The Bogman had command of the whole of Grackenwell after a time and sent slave raids into Claeloch as retribution. He suffered to live only his most obedient subjects. Grackenwell had been a land of prisoners, but he transformed it into its own sovereign kingdom, and he bade his subjects to make it prosperous, and thereby its might grew. He ruled severely, as a proper ruler ought. The people of the northern lands no longer looked at him with any love. Rather, they regarded him with great fear, as they were right to do. For the love of a thing made one beholden to it, but the fear of a thing made it one’s master.
-The Legend of the Bogman
Castle Feirhall, Zan Vayonado
Crack! A faint grunt of pain followed by a bursting mouthful of obscenities. A fresh flow of crimson blood. The smell of metal in the air.
Kimbel laughed. “Again.”
The guard standing in the corridor, Ulther, raised his whip and cracked Teralt in the back once more.
“Son of a whore!” Teralt growled.
“Terry,” Kimbel snickered, “you already used that line earlier. Or was it son of a bitch? Either way, your king is not very entertained.”
Teralt breathed heavily, murderous intent in his eyes. “So... you killed a king... Think that makes you... worthy of my praise? Think... I ought to fear you now? That it?” Crack!
“Easy now, Ulther,” the young king chided his guard. “Give him time for the pain to subside.”
The guard glowered down at his ex-comrade. “Apologies, Your Majesty. He was disrespecting you.”
“Oh, you misunderstand me—I don’t mean to show him mercy. I only know from experience that if you get them all at once, you start to go numb to them. Give him just enough time to start to feel better and then let him have it.” Ulther nodded. “Now then, have the scouts returned from Dridon? They were due back yesterday. I grow anxious to hear what that slave-loving crone has decided. And I know damn well she doesn’t have half the gall to hold them there.”
“I’ll go check, Your Majesty,” said Ulther. He dropped his whip and marched down the limestone corridor toward the castle’s great hall where guests and visitors would be received.
Kimbel sat in what had been his father’s throne away from home, a comparatively modest chair of velveted ebony wood, otherwise unadorned, in the throne room of Castle Feirhall. The squat limestone edifice had gone by a different name not long ago. Then it was Brynh’s to rename. Now it was Kimbel’s to rule.
The new king twirled his dagger blade-down on its axis against the cushioned armrest of the throne. He smiled at Teralt, though the ex-jailer’s back was turned and he couldn’t see him. The prisoner was chained up in the adjacent corridor leading to unused rooms in the castle.
The desert sky outside was a saccharine blue. The sand burned hot and dry, but it was a season cooler in the well-ventilated castle. Desert savages got one thing right, Kimbel mused. Rumor had it that Castle Feirhall was the only permanent structure in all the Zan desert, save for the Oasis of Baranatha, and it was remote enough as to be well-guarded and well-removed from the threat of invaders.
“Has it overflowed yet?”
Teralt’s voice startled the young king. It was calmer and more collected than was expected of a man in his condition. “Did I give you permission to talk, oaf?” Kimbel replied.
On the white floor beneath Teralt’s red, shredded back sat a stone basin to catch most of the blood that the whip squeezed out of him. It was far from overflowing, but the drippings had indeed added up. The soup therein was thick and a scarlet shade of black.
“Only trying to be helpful,” Teralt sneered. “You have a lot to learn as a new king.”
Kimbel snorted. “And what does a slack-jawed ape like yourself presume to be able to teach me? You’re not the one in control anymore, Terry. It’s like I promised you. I am the king, and now your worthless life is my plaything for when I grow bored. And waiting for two slave ambassadors to return bores me right out of my skull, you know that? I think I might have the Feirhall slave cooks do something with that basin tonight. Whip up a nice blood pudding and that’ll be your three meals a day until it runs out. With that much blood lost, I dare say they’ll keep you fed off your own drippings well into—”
“It’s not like you promised me at all,” Teralt interrupted. “You’re not making good on your threats. You think you’re such a fearsome king, but are you really?” For a moment, Castle Feirhall was deathly quiet. “You can only bring yourself to inflict on me what’s already been done to you. What happened to all that bravado when our roles were reversed? Haven’t you the stomach for it anymore?”
Kimbel rose from the black throne, knife in fist. The sudden movement served as a grave reminder of the healing wound that was his entire back; it ached, stung, prickled beneath the bandages beneath his shirt. He strode as menacingly as he could manage across the tile floor, through the arched doorway, and into the corner of the corridor where Teralt knelt in chains.
The former jailer’s arms were splayed out, each one shackled to an opposing wall. Kimbel ducked under one of his arms to step around and meet the man face to face. He squatted; their eyes were level now for the first time ever. Teralt’s, bleary but defiant, and his own, he liked to imagine, stoic with just a sprinkling of mirth.
“I’ve learned something since all this started,” said Kimbel. “When you push a man over the edge, one of two things will happen. You might break him completely.” He pressed the blade of the Garrotin family dagger against Teralt’s neck. The prisoner flinched ever so slightly before composing himself, straightening his whip-flayed back. “Or you might drive him to do something incredible, something neither one of you ever thought possible. That was me, of course, as I’m sure you remember.” Kimbel grinned proudly.
“Then why don’t you push me?” Teralt leaned forward, pushed his skin against the blade of the dagger, unafraid, almost daring it to cut him. “And see what happens?”
“I won’t push you over the edge, Terry. I don’t want you having any fantasies of freedom. I don’t want you to do something drastic. And I certainly don’t want to break you. Then it’s no fun anymore! No, I won’t push you over that cliff’s edge.” He scraped the blade slowly, gently, up Teralt’s upper neck and chin. Coarse little needles of stubbled black hair broke and sprinkled to the floor. “I’ll keep you dangling over the edge to keep the fear alive, something I’ll have to remind you of every now and then. Is today the day I do it? Tomorrow? When? You’ll never know. That is, until it finally happens. When that greatest fear we all share is finally realized for you.” He twirled his dagger on its axis, the point pressing just under Teralt’s chin. “But not until I’m good and ready.”
The blade pressed a hair too close. A nick opened up in Teralt’s skin, enough to draw a dot of blood. His victim kept every muscle still except to sharpen his glare. “You’re soft, boy. No matter how strong you think you are. And it’ll be the death of you, by my hand or another’s.”
Kimbel gently wiped the blood off on Teralt’s tattered pant leg, the tip of the blade perilously close to the most vulnerable part of the man, and Teralt actually stole a tiny gasp. It thrilled Kimbel to know the power he had over him. “Tsk-tsk,” said the king. “Clumsy Teralt. My father taught me how to shave without cutting myself. Clearly yours was never around to do the same for you. I suppose that’s what happens when your mother’s a whore, isn’t it?” He stood and patted his prisoner on the head like a dog. “No supper for you tonight.”
The distant sound of thumping boots rebounded down the corridor. Ulther was back—unaccompanied. He frowned and shook his head at the boy king. “My apologies, King Kimbel. They still have not returned.”
“I propose a new game!” Kimbel exclaimed. He clapped both of his hands on Teralt’s exposed shoulders, knowing it would hurt the man and his still-bleeding back. The prisoner grunted. “Starting tomorrow, for every day that goes by without word of their whereabouts, Terry loses a nail. We start with the feet.” He motioned for Ulther to resume his watch. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Remember what I said. Breather, then whip. But do it sparingly—you need to keep the nerves in his back alive or else it won’t do anything. I have faith in you, Ulther.”
His guard bowed respectfully. With that, Kimbel folded his hands behind his back and strode off to the royal chambers, wholly at home and comfortable beneath the weight of the crown.
Kinghood suited him more and more with each passing day.
***
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
It was night. Kimbel wandered Castle Feirhall all alone.
He felt along in the dark, lost, frightened of what waited around every unfamiliar corner. He hadn’t yet memorized his way around the sprawling castle with its long corridors that all looked alike. His tiptoeing brought him down a long, windowless hallway through tall, opulent doors and into the Hall of Unity in Castle Muadazim. He was back in Qarda.
It was the Circle of Kings, the banquet where he and his father had dined with the king who would die later that same night. The king who died. Who died and handed down the crown to his only child. His child, whom he had loved.
There was a haze to the world. It was not quite morning, not quite night anymore, light enough to see and yet the sky outside was empty. He felt strangely out of place.
Kimbel proceeded through the double doors at the other side of the Hall of Unity and stepped through into a new world. It was a partitioned tent. Behind the wooden doors were open flaps of a tent tousled in the wind. Through the flaps at the other end of the tent, he could see the star-speckled sky over Le’Me. In the tent, a prisoner kneeled in chains facing away from Kimbel, his back thoroughly torn open by whip.
“Read it,” said a voice. His father’s. Before him sat an open book, the Secret Ledger, and the page bore two amorphous words written in splotchy black ink.
“I can’t,” said Kimbel, rasping. His voice was shamefully small.
“It’s my name, isn’t it?” Silence. “Don’t lie to me, boy!”
Kimbel flinched and drew back a step. Even in chains, back skinned like a potato and bleeding like a cut of meat, the man sowed cold fear in the hearts of his enemies. And Kimbel counted himself among them now.
“You let them burn me,” said Brynh, his voice plummeting in pitch and rising in volume. “A burned man sleeps forever. A burned man can never come back. You disgust me.”
“I’m your son,” he murmured back.
“Look where that’s got me.”
The tone of the world around them wobbled on that razor’s edge of reason in Kimbel’s favor, briefly. He felt empowered enough to speak his mind. “You didn’t know when to stop. You once said you loved me and you lied. Liar! You know what happens to liars in Grackenwell! Don’t you? You were the one who first told me!”
There was a great, earsplitting sound like grating metal. A fire burned in some unseen place, casting wild shadows on the walls of the tent which danced madly, stretching, contorting into howling shapes.
“You’re just going to leave me here?” said Brynh, and now his voice was small again and disarmingly familiar. “You’re my son, aren’t you?”
“Was your son.” Kimbel turned to leave the way he’d come. Where the tent door had been open a moment ago, there now stood a smooth limestone wall with no exit. He about-faced.
The prisoner had turned around as well, revealing a front side just as mangled as the back. His mouth was an asymmetrical scattering of teeth and bloody, toothless gaps. An eye dangled from its socket. The prisoner was Hane.
“A wise king knows when to stop,” he said.
“Stop,” said Kimbel. His mouth formed the word, but there was no breath to it. “Stop... Stop...”
“Stop,” Kimbel said again, and he felt his vocal cords strumming in his throat this time. “Stop!”
He bolted awake. He was drenched in a cold sweat, coughed once, twice upon waking. At first his surroundings were unnervingly alien to him, but a moment’s reflection reminded him that he was in the royal bedchamber of Castle Feirhall in Zan Vayonado. He half-expected to wake up in his Holcort cell again.
Something dampened the space between his legs. He ripped away his bedsheet, grimacing. It was thin, odorless, colorless.
Was it her again? His heart was racing and his muscles were tense. He hadn’t dreamed of the Qardish princess since before his arrest on Le’Me, but this was not that. He could only remember a few fleeting fragments of his dreams the previous night, but they were fearful, not enticing.
This was not the result of a lustful dream. He wasn’t sure whether to be more or less ashamed that he’d simply wet the bed.
But he immediately knew how he would spend his day as a result.
***
“Again.” Crack! The length of leather snapped at Teralt’s legs once more, leaving another crimson gash. Even an ox of a man like him buckled under the weight of his treatment, hardly able to support himself now that they’d stood him upright. He breathed heavily and often. “Mmm... Only one more for now. Make it a good one.” Crack!
“What would you have me do next, Your Majesty?” Ulther asked, wiping the blood from his whip before coiling it back around his belt.
“You work harder than the slaves,” the king chuckled, polishing off his second bowl of oatmeal. “You’re worth every scale I pay you. Let’s see. I made a deal with Terry this morning before his punishment. If he endured the whole thing without saying a word, I’d give him eight servings of breakfast. For each time he spoke out of turn, he would lose a serving. By my count, he said, ‘Is that all,’ ‘You whip like a wench,’ ‘Damn you,’ ‘Burn on a pyre,’ and ‘Please.’ Five servings taken away leaves him with three. I’m certain even a simpleton like him has already done the math, since it involves stuffing his ugly face. Feed Terry three servings of breakfast, Ulther.”
The guard took one of the serving dishes, still hot and steaming, and scooped the last of the oatmeal into a small wooden bowl. The breakfast smelled like hearty grain with hints of nutmeg and cinnamon, plus the butter that had been melted into it. It must have smelled downright divine to a starving man like Teralt.
Ulther brought the bowl to the prisoner, who craned his neck like a poorly trained dog to get closer to the food. The chained man accepted his first spoonful of oatmeal with such a look, so infantile and subservient, that Kimbel cringed internally. He wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or gratified at his quick progress in chipping away at the brute’s dignity.
“One,” said Kimbel. Ulther lifted a second spoonful to those chapped, eager lips, and this time the prisoner raked his teeth across the metal of the spoon, sure to get every last moist morsel of oat. “Two.” The third spoonful reached Teralt’s mouth and he seemed to regain a shred of his pride and defiance. He chewed and savored his third bite while staring daggers at Ulther.
Maybe he already knew what was about to happen.
“Three,” Kimbel finished the count. “You know the rules, Terry.” Ulther dipped the spoon back into the bowl and scraped out the remainder onto the floor, just out of the bound Teralt’s reach, just as Kimbel had instructed. It was far enough that Teralt couldn’t reach it, but close enough that he would have to smell it the entire time. “Leave it there for a while until it stops steaming and loses its fragrance. Then clean it up and throw it out.”
“I will kill you someday,” Teralt snarled. “Both of you. And I will relish the sensation... of your eyeballs... popping underneath my thumbs. Like grapes. Your skulls collapsing... like rotten gourds.”
Kimbel slowly applauded. He stood up from his seat at the hall’s stone table, giggling and clapping. “Now that’s the kind of imagination I expect from you, Terry! Much better than yesterday. Not that you’ll ever be able to fulfill these fantasies of yours, but that makes it all the more entertaining for me!”
“Don’t be so sure. I doubt King Brynh ever predicted his fate, either.”
A little twist of fear in Kimbel’s heart. He rolled his eyes and shook it off, not daring to let it show. “Right, but you aren’t the heir to any thrones, now are you?” At this, Teralt bowed his head to catch his breath and didn’t answer. “Ulther, what matters do I have to attend to today? Let’s pass the time before our ambassadors return. Let’s hope for Terry’s sake that they return today, or else he’ll have his first punishment. Just like the ruler of this very desert, eh? Remember that, Terry?”
Kimbel strode from the dining hall into the corridor, sneaking past his grim-faced prisoner, and breathing in the fragrance of the wasted oatmeal before returning to his throne.
“There is still the issue of what to do with the remaining Qardish corpses,” Ulther began, reading from a small slip of parchment taken from a pocket in his belt. “You had mentioned you might want to send them back to Qarda somehow?”
“Oh, that project,” Kimbel sighed. “I had this grand idea to fasten them together with metal rods and hooks into one big mass of bodies. I saw it in a dream once. It would have been a nice present to send back to our unwelcome guests, but that would take far too much effort. Just have the slaves gather them onto one big pyre and burn them.”
“Very good, Your Majesty.” Ulther used a charcoal pencil to scribble down a note. “Are taxes to be adjusted in the wake of this latest wartime development?”
“Raise taxes on everyone outside of Holcort by two per cent. If I remember anything of my lessons on royal revenue, the noblemen of the capital will pitch a fit if I ask them for another coin. Not worth it.”
Ulther jotted down that answer while Kimbel unsheathed his dagger and again set about fiddling with it idly. “The noble blacksmiths are still hard at work polishing and sharpening Havokond. Do you wish to have it brought to you here or would you like it to await your return to Holcort?”
Havokond. The hair on Kimbel’s neck stood up straight at the mention of that name. That legendary weapon belonged to him now.
“I don’t want to risk any desert savages trying to nab it in transit,” the young man replied. “Have it wait for me in the castle, in the throne room. I won’t be staying here much longer.”
“Of course, Your Majesty. Now then, if I’m not mistaken, I believe that’s all the matters that require your attention...” He unfolded the bent end of the slip in his hands. “My apologies, King Kimbel. There is just one more matter that would benefit from your attention. It’s that rebellious slave.”
“Rebellious slave, eh?” The king chuckled. “I wonder what I’ll have done to him.” He raised his dagger toward his own throat and pretended to slice it open, as in an execution. “The name?”
“It is the former royal slave, Hane, Your Majesty.” Kimbel’s stomach went cold. “He is still imprisoned in Holcort for refusal to work. He’s been given the customary whippings, but Grackenwelsh law forbids the execution of a slave by anyone other than the slave’s owner.”
“Well...” The king shrugged, looking away and pretending to be bored of the situation. In truth, his mind and heart were racing again. “I suppose I’ll take care of that when I return to Holcort. Have him kept alive and well and administer no further whippings.” He rubbed his hands together. “Hear that, Terry? You might just have a new friend soon!”
“Very good, Your Majesty,” said Ulther, pocketing his pencil and rolling up the slip. “I will deliver your orders to the courier at once.”
Kimbel nodded. Footfalls against the limestone shrank and shrank until he felt sufficiently alone again, alone with his thoughts and the white-hot sand outside, the dry desert air. Somewhere, nowhere, the small sound of a fork raked across a rock, metal scraping stone. It filled his mind’s ear.
Hane, he worried, though he would never speak his fear aloud. What am I going to do about you?