Chapter 12 #2
Aren is breathing in short shallow gasps through his teeth.
Sweat has broken across his forehead and upper lip.
He is shaking, a fine continuous tremor running through his shoulders and into the chair, and there is a dark stain spreading down the front of his trousers that he does not appear to have noticed.
"Where were you recruited?"
"Fuck you."
Eskil twists the dagger.
The second scream is different from the first. Shorter, higher, cut off at the end where the throat gives out. The blade turns in the wound and Eskil watches the tendons in the man's forearm jump under the skin as the fingers try to close and cannot.
He waits. He asks again.
***
The lamp burns down. Somebody outside the door replaces it and the light changes angle and the shadows all move a hand's width to the left.
Aren breaks in stages, and the stages are ugly.
The first piece is a name. Forty minutes in, sobbed out sideways with his chin on his chest, a Jakadi contact who found him in a border town and paid him in silver and told him he was doing a service.
Eskil files it and asks the next question and gets nothing, so he pulls the dagger out of the man's knee, which is worse than putting it in, and Aren vomits down his own shirt.
Eskil waits for him to finish. He does not step back from it. He sits on the stool with the vomit six inches from his boots and his sleeves rolled and his hands red to the second knuckle, and when the retching stops he repeats the question in exactly the tone he used the first time.
Somewhere above him there is a kingdom with roads and granaries and a herring dispute.
He is down here in the wet with a man's piss drying on the flagstones and his own hands ruined to the wrist, and this is also the job, and any king who tells you otherwise is either lying or has somebody else doing this part for him.
The second piece comes an hour in. Dead drops outside the walls, a hollow under the third milestone on the eastern road, messages in trade script.
The third piece takes another half hour and costs the man two fingers.
"You're going to want to keep pressure on that," Eskil says, and closes the man's other hand around the stump, and holds it there, because Aren's arms have stopped taking instruction.
Aren is weeping now. Not resisting, weeping, his face wet and his nose running and his voice gone to a wreck from the screaming, and he has begun saying please on a loop, please, please, please, without appearing to know he is saying it.
This is the part that would stop most men.
It does not stop Eskil, because Eskil has done this often enough to know that please is not the end.
Please is the point at which a man will say anything, true or otherwise, to make it cease.
What comes after please is the part with information in it, and the only way to reach the part with information in it is to keep going through the part where a man begs.
He leverages pain and fatigue and the grinding certainty that this will not end until it ends.
That is the actual weapon. Not the dagger.
The dagger is a demonstration. The weapon is the understanding, arriving slowly in the prisoner's ruined face, that the stone will not open and the ropes will not loosen and the man on the stool will not tire, will not lose his temper, will not make a mistake, will still be sitting there tomorrow, and the day after, with the same expression and the same voice, asking the same questions.
The situation will not change. The situation is Eskil.
And it comes.
"There is something coming," Aren says. "Not the border. They are finished with the border."
Eskil does not move. "Where?"
"A settlement. Out on the edge." His head lolls and he drags it upright. "It is not for ground. It is to show that it does not matter whether you are home or not. That you can be sitting in this keep with every man you have and it will happen anyway."
"Which settlement?"
"I do not know."
"Which settlement, Aren?"
"I do not know, I was never told, they do not tell a man like me the—" His voice breaks. "A village. It is a village. That is all I have."
"When?"
"A week." A wet sound. "A week, maybe less."
Eskil pushes once more.
"The healer's clinic," he says. "The prince. You monitored both of them."
And Aren looks up at him out of a face that has come apart.
"I wrote down everything," he says. "That is what they told me.
Write down everything. Every building, every name, every face, all of it, so I wrote it down.
" His breathing is ragged and his eyes are streaming and he is looking at Eskil with something close to pleading.
"I do not know what any of it was for. I never knew. I only wrote it down."
Eskil stands. He sets the stool back in the corner where he found it.
"I'll be back tomorrow," he says, in the same tone he opened with. "Think about what else you might like to tell me."
Aren spits at him with what little he has left.
"You will not sit on that throne another winter."
The door clangs shut.
Eskil has heard better threats from his brother.
***
There is a basin of water on a stone shelf in the corridor. Eskil rolls his sleeves higher and puts his hands into it.
The water turns pink immediately. He scrubs.
Palms, fingers, the spaces between them, the beds of his nails, the lines and creases where blood has settled and dried and gone tacky.
There is a great deal of it. There is more of it than he expects, and some of it is not blood, and he scrubs at that too.
The water runs pink and then red and then pink again and then clear. His hands are clean. They do not feel clean. They will not feel clean for some time.
Bohdi is beside him. Bohdi has been beside him the entire time.
He always is. That is the thing Eskil has never found a way to thank him for and has therefore never tried.
Bohdi does this work himself and does it well.
He has sat in Eskil's place a dozen times, has gotten answers out of men Eskil could not have gotten answers out of, and does not lose a night's sleep over any of it.
He offered this morning, the way he always offers, and Eskil said no, the way he almost always says no, because there are some things a king does not hand to another man to do on his behalf and this is one of them.
The city is his. The cells are his. The prince and the healer that man wrote down in his little book are his.
So Eskil takes it. And Bohdi, refused, comes down the stairs anyway and stands by the door and watches every hour of it and does not speak and does not leave and does not look away.
Fifteen years. In all that time Eskil has asked him for a great many distasteful things.
Bodies moved in the dark. Men put down quietly.
Orders carried out that could not be written down or spoken of afterward.
Bohdi has never once hesitated, never asked whether it was necessary, never made Eskil explain himself, and never once looked at him afterward as though he were something that needed washing.
He simply arrives, and he stays, and he is there at the end holding the coat.
Eskil takes it from his outstretched hand and shrugs it on.