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‘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 —
