“I have rights!” the young Darkling replied. “You’ve no proof I did anything wrong!”
Corbin took the black-and-white thread from the Crimson guard and showed it to the Darkling. “They found this hidden beneath your shoulder plate. You’re a Darkling and a traitor to the empire.”
“I’m innocent!” the Darkling insisted, but his heart was racing, sweat already dripping down his face. As much as he tried, he still came across as disingenuous. I’d always believed that people who were terrible liars had a tendency for good, so I had to wonder… what had pushed him to join this murderous faction?
“You’re a Darkling, and you’re going to tell us where Zoltan Shatal, your so-called Scholar, went,” Corbin replied, towering above the former silver guard, who held his head up despite kneeling.
Valaine said nothing, watching as the conversation unfolded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Darkling said, sticking to his story. Given his age, I had a feeling we could break him. The less experienced a cult member was, the more likely they could be swayed into cooperation.
“All Darklings identify one another by this black-and-white thread. What is its significance?” I asked, trying to get the ball rolling. Corbin shot me a brief and cold glance, which quickly softened as he understood the angle I was playing from.
The Darkling didn’t answer, and Corbin gave the Crimson guard a faint nod. It was enough for the soldier to punch the Darkling. I heard his jaw crack, and the fiend cried out from the pain. Blood dripped from the corner of his mouth. An Aeternae’s punch was clearly devastating—there was only so much this guy would be able to take before Corbin decided to cut off his head and be done with it.
I moved closer, crouching so I could look him in the eye. “The sooner you talk, the quicker it will end for you,” I said. “Forget everything the Darklings taught you. They gave you a poison capsule to kill yourself in case you got caught because they know you will crack. You all crack. But now… Buddy, you don’t have the poison anymore. Be logical. Adjust.”
The Darkling sneered at me, his fangs bloody from the Crimson guard’s punch. “I will never crack.”
“You say that now,” I muttered, stepping back.
Corbin grabbed him by the throat and raised him off the ground, his boots dangling several inches above. The Darkling coughed and choked in his hold, but Corbin didn’t relent. Instead, he squeezed tighter, his claws extending and digging into his skin. They would draw blood in a few moments.
“Do you feel that?” Corbin asked, though he obviously didn’t expect an answer. “That’s your skin breaking, my claws piercing it. I can take my time with you, too. I can poke holes until you have nothing left to poke. I will bleed you dry, and you will beg me to stop. You will implore me. You’ll want me to put an end to it. Do you really want things to get that far?”
“K-kill me… if you must. I’m not… I’m not telling,” the Darkling replied, barely able to breathe at this point.
“I can kill you, sure. But do you want it to be quick, or are you ready to spend days on end dying?” Corbin asked, his fangs growing and glistening with raw hunger for mindless violence.
The Darkling went pale, finally understanding what this was about. But even then, he managed to find a flicker of resolve, to which he held on. “I’m loyal. I say nothing.”
“That’s fine,” I replied. “You see, even if you don’t tell us anything, you will still be tortured and killed slowly—as slowly as possible, until someone else among your peers comes to their senses and speaks. For us, it’s a matter of patience. For you, death awaits either way. One of you will talk. The real question here is… which one of you wants to do the talking?”
I glanced around, noticing the horror imprinted on the other Darklings’ faces. They couldn’t look away from Corbin’s hold on their companion. The young one’s legs flailed, his windpipe nearly crushed, but still… he resisted.
Twenty minutes went by with a combination of persuasive arguments and savage beatings, but the Darkling held on. There wasn’t much left of him, but I had to admit, his resilience was astounding. His eyes were swollen shut, red blotches spreading across his face, the flesh swelling from the flurry of punches he’d received.
He couldn’t even kneel anymore, leaning back into the Crimson guard’s shins for a bit of support.
“Where is Zoltan Shatal?” Corbin asked. I’d lost count of the number of times he’d asked this question. Yet again, the Darkling refused to speak.
Valaine exhaled sharply and stepped forward. She gripped his shoulder and held him up, effortlessly. There was strength in her I’d sometimes overlooked. This was a sobering reminder of how different she was from all the women I’d come across, especially among my vampire kind. Then again, Valaine was an Aeternae. One step higher on the evolutionary ladder.
Something changed in the Darkling. His expression shifted, a certain realization smoothing his face. Dread skewed his lips. My own blood ran cold, as the temperature seemed to drop.
“You will tell the truth,” Valaine said, her voice lower and deeper.
The air thickened, moisture filling my mouth as I swallowed, almost feeling the Darkling’s own crippling fear as he beheld Valaine. She stared him down. Shivers ran down my spine, and the Darkling quivered.
His lips parted.
“You will tell the truth,” Valaine repeated. “Or you will suffer pain unimaginable by most. I cannot convince you to speak… I am merely stating a fact. You will tell the truth, or you will discover that the pit here has no bottom. It is just endless agony. Darkness. Death that never comes, even though you pray for it.”
“Get her away from me!” the Darkling cried out. “For the love of all that is in this world, get her away from me! Get her away! Make it stop!” His cries turned to screams. Convulsions took over, and he shook as though he’d been electrocuted. “Make… it… stop!”
Valaine dropped him and moved back. The Darkling pulled himself into a fetal position, hands painfully bound behind his back, blood trickling from his cuts and his mouth. “Make it stop… Please, get her away… I’ll talk… I’ll tell you everything… Please…” He kept droning on, while Corbin and I exchanged concerned glances.
Briefly looking at Petra’s disciple, I noticed the glimmer of recognition in her dark blue eyes. She’d seen this before. It prompted me to pay more attention to Corbin—he was Valaine’s father, after all. There it was… the same knowledge, lingering in his smoldering gaze. He, too, had witnessed Valaine’s persuasive power before.
My skin tingled. “That was… impressive,” I managed.
“Well done, my dear daughter,” Corbin said, his voice low and flat.
Valaine sighed deeply. “Let’s hope it gets us something.”
“What did you do, exactly?” I asked, unwilling to let this pass. It wasn’t the first time that I found myself equally fascinated and terrified by her abilities, but this certainly took the cake. Clearly, Valaine had a special ability that set her ever so slightly apart from the other Aeternae. I’d seen her in beast-mode. I’d witnessed her talent in casting mazir magic. But this… this was something else entirely.
“I’m not sure,” Valaine murmured. “It’s just something I do to get the truth out of someone when nothing else works. It’s a little hard to describe.”
“Valaine is rare but not the only one. There were other Aeternae with her gift of persuasion,” Petra’s disciple said, a faint smile lingering on her oval face. “The energy inside her… it resonates with the mazir and it produces this effect. I have seen it before. Unfortunately, Valaine is the only Persuasive left—that’s what we used to call them. The last one I knew personally died before Valaine was born.”
“So, it’s a rarity among the Aeternae,” I concluded. It sounded a lot like mind-bending—but, then again, not really. Mind-bending of the Mara variety was basically extremely powerful hypnosis. Valaine’s skill was, as the disciple had called it, more along the
lines of literal persuasion. She put the fear of something so powerful inside this Darkling that only the truth seemed to be able to set him free from the terror she’d injected into his very core.
“Please… Get her away from me,” the Darkling wailed, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Valaine moved farther back, until he relaxed, his frame loosening. He lay on his side, temple pressed against the slate-colored cobblestone.
I looked at her, then back at the Darkling. “You said you’d talk,” I reminded him. “Go ahead. We’re all ears.”
Indeed, all eyes were on him now. Even the other Darklings were terrified and curious. I could only imagine what was going through their heads. If Valaine could pull the truth out of this guy, then she was bound to do the same to them—and it looked a lot worse than any beating the Crimson or gold guards could deliver.
The silver guards were ordered to disperse and return to their posts without so much as an apology. Some did seem insulted, but they didn’t say anything. What could they even say, if this shakedown had resulted in almost one hundred Darklings being taken from their ranks? They understood the situation.
“What… What do you want to know?” the Darkling asked as the Turquoise Square cleared. In a way, I felt as though I could breathe again. Crowds, especially crowds of Aeternae soldiers, were not exactly my thing. They made me nervous, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
“Don’t tell them anything!” another Darkling blurted, but he was swiftly silenced by a smack over the head.
“Shut the hell up,” the gold guard responsible snarled.
“I told you, I want to know where Zoltan Shatal went,” Corbin said to the terrified and finally compliant Darkling. “I’m aware that he left the city, but it’s a big land we have. A more accurate location would be most helpful.”
He sounded so polite, given he’d nearly crushed the guy’s throat not that long ago.
The Darkling sobbed. “There are several places where he could have gone,” he said between hiccups, still reeling from whatever dark horror Valaine had pushed into him. “Most are along the Green Road. Follow the route to Astoria. If he’s not in any of the Darkling hideouts, you’ll find him in Astoria.”
“Astoria?” I asked, looking at Corbin.
“That’s odd. The city is abandoned,” the master commander replied, raising an eyebrow at me. “It’s nothing but ruins and greenery. It hasn’t been inhabited since the last Black Fever outbreak. It killed so many Astorians, there was no one left to carry that city forward.”
“It’s not just ruins,” the Darkling said. “There are tunnels. Escape tunnels. Dug hundreds of thousands of years ago. The whole of Visio is riddled with them, designed by the Darklings to stay in the shadows… for situations just like this.”
“Astoria is on the east coast,” Valaine clarified. “About two thousand miles away.”
“You mentioned he might be in one of the hideouts,” I said, looking at the Darkling. “We need all the locations you have.”
He nodded, deeply broken. “I’ll… I’ll mark them all on a map.”
“Is Zoltan alone?” Corbin asked.
The Darkling shook his head. “He took the whole horde with him. I’m from the lower caste, so I’m not allowed in the palace basement. I don’t know what goes on there. I just deliver messages and items—”
“Of which you’ll give us a full list, as well,” Corbin replied.
The Darkling nodded again. “There are hundreds of Darklings under his direct command. More will probably join him. The word is out now. They likely know you’re looking for the black-and-white thread. They can’t lose it, otherwise they won’t be recognized by the others. Every single wall in this empire has eyes.”
“Palace staff or someone else must have seen us. They must’ve figured out what we’re trying to do. This conspiracy runs much deeper than we originally thought,” Valaine said. “And he’s right. It’ll travel fast. Soon enough, all the other Darklings who have infiltrated our society will know we’re looking for them, for their threads.”
“What do you think they’ll do?” I asked.
“Run. Hide. Join Scholar Shatal,” the Darkling replied. Groaning from the pain of the many hits he’d taken earlier, he rolled on his back, exhaling with visible difficulty. There was at least one broken rib threatening to pierce his lung. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would cause him great discomfort until it healed—provided, of course, he wouldn’t be executed in the next few days.
The Crimson guard scooped him off the ground and threw him over his shoulder, drawing a muffled protest. “I’ll take him to the nearest Infirmary,” the guard said. “You should come with us, Master Commander.”
“Yes, we’ll need him to show us where the hideouts are along the Green Road.” Corbin nodded slowly, briefly glancing at his daughter. “Valaine, my dear, organize an expedition for this. We need at least two or three thousand troops, preferably Crimson and a few gold.”
“Yes, Father,” Valaine replied. “We’ll have to comb the Green Road all the way to Astoria. Such an expedition requires Visions, too, right?”
“And supplies. At least four or five carriages with blood and healing herbs,” the Crimson guard holding the Darkling said. All the Aeternae in direct service to the Crimson dynasty acted as Corbin’s lieutenants from what Valaine had explained. Many of the operational logistics were automatically delegated to them, allowing initiative.
“I’d like to join you,” I said, looking at Valaine.
“You should,” Corbin replied for her. “You’ll have a lot to learn from such a campaign. And I plan on using every resource we’ve got until that bastard is captured and executed.”
Even though I was usually against the death penalty, the disgraced former chief councilor had done too much harm. He couldn’t be allowed to live. My only hope was that we’d capture him alive, so we could at least extract as much information from him as possible before severing his head.
But death was definitely his only option. For his involvement with the Darklings. For what he’d done to Nethissis. The universe had a tendency to pay its creatures in kind, but sometimes it needed a little bit of a nudge. In this case, I was more than fine with being said nudge.
Nethissis
“What is this place called?” Seeley asked.
We’d been here for a few hours, and I’d spent most of them moving around, spying on the black guards and watching as they set up camp in what looked like an abandoned city. Stone and marble ruins poked through the tall, thick grass. There were patterns visible not only in the green areas, but also in the patches of dried dirt that persisted in the middle of a once highly populated city.
“Astoria,” I said, my gaze wandering across our new temporary home. I’d heard Zoltan call it Astoria, and I’d picked up more information from his Darklings. This had once been a sprawling metropolis. It had resisted numerous Black Fever outbreaks, but the last one had destroyed it. Most of the Aeternae inhabitants died during the last episode, their remains burned by the surviving Rimian and Nalorean servants.
No one wanted to live in a place with so much death, so the servants moved away, leaving the city to wither and shrink under the sun, under the wind, under the storms and the many snows that followed. The entire settlement covered several square miles, surrounded by rolling emerald hills with wild trees and abandoned orchards that still flourished and bore skull-sized fruits.
Beyond the eastern hill barrier, the ocean sprawled forever, its dark blue waters glimmering beneath the hazy, reddish pink sky. It was a quiet place, further isolated from the rest of the continent by a massive, half-moon-shaped forest which covered enough land to make Astoria significantly inaccessible.
“No Reapers here, either,” I added, though we had both known that was going to be the case. I’d meant it more as dry humor. Fortunately, Seeley caught the nuance and gave me a half-smile.
“How are you feeling?”
I shrugged. “Still pi
ssed off, obviously. But I admit I am a little hopeful, given the circumstances of my death. I’m definitely more accustomed to being nude twenty-four seven now. Again, sorry for that. It was out of my control.”
Zoltan’s ghoul had killed me in snake form, forcing my body to resume its natural form. There was no ghostly apparel available, so I was reduced to moving around as naked as the day I’d been born—the irony did not escape me, for I’d walked into death with my birthday suit on.
Seeley had been nothing but honorable and respectful about this, though I knew it was hard for him to focus. Fortunately, my long copper-red hair did cover most of my private parts, which took some of the pressure off the both of us. Despite my condition, however, I felt better than a few days ago. I had a better understanding of how it had happened and what had led everything to blow up in Zoltan’s face the way it had the other night.
Piecing together whispers from the black guards, Seeley and I understood that the Darklings had been revealed and that Zoltan had been declared an enemy of the empire. He’d brought the whole gang to Astoria because it was one of the few places he could control.
“Where’s Rudolph?” Seeley asked. He no longer had his arms up, but the rune cuffs, collars, and chains had stayed on—the latter bolted into a giant marble column base. He leaned against it, pleased to be able to stand and stretch his legs. His Reaper form was not as easy to fatigue as a living body, but still, he could experience all kinds of physical discomfort, and I liked him as far away from grouchy as possible.
“He’s with the others from his crew,” I said. “The guards had the ghouls grouped in several clusters, half a mile away from here.”
“And Zoltan?”
“Oh, he’s putting all that death magic in place,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “Barriers to keep the living out, barriers to keep the ghouls in. If any of them get loose by accident there will be a blood bath. He’s trying to maintain control over this situation, but I’m willing to bet he’s a little frazzled.”
A Shade of Vampire 80: A Veil of Dark Page 4
