Chapter 75 The Kingpin’s Interrogation
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The Kingpin’s Interrogation
Levan had been in the interrogation chamber for several hours and had yet to speak a word.
First Auria Marriosan attempted to wrangle answers out of him—to no avail. Then Jebat threw every trick in the book at the captured kingpin, trying to get him to talk.
Nothing worked.
Not because of some grand plan on Levan’s behalf, not through willpower or wisdom or stubborn pride, but because he was not truly there in that room.
All the parts of him that usually thought and planned and felt—his mind, his intuition, his heart—had been decimated, leaving behind a wasteland entirely devoid of life.
He was by turns numb and utterly ravaged by grief, and in both states, the questions levied by the increasingly frustrated detectives did not penetrate the fugue.
Miret was dead.
First his mother, then his father, now his surrogate grandfather.
At some point, Tenébo Jebat was replaced by a younger mage with long, ashy hair tied back in a ponytail.
His interrogation technique was more sophisticated than the other attempts, a masterclass in dark psychology and subliminal warfare, but it didn’t crack Levan either.
There was nothing left to crack. The kingpin simply dissociated out of his body, out of the room, out of the world.
After the sixth or maybe sixteenth hour, Sebran entered the room. Levan’s long-lost brother was almost enough to penetrate the emotional fog.
Sebran looked weak, exhausted, as he sat too heavily into the seat opposite Levan. His eyes were red with lack of sleep, his once brawny arms and chest drowning in the folds of his silver cloak.
When he spoke, his words destroyed anything that remained of Levan’s soul.
“Saffron Killoran has handed over evidence of Bloodmoon treachery. It would appear she was undercover all along.”
Levan stared down at his hands, manacled to a table in short-chained cuffs.
Saffron, who brought him incense to burn away the scent of nightpoppy. Saffron, who held him as he tried not to weep. Saffron, who had outplayed him, who had once again not chosen him.
Of course she hadn’t.
He was a monster.
He was beyond redemption.
He was nothing.
All of this played out in some deep cave of Levan’s mind, without rising as far as his facial expressions or body language.
Sebran found this utter lack of reaction infuriating, fist clenching at his side.
He could not use his compelling to force a response when Levan was bound in deminite.
The irony, that such bounds offered them both protection—from each other, from themselves.
“You’re going to hang. A mercy you do not deserve.”
Levan was very far away from it all, in a similarly dissociative haze to the kind he experienced while on loxlure, only without the raw animal pleasure.
Loxlure.
He would give anything for it right now. That was the one desire capable of cutting through the oblivion. His whole body curled around the pit of his stomach, the intensity of the craving turning him inside out.
Sebran leaned forward, something terrible and raw in those dark brown eyes. “I burned your mansion to the ground. It’s naught but ash.”
The faintest reaction flickered beneath Levan’s fugue.
The crypt. His parents’ bodies.
Everything was gone, yet all he could think about was loxlure.
The first rush of euphoria, like the crest of an orgasm but more drawn out.
Broader, deeper, better. And then the oblivion.
Not the raw, grief-stricken oblivion he currently felt, but something blissful and pure, like an embryo in a womb.
At the very height of his addiction, the black substance had ceased to provide any of this—no euphoria, no oblivion. He had to take it just to feel normal. But since he’d gone two years without it, that first time would be pure heaven.
Sebran grew increasingly irate at Levan’s lack of response.
He’d obviously assumed these pieces of information—his lover’s betrayal, his death penalty, his home burned to ash—would cut through his silence, would force the kingpin to talk, but revelations only seemed to drive him deeper inside the labyrinth of his own mind.
When Sebran got up and left for what would likely be the last time, Levan ran his brother’s words through the loom of his ruined heart.
You are fundamentally broken, Levan.
And there is no redemption, whether you want it or not.
Several hours later, Levan was back in his holding cell awaiting transportation to Duncarzus. The wasteland of his consciousness was repopulating with thoughts, feelings, memories, each one of them fresh agony.
He thought of his brother’s hateful stare, and of their time as children in the Havenwood.
Of the map they used to study, pressing pins into the places they might one day adventure to: the southern tip of Mersina, a valley in Laudon, the craggy heart of Nomaden.
Shishai and Soral and Suva, a speck-sized island in the Ashen Narrows.
He thought of the boat they’d made of old rotting crates, how they’d pretended to be pirates plotting their path around the world.
He thought of Miret, of all the thousands of hours the kooky academic had spent teaching him how to defend himself, of how little it had mattered in the end.
He thought of half-moon spectacles, of colored Saints stones, of leathery laughter, of a beloved library burned to ash.
He thought of a blue-cloaked body tumbling from atop an axelmare’s skeletal black back, lifeless before it hit the bloodied ground.
He slammed his manacled wrists into his forehead over and over again, trying to banish the memories. It hurt too much, and there was no release, no escape.
If he could not have loxlure, at least he could have death.
A release from the pain at last, because this was too much for anyone to bear, too much grief, too much relentless suffering.
And yet, did he deserve such relief? He had murdered sixteen mages after Alucia was killed, when the red veil had fallen behind his eyes.
He had sentenced sixteen families to this same devastating loss.
I am a monster, and everyone knows monsters exist to be slain.
There was the jangle of keys, and then somewhere beyond his cage—both mental and literal—two figures appeared. Vel Karvas, Captain of the Order of the Silvercloaks, and a lone streetwatcher.
“We’re here to transport you to Duncarzus,” the captain said evenly, though the black ring tattoos on his throat rippled and warped as he swallowed hard.
Levan followed Karvas and the streetwatcher through the halls of the Order, ankles and wrists bound in so much heavy deminite that he shuffled rather than walked.
They passed the common room, where Levan had waged battle against Marriosan and Naszi, and the hospital wing, where he had healed half a dozen patients.
Somewhere low in his ribs, he felt a brief pang of loss, regret.
He would never heal again, never feel that rush of pure, clean satisfaction.
Beside him, Karvas’s body was a hard line of tension. He smelled of stale sweat and something dankly earthen, like rotting trees. Whenever they passed another detective, the captain offered a nod so brittle it was as though his neck might snap.
The Silvercloaks had a portari gate housed in a small, functional room not unlike the one in Bloodmoon mansion—there is no longer a mansion, Levan had to remind himself.
The walls of the gate room were pale creamstone, hung with perhaps two hundred different town maps and diagrams of Vallin’s portari network.
With a final strained nod at the streetwatcher, Karvas grabbed Levan by the forearm and hauled him over the threshold of the gate.
Levan closed his eyes, trying desperately to banish the image of Miret’s corpse. When he opened them again, they were not in Duncarzus. They had arrived, bodies squashed together, in an unfamiliar gate—in a very familiar city.
The tang of brine, the clamor of a marina. Tall creamstone buildings, a glittering blue sea.
Aredan.
The street was almost deserted. Judging by the pale pink of the sky, it was only just gone dawn. A second figure stepped out from beneath a shop’s indigo-and-silver awning.
Grand Arbiter Dematus wore not her purple highcloak, but a pale blue scholar’s robe. Graying hair fell around her face in limp locks, and she wasn’t wearing her distinctive violet lipstick. She seemed pale and sickly without it.
“There’s a boat waiting for you in the dock, ready to take you to Mersina.”
He stared at her, through her.
“This was always the plan, was it not?” She looked at him with a tortured expression.
Levan dimly recalled the night he’d broken into the Order to retrieve Saffron’s letter.
He’d told the Grand Arbiter exactly what to do if he was caught, and now she was making good on her word.
She would do anything to save her daughter, after all, and obviously assumed the kingpin still had the power to ruin her from inside Duncarzus.
Karvas unlocked the deminite manacles, first wrists, then ankles. Still the kingpin did not move, did not react. That numbness was back, that oblivion, a sense of watching events unfold from another plane of reality.
“This is the end of me now,” the Grand Arbiter whispered, her words punctuated by the garish caw of seagulls. “My career, my life. You cannot ask any more, because the card has been spent. Burned. All I ask, all I have ever asked, is that my daughter remain unharmed.”
“You have my word,” Levan croaked, ears ringing, limbs still leaden. The thought of hurting Dematus’s daughter seemed foreign, absurd, even though he had slaughtered sixteen mages not two days earlier.
“Nobody need know of your involvement,” Karvas said to the Grand Arbiter. “I’ll say the kingpin overpowered me at the portari gate. You can still emerge from this unscathed.”
Dematus stared at him for several long, penetrating moments. Levan dimly registered that her grip had shifted, tightened on her neat yew wand.
“Atherin and its various institutions are rotten to the core,” she murmured. “An orchard growing more spoiled fruit by the day. It’s time to carve out the corruption at the root.” She rose her wand, aimed it at Karvas’s widening eyes, and incanted, “Sen ammorten.”
Karvas fell dead, and Levan was jerked free of his reverie by the shock of it.
“What—?”
“It ends here.” The Grand Arbiter turned her wand on him. “With me. With you.”
For a moment, Levan felt nothing but relief.
True oblivion at last.
And while the young, innocent boy at the heart of him might have pleaded, no, don’t hurt me, I want to live, the ruined mage he’d become welcomed it. He closed his eyes and waited for the sound of the killing curse, for the ravaging fork to find his chest.
It didn’t come.
He opened his eyes warily, only to see that Dematus was standing still, trembling, her lips moving around inaudible words, as though trying and failing to cast the curse.
As though compelled.
Realization struck Levan then.
The young, innocent boy at the heart of him hadn’t just pleaded.
He’d commanded.
Some part of him, buried beneath the scorched earth of his trauma, must still want to live.
He was free—if he wanted to be.
There was a boat waiting for him in the harbor. He could go to Mersina as planned.
And do what? he asked himself bitterly.
The answer was already there.
For every hand he’d severed in the name of extracting information, he would heal a wound. For every life he had stolen in his mother’s name, he would make another better.
With one final look at Dematus, he turned and walked away. Toward the harbor, toward his new life. But as he reached the end of the street, the compulsion over the Grand Arbiter shuddered and dropped—he was obviously still depleted from the battle in Lunes.
He expected to hear the cry of a killing curse, to feel that vicious fork into his back, but when he peered over his shoulder, the last thing he saw before rounding the corner was Dematus lifting the yew wand to her own chin.
A few moments later, he felt, rather than heard, her body hit the ground.