Chapter Three
Whoever’s voice he’d heard in the dark, it didn’t matter, because suddenly all the cell gates opened, and barbaric pandemonium ensued.
In the centre of all the cells was a pit, designed for one thing and one thing only: carnage. Wilder found himself thrust into a violent free-for-all, mostly naked bodies clawing and punching at one another, teeth sinking into flesh, screams echoing up what seemed to be a miniature amphitheatre where gore spilt across stone like waves breaking upon sand.
And Wilder lost himself in it. Fists swinging, he broke jaws and ribs and arms, blood splattering hot and metallic across his bare skin, across the other prisoners. His opponents were barely human now, if they ever had been, and that only made it easier to rain blow after blow down upon them in the haze of madness. He relished every impact, every split of his own knuckles.
Screams for mercy didn’t register. Cries for help fell on deaf ears.
Wilder half expected that when he closed and reopened his eyes, the swarm of bodies would be gone and he’d be alone in his cell once more. Only that didn’t happen. Husks of prisoners poured from dungeons and chambers he couldn’t see, and he kept swinging, tasting blood as he ripped people apart with his bare hands. He devolved, became his baser self, an animal, a killing machine.
The Hand of Death, they had once called him.
And he was here to deliver.
It went on for hours, or so it seemed. He welcomed it, welcomed the kiss of violence, the song of endings. Whether it was real or not, he didn’t know, only that he was at the heart of the bloodshed, and that was where he belonged. Countless bodies, man and monster alike, were piled up around him, their blood slippery underfoot. By the end he was bathed in it, his skin slick with black and red warpaint.
Panting, he realised that the amphitheatre had grown quiet.
There was not a sound in the whole Scarlet Tower but for the blood dripping onto the stone from his clenched fists.
Wilder staggered. The wave of violence, his wave of violence was over, and it settled around him like a heavy weight. He collapsed against a column, sliding to the blood-soaked floor. As the shock ebbed away, he felt the keen pulse of pain in his chest and the sting of the cuts across his knuckles, noted the blurred vision of his left eye as it started to swell shut.
He gasped through the sharp stabbing sensation across his ribs. He couldn’t put a face to the blow that had potentially cracked a bone. In fact, he couldn’t recall a single face from the brawl at all.
With his one good eye, he stared out at the pit.
It was empty.
Though the bloodstains remained.
Wilder rested his head back against the column, breathing through the fire in his chest and cursing the manacles at his wrists and ankles, his skin shredded beneath the iron there.
That voice from his cell came back. ‘You don’t remember me,’ it repeated.
Wilder peeled open his good eye. The man before him was practically a skeleton in rags.
‘Should I?’ he rasped. Gods, what he would give for some water, mind-altering substances within it or not.
As if reading his mind, the man pressed a tattered waterskin into his bloodied hand and helped him lift it to his lips. Cool water cascaded onto Wilder’s cracked lips and parched tongue. He nearly moaned as it soothed his throat.
‘Perhaps not,’ the man said. ‘I didn’t look like this when you put your spear through my cloak and detained me in the Great Hall of Hailford…’
Frowning hurt Wilder’s face, but his brow creased anyway. ‘Who are you?’
His new companion gave a hollow laugh. ‘I’m the man who tried to poison King Artos… The man you and the would-be shieldbearer condemned to this place.’
Somewhere in the back of Wilder’s mind, realisation dawned. Crushed Naarvian nightshade, Thea had said in that hall, pointing at the blue stains on a nobleman’s fingers.
The man now watched him intensely. ‘The name is Aemund.’
Artos’ voice came back to Wilder. ‘Well, Aemund… You have a choice… You can choose death… Or you can choose the Scarlet Tower.’
‘Death,’Aemund had choked out. ‘I choose death.’
Wilder remembered how King Artos had studied the man, a predator sizing up its prey.
‘Take him to the dungeons. Interrogate him. We need to know who he is working with. Then, he goes to the Scarlet Tower.’
‘No! Your Majesty, I beg you —’
‘The time for begging has long passed, Aemund.’
That had been over two years ago. Wilder focused his blurred vision on the figure before him. Aemund looked utterly ravaged, thin skin hanging off his bones, deep purple circles beneath his eyes. His hands shook at his sides and his knees knocked together, but he seemed alert – haunted, but not quite a husk of his former self, not like the other prisoners.
‘You’ve been here all this time?’ Wilder managed.
Aemund nodded. ‘I’m the last new prisoner who has survived what they do here.’
Wilder blinked, his swollen eye throbbing. ‘How?’ From what he remembered, the man before him had been an oily-haired nobleman, not a stoic warrior.
Aemund didn’t answer. Instead, he stared at Wilder. ‘My guess is that if you’re in here, you couldn’t beat him either.’
‘Who?’
‘Artos. Had you and your shieldbearer not interfered, neither of us would be here now.’
Wilder spat blood on the stone, thinking back to that time at Harenth. The irony was not lost on him that he’d lectured Thea about actions having consequences. Here they were. He had helped detain this man, and now they were cellmates in the Scarlet fucking Tower.
‘They say this is where they send the monsters of the midrealms, but it is their birthplace,’ Aemund told him.
‘Is that so?’ Wilder wiped the blood from his beard with the back of his hand. ‘I’d say monsters are born everywhere nowadays, wouldn’t you?’
‘Not like this.’
‘No?’
‘I’ll show you, Warsword. Then you can see how far wrong you’ve been led your whole fucking life. Are you coming?’
Strangely, there were no guards patrolling the pit, no reapers or wraiths or howlers lashing out with their shadows. The prison was quiet, disturbingly so.
Grunting in pain, Wilder got to his feet, disoriented and suspicious. ‘Apparently I’ve got nothing better to do. Lead the way.’
Wilder limped after the nobleman, waiting to be wrenched from some kind of illusion, expecting to wake, curled up and shivering, on the cold stone floor of his cell. But no such thing happened as he followed Aemund across the red-and-black-splattered floor of the amphitheatre. Dazed, he stayed close behind the strange man, trailing behind as Aemund made his way deeper into the tower, which now seemed barren of all life.
Did I kill them all?Wilder wondered abstractly as they passed empty cell after empty cell. Or was it another mind game? Another trick to make him think he was going mad? Blood still coated his fists, his body, but whose?
‘This way,’ Aemund called, taking an iron spiral staircase, down, down, down.
‘Why should I trust you?’ Wilder paused on the threshold of another level. ‘I’m the one who put you in here…’
‘There’s nothing I can do to you that they can’t do worse, Warsword.’
‘Even so… If I hadn’t interfered in the palace —’
‘I’d have ended up here anyway. I wasn’t cut out for espionage.’ He motioned for Wilder to follow.
Seeing no other option but to be forced back into a cell, Wilder did, grimacing with each step as his injuries flared to life with new pain.
Aemund led them to a laboratory. There, they lingered in the unguarded doorway. Torchlight illuminated the horrors within: twisted instruments and arcane contraptions gleaming in their silver trays. More than anywhere else in the prison, the air here reeked of iron, sweat and piss, and Wilder saw why. Prisoners were chained in the corners, huddled together, their gazes hollow, their bodies emaciated, their whimpers drowned out by the screams from distant chambers. There were bodies strapped to tables as well, and the intention became crystal clear: experimentation.
Wilder didn’t dare breathe. He saw several alchemists at work, dressed in masks and leather aprons, injecting writhing bodies with shadow magic. Before his very eyes, ordinary men became howlers, their screeches echoing off the prison walls as they thrashed against their restraints.
‘The birthplace of monsters,’ Aemund said without feeling. ‘This is just the beginning.’ He gestured to the corridors leading away from the laboratory, where within the grim confines of twisted iron bars and moss-covered walls were more poor souls awaiting horrific fates.
Wilder stared. The Scarlet Tower was full. Once, it had been reserved for the vilest of criminals from across the midrealms, but looking at its numbers now, that was certainly not how it had been utilised of late.
Ignoring the throbbing pain in his ribs, he started forward. ‘We have to —’
‘Help them?’ Aemund scoffed, grabbing his arm. ‘There is nothing left of them to save, Warsword.’
He led them to another chamber where, to Wilder’s shock, he spotted his own Naarvian steel swords on display in a glass case. He moved towards them, but Aemund gripped his arm again, his grasp slipping over Wilder’s blood-slicked skin.
‘Another stupid decision. They are trophies of war. Just as you are, for now.’
Wilder swallowed, watching the figures he’d originally thought to be alchemists at work on tables and benches. They were no such things. They were creatures of darkness – not howlers, not quite, but they too had once been men and women, and now their eyes matched the clouded blue of the reapers.
‘Why are we here?’ he said, his skin prickling. ‘How are we here? Why are they letting us see all of this…?’
‘Men become monsters in this place.’
Aemund’s voice sounded distant as every pair of clouded blue eyes snapped up and latched onto Wilder.
His blood ran ice-cold. There was a gleam in those gazes, brimming with a sense of foreboding, of hunger.
But even in his current state, shying from a fight had never been who he was. He dug deep. Despite the magic of the tower suppressing his Warsword power, despite the injuries already covering his body and the heavy manacles at his wrists and ankles, he let out a roar of rage and charged at the creatures.
Tables and instruments went flying, as did their attendants. With his bare hands, he vowed to do as much damage as humanly possible, to dismantle every contraption, every vile apparatus. Unlike in the pit, he did not lose himself; every strike resonated with his own fury, his own desperation for the destruction of the torture chamber. He pummelled them with fists and with the irons clamped around him. He was a whirlwind of rage, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake. He would destroy every inch of this festering place from within, so the bastards couldn’t inflict their curse on anyone else. He would ruin them all, then he’d escape – he’d get to Thea, to the rebel forces, and tell them of all that was happening here, that it needed to be burned to the fucking ground.
Aemund forgotten, Wilder didn’t stop. With a primal cry, he crushed skulls, strangled creatures with his chains, slit throats with discarded scalpels. Darkness leaked from broken vials and tanks, but he didn’t care. He had faced worse, and would do so again before his time was done. More trays and glass bottles went flying across the room, shattering into a million shards —
A single person’s applause rang out across the space.
Wilder whirled on his feet, not feeling the broken glass beneath his soles, or the wounds from the previous brawl that had worsened. Panting, he spied the jewellery-clad inquisitor of Harenth’s dungeons in the furthest doorway, and beside him a robed man he didn’t recognise, whose face was contorted in a smug smile.
Wilder heard Aemund’s intake of breath. ‘That’s the Archmage of Chains,’ he whispered, cowering as the man in question came forward, his eyes not leaving Wilder’s heaving form.
‘Aren’t you something?’ the Archmage said, an eager lilt to his voice.
Wilder took a step towards him, ready to wrap his hands around his throat —
‘I like your tattoo,’ the man said unexpectedly, that oily smile still on his lips. ‘It’s not often I see scripture of the ancient tongue of the Furies…’
‘What do you know about it?’ Wilder growled.
‘Glory in death, immortality in legend,’ the Archmage of Chains recited, his eyes sparkling in the torchlight.
An icy talon raked down Wilder’s spine, exactly where those words had been inked: a vow and a motto he and Malik had lived by, now sullied by the vermin before him.
‘I’m glad you’ve shown us what you’re capable of, Warsword,’ the man taunted. ‘You’ll become a legend among monsters.’
Several powerful, invisible hands grabbed Wilder, and he struggled against their grip, horror dawning.
They had meant for him to see every nightmare imaginable within this place. They had wanted to witness his strength against all odds.
The Archmage of Chains smiled as he revelled in Wilder’s realisation. ‘You will be our best creation yet… A general of darkness in Artos’ growing forces. A weapon of our own making…’
Wilder thrashed against his manacles and his captors, against the horrific fate that awaited him as they forced him down onto a table.
Darkness swallowed him whole.