Part 3 Chapter 11

Sephtis regarded the unconscious Death Eater silently for a moment. His portkey had worked perfectly, although it had deposited the prisoner into the cell with rather more force than absolutely necessary. The bolt had been crushed into the man's shoulder by impact with the floor, and the barb had tangled itself in the back of the wizard's black robes. Sephtis lifted the man up, conjured a chair, and deposited him unceremoniously into it. A deft cutting charm split the robe's dark fabric, and Sephtis used his fingers to reveal the fletching of the quarrel itself. The runic shaft was almost completely buried in the man's shoulder, below the collarbone.

The dark wizard groaned when Sephtis hauled him forward by his wound, making a similar cut on the back of his robes. He saw that the barb had passed completely through the man's body, and that it had taken a chunk of meat with it. He severed the barb from the shaft of the bolt with another spell and took hold of the quarrel's butt.

A vicious wrench tore the projectile free, and Sephtis stepped back as the prisoner jerked to life screaming. Discarding the bloodied shaft, the dark king of Azkaban eyed the convulsing prisoner dispassionately, sticking the man's feet to the chair as an afterthought. Blood welled up from the puncture in the man's shoulder, and Sephtis heard a rattle in the man's screams that implied an injury to his lung.

At last, the Death Eater sagged against the back of the chair, reaching up with trembling hands to touch his injury. He hissed and moaned, dark eyes flicking up to glimpse the gaunt wizard who had defeated him.

"Where am I?" he whispered. His accent was foreign but subtle.

Sephtis didn't answer for a moment. instead, he watched the blood as it trailed along the Death Eater's exposed skin, disappearing into the black fabric of the man's robes. "Azkaban," he eventually intoned.

This was answered by a low groan as the prisoner hung his head so that his chin nearly touched his chest.

"Tell me your name," Sephtis ordered. He didn't raise his voice. He gave no indication at all that he knew of his captive's pain. He might as well have been discussing the weather.

The dark wizard shook his head. "You'll just kill me anyway," he replied, resigned. "Why should I tell you anything?"

"The name of a dead man means nothing," Sephtis replied. "Tell me. There's no harm in introducing yourself."

The man pressed his palm against the puncture in his shoulder and hissed again. When he drew breath once more, it was shallow, and his skin was beginning to look pale. "Leon," the man eventually muttered.

"Leon," Sephtis repeated slowly. "I am Sephtis. I am the one that will decide your fate. I have questions for you, but...I don't think that you will be much for conversation in a short while. Your lung has been punctured. It will have collapsed already, and your chest cavity may be filling with blood as we speak. I'm afraid you'll soon find it quite difficult to breathe, and your pulse will become erratic...increasingly thready and slow."

Leon raised his head to glare. "You're sick," he spat, breath catching as the word left his mouth. He groaned and fell back against the chair, reaching across his chest and fumbling with his robe.

"You won't find your wand there, I'm afraid," Sephtis said. Leon dropped his hand. "I destroyed it."

"Why are you doing this?"

"We are at war," Sephtis replied blithely. "You are my enemy. Didn't your master tell you that you were fighting a war?"

Leon nodded his head, scowling darkly. He coughed wetly and winced as the color drained from his face, leaving him pale and clammy.

"So, let us begin. I admit that I am not very skilled in the Mind Arts, but between the two of us I am sure that we will make do," Sephtis continued conversationally. He conjured another chair and eased himself into it, close enough to Leon that their knees were almost touching. The Death Eater twitched as if he might lunge forward, but Sephtis caught him in the chest with the head of his staff and pressed the man against the back of the chair.

It glowed with magic and Leon hissed uncomfortably as it began to heat up against his sternum. "None of that, now," Sephtis cautioned him. The staff slid across Leon's ribs and caught on the open wound. A pulse of magic was all it took for the blood to sizzle and hiss, and Leon's mouth opened in a soundless scream as his body convulsed violently in the chair.

Then he found his voice and a high-pitched keen pierced the air, echoing along the empty corridors of the castle and fading by degrees until the only sound between them was desperate, labored breathing.

"I wouldn't want you to bleed to death while we're working," Sephtis explained, laying his staff across his knees. Leon moaned and twitched as an aftershock of pain danced across his raw nerves. The wound in his shoulder was blackened, oozing with clear fluid, but the flow of blood had been slowed nearly to a halt. "Tell me, Leon, how many years have you been serving the Dark Lord?"

"I…I won't talk to you," Leon answered him, forcing his teary eyes to open. "Just kill me. I won't talk."

"I didn't think that you would," Sephtis replied. He leaned forward slightly, hesitating only briefly. "Look at me."

At once, Leon shut his eyes tightly and turned his head to the side.

"Ah, come now," Sephtis murmured, reaching out with one hand. His fingers sparked briefly just before he seized Leon by the jaw and turned his head. By shunting magic through Leon's nerves, Sephtis achieved a crude form of paralysis that didn't cause the muscles to seize up, so it was easy for him to shift the prisoner's posture until he was looking directly into the man's closed eyes.

He paused for a moment to think. How to open Leon's eyes…

"Sussurus," Sephtis whispered, still touching the man's hard jaw. A shock of power leapt down his arm and burned through the man's body, and as his muscles spasmed involuntarily his eyes opened and locked with Sephtis' indomitable stare.

The initial intrusion of the mind can be compared to a surgical cut if a practiced Mind Healer or a skilled interrogator is the one performing the act. For Sephtis, it was more like the battering strike of a flail. Leon hissed through suddenly clenched teeth as his instinctive defenses were crushed aside like tissue paper, and Sephtis knew that the man's head would soon begin to burn with a severe migraine.

"Now," Sephtis said, slowly. He felt the man's hatred and fear welling up like steam from a geyser and shuddered in the middle of his sentence. "Tell me how long you have served the Dark Lord."

Leon's jaw dropped open as he struggled uselessly, incapable of stopping his thoughts from turning unbidden to the covenant he had sworn with the shade. Images and flashes of sensation returned to him of that night, so long ago, when he had brought a woman as sacrifice to the cavern where the shade had been hiding.

In moments, the whole truth of his sins was revealed. As his skull began to pound, Leon groaned and felt tears swelling in his eyes, but Sephtis was unrelenting. At last, the mental assault subsided just slightly, and Leon released a breath that he hadn't known he was holding.

"Please…" he whispered, surprised to find that he could speak. He didn't know if the words resounded in his mind or his mouth was actually moving, and it didn't matter.

"Tell me how many men the Dark Lord has in his service."

"Tell me, have you ever summoned spirits or demons?"

"Tell me, have you ever attempted to revive the dead?"

"Where are the Dark Lord's men located?"

It went on…and on…and on. Leon was crying and gasping for breath, jerking and grinding his teeth. He was panting, drooling, spitting, screaming. Sephtis remained absolutely still, staring into the mind of a ruined man, tearing through memory after memory, turning his attention to one topic or another. There seemed no rhyme or reason to his interrogation. It seemed as if he wanted to know everything that there was to know about Leon Videnti, the aspiring dark wizard who had thrown his life away in service to Voldemort.

As the world began to spin before Leon's eyes, and shadows encroached on his vision, Sephtis finally released him. He stood, vanishing the chair that he had been using as he stepped a few paces away. Past the throbbing pain in his skull, Leon watched as his captor twisted his knuckles around the staff that he carried at his side.

"You are a wicked man, Leon," he said, seemingly to no one. "You have sacrificed souls to demons, conjured spirits of the dead, assisted in the depraved art of necromancy, and contributed to the schemes and machinations of monsters beyond your feeble understanding. You have served evil for all of your life."

"Please…" Leon whined, pulling at the charms that held his legs to the chair. "Kill me. Please. I can't...the pain is unbearable…"

"The Mind Arts are a cruel thing," Sephtis observed, almost in agreement, as he turned back to his captive.

Leon snarled, jerking his head up as his limbs trembled weakly with the effort of keeping him upright in his forward-leaning posture. "You're a monster," he hissed, coughing. "You're no better than I am."

"The difference between us, Leon," Sephtis answered him, tapping the ground with his staff. "Is that you have fallen so far that you no longer regret your evil deeds."

Leon curled his lip just before his head was severed from his body. It popped from his neck like a cork from a bottle and flew back against the stone wall with the force of Sephtis' severing hex, and even as the corpse sagged to the side and spilled its blood across the stone, Sephtis scorched the body and the chair with a burst of flame. When there was only ash, Sephtis breathed deeply and departed from the cell.

The other prisoner was already awake when he arrived. Pale, terrified gray eyes tracked the steps of the gaunt wizard as he opened the cell and stepped inside.

"No!" the man moaned, scrambling away from his approaching captive. "I'll tell you everything! I swear!"

"You will," Sephtis agreed. And he conjured a chair.

Sirius fidgeted uncomfortably as he watched the pale king. He was forced, somewhat reluctantly, to admit his mixed feelings regarding the gaunt young man, and his recent actions were doing very little to ameliorate the situation. As usual, it seemed that Sephtis could understand the older man's thoughts, for he soon paused in his writing and set his quill aside, folding his bony fingers atop the parchment and blinking.

"Are you going to hover in the doorway or sit down?"

Shuffling into the office which had once belonged to the warden of Azkaban, Sirius turned his eyes to its sparse interior and wondered why Sephtis had yet to replace any of the furniture that had been destroyed by the departing guards. The only other chair in the room was just barely tall enough for Sirius to sit in it comfortably, and it groaned worryingly as he settled into it. "I heard what you did to the prisoners. Hell, I think the whole castle heard."

Sephtis nodded his head slowly. "Does it bother you?"

Sirius scoffed. "Of course it does! We didn't resort to torture in the last war, and I don't see any reason why we should stoop to such a level in this one," he declared, narrowing his eyes.

"It was legilimancy, actually," Sephtis replied. "The only pain that they suffered was a result of their wounds and my exceedingly crude treatment of those injuries. As you probably know, pain makes it almost impossible for an occlumens to protect their mind. Only true masters are capable of maintaining their shields through agony, and neither of the men we captured qualified as masters of anything."

"Mind-rape isn't any better," Sirius replied hotly. "And withholding medical treatment of war prisoners is considered torture."

"I'm glad that this concerns you," Sephtis interrupted, leaning back. "It concerns me as well. Do you think I enjoyed what I did to those men? That I took pleasure in watching the wicked affairs of their lives unfold before my eyes in snippets of horror?"

"You shouldn't have done it. I don't even know how you did it. For Christ's sake, you should still be in school!"

Sephtis sighed and tapped his fingers on his desk. "You know from experience how Azkaban will strip the humanity from you. You were on the first level, farthest from the dementor hive, while I languished on the lowest level. I may be sixteen, but I am not a child any longer."

"Do you even care that you executed two men this morning? I saw what you did to the prisoners in the courtyard when Dumbledore came, but I excused that because they had been sentenced to a fate worse than death. But I suppose I should have started to worry when I never noticed you so much as hesitate in the act!" Sirius exclaimed, leaning forward as if he was about to stand.

"Listen to me," Sephtis barked, and Sirius dropped back into his chair with a rough sigh. "I do not have to kowtow to your expectations in this matter or in any other. I have been raised to act as a champion, a soldier, an executioner, and that is what I am. Do not mistake me for a hero."

"What do you mean you were raised to be an executioner? Dumbledore would never do such a thing!"

"I was sent to the Dursley's as a child," Sephtis said quietly, looking down at his hands. "You know that they hate magic?"

Suddenly pale, Sirius nodded in spite of the apparent non-sequitur.

"They starved me. I don't even remember what I did, but it was probably something innocuous, something foolish. Vernon threw me into a cupboard and locked the door," Sephtis continued stoically, betraying no emotion. "I died, I think. Who knows how long I was there, but it was thirst that did it, probably. I knew I was dying, and I was glad."

"You died? I don't understand."

"It was when I met my master. Death," Sephtis whispered. He looked up and met Sirius' disbelieving eyes. "He was like an angel. I thought that was what he was, at first. He put his hand on my chest and I breathed easy. Though I was hungry, I did not starve. Though I was thirsty, I did not waste away. He told me that I would see him again. He called me his child."

Sirius said nothing in response to this, and Sephtis allowed himself to continue after a long, slow blink of his eyes. "He did return, later. When my Hogwarts Letter came, Vernon was angry. So angry. I'd never seen murder in his eyes like that before, and believe me I had seen him at his worst many times. He came towards me, and then Death was there. Vernon fell to the ground, clutching his chest, and I fled. It was then that Death approached me, and told me who he was. He said that I was a fated child, that he cared for me. We swore a pact that day, Death and I. You see, Voldemort has made an enemy of God."

"I didn't know you were religious," Sirius said slowly.

"You wonder how it was that I do the things that I do?" Sephtis asked rhetorically. "Well, it is because of Death's mentorship that I am the wizard you see. When I discovered magic, I was told to read every book that I could find. So I did. In my dreams, he tutored me in magic, in combat, in mental disciplines. I learned how to be a man from Death. So I am not really a man at all, am I?"

"This is insane," Sirius muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I don't know where to start with this. Does this have something to do with the Hallows? You mentioned them after the duel with Voldemort."

"Everything and nothing. I was Death's faithful servant even before I united his talismans," Sephtis replied. "As the bearer of these relics, I am closer to him now than I was before. His knowledge, His power, His intuition…these are what have allowed me to do the things that I have done. By his will, I have the strength to do what is necessary to safeguard mankind against enemies they cannot begin to comprehend."

"And he condones torture?" Sirius scoffed. "You're saying that God is making of you a monster more terrible than the man you've been commissioned to kill?"

At this, Sephtis' eyes flashed with power and he rose from his seat, leaning over the desk to pin Sirius with a deathly glare. "It would take more than legilimancy to accomplish that. Rest assured, if I had done something that displeased my master, I would not need you to remind me of the fact."

"I think you're full of shit!" Sirius exploded, standing as well. "I think that you need to reconsider how far you're willing to go to win this war. It wouldn't help anybody to exchange one Dark Lord for another."

Sephtis shook his head. "I know that we do not know each other very well, Sirius," he began, "but I am hurt that you think so little of me, nonetheless. You don't understand what is at stake, what I am fighting for. Do you think that Voldemort offended God with his political agendas? Ha! There are more things in Hell and Earth than you could possibly imagine, although you surely have a better perspective than most considering the Dementors."

"If you want to believe that God's out there, talking to you in dreams, fine. But you can't use it as an argument to justify atrocities," Sirius answered sharply. "I want you to explain to me, right now, why you were willing to do what you have done."

"Or what?" Sephtis replied, taking his seat once more and waving his hand dismissively.

"I'll leave," Sirius replied immediately. "I'll go to Dumbledore."

Sephtis considered the older man for a long time, and nodded. "Alright. Dumbledore will find himself on Azkaban soon enough, asking for my help, but I will give you your explanation.

"What is war, really? Is it supposed to be honorable? Is it supposed to be orderly? Is there meant to be a distinction between combatants and innocents? You'd have me believe that there's some unwritten code of conduct that I should be following. Is it honor? Whatever it is, our enemies have none of it. They don't care for your ideas of morality, for your ethics, for your distinctions. And look at our situation, Sirius; does it look like I have the time or the resources to care for prisoners? We will be forced to do things that we don't want to do. People will die, painfully. I don't know where you get off judging me for doing what's necessary for the sake of this country, for the world, but it ends here. This is more than a political matter, Sirius. Believe it or not, there are souls at stake," Sephtis exclaimed. "Voldemort is more terrible than you know, and his masters are more powerful than any mortal man could hope to face."

"Souls are at stake?" Sirius asked, openly scoffing. "Yours is lost already, I fear, if you're willing to torture and kill without remorse. What ever happened to your conscience?"

Sephtis laughed coldly, "It was stripped from me, day after day, by demons," he answered. "It was crushed by the abuse of small-minded fools. I do not claim to be a good man, Sirius. I know that I have done terrible things, and that I will do terrible things, but I regret none of them."

"For what? For England?" Sirius spat. "Please. You don't strike me as a patriot. I think you enjoy it. That's what I think. And I'm afraid for you, Harry. I'm terrified. This isn't what James would have wanted for his son."

"I hated what I did to the prisoners that we took, Sirius. I won't lie to you and tell you that I don't enjoy the heat of battle, the rush of combat, because I do; but I don't relish the act of killing. Perhaps, if Harry were here, he would agree with you. I am not Harry. I told you before that he had died, and I meant it. Harry was human, he was a child, he was, ultimately, too weak and too arrogant to do what needed to be done. I am Sephtis, and I do not have the luxury of humanity. I am a broken vessel, and through me the wrath of God will come to Voldemort and his followers," Sephtis replied quietly. "If you leave, you will only find yourself returning to this island when Hogwarts has fallen. My efforts in this war would suffer for your absence. People could die because you shirk your responsibilities."

"Hogwarts has never before been conquered by any wizard, Dark or Light, and I don't think Voldemort has the capability to make history, at least not in that way," Sirius argued. "Not while Dumbledore still lives. And I am not much of a leader, kid. Never was."

"Much faith you have, in Dumbledore, and so very little in yourself," Sephtis sighed. "I am telling you that it will fall. Hogwarts has stood against wizards and witches of incredible power, but it has never faced the Gates of Hell. That is what is coming, Sirius. No mortal man can hope to stand against it, not even Dumbledore."

"I don't believe in Hell," Sirius hissed. "If Hell existed, it would have been Azkaban, and I survived Azkaban for these many years. If there are such things as demons, then the dementors were it, and you destroyed them. Voldemort, powerful though he may be, is no demon. He is only a man. And men can be killed like any other."

"Then go," Sephtis replied sharply, rising up and suddenly holding his staff. A pulse of red magic rippled across the stones as his eyes blazed like the Killing Curse. "Like the Queen, like the prime Minister, you labor under misconceptions and judge me in ignorance! Fine! Depart from this castle, and see for yourself the horrors that will be unleashed upon the world by this mere man you name Voldemort. It will happen sooner than you think. Don't come back here, Sirius Black, until you're ready to do what is necessary for the sake of this world and its people."

Sirius clenched his jaw, nodded tightly, and swept from the office, leaving Sephtis alone with his troubled thoughts.