Excerpt: Worse than Mere Death

The Church of Light had given Kayri Ceryn a very specific and very important job. After they tortured a man or woman under suspicion of shadow artistry, it was her job to make sure he survived the night so that they could continue torturing him the following day.

Different authorities had told her differnt things in regards to what extent she should heal the prisoner. Bishop Ingall, the man in charge of overseeing the proceedings, believed that the man should be healed as little as possible, kept in constant pain until he finally broke. Once, however, the torturer himself had taken Kayri aside and told her something entirely different. “Sister Kayri,” he had said to her, his kindly smile belying his brutal profession. “Torture is only effective so long as a man thinks there is a chance that he may live, as long as he has hope. As soon as he realizes he is dead, his spirit dies, even if the body lives on a few days longer. Heal him to the best of your ability each night, give him a few hours without blinding pain, and the expectation of renewed pain the next day becomes all the more effective.” She had told this to Bishop Ingall, and he had merely shrugged and told her to do whatever she felt was best.

So, whenever Kayri was assigned as a healer, she gave the prisoner a brief reprieve from his pain. Inwardly, she told herself so that the torture of the following day would be more effective, but secretly she was glad to be able to give these battered, broken people any mercy that she could. It was not a pleasant job, and Kayri often returned to her room at the end of the night and buried her face in her pillow to cry for the sheer magnitude of suffering she had witnessed, but Bishop Ingall thought her particularly suited for the task, so time and time she went again down to the dark dungeons beneath the city of Imegia.

Tonight the dungeons seemed especially dark and oppressive; the light of her torch did little to dispel the shadows around her. With her free hand, she pulled her cloak tighter around her brown wool robe and shivered. She heard the man's moans almost as soon as she entered the lowest level of the dungeon. This was her first night with him, but of course she had been told of the list of crimes he had been accused of in addition to shadow artistry. Bishop Ingall had said that the man sacrificed his wife to the shadows, attempting to exert control over her mind, and when he had failed he had killed her and their son so that they could not tell anyone what he had done. Whether that was true, Kayri did not know, but she had a job to do regardless. They had sent all the way to Sealia for her specifically, requesting that she cut short her visit with her family so that she could return before this man’s torture began. Reluctantly, she had obeyed, although on observing him she knew why they had waited for her. Bishop Ingall had no plans to be kind to this prisoner.

His moaning led her straight to his cell, and his eyes opened at her approach, slits in a badly swollen face. Their treatment of him had been brutal, which was unusual for a first day of torture. The unnatural angles of his arms and legs spoke of clean fractures, and all of his fingers were missing. He opened his mouth slightly, and she saw that most of his teeth were missing as well.

“No more, please, no more,” he gasped.

“Shh," she told him. “I am here to ease your pain.”

He laughed at her and turned his head aside, spitting blood and phelgm. “Why would they do that to me, only to send someone to ease my pain?”

Kayri knelt beside him and took his mangled hand in hers. “Because the Light is merciful to all of its children,” she told him, stroking his bruised skin with her fingertips. “Even those who have sinned.”

Tears squeezed from his swollen eyes. “I’m no shadow artist,” he whispered. “My wife was already dead. Oh, Marlane...”

“Then your pain shall be short,” she said gently, closing her eyes. She gathered the Light inside of her, channeling it into his body and sensing what was wrong within. She was right about his arms and legs being entirely broken, and she could feel that several of his organs were bleeding, perhaps even ruptured. She sent the soothing warmth of her Light into him, little by little, mending bones and organs and whatever else had been damaged in his torture.

He was not a shadow artist. She could tell immediately that, though he did have some inherent strength in the Shadows, it was nowhere near enough to cast even the simplest spell, let alone exert any form of mind control on another person. She could tell Bishop Ingall that, but she knew he would merely nod and thank her for her opinion on the matter. If the Church inteded to kill someone for shadow artistry, they often had a good reason, and Kayri knew that the Light guided their actions in mysterious ways. She was a priestess, but of a low rank; it was not her place to question Bishop Ingall's decisions on such matters. It was her job to keep the prisoner alive.

When she opened her eyes, she saw that the swelling in his face had greatly subsided. He was younger than she had first supposed, perhaps only two or three years older than she was, and now the tears flowed freely from his eyes. He tried to take her hand, but lacking the fingers to do so, he merely rested his useless hand on her wrist. “What is your name?” he asked her.

“Sister Kayri.” She did not ask him his name in return. She did not want to know it. The more she got to know prisoners, the harder it was for her when they were inevitably condemned to death.

“Kayri. What a beautiful name.” He sighed at her. “My pain is gone. You are a good healer, Kayri. I feel better than I have since they put me in this forsaken dungeon.”

“Sister Kayri,” she told him, gently but firmly. There was no place for informality in this cold, dark dungeon. She was here as a priestess, not as Kayri Ceryn.

“Sister Kayri," he repeated. He stared into the flames of the torch for a long moment. “Will they take me into that room again tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” she told him, and her stomach twisted with guilt. It was a lie. They would torture him until they got a confession out of him, and then they would torture him some more as punishment for his crimes, and then they would kill him. It was a cycle as sure as the seasons for those who had been accused of shadow artistry.

He laughed bitterly, exposing the black holes in his mouth where his teeth had been. A few teeth still remained to him, mostly ones in the back, but almost all of his front ones were missing. “Why would they send a young, beautiful lass like you alone into a cell with me, if they thought I was a dangerous shadow artist?”

She smiled at him. “The Light would protect its faithful servant from harm.” In truth, she had proven repeatedly that she could take care of herself. She was a far more skilled healer than a fighter, but the two times that she had in fact been attacked with Shadow by prisoners, she had managed to protect herself long enough to summon help. She did not fight back--the thought of causing harm to any living person made her ill, even if it was in self-defense--but she had a talent for repelling shadow magic. If she required assistace, several guards waited within hearing distance.

The prisoner’s chains rattled as he sat up straighter against the wall. “I didn’t kill my wife and child, you know,” he said. “I'd never hurt Marlane.”

Kayri nodded at him and set her pack on the ground, drawing out a skin of water and a loaf of bread with her free hand. “Do you know who did?” she asked, leaning forward to offer him the victuals.

He brought his face closer to hers, and Kayri saw the flames of her torch dancing in his eyes. “What I killed was not my wife.”

The tone of his voice sent a chill down Kayri's spine. “So you did kill someone?” she said, softly.

He stared at her for the longest moment, and just when Kayri was sure he was not going to answer her, he said, his voice rasping, “The three of us--my wife, my son, and I--were coming down from Sealia when we were attacked on the roadside by a group of beggars. They fought like animals, biting and scratching, and one of them took a good bite out of my wife’s hand when she tried to fend him off. We escaped with our son, made it a good deal away from the road before we felt safe and pitched our tents for the night. My wife was feeling ill, and there was something not right about her wound--there was some strange black stuff coming out of it--so I worried the man's filthy mouth had given her an infection.” He stared straight ahead for a moment, his mouth pulled tight against his gums. “I woke up in the middle of the night to check on her, and she was dead. No heartbeat, no breath, her skin cold. She was dead.”

“I’m so sorry,” Kayri whispered. Goosebumps rose along her arms as the man turned haunted eyes to her.

“There’s more,” he said. “Our son--he was just a lad of three years--woke and went to his mother, crying. I let him be and went outside to begin digging a grave for her, to give her a proper burial. After awhile, I noticed that my son wasn’t crying any more. I went back into the tent to check on him, and... and...” The man broke down weeping and buried his face in his ruined hands.

Kayri hesitantly reached out, touching his shoulder in what she hoped was a reassuring manner. “What happened then?” she asked him.

It was several minutes before his sobs died down, and several minutes more until he had composed himself enough to continue. “I went into the tent, and there was blood... by the Light, the walls were painted in it. My son... I didn’t recognize him at first. It was like an animal had mauled him. His face was gone, one of his arms had been torn clear from its socket, his guts were all over the floor... and my wife. She looked up at me, and her face was covered in blood, and it was like she didn’t even recognize me. Her eyes... And I realized that she had been eating him, Light save her. And then she totally forgot about the boy, she stood up and his little body dropped to the floor. She came after me... I didn’t know what else to do...”

“So you killed her then.”

The man reached for her arms as if to seize them, but his missing fingers again failed him. He rested his palms on her hands and leaned forward so close that she thought he was going to kiss her. “You can’t kill what’s already dead, Sister Kayri, and I would swear on my life that my wife was dead in the tent that night. What I killed was something else entirely.”