Edwin: 14 Flamerule
Highly...unpleasant, it was. Deeply unpleasant. When his father had a few months before his departure casually ordered the house slaves to be interrogated over a missing ruby figurine inherited from Edwin's great-grandfather, had it been like this below? Philias was screaming, and the questions did not stop. And yet what he told seemed close to what they wanted to know.
The strong and bestial Shar-Teel, Edwin's mind enumerated.
"Yes—their leader—she's called the Man-Slayer. She's supposed to be strong and built like a male—" Philias screamed, his flesh burning.
The luscious drow cleric.
"Vicynthia—Viconia. A cleric. Of Shar! A drow. Knows nothing of Bhaal—I swear—a cleric of Shar—please."
Such beauty would be wasted on the Iron Throne's swords but there would be other wenches, Edwin had thought of Viconia. It seemed a far thing from this cellar.
The idiot Ajantis of the Order of the Radiant Imbeciles.
"A knight—an Ilvastarr—Waterdhavian—Amnian—paladin, he thought he fell in the Cloakwood—a foreigner—" Philias cried.
Imoen the apprentice wizard.
"A little girl—no, red-haired—a wizard. She wasn't—please—a wizard girl, young, a transmuter—" It was a clerical spell that the acolyte Zhalimar chanted, and Philias' eyes bulged the colour of egg-whites at horrors only he could see.
The helpless bard Garrick.
"A bard. There was a first bard—not too clever—harpist—no; no knowledge of the Harpers—just a bard—" Zhalimar raised a sharp knife, and brought it down. Edwin stared at the stone walls, thick enough that doubtless little sound escaped them.
The fool Eldoth Kron.
"Kron. From here, they said—all the group said—no—no, I shouldn't have been with them. Please. The second bard—Waterdhavian too, I think—just a bard—came in the forest—"
And the crying little thief.
"Skie! Her name's Skie. Yes—short and dark-haired. No—yes—yes, of course she did—please. She sewed robes once—" Philias screamed yet again. Edwin remembered telling Philias that brief tale; the girl had agreed to help him in the days before her nervous breakdown with those bandits. Proven a halfway acceptable seamstress. It mattered not, of course, but the memory of Skie quietly bent over her tidy needlework was a thing so far away from this scene.
"Zhalimar, burn him once more," Sarevok demanded suddenly, his voice suddenly far harsher and deeper. Of what importance was Skie? The incompetent girl snivelling on his shoulders half the night, Edwin thought—
"Silvershield—" the boy's voice sobbed out. "Some...provincial nobility here—" Edwin's own words echoed back at him.
"The Silvershield girl was missing," the Kara-Turan woman said. She had stood in the corner of the dark room, her arms folded across her chest; she had not participated in the interrogation at all.
"Sky. Skie Silvershield was—" Edwin could not help but look at Anchev's eyes, as if they belonged to some animalistic predator that hypnotised its favoured prey against flinching from the fatal glance; bright amber, almost gold— Sarevok drew his heavy sword despite the cramped room; there was by a narrow margin enough space to bring it down as if he would slay them all.
"Wagakimi; you should not destroy them, when they may have other information—" the woman pleaded, stepping forward; Edwin had flung himself to the opposite wall, pressed against it as far out of the reach of that yellowed sword as he could possibly escape to. "Ignore the second coward; I beg that you would listen to me," she said.
Anchev, oddly, lowered the greatsword. "Foul incompetents serve me."
"Is it not the lady Cythandria with the most information upon the Silvershield affairs of merchantry?" Zhalimar Cloudwulfe said; the female cleric appeared to respond to the name, her mouth twisting.
"So it is. Inquire, Zhalimar. He will describe why that girl has escaped the traps. Gorion sought to play us for fools."
The name—the man had been some sort of relation to Imoen, some acquaintance of Skie's father, Edwin's mind scrambled over the vague recollections of tales gabbled in monkey-voices near his hearing, killed on the road before he had met the group. It was not a fact he had seen fit to describe to Philias at all.
"The girl was lucky! The girl had magical aid—" Philias pleaded for his life. "None of them said the name Gorion—I swear that they concealed it—"
"Then," Zhalimar said, "the old man confided in them..."
That was it, Edwin thought. Skie (and Imoen) must know some information, some piece of some intrigue that the man called Gorion had confided in one or both of them. For the alternative was horrible beyond belief to contemplate.
"Yes, he must have," Philias said; he screamed, writhing like an eel trapped in a cage, and Edwin was careful to look away, at the dark lines of the stone wall above the head of the torturer. "They said nothing—they must have lied to me—I promise I know nothing of Gorion—"
"Is he telling the truth, Tamoko?" Anchev said; and the woman's eyes seemed to take on a dark glow.
"No—please! I know nothing—I have never heard the name—"
The cleric gave a slight nod. "The Red Wizard speaks truth," she said.
He and Philias had worked to protect against divinations, Edwin knew, abjuration spells against those who would pretend to tell true from false. But how powerful was this Tamoko? The concern of it was heavy in his mind, but he could do nothing but stand and wait.
"Has she power, that foolish girl?" Anchev said.
"I don't know! Nothing of any powers—no powers—"
Tamoko spoke again. "He has witnessed no unnatural abilities."
"Where is she now?"
"I don't know! She was in Cloakwood—" Edwin had heard screams like that of Philias once, on a hunting expedition he had only reluctantly accompanied for he hated the stench of sweat and animals and being invariably left behind in the mud while others rode onwards, where one of the Tharchion's wizard guests had slowly strangled a wild deer with a spell tightening gradually around its neck. The animal's cries had been high, slowly fading away. "I know not where now—stop, I beg—"
"He is very ignorant," Tamoko said. The duration of her spell faded from her eyes, or so it seemed to Edwin, and gratitude to the fates swept through him.
"A mortal fool." Sarevok Anchev commanded the room in which he stood, Edwin could feel that; his uncle Homen Odesseiron in one of his sterner moments with a face as if carved from granite, zulkir Nevron that he had only personally met twice, sneering and stinking of brimstone from the demons he used at his whim... "Zhalimar, take the prisoner. I will send others—I will send trackers—" His gauntleted fist hit the wall; to Edwin's shock, it left a dent in the stone the size and depth of the clenched hand. Godlike strength. "There will be a war. She is irrelevant; she is behaving as nothing; and you." The yellow eyes—suddenly they blazed at Edwin, and any man would have lost control, would have feared that horrible voice and that knowledge of what Sarevok Anchev was. "I have no use for traitors," the man who was not entirely a man said, and those spikes would spit him like a roast pig and he would bleed and die here and never again—
"Sarevok, it is not necessary."
The cleric. The ugly cleric laid a hand on Sarevok's arm, speaking in her soft manner. "I loathe a traitor as much as you," she said, and her black eyes were pitiless and unreadable when they rested on Edwin. "But you could bind him instead to your service. For you, I think it would be the better choice. He is a mage."
And in the name of the lady Tamoko—a geas, a geas that he was never going to be able to explain to his superiors, a compulsion that his life would be forfeit for betrayal—he was alive. Respite—a need to change his robes—washed through Edwin. But Philias would not be...
"Make no mistake that I despise you, Red Wizard," the woman dictated to him, when he'd no choice but to listen; "Uragirimono: you betray your own countrymen. What I do is for Sarevok alone. Your blood will be shed if you prove any threat to him. Do you understand me, Thayvian?"
"Yes," Edwin struggled to speak, his mouth as dry as if he would never be able to cast a spell again. His grand plans lay tattered in ashes about him; he was as weak as he told the little thief Skie that she was and could for the time being do nothing...
Tamoko left him alone. He would not die; confidence did not return to him. He could have screamed into the wall, punched a helpless cushion as if a child's temper tantrum. If he had not left; if he had done anything else; if things were different and he would not lose control...
Zhalimar Cloudwulfe had Philias, taking the last of the information from him. The apprentice insisted, at one point, that he had done nothing and he wasn't even there and do it to Edwin do it to Edwin instead leave me alone— And yet it was a lie, to Zhalimar and his knives, a lie he was made to recant. What Zhalimar wanted was spoken aloud, at the cost of more pain. Edwin saw some of it, as though glancing at it through a thick distorted glass wall. He saw a brief flash from Philias' left hands that was another attempt at the spell of escape, and what Sarevok's acolyte did in response to that was...not worth the recounting of it. Chains weighted against magic held down the other Red Wizard, and perhaps he would stop that awful crying; perhaps...
There was so little that lay within Edwin's capacity to do; so minuscule. He was not watching the torture, only witnessing—and that was bad enough. Troublesome enough. Bellissima Leonov would kill him slowly.
In the dark of the night the—the vaguest of solutions came to him. A slight manipulation; a manipulation that could only be accomplished by consent, Edwin told himself, consent from the howling part-flayed thing bound to a stone slab. He detested trivial attempts at quietness, as if he were a rogue instead of a noble wizard impressing others with his sheer power, but tolerated it in this instance if he must. His mind had raced frantically and repetitively on the same lines, in that condition of studying through the midnight hours for a test on the morn, though this was nothing so innocent and no test at all; the idea had come to him...
He cast, the spell a barely-studied attempt, inadequate, hardly working. A tiny zone of dead air, lacking the necessary gases to breathe, an invisible thing in motion through the air like a bird. Zhalimar had gone, had locked the door of the cell on the prisoner. Edwin had concealed himself and could see only a little within the bars of the cell door. He uttered the words of it quietly. The boy's eyes were blue and accusing, meeting his; and he moved his hands to manipulate the casting across the bars. It was not his fault, not his fault at all; the best choice to protect the mission. A mutual choice at that. The small void of dead air moved, positioned across Philias' face. It was no betrayal of Sarevok because he had already given useful information about the group. Edwin would have seen the Challesme move to escape it and gasp fresh air, or signal that he wanted something else; but sweating, bleeding and burned, the boy let it cover his mouth and nose, slowly perishing through suffocating—
The deer, slowly strangled. Edwin had intended to look but could not, turning away in the final moments. The face (the face of the boy, Edwin might have thought, but truthfully Philias was of an age near his own, there was no matter of that sort...) was tinged a purplish blue, no visible evidence of what had happened as if it were a natural enough death, the casting residue to be outside the cell. A faint wheezing, perhaps...
It certainly wasn't the first time Edwin had directed his magic against another person. To say nothing of trivial duelling in his education in Thay; self-defence roaming the land, that odd time in Nashkel with the Witch and all the others after the girl, slaying that merchant mage, the guards of the Cloakwood.
Philias was dead and would not give further secrets and would be tormented no longer and he must escape. Edwin fled, invisibly, back to the quarters allocated him.
All in the name of Thay. All in the name of what I must. All in the name of frankly I hardly wish my intelligence and person destroyed by barbarians when I've scarcely conquered anything or concubines or life itself I have no wish to perish in this place of fools all...
If he had stayed those few remaining days with the crying little thief, would the information have been vouchsafed to him? Perhaps doubtful. Perhaps it mattered not; a profitless tool.
Edwin closed his eyes and tried to rest in the low room in the closed quarters of the Iron Throne. His body twitched despite his efforts otherwise, and he pulled a thin sheet close around himself as if it could hide him.
—