Arion had woken up to a lot of things, and for the most part they tended to be rather pleasant. Nice furniture, nicer women within squeezing range. The smell of cooked breakfast, sunny weather or even the rare day off from his studies. All in all, waking up was a typically enjoyable experience when one was the most gifted magus alive.
In recent weeks, the experiences had soured somewhat. Hard ground instead of soft beds, dry rations rather than fresh meals, and no women at all save for a steel-clad scowling Paladin who seemed to regard him rather like something she’d just scraped off her heel.
Nothing, though, had yet compared to the sight of his Master’s fury. Silenos Shaiagrazni demonstrated his displeasure subtly for the most part. A stiffened jaw, a curled lip, the very occasional arching of an eyebrow. His glare was like burning magnesium now, though, and his anger crushed in around Arion like the great weight of stone.
He still felt that on his back, and it was a testament to his Master’s sheer presence that he had taken so long to even notice it hadn’t been removed.
“You allowed her to escape.” Shaiagrazni noted, speaking as if to some drooling child who might be inclined to misunderstand if he did not temper his rage with a careful clarity.
Arion did not need to ask who, that much he was sure of. He didn’t really need to ask anything at all in fact, his head suddenly clear, body suddenly refreshed. Obviously his Master’s work, which would only enrage him further.
“I’m sorry.” He hurried, “She-”
Silenos Shaiagrazni kicked Arion hard, his heel slamming into his nose and flattening it. The cartilage caved so quickly it barely even felt solid, as if it were a snail’s shell being stomped on rather than the body part of a grown man. Blood filled his nostrils, tears filled his eyes, and Arion felt suddenly strangled by the weight crushing down on his back.
“Apologies are for simpletons.” His Master snarled, punctuating the words with another stomp, further mangling the crushed meat of Arion’s face. “An apology comes after a failure, and only simpletons fail. Are you a simpleton, Falls? Have I accepted a simpleton as my apprentice?”
The stomping finally stopped, leaving Arion to gasp in air and huff the thick blood out from his crushed nose. Everything hurt, suddenly, face, jaw, neck, and the rest of his body, somehow, to boot. His head was clear as anything, though. As coherent as the flight of a Ranger’s arrow. That clarity gave way, slowly, to anger.
“You don’t give a shit about me, do you?” He snapped back, forcing himself to meet his Master’s eye. “You don’t care about any of us. I know you haven’t visited Galukar even once since what happened with his sons, and…” He hesitated. Arion saw a fury in Silenos Shaiagrazni still burning, a dangerous one. If what he was about to say turned out to be wrong he might well pay for it. But he had to say it, some things just needed confirming. Some truths just needed speaking.
“You killed Finlay.” He accused, finding his mouth and throat suddenly terribly dry. The words hung between them like a dead weight, dangling there in silent anticipation of a nudge to send it tumbling one way or the other.
His Master provided it first.
“You accuse me?” He asked, slowly, calmly. “Me, the greatest Fleshcrafter- the greatest caster- this world has ever seen? You demand truths of Me? You complain to ME?!” His fury remained quiet, as always, but the molten heat of it was enough to blister Arion’s wits even regardless. He saw his Master raise a hand, flinching, expecting a blow, but it never came. Instead magic wrapped around the man’s fingers, and a new sensation swept over him.
Arion knew pain, somewhat at least. He’d felt blows strike him, felt cold iron chafe against his skin, felt the Toxicologist’s venom eat him alive from the inside out. Nothing could have prepared him for the agony unleashed by Silenos Shaiagrazni.
It was like fire, running through his veins along with the blood. Like ice pricking every nerve he had. He’d read about flayings, a form of torture so horrendous that men had been known to die from the simple shock upon experiencing it, but even that hardly seemed a comparable thing to what he felt now. How could the mere mundane mangling of flesh measure up against this? How could any physical sensation at all?
His mouth opened, silently, and his lungs tried desperately to form something, anything to project their torment outwards. A moan, a groan, even a whisper to tell of his torture. But nothing escaped him, it was all held tight and compressed by the bottomless torture. Arion was crying, he realised, and by the wetness around his groin he knew he must have pissed himself. Humiliation was no more significant than the physical agonies of his past might have been. He didn’t care for how he looked or how he’d been embarrassed, he just wanted the torture to stop.
Finally, finally, it did. Pulling away all at once, like a rug dragged out from under him. The shock of it was so abrupt and jarring that Arion almost started laughing, sure he must be imagining his lull.
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A gasp escaped him, then, followed by a groan. Long, low and scraping his raw throat even more. He looked at Silenos Shaiagrazni through eyes flooded with tears.
“I did kill Finlay Baird.” His Master told him, with a voice so casual he might have been admitting to eating the last slice of beef. “And I did it intentionally. I skewered him through both his hearts, then healed the damage away after he died and twisted his innards to resemble a death by Necromantic poison or magical influence. I did it intentionally, and I do not regret its doing. It was for the greater good, serving a higher purpose, necessary.”
Arion was torn between barely focusing enough to hear, and desperately clinging to every word for fear of being plunged back into the depths of his agony if they stopped. If his Master noticed, he didn’t communicate the fact.
“You, however, served nobody and nothing in your betrayal. The Necromancer you released might have killed me, or else left me seriously wounded, in her ambush. And had we been forced to leave we would have done so without making half so large a dent in the Dark Lord’s forces. Every possible eventuality to come of what you did was a poor one, save for your own self preservation. You are a petty, stupid, selfish rat of a man unworthy of the name Shaiagrazni, and perhaps unworthy of even my tutelage.”
The bile was rising, sickness made solid. Arion could scarcely believe what he was hearing, could scarcely believe it was all real. Surely he was in some nightmare, surely the world was not this cruel. His Master, though, showed no hint of stopping.
“I had an apprentice like you once.” Silenos Shaiagrazni murmured, seeming distracted suddenly.
His eyes were incoherent, unfocused, his words soft and distant. It was as if his thoughts were on another place, another time, as if Arion were some spectre ephemerally drifting before him.
“He rebelled, constantly. Complained about everything, a great, gushing heart of sentiment and idiocy. He complained about how I treated our servitors, about how I conducted my research, about how House Shaiagrazni itself operated. And that was a transgression too far. I twisted his spine, leaving it just an inch from breaking, then left it to naturally fix into that shape. The look of a cripple, I thought, suited him rather more given his crippled intellect. What do you think, Falls?” His hand raised, his magic built. “How might it suit you?”
Arion felt the tears running down his cheeks, tried to speak, but found his words leaving him as a blubbering, clumsy wave of inexplicable sobs and half-formed syllables.
“Please.” He croaked. “Master, please, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’ll never do it again, I’ll never act against you again, I’m a fool, an idiot, but I’ll do better. Please let me do better.”
His Master hesitated, hand remaining aloft, eyes remaining sharp and grim. He stared at Arion for a few more moments, some subtle shift running under the skin of his face. Then he nodded shortly.
“You are more useful to everyone alive, for now.” He replied, then, with a gesture, the stone at Arion’s back was pulled off. Some undead, he saw, hefting the boulder aside without any visible exertion at all. His Master was leaving by the time he looked back to him.
Shaiagrazni was almost at the door when Arion next spoke, and he found himself unable to meet the caster’s eye.
“I’ll do better.” He breathed, repeating the promise, not certain even why. A silence followed, and Arion looked up only when it had persisted a few seconds more to see his Master’s staring, cold face.
“It would have been better if you had died, instead of Ensharia.” He replied.
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There was a lot of work to be done in holding an army together, particularly an army who had just recently lost the man responsible for leading them across a decade. Particularly when that recently decapitated army was staring down a force ten times its size and a hundred times its strength from behind fortress walls they’d long since been trapped in.
One surprisingly notable issue, he found, was in keeping them behind the walls. Collin would have thought that men might go placid over something like a giant, snarling army threatening them. Apparently not.
Some men, it seemed, went fucking insane under such conditions. Fear displaced from them as surely as air was by smoke, replaced with a bizarre sort of maddened, vicious aggression that drove them towards the enemy like loosed pit dogs against a juicy steak. It was half his challenge just to keep the men struck by their random bouts of lunacy from making impromptu charges. The other half was resisting his own.
Out there, somewhere, in the dirty grey plains, there were the fuckers responsible for killing Collin’s father. Could he really stay put and mess around with logistics and planning while they went about their business without so much as an ounce of steel in them?
Yes, he told himself. More to the point, he had no choice in the matter.
Some idiot had mixed up an order for defensive stones, intended to be dropped over the walls on attackers, and piled three loads in the same area. Collin had to rectify that himself. He’d had heavy axes prepared to hack apart the grapples apparently used last time, but those were delayed in arriving, which had forced him to investigate the matter personally. It turned out the load was being smuggled and sold among the city for profit, thus necessitating new action to resolve the entirely separate issue that posed. Collin hated that part, he’d never liked hangings.
He recalled what his father told him about thievery within a siege, the way hoarded food suddenly became the most valuable thing within its walls, and so he had the known criminals rounded up and disposed of all at once. That one stung in particular, but it was necessary.
Forty years ago his own dad might have been among that class, but today anyone in it was a threat to the people. He couldn’t tolerate those at this of all times.
Collin worked for hours, distributing ladders, checking over firing slits, supplying ammunition, working men, working forces, working bloody officers. Everything was his problem, everything his duty, everything his fault. He was so smothered by the scale of it that it took him rather by surprise when word finally reached him that other matters, besides drunken arseholes knocking out teeth in a pub brawl, demanded his attention.
“General,” Gyvain said, looking about as happy as ever to be bringing the news, “Venka is here for a parley.”
Collin was so suddenly cold at the knowledge, he barely even noticed being called General.