his hand at him, but Ferrous was ready for him. He moved his hand to touch the hairs on the back of his legs (he dropped his clothes becoming a snake and hadn’t bothered to dress again), and immediately started sprinting.

Pain hit him like wall of fire and he lost all conscious thought, but he kept moving. His legs were acting without any input from his brain. A series of nerve relays he had set up between his legs and his spine were making him run without any input from his conscious mind. It was working, he was escaping the painshaper.

Of course, the painshaper wasn’t the only one of Darrian’s men, and a large man stepped out in front of Ferrous and smashed a meaty fist into his chest. His legs went out from underneath him and Ferrous hit the ground, his lower half still trying to run despite the fact it was now horizontal.

“Slippery bastard,” the man commented.

Ferrous was still in an enormous amount of pain and couldn’t think clearly enough to respond.

“I’ll see to that,” another man said, this one tall and wearing a stupid hat. “Hold him steady.”

The big man held Ferrous’s leg, which was still trying to run, while the tall man whipped out a sword and took his foot off at the ankle.

This probably hurt, the painkilling chemicals Ferrous had released earlier had worn off some time ago, but Ferrous was in so much pain already that it barely registered. Something hot pressed against his foot as someone cauterized the wound, and then someone was chaining him up.

Once he was chained, the soul-crushing agony abated from his body and he was left with just the regular agony from his severed-then-burned foot. By comparison it was almost pleasant. Almost.

“Good work you two,” an older man said. “We are going to need to watch him carefully Darrian returns. We don’t want any more escape attempts.”

Yeah, Ferrous thought, almost delirious from pain, wouldn’t want me to hop away from you.

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