Nightlord: Orb (116 page)

Johann shook his head mournfully and applied an electronic gadget, causing Juliet to convulse and scream soundlessly.  I couldn’t hear a bit of it through the barrier, but I could see the smoke from the contact with her skin.

I reached out with tendrils and got the shock of my life.  Literally.  There was some sort of magical barrier surrounding my rack.  The moment my tendrils reached far enough to touch the surrounding spell, it shocked them.  It was like reaching into sunlight, but without the sunlight.  Weird, and a painful, not-at-all-good weird to boot.

My estimate climbed to eighty percent in favor of wadding him into a crushed, bloodless ball.

After watching Johann play with Juliet for a while—much the same way a cat will play with a mouse it has cornered—Johann lost interest.  He left Juliet hanging there and disappeared, only to reappear in my half of the torture chamber.

Interesting.  There was a perceptible length of time between disappearance and reappearance.  The transfer wasn’t instantaneous.  It was on the close order of a tenth of a second.  Was distance a factor?  Mass?  And could that help me in some way, later?  Probably not, but it’s always good to know the little things.  You can never tell.

“Well, I see you’ve recovered nicely.”

“I’d like to think so.”

“Good, good.  Now, suppose we discuss something.”

“Fire away.”

“You know my granddaughter, Juliet?”

“I think I’ve seen her before, yes.”

“No doubt,” he replied, smirking.  I wanted to punch his smirk out the back of his well-barbered head.  “I presume you’ve also met others of my descendants.”

“Doubtless.”

“Good!  Please describe them.”

“I can’t do that.”

The grating was apparently there so an updraft of flames could go through it whenever he felt like it.  He felt like it.  My hair burned away, creating an awful stench.  My beard survived the earlier electrical discharge fairly well, more’s the pity, and my body shielded the remainder of it from the flames.  The skin of my back crackled, bubbled, cracked.  I screamed.

Johann was both shocked and pained; he clapped his hands over his ears and clutched at the sides of his head.  The flames died as he did so.  A moment later, I ran out of air for screaming.  He scowled up at me, hands still plastered over his ears, and I saw something deadly, murderous in his gaze.  But also something afraid.  I’d hurt him with the inhuman volume of my scream.  I’d hurt him in a way he hadn’t anticipated.  There might be other ways, and the thought frightened him.

He vanished.

I lay there, regenerated, and thought about ways to kill him.  It kept my mind off my stomach.

Johann rejoined me shortly.  He seemed less than amused; his façade of kindly host was gone.

“Now,” he began, “you are going to tell me who else is planning my overthrow.”

“Some of your kids and grandkids.  That’s all I know.”

“I do not believe you.”

That’s when the real pain started.

I’ll say this for Johann:  he’s not at all shy about going all-out for what he wants.  He wanted me to tell him who was plotting against him.  He didn’t believe me when I told him I didn’t know.  He did one damn fine job of trying to wring it out of me.

I think I’m going to leave it at that.  I didn’t enjoy any part of it at any time nor in any way.  True, losing a limb—or other appendages, or organs—is traumatic and painful, especially given his methods, but the knowledge it will all grow back takes most of the sting out of it.  It still hurts, sharply and deeply.  It didn’t help when he traded off between my side and Juliet’s side.  She got to watch me suffer and I got to watch her suffer.  It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea.

Let me put it this way.  If I’d known who they were, I’d have told him.

Yeah, it was a bad night.

Captivity, Second Dawn

It was a bad day.

It was a bad night.

Captivity, Third Dawn

One happy ray of cheer I found was Johann’s knowledge of the care and feeding of undead prisoners.  He didn’t bother with giving me a victim to consume.  Instead, when I reached the point of being too hungry to answer questions, he had blood poured over me.  Occasionally, to restore lost bits for fresh tortures, he dunked me in a tub of the stuff until they grew back.  I didn’t ask where he got it and he didn’t offer the information.

Did you know sawing through the lowest rib to remove it is extremely painful?  And that was one of the milder treatments.  He was really,
really
fond of needles, though.  Neat, tiny, penetrating wounds, and lots of them, generally administered at slow rates—an inch per second to an inch per minute.

Like I said, I don’t want to talk about it.  Forgive me if a few examples bubble to the surface anyway.  They tend to be a bit intrusive.  Remembering them is even less pleasant than relating them.

No doubt he could have inflicted much more interesting and engaging pain if I wasn’t fastened down with magical grounding metal.  Spells wouldn’t affect me directly, but he could conjure up heat, cold, electricity, or other forms of energy and focus them on me.  Summoned servants could manipulate purely physical tools.  That sort of thing.

He never tried using sunlight as a torture implement.  Probably because he didn’t know how awful it is, but possibly because it would only be useful during a narrow window.

See?  I still have my sense of humor, such as it is.

This morning, after my transformation, I was pretty much intact.  Yesterday I was missing some non-vital bits, which was more than a little disturbing.  It’s an interesting experience to have only one eye, or be short a thumb, or find some less-vital organs have gone missing.  Puts a sort of perspective on things regarding people who have to deal with disabilities.  Today was better in that respect, but everything was firmly tied down to the grating, which was slowly heating up.  He left me there while he went to quiz Juliet a bit more.

I noticed she also tended to regenerate.  Not as quickly as I, but also without infusions of blood.  Powerful healing spells, I assume.  Possibly some sort of magic to supply the nutritional requirements of a healing body—if the spells in question even worked that way.  For all I knew, it might function as a slow-motion undo function, reversing the damage purely through magical means.

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good idea.  Maybe I should look into it.  Hello, Someday.

To keep myself distracted, I wondered how long Johann had gone without sleep.  Something on the order of two days?  Of course, he’s was running on a power high, so he might not be feeling it.  He might even have spells to eliminate the need for sleep.  If so, this could go on for an awfully long time before I got a real break.

Actually, I already had several breaks.  Mostly arms and legs.  I was surprised at how difficult it was to break my bones.  You’d think a brawny-looking guy conjured out of thin air could do it with a well-placed kick, but no—they tried clubs, then upgraded to sledgehammers.  At least they had to work for it.

I also had to respect Juliet.  If she hadn’t given up her co-conspirators yet, she was either a lot tougher than me, or she didn’t know, either.  I thought it unlikely she wouldn’t even know her own relatives in the cabal, but it was slightly possible.  If she did, I had to respect her guts, notwithstanding the times I saw them hanging out of her.

The heat in the metallic grating was starting to become painful on my mortal skin, so I tested my bonds again.  Nope.  Still fastened down like a passed-out frat boy covered in duct tape.  On the plus side, my hair and clothes burned away early on, so I didn’t have to worry about them catching fire again.  Even my beard went away.

It says something when that’s the high point of my day.  It doesn’t say anything good, but it says something.

I spent most of the day on the grill.  With uncanny timing, every time the burned areas got to the point where the nerves started to shut down, the whole grating jounced, shifting me on my griddle to expose new bits of fresh skin.  That was just mean.

I’ve had better days.

That night, immediately after sunset, I was more than a little hungry from regenerating the extensive burns on the back of my body and the usual crop of full-body piercings.  I decided to distract myself with a puzzle.  The chains kept grounding out my spells; they didn’t seem to have much effect on my tendrils.  I probed the metal, getting a feel for it, trying to analyze it.  Oddly, while I could examine them without too much trouble, they felt much more solid than any other form of matter.  Instead of whisking through them as easily as air, they felt thick, almost sticky.  It took real effort to push a tendril through the material, then more effort to pull it back out.  I could even move the material with tendrils, but it did me no good.  I lacked the strength to physically rip my way free; my tendrils are orders of magnitude weaker.

Examining the stuff kept me suitably distracted until my host paid me another visit.

Johann didn’t bother to ask me anything.  He started poking holes in my undead flesh with a carefree lack of compunction.  As always, it was nothing too damaging from a structural standpoint, but aimed quite skillfully at the goal of causing pain.  It was a fairly mild treatment, at least in comparison to his previous creativity, though.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Ready to talk?”

“If I could tell you what you wanted to know, I would have.”

“Any human would,” he countered.

“So, this is going to go on until I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that incentive enough to believe I would have told you?”

“No.”

“Hard to argue with that,” I said, trying not to sound condescending.  “I have a question, though.”

“You want to question
me
?” he asked, eyebrows climbing his forehead.

“If you don’t—ow—mind.”

“By all means, go right ahead.”

“This bronze-ish stuff.  What is this?  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s an Atlantean alloy called
orichalcum
.  It’s a magical conductor.  Atlantean magical technology relied heavily on it.”

“Thank you.  I was wondering.  Ouch.  It must be a pain to work with, though.”

“Not really,” he assured me, shrugging.  “I have people for that.  It cannot be worked with magic, that’s all.  It must be done with fire and water, the old way.”  He shrugged.  “There are some special tricks to it, but it can only be worked by hand.”

“Fair—Ow!—enough.”

Johann nodded and drank something while watching his conjured servants continue to stick sharp spikes through me.

“That reminds me,” I added, then grit my teeth while a spike went through my undead liver.  “I’m getting hungry.”  I hoped he recognized an understatement when he heard it.

“I know.”

“Ah.  Not interested in my sparkling wit and pleasant conversation?”

“All you do is lie,” he sighed.  “Maybe you shall feel differently when you return to your senses.”

“Can I ask what you’ll do if you ever get evidence I’m telling the truth?”

“Regret the wasted time,” he told me.  “Or not.  It has been somewhat interesting.  I certainly won’t apologize.”

“I thought not.”

An hour or so went by.  Johann stepped up his game, forcing my regeneration to work harder.  Fire and acid are especially difficult to regenerate.  They actually destroy flesh rather than simply open it up.  This hastened the onset of a severe hunger fit.  It was obviously his goal and he knew how to go about it.  I was in no position to stop him.

It wasn’t long before the hunger grew to inhuman, even monstrous proportions.  When it grew large enough, there was no room for me.

When I came out of my berserk hunger rampage, I was standing amid piles of corpses, fully healed, while a mist of blood whirled in the air and condensed on my skin, vanishing.  I was still in the torture chamber, but someone had unfastened me from the grating, turning me loose on a bunch of people.

Small people.

Children.

I was knee-deep in corpses.  They ranged mostly from four to twelve years old.  None of them appeared to be sleeping.

Then I realized I wasn’t standing on the floor.  I was standing on another layer of bodies.

How many bodies?  I don’t know.  I hope I never know.  Hundreds, certainly; possibly a couple of thousand.  It was a big room, and the floor had more than one layer.  I didn’t dig down to find out just how many.

Hunger was one thing.  I know the feeling well.

Rage was entirely another.  I haven’t felt so vast a wrath since the elves blew chunks out of Bronze.  It was a burning sensation, as though I was on fire on the inside.  If I’d tried, I think I could have breathed fire, chewed stone, and spat lava.  I already intended to kill Johann if I could manage it.  At that instant, he stopped being a target of opportunity and became a goal.

As bad as it was, it got worse.

I found five bodies fastened to the wall, kept separate and obvious, above the piles of bloodless dead.  Their placement and positioning made going for the throat awkward, so they were disemboweled rather than bitten.  The smallest hung in two pieces, half still suspended on the wall, the other half dangling by a few strips of internal tissue.

Johann found out about my feelings regarding children, so he tormented me with feeding on them.

Then he went to the trouble of finding my old neighborhood.

The bodies were the Fabulous Four—Gary, Luke, Edgar, and Patricia.  Worst of all, though, were the broken remains of little Olivia.

I can weep.  My tears are bloody things and sink into my cheeks as quickly as they form, but I weep, nonetheless.  I would have torn my hair out if Johann hadn’t burned it off.

He deliberately provoked me into a berserk hunger, knowing I would kill anything I could reach.  He then introduced hundreds of children into the monster’s cage—my cage.  Moreover, he deliberately included children who meant something to me,
personally
.  He carefully set it up so the special ones would remain visible even after I turned a mob of children into a pile of corpses.

He was moving on from torturing my flesh to torturing my soul, and doing an amazingly good job of it.

My burning rage dimmed, replaced by a bitter, empty cold.  I sank to my knees before the broken bodies and gently—oh, so gently!—searched within them for any trace of life.  Of course, there was nothing.  Nothing survives a nightlord gone berserk with hunger, much less a defenseless child.  They were as cold and empty as I was, and their eyes could not even accuse me.

I wanted to kill Johann before this.  I wanted to take him in my hands and rip him to pieces in such a way as to make music of his screams.

Now I wanted him to live—live a long, protracted, excruciating life.  I wanted him to survive for a thousand years in an agony so vast he couldn’t scream.  I wanted his essence placed in a lantern so his soul could burn and provide me with a warm glow.

I used to joke about being a guardian demon
, I thought, still holding Olivia’s lifeless hand
.  Johann will find out what that means.  Today, it’s not a fucking joke.

To make it possible for me to kill as he wanted me to kill, he had to let me out of the
orichalcum
chains.  I was still confined to a room, yes, caged in a cell, but free to move around, free to cast spells.  Free for how long?  Long enough to suffer?  Surely, but there was no point to my suffering if he couldn’t enjoy it.  He was watching—
must
be watching.  The moment he thought I passed beyond pain and rage and into something closer to rationality, he would have me back in chains.

I’ve never tried to cast a spell in overdrive.  Time to give it a shot.

While I knelt there, next to the wall, I moved my awareness through my body.  There is no heartbeat to increase, no breathing to accelerate, but there is something inside me, ticking with a slow, steady movement.  It is nothing physical, but mystical, spiritual.  Perhaps it is my soul, washing back and forth inside my flesh, like water in a shaken vessel.

I shook it faster.  And faster.  And faster.

Power surrounded me in this place, as always.  I left it alone for the moment, building the first spell I wanted—shields.  Shields against being simply grabbed and stuffed somewhere; a barrier to directed magic.  I built it out of my own energies, a trick mortal spellcasters can’t use.  Trying to do so would exhaust them for even the simplest spell.  I have the advantage of many souls to feed my forces.

Only when it was complete did I gather up the magic around me, squeeze it, mold it, compress it, funnel it into the matrix of my shielding spell.  It came alive, sparkling around me, and immediately I started work on a second spell.

Johann appeared in the room, somewhere behind me.  I could
feel
the bastard smiling.

“My, but you seem upset,” he chuckled.  “Did the evening meal not agree with you?”