Chapter 24: Chapter twenty-three

There is no secret I can teach you to hold out under torture. Everyone breaks eventually. My advice to you is to try to die before that happens.

• Shadows of Inveritus training manual.

 

Morning was breaking when they brought Kalissa back to Bracken’s compound. The place was a shambles.

“What happened here?” Bracken demanded of a bruised guard.

“We were, ah, attacked sir. Forceshaper broke in. We went after him, but he got away. Killed a few of the men, busted up a few more pretty good.”

 “You’re telling me that one man broke into my home, gave my personal guard, my very well-paid personal guard, a sound thrashing, and got away?” Bracken’s voice was low and dangerous. “That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Ah, no sir. We would have caught him. But then some more people showed up to rescue him. Tarrow really saw more of it than I did.”

“Take me to him. Now.”

The guard hurried to comply.

“Put the girl somewhere safe,” Bracken said before he left. “And don’t do anything to her yet. I’m suddenly of a mind to hurt someone and I somehow doubt that Tarrow is going to improve my mood.”

Large men dragged Kalissa into a small, dark room in Bracken’s home and chained arms to the wall. The room was dark and smelled awful, like people had died in there and only a token effort had been made to clean up afterwards. The chains that held her were rusty, but still plenty strong enough to keep her in place.

Kalissa said nothing as the men chained her up. They left and she hung her head and stared at the floor. Her chains weren’t long enough for her to sit down and her legs felt like lead. She was covered in cuts, and her left arm ached a terrible, bone-deep, ache with every movement she made. She had given up on trying to heal that wound after she got it to stop bleeding, and now she sat in silence, waiting for hard men to come and torture her.

She was waiting a long while. Whatever had happened at Bracken’s it was obviously taking some sorting out. Which left Kalissa a long time to think about her predicament.

She had seen about a dozen men when they were taking her in, though it was hard to get an accurate count while bound and slung over the back of a horse, and there were bound to be plenty more here in the compound. Even assuming Bracken had taken most of his men with him to go after the Dagger and only left a skeleton guard behind, he had more than twenty men. Practically a small army. Sarina might have some reason to help Kalissa, she hadn’t been paid yet after all, but not enough to take on those odds. The other Shadows could get Kalissa out if they knew where she was. But they had no way of tracking her back to Bracken and she had no way of getting a message to them. Eventually, the Silent Tower would come for the Dagger, but even if Kalissa survived that long, there was no guarantee they wouldn’t just kill her on general principles.

In short, she was alone. No one was coming to save her.

A shiver ran down Kalissa’s spine.

Eventually Bracken came into the room.

“I’m having a bad day,” he said, closing the door behind him.

Kalissa said nothing, just stared at the ground. She was holding her right arm as close to herself as her chains would allow, almost as if she was trying to hold herself together.

“Well, I suppose you think I’m hardly in a position to be complaining,” Bracken said. “Given that I’m not the one about to be tortured and all. But I’m not telling you to complain. I’m telling you because you’re in a position to cheer me up.”

Kalissa remained silent.

Bracken drew a knife from inside his coat. “It appears I’ve been burgled. And, since I recently had dealings with a thief, I have a pretty good idea of who did it. Thing is, I don’t know who this thief is working for, but I do know he had the Dagger before the Yarrls took it. You and your friend seemed to be trying to steal the Dagger back from those Yarrls, so I figure you might know something about the one who robbed me. So, what do you know about Saladeen Hadon?”

Kalissa’s eyes flicked up at Sal’s name. Then she went back to staring at the floor.

“Now, before you say you don’t know anything, I want you to explain your situation to you. If you have information I can use, I will keep you as a hostage in order to lure your friend in, then kill both of you. There’s no version of this where you leave here alive. Got that?”

Kalissa said nothing.

Bracken punched her, hard. “Got that?”

Kalissa nodded obediently.

“Good. But, if you don’t have any information I can use, I’m going to let the boys have their way with you. You’re far too old for my tastes, but plenty of my men could find all sorts of uses for a girl like you.”

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Kalissa was seventeen and hadn’t made herself look any older. Which meant that Philious Bracken was what one of her professors called a paedophile, and what everyone else called a disgusting piece of shit.

“Of course,” Bracken said, gesturing with the knife. “If you give me information and it turns out to be a lie, I’m going to beat you bloody. Then, I’ll use this knife on you in the last places you’d want me to. Then, once I’m done, I’ll give you to my men. You’ll be blind, tongueless and torn up inside when they take you, understand?”

Kalissa nodded again, sick to her stomach with revulsion and fear.

“Good. Then let’s begin. What do you know about Saladeen Hadon?”

“He’s a Lhintish thief,” Kalissa said. It was an effort just to talk, but it was better than being tortured. “We were following him. Don’t know who hired him, but I know where he’s been for the last few days.”

“Excellent. Now we’re getting somewhere. Where has he been?”

“He spent time in a lot of bars. Saw him meeting with a man a couple of times. Could have been his boss. And he went into a warehouse on the east side of town too, good place for deals.”

“It wasn’t the warehouse,” Bracken said. “Who’s the man? Describe him.”

“Ah. You humans all look the same,” Kalissa said, trying to think of someone who could plausibly have hired Saladeen. She didn’t want to finger Carrus, but she couldn’t just give a generic description either. There would only be so many people in town who would have the means and motive to steal Bracken’s blackmail material, so it would have to be one of them. The problem was that Kalissa didn’t know who any of them were. If she pretended that she couldn’t tell one human from another, then maybe she could give some detail of an office they held, without having to know what they look like. The sheriff would be a good bet, or maybe the local lord. She’d only get one chance at it though.

Bracken didn’t ask any further questions. He either knew he was being played, or he had just run out of patience. He approached, took hold of Kalissa’s middle finger on her left hand, and began to push his knife under the nail. Kalissa tried to pull her finger away but her arm had almost no strength and Bracken was easily able to overpower it.

“Okay! Okay!” Kalissa wailed, no longer trying to be clever, just desperately not wanting to be tortured. “It was Carrus. From the Snake Pit. He’s the one who stole from you.”

Bracken stopped, his knife barely under Kalissa’s nail.

“Hmm,” Bracken said, considering. He hadn’t let go of Kalissa’s hand and blood was welling up from her finger and dripping to the floor. “That could be true if Briggs had enough stashed away. How do you know it was Carrus? Actually, don’t answer yet. I think you need a lesson on truthfulness.”

Bracken jammed the knife in under Kalissa’s fingernail.

Kalissa screamed.

A few moments later, Bracken was grinning at Kalissa and holding her fingernail. Kalissa was crying.

“Now, how do you know Saladeen is working for Carrus?” Bracken said, flicking Kalissa’s fingernail across the room.

Kalissa said something that came out as a whisper.

Bracken grabbed her face. “What was that? Speak up or I’ll have to give you another lesson.”

Kalissa tried to put her body between Bracken and her right arm, still with all it’ fingernails, but her chains barely let her move it at all.

Bracken saw what she was doing and brought his knife up to her eye. “Oh, don’t worry. It won’t be just a fingernail this time.” Then his gaze went back to her right arm, as if something about it had caught his attention. His eyes widened.

Kalissa had been shifting all she could into that arm since they had chained her up, increasing bone density and muscle mass at the expense of the rest of her body. She had just needed time, but now her right arm was a freakish thing, bulging grotesquely with muscle and sinew.

Kalissa grinned fiercely as she snapped the rusty chain and punched right through Bracken’s chest.

Bracken made a wet, hacking noise. He tried to stab Kalissa with the knife, but his body wasn’t working right.

Kalissa leaned in and whispered in Bracken’s ear. “I said, you talk too much.”

She pushed him to the floor and broke her other chain.

Now she just had to get past a dozen or so thugs, and she’d be home free.

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