The sparrows were silent. In the courtyard's ancient oak, a dozen small birds perched motionless as ornaments, heads cocked toward the approaching dust cloud. Even the stable horses had lifted their muzzles from the hay troughs, stretching their necks over the stalls, ears pricked forward with an alertness beyond mere curiosity. Someone coughed. The air grew thicker with dust and expectation, as if nature itself held its breath.
Merauve stood in the courtyard with the absolute stillness of a predator that has caught an unfamiliar scent. His parade uniform caught the morning light like armor, but there was an unusual stiffness in his bearing today. He had positioned himself with a clear view of the wagons at the back of the caravan. Those iron-bound tombs carried the Empire's most precious cargo toward their final interrogations, and today's delivery had been marked with High Inquisitor Sirius's personal seal.
Behind him, attendants prudently melted into the background. One had ventured a comment about the weather earlier, earning himself a glance that could have curdled milk. Months of service had trained them to read the signs: the precise angle of their master's shoulders, the rhythm of his breathing, the way his hand would drift toward Tachet when his thoughts turned dark.
Today felt fragile; anticipation balanced on the edge of fear.
The commotion began near the second wagon from the end: a guard stumbling from its confines as if fleeing rather than merely disembarking. The man hit the ground with crude force, wind knocked from his lungs, cursing. Around him, other soldiers maintained their distance with the studied casualness of men avoiding plague.
"I shouldn't wonder," Merauve murmured, "if our charge resides in that particular wagon."
Lieutenant Pip approached with an eagerness that betrayed youth. Twenty-five years at most, with the kind of mustache that suggested ambition outpacing accomplishment. He had the swagger that came from wearing the Empire's colors without having earned them through anything more demanding than standing watch.
"Inquisitor Merauve," he said, clicking heels with textbook precision. "This way, sir."
They approached the wagon like archaeologists approaching a sealed tomb. The fallen guard continued his rambling testament to anyone who would listen: "...ain't natural, I tell you. He knew things. Said things no man should know..." Around him, caravan guards relieved of their charges were already swapping stories and playing dice.
"Glad to see you brought help," Pip observed, gesturing toward Merauve's attendants. "He'll need carrying. You'll get no fight from this one." A glance toward the babbling guard. "Would've told you that you'd get no words from him neither, but..." He shrugged.
"Assuming you've got him unchained," Merauve replied, "I can handle it from here."
"Chains?" Pip's laugh held an edge. "No, sir. This one won't be needing any chains."
The wagon's interior revealed itself reluctantly to Merauve's adjusting vision. Darkness thick as velvet, broken only by a barred window that admitted a single shaft of accusatory light. The smell hit him like a physical blow: the reek of human degradation, of flesh pushed beyond endurance. But beneath that mortal stench lay something else, something that made his refined senses recoil for reasons he couldn't name.
Chain mounts hung empty. The supervisor's seat bore no occupant. For a moment, Merauve wondered if the prisoner had somehow escaped, dissolved into shadow and rumor. Then his eyes found it: a huddled shape so diminished, so reduced, that it might have been mistaken for discarded rags and not an adult of nearly twenty years.
Even motionless, even seeming dead, the sight commanded attention. There was a gravity to its stillness that suggested concentration, not absence. As if all the world's listening had been gathered into that one small lump.
"Keep the hood attached," Merauve instructed his attendants, his voice carrying a note he did not recognize. "We'll not want him tasting sunshine yet. Triage hospice. Immediately."
As the attendants maneuvered their burden onto a stretcher, Merauve's attention returned to the babbling guard. Curiosity, he told himself. Professional interest. He was an Inquisitor, after all.
"Were you responsible for transporting this criminal?" he asked, allowing his shadow to fall across the man.
"Aye." Middle-aged, balding, wearing a wedding ring that spoke of domestic entanglements. Probably joined up to avoid a nagging wife. "He told me you'd ask."
The words hung in the air. Merauve crouched, gravel scraping beneath his boots, and fixed the man with his full attention. "Did he, now?"
"Said I should tell you everything if I want to live." The guard's eyes widened as realization dawned: perhaps the prisoner had spoken true. Words tumbled from him in a desperate cascade:
"Couldn't hear much at first. Mumbling, groaning; common enough for his sort. Thought maybe a kick would quiet him proper, so I stood to deliver one, and he says, quiet as breath, 'please don't.' Surprised me, see? They said he don't talk. So I says, 'Give me a good reason,' and he says, 'Your dad.'"
The guard's voice went distant, lost in unwelcome memory. "And all sudden-like, I'm seven years old again, and my da's boot is finding my ribs, and yeah... it hurt like all the hells."
Merauve found his hand on Tachet's hilt without remembering the motion. "How did he know about your father?"
"Asked him that myself. Yelled it, actually—'HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MY DA?' And he says, real quiet: 'I don't. He told me.'"
Something cold walked down Merauve's spine. "Who?"
"That's what I asked. Says, 'You don't know Him.' But then..." The guard swallowed hard. "Then he says, 'But He knows you.' And I get this feeling, right under my heart, like when you're standing at a cliff's edge and some part of you wants to jump. Could hardly breathe after that. Just counted the minutes till we got here so I could bolt from that wagon..."
Merauve realized he had drawn Tachet without conscious thought, the blade tapping a quiet rhythm against his other palm. The guard's eyes widened at the sight of the stiletto, and Merauve sheathed it with intention.
"I see," he said, and left the guard to his fears.
The bright lighting of the infirmary came as both blessing and curse. Glass windows, a rare luxury at this frontier post, flooded the rooms with merciless illumination, revealing the details shadows might have kindly obscured. The sterile bite of vinegar warred with the reek of their burden, neither quite winning, both conspiring to create an atmosphere of barely-controlled revulsion.
Merauve had prepared Physick Grendle well. Their relationship, built on mutual understanding and regular bribes, had proven fruitful over the months. Bodies broken in interrogation could be mended here, made ready for breaking again; a tide of suffering that ebbed and flowed with medical precision. He wondered, briefly, whether Anders-water-brother would have appreciated the metaphor.
As the attendants maneuvered their burden from stretcher to examination table, something peculiar happened. The room's center of gravity seemed to shift, as if moving the prisoner moved the room. One attendant stumbled, nearly dropping his end of the stretcher. The other whispered what might have been a prayer or a curse.
"Steady," Merauve commanded, though he had felt it too, a strange pull, as if the universe had shifted its footing.
Physick Grendle burst through the door with his customary urgency, a man perpetually racing against death's timer. His nod to Merauve was perfunctory, his attention already fixed on the patient. But as he approached the table, his steps faltered.
"Mother of Lies..." He didn't finish, discipline overriding shock. "Anemic. Filthy. You—" he pointed at an attendant, "will dispose of these rags. Burn them."
The Physick's scissors flashed, cutting through fabric. Each snip revealed more impossibility. As the filthy cloth fell away, Grendle's movements grew slower, more deliberate, as if he were uncovering something that violated the natural order.
"Inefficient work," he muttered.
Merauve studied the exposed flesh with clinical fascination. The torture was evident, too evident. Where his own methods were symphonic, this was noise. Brutality without art, pain without purpose. Garoth's work, clearly: the signature of a man who confused volume with eloquence.
"No broken ribs," Grendle reported, voice growing uncertain. "The digits show healing from multiple fractures, but..." He pressed fingers against the prisoner's throat, withdrew them as if burned, then checked again. "His pulse. It's..."
"What?"
"Steady. Completely steady. Like he's sleeping in a feather bed, not..." Grendle gestured helplessly at the catalogue of abuse. "Someone enduring all this. Some of these wounds should have been terminal."
The statement begged an uncomfortable question. Outside, the windows showed a warm afternoon, indifferent to all this.
"Permission to remove the hood?" Grendle's question brought Merauve back.
Merauve waved permission with a hand. Something was building in the room, a pressure like the air before lightning splits the sky. As Grendle's scissors approached the sackcloth hood, time seemed to slow.
The fabric fell away.
Beneath lay a face that should have been grotesque but somehow wasn't. Dirt, blood, and worse had painted abstract patterns across features that might once have been handsome. Dirt caked hair had begun to grow back around a scar that traced from eye to scalp like an arrow. But the face wore an expression that had no business being there.
Peace. Impossible peace. The kind of serenity that belonged on statues of saints, not on men who had endured six months of the Empire's worst creativity. It was the face of someone who had passed through suffering and emerged somewhere else entirely, somewhere pain held no dominion.
The eyes opened.
Merauve had seen many eyes in his career; some terrified, defiant, absent, broken, mad. These were none of those. They were simply aware, taking in the room, and those in it, with a calm, lucid assessment. When they found Merauve, they lingered.
"I need to clean him," Grendle said, his voice seeming too loud in the sudden stillness. "He's clearly no threat in his current state. Everyone out. Now."
Merauve barely heard him. He stood transfixed, watching as those impossible eyes slowly closed again, dismissing him as gently and completely as a parent dismissing a child from adult conversation. The peace returned to that ruined face, deeper than before.
In that moment, Merauve understood with crystalline clarity: conventional torture had not merely failed here. It had been irrelevant. Like trying to burn the ocean.
Merauve's mind was racing. His interrogation would need a completely different approach.
"You," he said to an attendant, "fetch two competent guards to replace yourselves at this post." To the other: "Requisition clothing for our guest. Comfortable clothing. And..." He paused, the new composition taking shape in his thoughts. "Stop by the kitchen. Have them prepare a proper soup. Something nourishing but easy to eat."
The attendants exchanged bewildered glances.
"Sir?" one ventured.
"Now," Merauve said softly, and they fled.
Alone in the corridor, Merauve withdrew his tobacco pouch with hands that were twitchy. Rolling, lighting, inhaling gave him time to think, to rearrange the entire symphony he'd been preparing.
One could not torture water—it simply flowed, reformed. But give it a vessel, give it form and substance and something that holds it together... ah, then one might find a vulnerability. Not through what could be taken away, this man had already lost everything and found peace in the emptiness. But perhaps through what could be given back.
The smoke curled up like incense, like prayer, like the last wisps of his previous strategy dissolving. In its place, a far more subtle gambit began to form. If his subject had found refuge in some deep place beyond pain, then Merauve must coax him back to the shallows. Feed him. Clothe him. Speak to him of philosophy, memory, family. Make him remember what it was to be human; to be True.
And then, when humanity had returned, when the True One had flesh again instead of just spirit, then Merauve would have something to work with.
He snuffed the tobacco against the stone wall and turned back toward the infirmary, already composing his orders. A trip to the Archivist for books; the old texts, the ones that spoke of the elements. He'll need better quarters than the holes he'd originally prepared. He would be treated as a political prisoner. The sunset room in the tower? It had two chairs, a view, and a natural guard station with bars over the windows. The list went on. Delicate work, like a luthier gauging an instrument strung too long past its breaking point.
Soon, he realized, with something almost like hunger, he would be sitting across from those eyes; and he would make his debut as Merauve, seeker of Truth.
Two days. That was Grendle's prescription, and Merauve had accepted it with the patience of a vintner awaiting the proper moment to uncork a rare vintage. The True One would need two days of ministration before any conversation could be attempted. Not interrogation; Merauve had already discarded that word alongside his regular crude toolkit. This would require something altogether more sophisticated.
He had not been idle. His quarters had become a scholar's nest of borrowed texts and copied records. The Archivist, initially reluctant, had proven remarkably cooperative once Merauve mentioned High Inquisitor Sirius's personal interest. Books on the True's customs, their philosophy of elements, their distinctive gestures: all had been devoured with the hungry precision of a man preparing for the performance of his life.
The tower quarters had presented their own array of challenges. The garrison Major had protested the waste of such fine rooms on a prisoner. The quartermaster had complained about the expense of proper bedding. Even the tower guards had grumbled about the inconvenience of their new posting. But Merauve had persisted with the certainty of a man who knew his course. After all, one did not bait a trap with spoiled meat.
By morning of Foursday, everything was arranged. The sunset room waited like a theater before curtain rise.
Merauve paused outside the reinforced door, acknowledging the guards with a nod. Good. These were professionals: men who understood that feeding the tiger did not mean forgetting its teeth. He was surprised to find his palms damp with anticipation. It mattered not. The curtain would rise; let the performance begin.
The door swung open with ponderous weight, iron-reinforced oak groaning like a confession. Morning light poured through three tall windows, each elegant frame crossed with bars that threw shadows like sheet music across the floor. The room was everything Merauve had requested: austere but comfortable, a prison that could hide behind the skirts of civility.
What he had not expected was to find the True already seated at the corner table, positioned as if he had been waiting.
The transformation was remarkable. Where before had been a creature of rags and suffering, now sat something recognizably human. His cheeks remained hollow, carved by deprivation, but they were clean. The peace that had so disturbed Merauve in the infirmary remained, but now it seemed less strange, more like... patience. His gaze was fixed on the window with the intensity of a drowning man who has just broken the surface.
Merauve crossed to the opposite chair, each footfall a note in the opening movement. He had wagered on those windows being a calculated kindness. He had not anticipated them being a rival for attention.
The True—Elenden, he must think of him as Elenden now—had the look of northern nobility about him. Hair like winter wheat now that it had been washed, already growing to cover the worst of Garoth's crude barbering. Blue eyes like shallow seas. High cheekbones that spoke of breeding, a chiseled jaw. Only the scar, tracing from eye to scalp like a comet's tail, marred what might have graced any noble portrait gallery.
The particular quality of his stillness made everything else in the room seem restless by comparison. It wasn't the empty absence of the mentally broken; Merauve knew that well enough. No, this was a taught string of a bow pulled back kind of stillness. Elenden's gaze remained fixed on the window, waiting for something.
Merauve withdrew his tobacco pouch with deliberate ritual, letting the motions anchor him. Roll, crimp, seal. Still Elenden gazed at the horizon. Merauve struck his flint, drew smoke, exhaled. Time to deliver his first line:
"Elenden, deArthis."
He pitched it perfectly between statement and question, an invitation. It might have been the first time in six months anyone had acknowledged the man as human, let alone by name.
Elenden's response came not in words but in a gesture: his right index finger extended toward Merauve in a motion both graceful and alien. The literature had mentioned this, of course. The True's handspeak. To point at truth when recognized. But seeing it performed carried a strange thrill.
"I am Inquisitor Merauve." He watched for further signs but found only that terrible patience. "I would hear your truth."
At last, those sea-colored eyes turned from the window. In the morning light, they held no magic, no otherworldly power, only a resignation. Elenden's gaze dropped to the tobacco slowly charring between Merauve's fingers, and for a moment the Inquisitor wondered wildly if the stories of Fire Masters were true.
"I always preferred pipes."
First words. Mundane, human, unexpected. Merauve allowed genuine pleasure to touch his smile, though triumph sang beneath it. Had he accomplished in moments what Garoth had failed to achieve in months?
"Perhaps that could be arranged?" Merauve gambled, the logistics already working in his mind.
Elenden's response was another gesture: a horizontal cut of his flattened hand, economical as a blade. Gentle refusal.
Then came the sigh. Long, deep, carrying the weight of more than exhaustion. It was the sound of a man preparing to put down a burden he had carried across impossible distances, or to take one up. When Elenden spoke again, the words came as if he were stepping off a precipice, trusting the fall.
"I came here to tell you the truth."
The words were a confession already begun. Merauve found himself leaning forward despite years of training in stillness. This was wrong—too easy. He scanned the room's edges, hunting for whatever game was being played. Six months of silence, and now this—why was the True suddenly speaking?
"All of it," Elenden continued, and now there was something else in his voice, not quite fear, not quite relief, but somewhere between. "And if that's to be so, we must begin at the beginning, as one of my old masters would say. Though I wonder..."
His eyes found Merauve's again, and in them was neither defiance nor submission, but something far more dangerous: recognition. As if he saw not the Inquisitor, not the play acting torturer-turned-philosopher, but saw through those facades to something Merauve himself had not yet acknowledged.
"You asked for my truth," Elenden continued, his voice gaining strength like a river remembering its course. "But the Truth has power, Inquisitor. It changes the listener. Once heard, it cannot be unheard."
He paused, studying Merauve with those sky blue eyes. "He told me about you." A shadow of memory crossed his face. "Said you would understand, eventually. Though understanding and believing are not the same thing." He trailed off, that strange almost-smile returning. "But I'm getting ahead of myself. Stories must start at their proper beginning, or they snarl like thread pulled at a single fiber."
The morning light shifted, painting new geometries across the floor. Somewhere beyond the tower, the outpost bells began their marking of the hour. Merauve's tobacco had gone out, forgotten. The morning's careful script lay in ruins at his feet. This was not how interrogations began. This was not how anything began. What was this?! Whatever it was, Merauve was terrified to interrupt.
Elenden arranged himself in his chair—the first truly human gesture Merauve had seen from him. His hands found each other, scarred fingers interlacing with the unconscious habit of prayer or memory. Merauve wondered if this long pause was a meditation or a preparation.
Whatever he had expected from this morning, it was not this. But Elenden was speaking, and despite every instinct, every training, every carefully constructed wall of cynicism, Merauve found himself doing the one thing he had never truly done in all his years of interrogation:
He patiently listened.
When Elenden began again, his voice carried the rhythm of ancient oration, of histories preserved in spoken word through generations of speakers.
"I was born Elenden, deArthis, and I was raised to dance the Truth."