The man in shackles lifted his head at the creaking sound of the old but robust wooden door and revealed a black eye and a nasty gash on his left cheek. His brown shoulder-length hair was unruly and matted strands of it covered part of his face. A faint smile played around his lips when his gaze fell upon the warden entering the dimly lit cell. The man did not move, nor did he flinch when the warden backhanded him across the face. Maybe he should not have spat him in the face when he upon his arrival in the dungeons.
Satisfied, the warden showed a dirty grin and knelt down next to his prisoner and producing an iron key, he removed the shackles around the man's wrists. With a loud clank that reverberated in the cold wet cell the chains tumbled to the stone tiles, right next to a solid iron ring protruding from the floor. The man had been chained to it, in order to keep him in a kneeling position.
As if the rattling of the dropped chain links had been a signal, two more guards with grim features stomped into the small room. To an unskilled eye they would have seemed like any ordinary person. Their dull grey eyes and even greyer hair added to their blank and earnest expression. Yet, however ordinary they looked, the man knew better. The Twins, as they were called, were products of experiments carried out on war prisoners by Doctor Nye. They owed their peculiar name to the very first test subjects who had been twin brothers, namely Damien Everglade and Brandon Everwood. The experiment itself was a feeble and rather amateurish attempt of capturing the human soul by extracting it from its body. Curiously, each person to have their soul ripped from their body – painfully, I imagine – was robbed of every colour; be it eye or hair, leaving the expressionless grey of a train station behind.
Stripped of their souls they were the perfect lackeys for the bad guys. And lackeys they remained for with their soul taken every ounce of magic they might have had possessed one day, vanished.
The Twins grabbed the prisoner by his upper arms and hauled him into a standing position what made him cry out in pain since he had been kneeling for over two days now. His legs gave in and had it not been for the guards, he would have collapsed to the cold floor once again. Instead he was dragged out of the dungeons, his legs scraping over the stone tiles uselessly.
Nefarian Serpine stood at the far end of a ridiculously long dining table that could have hosted about seventy people, hands crossed behind his back, which faced the massive wooden door through which The Twins were leading their prisoner now. The man looked around as he finally managed to stand on his trembling legs, taking in the stone walls that were covered by heavy crimson tapestries. There were no other adornments, at least no visible ones but the man was certain, the whole castle and this room – it must be the throne room – especially were covered in protective sigils.
Upon hearing approaching footsteps, Serpine turned around and a broad grin split his face as he strode towards the trio. "Skulduggery Pleasant!", he exclaimed and stretched out his arms as if he were to embrace his arch enemy. "How are you, old friend?"
Skulduggery waited patiently until Serpine was close enough before he kicked him in the shin and struggled to shake off The Twins. He smashed his forehead into the face of the guard to his left, feeling the crunch of a breaking nose and wrenched his arm free. Snapping his fingers he produced a flame in his hand and threw the fireball at the second guard. Skulduggery was about to send a blast of air into Serpine when he experienced an agonising pain rippling through his body and his legs buckled beneath him, sending him to the stone floor screaming. Had he looked up and kept his senses together enough to register anything but tremendous agony, Skulduggery would have seen Serpine's blood red hand, cramped like a hawk's talon, sometimes twisting to entice another high pitched scream out of his prisoner. His eyes shone like those of a mad man while he seemed to be caught up in a world of blood and despair, his lips curling into a cruel smile.
Only when Skulduggery was on the brink of passing out, Serpine snapped his hand back to his chest and turned on his heels, waving to The Twins to pick Skulduggery up. "That was rude, my friend. However, I am a respectable host. Please, have a seat."
The Twins dragged their moaning prisoner to a plain wooden chair and firmly pressed him into it before binding his hands behind the chair's high backrest. Skulduggery hated high backrests. In contrast to ordinary or average backrests you had the advantage of tying up people far more efficiently since the hight of the wood prevented the victims from simply standing up and walking out.
Before Skulduggery could possibly think about snapping his fingers, burning the ropes and making for an adventurous and stylish escape, Serpine had walked behind him and touched the bonds whispering 'Bind the Strength and Bind the Heart'. Immediately every drop of magic was drained from his body, leaving an uncomfortable and peculiar void within him that felt too familiar for his liking. Maybe he should stop being captured all the time.
"Now that I have your full attention, soldier, we are going to have a lovely afternoon. You screaming and me, the one making you scream."
"I am not scared of you Serpine, you are nothing more than Mevolent's little pet."
Serpine laughed. "Mevolent is all cruelty and blood, a hammer where he ought to be a needle. He certainly lacks creativity."
"And you are the creative torturer?" Skulduggery cocked his head to the right, a tired yet mocking smile on his lips. "Pardon me, but you don't look like a spectacularly great artist. You have more of a librarian. This brings me to something I have always pondered. Since your right hand is slightly impractical for anything other than torture, are you a lefty? It would coincide with your claim to be creative, for lefties are said to be more of the artistic kind."
"You will look back to this moment with longing once you scream and beg for mercy." Serpine flashed his arch enemy a winning smile.
"I don't usually do that", Skulduggery replied nodding. "You may be right, though. I haven't been tortured in years, more like ages, I definitely lack the exercise to begin with."
"We should do something about that then, don't you think?" Serpine pushed back his long black coat and revealed a sheath girt at his hip. Carefully, he drew the dagger from the scabbard and admired the handiwork. "You know what is special about his weapon? It is magic-proof which means I don't even have to bother removing your armoured clothes."As if to prove his point, Serpine bent at the waist and sliced across Skulduggery's chest, easily cutting through garments and flesh.
Skulduggery moaned but his pride forbid him to cry out. "Ghastly will be so annoyed when he learns that I ruined another one. Keep doing that, you know?"
Serpine's answer came in form of him lashing out again and opening a cut on his prisoner's body that ran from the right shoulder to the navel. Skulduggery groaned as the cold metal was pressed into his flesh once more and tore away at his chest. He clenched his teeth and felt the warm sticky blood running down his torso, consequently saturating his jacket and trousers. Skulduggery made an attempt in hiding his pain behind a defiant glare and spat: "This won't get you anywhere! I-"
The hissed words were replaced by a blood-curdling scream ripping through the hall, echoing from the stone walls; Serpine had pointed his crimson index finger at Skulduggery and with a gloating smile was now watching him writhe on the chair with no means to break free or shake off the pain. Every inch of his existence was filled with agony as wave after wave rolled through his body, smashing into him with renewed force the longer the ordeal went on. His mind went blank; all that remained was hot white pain.
When Serpine finally released him after what seemed like centuries, Skulduggery's body went limp in the ropes and he panted heavily, trying to suppress the pain that still echoed dully inside him but slowly started to die away. He felt so weak.
Serpine bent down, grabbed a handful of brown hair and pulled his prisoner's head back sharply. Skulduggery's face screwed up in pain, yet no sound escaped his mouth as he glared up at Serpine defiantly, who simply smirked and backhanded him across the face before straightening up and folding his arms behind his back.
"You know, Skulduggery, struggling never saved anybody and you and your little gang out there can fight as long as you like, Mevolent will win this war."
"It keeps you concentrated on me while my friends have the possibility to wage war against the enemy without having to put up with your ugly face."
"What heroic and humble behaviour!", Serpine exclaimed, ignoring the insult. "But what good will that do, pray tell? I will torture you and present your fellow soldiers the broken shell of their o so great leader and defender of hope."
"Pain won't sway me, Serpine!", Skulduggery snapped.
A cruel smile appeared on Serpine's face as he embedded the blade in Skulduggery's right shoulder, finally drawing a scream of agony from him. Without removing the blade from his body, he gave one of The Twins a signal and leaned in on his prisoner conspiratorially. "That depends on the nature of pain", he whispered.