One of my earliest memories is pain. I was not much more than a baby and I do not remember anything else from that age, but the pain has a way of sticking around. We were on the muddy shores of the river and my father was fishing. I was pulling rocks and mud out of the riverbed, mesmerized by the silt disappearing from my palm as I held it under the current. How I went from plucking stones and dipping my palms under the water, to flailing in the deeper rips of current has never been clear to me. My memory is as muddy as the shore. What is not muddy is the panic, or the pain. The panic felt like an eternity. The sun set and rose again. Seasons flew through their cycle, and great empires rose and fell into dust and still I panicked, my limbs beating an ancient rhythm against the water, entirely out of my control. Somewhere and sometime in the midst of this hell, I realized I was going under and I was not going to come back up again.
Instinct again did its work. I inhaled as much life as was left to me before the curtain of muddy water came down over the stage. At first, it was familiar. I had held my breath as my father bathed me, as we swam in the river on lazy afternoons, to show him how long I could go. This was a sensation I could handle. But there was no popping up to ask father how long I’d been under, or if the soap was washed out and I could open my eyes. There was no coming up at all and it started to burn. Deep in my chest I felt the tightening, the vise squeaking as its crank went round and round, the steel teeth on either side of my chest biting into me. The burn into a full, searing torch of pain. A molten ball of magma sat on my sternum and bit through bone, sinew, tissue, and muscle as slow as it pleased. It was the last sensation I remembered before waking up on the shore, my father above me, water projecting out of my throat with violence.
And that was only the beginning of the pain. The reminder was a constant presence for the next few weeks, each inhalation a torture. I confined myself to sitting on my bed in the dark, taking shallow breaths and waiting for it to be over. Never again, I told myself, would I feel such pain. It’s how I got through it; by pretending that type of pain could only be enduring once in a lifetime, and I had done my time. I would never have to do it again. Oh, the arrogance of youth.
I woke up choking. Blood dribbled down my chin and onto the floor. I had been kicked in the gut. I was in shackles in the dungeon of Singhal’s palace. My head felt split in two down the middle, my brains on the floor. There was no other way I could imagine explaining what I felt, the pain radiating down my spine and into my hands. The bars were gone so the door was open, but I was shackled to the walls behind me, hunched over and dripping blood onto the floor. With great effort, I pushed myself off the floor and onto my knees so I could look up at my tormentor. It was the brute who had called me the spy in the library room. As I knew he would be, standing behind him was Carbo of the King’s Guard. His was the voice I had recognized before I had been relieved of my state of wakefulness by the man in front of me now.
“I don’t believe,” I said. “We’ve been acquainted.”
He kneeled down in front of me and grinned. Three of his visible teeth were missing. His hair was sandy brown and greasy, hanging lank in front of his gray eyes. He stank of sweat and leather.
“Ulbrecht,” he said, extending his hand and mimicking a shake with the air as I was shackled. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, spy.”
“There’s that spy business again, you see I don’t–”
He hit me with his open hand across the face, and I could feel and hear my teeth click together.
“We won't be wasting time on whatever story you would like to spin us, Master Origio, if that is indeed your name.”
It was Carbo who spoke this time, strolling into the cell. His tone belied no change in our respective positions. We could still have been side by side on horseback with the riding party to the borderlands or walking through the corridors above us. There was no additional menace, no sense of gloating or superiority that had not been there previous. His tone told me he had never doubted we would be in this place together. He clocked me as an untrustworthy Rodanian from the first moment and nothing in the interim had done anything to change his perception. Three had followed two had followed one. All was as it should be in the world of Carbo of the Kings Guardsmen.
“I am a busy man and my time is valuable. So let’s not use more than is strictly necessary, as pleasant as Ulbrecht might find it.”
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Carbo did not kneel down to look me in the eye, but paced the room behind Ulbrecht’s hulking form, his hands clasped behind his back, his longsword tapping lightly against his legs in its sheath.
“Now,” he said. “Let’s start again. For what purpose did you travel to Singhal?”
“Prince Edouard’s father–”
This time it was Ulbrecht’s gloved fist which smashed into the side of my skull. It would have knocked me all the way to the dungeon floor but my shackles kept me from lying on my side. My vision blurred black around the edges and I coughed. Each hacking retch made my vision blink out. The lights stayed on when I could retch no more and bloody saliva dripped from my mouth.
“Your story of his father’s desire for him to learn at King Everard’s knee is unequivocally false. I believe I was clear but perhaps you did not understand. I have discovered your story is a lie and there is no need to interrogate it further. You will not convince me of its truth any more than you can repeat the past. Do you understand?”
I could not help myself. The reaction was involuntary. Through the spittle and the blood and the searing pain in my chest, the pounding in my ears and behind my eyes…I giggled like a child. What other reaction could I have had to him invoking such a comparison at this moment? It felt like a cosmic joke at my expense.
“I understand perfectly.”
What followed can only be described as a litany of blows upon my skull, my ribs, my stomach, my shoulders, and anywhere else that was not blocked by my shackled position. My right shoulder was out of socket and my whole body leaned further left than should have been possible. Again and again he asked me his question. It was unchanging. He did not even alter the wording in a play to throw me off. It was a straightforward beating with one goal in mind: for me to admit I was a spy. I could have done so, to stop the pain, but I had entered a state of numbness. It was not like he was going to believe the truth. He knew what he believed and what he wanted to hear and it did not involve time travel and portals opened by signet rings.
I was not sure when they left. I blacked out for a short while and when I came to, I was alone, but it was going to be a short reprieve. I could hear a metallic scraping and clanging from nearby, along with Carbo’s voice speaking in low tones to Ulbrecht. They were up to something, and whatever it was, it was not going to be pleasant for me. I had the opportunity to watch them bring it in. It was a slow process. It was a table with chains attached. It was not on wheels and it left gaping scores in the damp stones of the dungeon floor. The minutes scraped by in eons and ages, much as my time beneath the silty river water when I was little more than a baby. There was nothing I could do but wait as they pulled the table closer and closer. Why they did not bring me to the table wherever it was stored was shortly to be answered.
“This is something few know about,” Carbo said, fiddling with a small chain on the far end of the table. “You are greatly honored. It is one of King Everard’s greatest secrets.”
The small chain Carbo held attached to a hole in the floor of my cell. One of the stones was a dupe, and he pried it out of its place with a short blade. Into this hole went the chain and when his hand came away, there was an unpleasant hum in the air. The hair on my arms stood up and my tongue rooted for every nook and cranny in my mouth as if compelled by a god. They stood me up and undid my shackles. Each of them under one of my armpits. I could not have stood without them. Carbo had my good side and Ulbrecht the bulk of the work with my shoulder that hung loose. They strapped me to the table with thick leather cords. Carbo disappeared for a few moments before returning with a plate helmet. From its top, another small chain hung. This helmet he fastened on my head, making sure the buckle underneath my chin was snug. The chain he took and knelt. I could only assume it was going wherever the first chain had gone, into the dungeon floor.
“Some years ago, I was on an envoy mission for King Everard in Vin’s highest mountains to the North of here,” Carbo narrated. “During a dinner conversation with one of my comrades from the region, he mentioned, quite out of line with our ongoing topic, an invention his Duke had stumbled upon one night in a storm. This duke, he liked ornate headpieces on his battle armor, and as a royal can be forgiven for his flair for the dramatic. On a regular soldier, his helmets would have looked gauche. One evening, on a ride with his son, a storm approached faster than they anticipated, and they were caught galloping ahead of it back to the keep. The son made it, but this duke did not. He was struck from the sky. A bolt of lightning took its rest in his headpiece and went straight through him and into his horse. His mount was killed, but the duke was not. Terribly burned and having been through unimaginable pain, he felt a revelation. He knew he had experienced the future. Water, men have harnessed to their use. Fire. Wind. Why not storms and their bolts? I’ll save you the gory details, as this was quite some time ago and it was not until very recently that King Everard was able to finish what the duke started, with a little…persuasion of the duke’s family. You, my young Rodanian friend. You are our first. You stand in noble shoes. I can only hope it will strike into you the same kind of clarity that it did for the duke. Ulbrecht, step away.”
I braced for the worst. I could not see what Carbo was doing as I was strapped down. My only view was of the moss growing between the cracks of the stones in the ceiling. I could hear him moving around, could hear small clinks and clanks as he moved things into place. When he ceased moving, I expected to see a violent flash, to hear a crash like thunder. But that is not what I heard at all. I heard a dull thunk of an oar against the side of a boat. And again thunk. Was this the machine warming up? Was this meant to cause me anxiety as I waited for the unknown? I was incapable at that moment of imagining anything other than additional horror and pain at the hands of my captors, such that, when a friendly face appeared above mine, blocking out the view of the ceiling stones, I did not understand, could not understand.