Page 41 of Tending the Ache

When it drops to a ragged panting, he says, "That's one."

He looks at the prisoner's other hand.

"You have seven more of those available on your body. Then we start on the parts you use for other things."

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?"