Janinda looked with naked disgust at the torture chamber that the Inquisitor maintained. Like many things about her father's business, the room she found herself in stank of unforgivable crimes and betrayals, and as she was now (perhaps only temporarily) in charge, she felt a burning desire to reduce the entire room and its occupants to ash.

The situation, of course, forbade such a thing.

Everyone in the room had been dismissed except for Janinda, the Inquisitor himself, and what remained of Dennet Mordain. Dennet, who could easily have died before reaching this room, was now being held deliberately at no more than a hair's breadth away from death. By some set of arcane cruelties, though, he would not die--could not die, not by his own will.

Janinda had not-insignificant abilities to read people's minds and emotions, and she had expected that she would have to seal those abilities completely in order to survive this room. However... by not doing that right away, she discovered something incredibly macabre: there was something awful, something... borderline erotic about Dennet and his complete submission. It wasn't that she didn't feel his pain; it was more that she sensed something, something that was absolute fact, and that was that Dennet Mordain saw her, right now, as incredibly beautiful, angelic, as the one and only person in all of creation that mattered to him, the one and only person who could save him. If she told him to...

She had to shake hear head to clear it. Yes, he would do anything she asked, and he would be pleased to do it, because that would mean the torture was over. However, that line of thinking had consumed her father, and her brother, and it had destroyed them both. She could feel the sick truth hanging in the air like a disease, could feel her own desire rise just from the certainty that it was true, but she pushed those feelings down. Right now, not only Dennet Mordain's life was hanging by a thread: her own, her father's...

It was distressing how short the list of people that Janinda actually cared about was. For now, she supposed she could add Chandra's name to the list, only because she was very upset that her efforts to protect the girl had been betrayed. So rarely did anyone in this family protect, and it simply had not been allowed.

She gestured for the inquisitor to remove Dennet's gag, and he obliged immediately. She waited a moment to see if he dared speak out of turn, but when it was clear that Dennet could do no more than whimper, she began. "You did some great violence to the jackal girl. I would know why, and what was done to her."

"Yes, lady," he paused, and Janinda could sense the lie before he even drew breath to speak, but she allowed it for a moment, just to see. "I was hired by a competitor, to place a spell--"

"I am a truth reader, Dennet Mordain," she interrupted. "The Inquisitor knows this. Any word that comes from your mouth that is not the truth will earn you a new punishment."

The panic in Dennet's eyes was informative. It was not a panic that spoke of being uninformed. The Inquisitor had clearly spent some time with the man preparing him to testify to her... or more likely, to Amon.

No, the panic read as though he had been misinformed. As though he had been prepared for something else. Nobody should have been here except the Inquisitor, but... nobody had ever heard the inquisitor speak.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

So Janinda shifted her eyes to the unreadable mask that was the Inquisitor. Something, whether it was the cloth itself or something underneath it, blocked every last shred of magic from passing through a barrier, and so she knew nothing of the man. Together with what her father had said, though, everything made sense.

"You are working for the King." She didn't specifically address the question to the Inquisitor; she could have been speaking to either of them. But she felt Dennet's emotions hit a peak, as though he expected any moment to be cut or burned or stabbed. Despite herself, Janinda's mouth curled into a small smile. "Inquisitor. I have spoken to my father, and he knows this is true. We would... appreciate your assistance brokering a deal. In order for that deal to take place, though, we need the girl."

"Yes! The girl!" Dennet's voice positively squealed. "There is a spell--"

"Silence."

Dennet could only whimper, as Janinda's voice somehow hit the man with the force of an order. She wondered if there was some spell on the rack that held the man; surely the Inquisitor could not train a man to respond to commands if the Inquisitor never spoke...? But then, if the Inquisitor had somehow influenced him already...

A voice that Janinda had not expected leaked out from behind the mask, raspy and interspersed with deep, heavy breathing, breathing that Janinda had not heard until he started to speak. "The man... helps. A deal... accepted. The king... intrigued. You will pay... now."

"The girl has what we need." Janinda felt her blood run cold. The voice that came out of the inquisitor was almost supernatural; her magical sense told her that it carried thick Deep essence, essence so thick that rather than wafting through the air towards her like steam, it fell to the floor like a heavy fog. It was bad enough that this man--woman maybe, from the voice, but who cared--was a torturer and showed up out of nowhere whenever he was invited, but the magic that poured off him could bind her, she wanted even less to do with him.

"The man... helps. You will pay... now."

Janinda turned her attention to Dennet, who trembled, but nodded with what little strength he had left. "Speak."

"The girl... there was a spell. Roan--Roan would know--"

"Roan is dead. What about the spell."

"He wanted to use her... against whoever sent her here. The spell should... let her act, but force her to remain... in service to the house. A tool to betray assassins."

"Before you put her back under that spell, she already could act." Janinda wanted to reach out and strangle the man, but she honestly wasn't sure how much it would take to kill him right now. Still, just reaching for him and then pulling back seemed to have an equally terrifying effect on the man.

"Yes... yes... I know. The king..." Dennet paused and looked at the Inquisitor, but the man made no move, and he continued. "the king... wanted assurances. If he sent the King's Own, they could turn Chandra to his side. To make sure that happened, I repaired the old bindings. I didn't know..."

"Fine. As long as we can broker the deal I don't care about the King." That wasn't true, but Janinda had to say it, both to get Dennet back on track and to keep the Inquisitor from reporting that she said anything else. "Honestly if she were completely free I wouldn't really care, as long as she gives us what we want."

"I cannot... I am not sure..." Dennet flinched as though he expected her to hit him.

"The spell, then. That allows her to act."

Dennet nodded, licked his lips several times, and spoke a number of strange words. "K’annam d’uordvek zininaam, k’ultuurva medivh konsharm’a. If you speak that to her, she should awaken."

Janinda paused, recognizing only about four-fifths of the sounds that the man had spoken. She rooted around in the torture chamber until she came up with a scrap of parchment and a bit of grease for writing. "Slowly. Spell it out if you need to."

She didn't like this room, she didn't like the Inquisitor, she didn't like Dennet Mordain, and she didn't like the idea of keeping Chandra bound by spells to be her servant. But Janinda had few options, and it felt like fate was just tugging her along moment by moment towards some end that she could not foresee.