Gabriel had been quite impressed with himself when they had apprehended Hubert without a hitch. Staring down at their quarry now though, a freckled, gangly teenager, he didn’t feel nearly as proud. Bound to a wooden foundation post, Hubert didn’t look half as menacing as he had with a dagger in hand.
The whimpering certainly didn’t help either.
The four mercenaries had left Hubert’s acquaintance tied to a chair in his own home before manhandling the young man six blocks to the rendezvous point: the attic of a public house owned by Hubert’s father. Incredibly, they only encountered one patrol on their journey, and somehow it cost them less in bribes than they had been fined earlier in the evening. Gladstone’s city watch was apparently a good deal laxer on kidnapping than it was on public intoxication.
They hadn’t exactly roughed Hubert up, but the teenager was sporting a few bruises and scrapes from where he had been dragged, rather than carried, up three flights of stairs. It turns out that people, even scrawny adolescent people, are really quite heavy.
Dawn was starting to seep into the room from a skylight in the slanted roof. The pale blue and amber luminescence was beginning to contend with the candlelight and had started to chase the shadows into rafters.
Good. Hubert’s father would be here soon to collect his son and reimburse them for their time.
In the meantime, the mercenaries busied themselves in their own ways. Gabriel paced incessantly, much to the irritation of everyone, Figo tried his hand at fletching, Bling napped in one corner, bundled in her cloak, and Vish was chasing lumps of stale bread around a bowl of oily looking beige soup that he had somehow procured.
“Someone’s coming,” Figo said softly.
This was no indication of the archer’s sensory ability or predilection towards vigilance, the entire building was shaking with the rhythmic thumps of heavy footsteps. Ancient dust had been disturbed from remote corners of the ceiling and trickled down with each impact.
Gabriel watched the door expectantly, ready to meet his employer for the first time, eye to eye, leader to leader.
Somehow, he still managed four seconds of startled airtime when it finally flew open.
In the doorway stood a colossal specimen of a man. In fact, he didn’t so much stand in the doorway as he did wear the doorway. Gabriel was quite sure that not even oxygen could seep around the meat of the man, and momentarily genuinely wondered if the giant, ginger behemoth had created a vacuum.
“You bastard,” the self-proclaimed Duke Vagalad of Gladstone spat through his walrus-like whiskers.
Throughout the room, testicles retreated into bodies.
The giant shuffled towards his son in slow motion. As he removed the doorway from himself (and Gabriel was sure he had heard an audible “pop”) two guards appeared in the void he had once occupied. Each big. Each a dwarf next to Vagalad. Gabriel supposed they must have been secreted in the folds of his flesh, or perhaps deposited in the pockets of his voluminous red velvet robe.
It wasn’t just that Vagalad was fat, which he was, extremely, but everything about the man was oversized. His fingers were clubs of meat, his cheeks bovine rumps and even his nostrils looked like they could inhale a three-course meal. He was enormous from each and every angle. If you were to run him through with a spear, then you would run out of spear long before you ran out of man.
Looming over his son it was clear that the apple had fallen far from the tree. More precisely, the apple had fallen miles from the tree, been nibbled to the core, and then what remained had promptly withered. Hubert was scarcely even visible in his father’s shadow, but the increased urgency of his whimpering told Gabriel that he was at least still alive, for now.
“Has the little shit said anything?” the Duke demanded to know.
“Ummm…”
Gabriel didn’t quite know how to answer that. The answer was a huge resounding “yes”. The boy had said much. Truth be told, he had talked at great length from the moment he had been apprehended. He had talked about causes and rights and the place of mankind in the world, and a whole lot of other things that none of them had really cared to listen to. Vish had eventually grown so tired of the teenager’s speeches that he had gagged him with a handkerchief he’d found stuck to the inside of his robe.
“Not a word,” Gabriel fibbed.
“Hmm, well it seems you got your father’s stubbornness, if not my integrity!” Vagalad grumbled with a mixture of malice and pride.
It occurred to Gabriel at this point that he didn’t actually know why he had just located, jumped and trafficked this young man, and that such information might have been handy when they had been debating two nights ago whether to coerce the boy with wine and flattery or shoot him in the knee caps. They had opted against the latter on the grounds that if the boy was wanted for some misdemeanor then it probably wouldn’t do to ruin any future prospects he might have as a runner or, say, an adventurer.
Fortunately, the middle ground they had settled on appeared to have been appropriate. Vagalad was clearly irate, but seemed generally pleased to see his son and heir in one piece. It was baffling, really. Then again, sentimentality was a peculiarity that the childless mercenaries had consistently struggled to wrap their head around.
Gabriel made a mental note to ask a few more questions in the future before accepting a job from the Mercenary Guild.
“This little shit-stained weasel stole from me,” Vagalad’s gammon finger was engulfing the view of Hubert’s face but he was looking at Gabriel, “He stole from his own father! Why I ask you? He never wanted for anything, never lacked, never had to work a day in his life for the whores and booze he squandered on my credit. But that wasn’t good enough! No, he had to take off with my prized possessions. Family heirlooms, priceless pieces of art, your own mother’s jewels, for fuck’s sake!” Luckily, he had turned his attention back towards the boy, because Gabriel wasn’t sure he would have survived the deluge of spit that sprayed from that cavernous gob without a snorkel to hand.
The Duke leant down and tore the gag from his son’s mouth without bothering to untie it. Hubert yelped in response.
“Why did you do it, son? Was it gambling? Do you owe money? You know nobody dares demand payment from me or mine.”
“For Aether’s sake, no! No! It wasn’t gambling. I’ve never gambled a day in my life. This just goes to show how well you know me, father,” Hubert leered as he spoke but he was a kitten staring down a bear.
Vagalad looked wounded by that but he nodded slowly, “Perhaps you’re right. I don’t know you. The boy I knew would never have had the gall to take from the man who sired him. In fact, this is probably the boldest thing you’ve ever done - engaged in petty thievery.”
Hubert winced as if slapped but he met his father’s eye, “I didn’t do it for me! I’m no thief. At least,” he had to concede, “I didn’t steal out of greed.”
The Duke of Gladstone cocked an eyebrow at that, “Then what or who in the blazes did you steal for? Was it a girl?”
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It sounded to Gabriel like there was a degree of hope in that last question.
Hubert rolled his eyes, “No, it wasn’t a girl.”
You could almost see Vagalad’s shoulders sag.
Hubert took in a breath and steeled himself, “I stole for The Order,” he said resolutely.
“The Order?”
“What? Yes! The Order!” Hubert insisted.
“Whose order?”
“Not whose, THE, The Order. Don’t you..? The Order of the Rising Dragon. Surely you know of The Order of the Rising Dragon?” Hubert asked, none too optimistically.
Vagalad stared blankly.
The youngster looked deflated, “Do you even pay a modicum of attention to life outside this oppressive little town? There are things! Things happening in the world. Big things! Things to care about! Things to champion. There’s more to life than your taverns and brothels. More than your desires of the body and the blood money you use to fuel them,” Hubert spat.
A few seconds went by while the tumblers clicked into place. When they did, Vagalad sat back on his haunches and enveloped as much of his face as he could into his sweaty palms, “Oh, no. No, no, no. For Aether’s sake Hubert, you daft lump of crotch rot. Don’t tell me you’ve been devouring the shit sandwiches of some pseudo-political fannying fanatics?”
Hubert looked aghast, and probably not just because his father had successfully used “pseudo” in a sentence.
The Duke looked like he wanted to hit the lad for a moment but sympathy overcame him in due course, “Look, my boy. This Order, well, a new one of those crops up with the changing of the moon. There’re always kooks muttering about who fucked what and who should dethrone who. Bored students and bitter old thinkers who know as much about politics as a monk does about cunts!”
Vagalad lay a hand on his son’s shoulder, “You wouldn’t know about this, and that’s partly my fault, I’ve sheltered you too much, it seems,” The Duke bemoaned, “but this is nothing new, son. There are places out there where rebellious little rats shit out a new cause like you and I do a good breakfast.”
Gabriel wished he could purge that image from his mind.
Hubert was clearly disheartened but he still shook his head, “You’re wrong.”
“You’ve been had, my boy. No one likes to be fooled, but be man enough to admit when you have been,” Vagalad half advised, half instructed.
The befreckled boy hesitated but his resolve held, “No! No, you’re wrong. And you’re part of the problem. There are people out there trying to make a difference, and I’m part of that! I am,” Hubert scowled, “and now so is your precious gold.”
Vagalad almost did hit him for that, but seemed distantly aware that even a tap from one of his palm platters would delete Hubert from existence.
“Tell me where my belongings are, you insolent brat. Tell me who you gave them to,” Vagalad demanded.
Incredibly, Hubert didn’t fold. Although it was clearly all he could do just to shake his head. Words were far beyond him.
“I will have an answer from you, boy. You will tell me what I want to know and you won’t dare try and hold anything back,” Vagalad prophesised.
Gabriel thought that Vagalad would finally snap then, but he didn’t. Instead, he grudgingly moved away… and looked at Gabriel expectantly.
“Hmm? Oh. Oh! You want me to?”
The Duke nodded, “He’s my son, and it will be hard to watch, but,” he sighed, “do what must be done.”
Gabriel looked from father to boy and back again, and then started drawing his sword.
“What? No! You daft prick,” Vagalad boomed, “make the little shit talk! Interrogate the bugger.”
“Right! Right, right, right. I’ll, um, I’ll just make him talk then,” Gabriel nodded.
Vagalad and his honour guard (because, really, what else could they be?) took a step back and gave Gabriel room to work.
Gabriel looked around sheepishly and then knelt in front of the young man, “So listen, Hubert, right? Now, um, it would be in your best interest to tell us what we want to know, yeah?” he licked his lips, “We wouldn’t want anything, um, bad to happen, you know?”
“You can’t make me talk!”
Gabriel was a tiny bit embarrassed by the conviction in the younger man’s voice, and more than a little insulted.
“We can, and we will.”
A long pause followed.
Hubert eyed Gabriel warily.
Gabriel eyed him back.
Hubert started to look around the room a bit.
Bling disturbed herself with a snore but immediately rolled over again.
“For fuck’s sake,” Vagalad shouted, “hit the little shit sack!”
“Right! Yes.”
Gabriel nodded to the father and raised his fist.
Hubert closed his eyes and waited for the blow.
And waited.
And waited.
“The hell’s the matter with you?” Vagalad demanded.
“You see, it’s just,” Gabriel stammered, “it’s just that I’m not exactly the muscle of our little group, you know?”
Vagalad cast an eye around the room.
The Duke looked in turn from the pretty-boy archer, to the runt of a girl, somehow still managing to snooze in the corner, to the weedy middle-aged man whose fraying sleeve was half submerged in a bowl of chicken and leek soup.
“Who the bloody hell is then?” The Duke asked, quite reasonably.
Gabriel made a show of thinking, “I suppose we do have something of a deficiency in that department.”
“Some fucking mercenaries,” Vagalad grumbled, and motioned his guards forward.
“Wait,” Vish halted them with a show of his hand, “I can make him talk.”
The duke of Gladstone looked skeptical, but he ushered Vish forward regardless. He was clearly trying to distance himself from any of his son’s blood that may be spilt.
Vish had more creative methods of torture though. He crouched in front of the youth, who recoiled for more reasons than one, placed a hand on each side of his head, and waited. For a moment it looked like nothing was happening, save Hubert’s cheek getting dirtied with chicken soup. In time though, it became clear that the pair were straining. Beads of sweat were forming on Vish’s forehead, and Hubert’s eyes had started to twitch. After a long minute or two, Hubert lost their private battle, and his body slumped forward.
Vagalad stared in confusion, tinged with fear, “What happened? What have you done to him? I swear to the gods, if you’ve killed-”
Vish lacked the good sense to explain himself so it was left to Gabriel to intervene, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he reassured, using the same tone and gestures that one might employ to talk down a feral dog, “he’s quite alright. His spirit has just been temporarily removed from his body.”
The Duke didn’t understand, and said as much.
“He takes the soul and he puts it somewhere else. It’s not an easy thing to do to an unwilling participant, but at close range it comes down to a battle of wills,” Gabriel summarised.
The beefy ginger giant stared at the pair of them with his mouth lolling on his chins, “That’s incredible. Do you have any idea what I could do with that talent in my service?” He looked quizzically at Vish, “You could serve kings and emperors. You could be a count, or a duke. Why do you squander a living as a,” he gave Gabriel and his team an unimpressed once over, “barely passable mercenary?”
Vish gave a lazy shrug and sauntered back to his stool.
“Yeah, basically,” Gabriel answered in his mind-mappers stead, “his employment prospects are severely hindered by his personality.”
Vish threw Gabriel a rude hand gesture but otherwise didn’t turn his attention away from his bowl.
Vagalad seemed to accept that.
A few moments later a thought occurred to The Duke, “So, if he’s not in his body,” he said slowly, looking at his limp-bodied son, “where is he?”
“Don’t you worry about that. I’ll put him back just as soon as I think he’s ready to talk,” Vish said with a wink.
A few hours passed in that room while Vish kept everyone in suspense. A guard was sent to fetch ales from downstairs whilst The Duke, Figo and Gabriel played dice and cards. Natasha woke up and went back to sleep again, twice. Otherwise, it was a slow morning.
After a particularly sloppy round of dice, during which it was clear The Duke’s mind was elsewhere, Vagalad leaned towards Gabriel and whispered conspiratorially, “Listen, I want everything back, of course, but some items are more valuable than others, if you catch my drift.”
The big man was shifting uneasily.
“His mother’s jewels,” Vagalad fixed Gabriel with a meaningful look, “Well, she’d be devastated if she weren’t to see those again,” he hesitated before adding, “There’s a pearl among them, a massive bloody thing, the size of a kidney. Make sure you get that back for me – for her,” The Duke corrected.
Gabriel could only nod and hope that put the self-styled Duke at ease.
Finally, when the sun was high in the sky, Vish clapped his hands together and announced that he thought it was about time.
Everyone watched with bated breath as the mind-mapper rose from his spot, stepping away from his now thoroughly cold meal, and sauntered back towards Hubert. He made a show of waving his hands around, completely unnecessarily, and tapped the boy on the forehead.
Instantly, Hubert came back to himself. Only, now Hubert was gasping for breath and flailing around like-
“He’s fucking drowning!” The Duke exclaimed.
Gabriel intervened again, “Don’t panic, it only looks like he’s drowning. He’s not in danger.”
“Oh no, Vish,” Figo groaned, “You didn’t imprint him on a fish, did you?” He turned to The Duke sympathetically, “He did that to me once and I couldn’t walk straight for days. I had to lie in bed watching the world spin. It was a fulltime job focusing on not throwing up.”
“Do you see any fish around here? I can’t project a soul further than I can see,” Vish reminded him.
Vagalad looked at each of them as if they were completely mad, “What the hell have you done to my son?”
Almost on cue, Hubert threw up on himself and toppled forward as far as his restraints would allow. He spent the next five minutes retching violently. When he did finally look up, he stared straight at Vish with horrifically bloodshot eyes.
“You turned me into a fucking sentient crouton!”
There was a stunned silence as everyone digested these words, and then slowly swiveled their heads to regard Vish’s largely untouched bowl of soup.