Ana had never been a speaker, nor someone who enjoyed being the center of attention. But she had a distinct advantage in that she didn’t give much of a damn about most people’s opinion of her, and between Charm, Command, Intimidation, and 34 Effective Charisma she simply cheated her way to making people listen to her. Sure, there were a few people there with higher Attributes than her or with a high enough Willpower or Sense Motive to not be affected. Maybe her actual words swayed them. Maybe not. It probably helped that Acting and Inscrutable helped her play the fearless leader, and that she truly believed that keeping them motivated was their best chance of survival, so she got the bonus from Motivational Speaker. At any rate, no one spoke up against her as she praised the fallen and injured for their sacrifice and swore bloody vengeance against those responsible.
As she spoke, she used Split Focus to inspect anyone who stood out. It wasn’t enough to get her to Level 5 — she’d just have to keep at it. She did notice that many of the combat Classers and volunteers had gained a Level or two, though, which was satisfying in a grim way.
When Ana finished, and her followers congregated in small groups to give their own, private eulogies for each of their dead, she’d successfully turned their sorrow and nascent despair into anger and a strengthened sense of purpose and determination. At that point she slipped away. Touanne will have to forgive me for abandoning Messy, Sylt, and Trig, she thought as she collected Captain Pirta and Marra Falk. They don’t need to be part of this.
Nor, for that matter, did she — at least in her own opinion. What the hell did she know about interrogations? She would have stayed away and left it to Pirta and Marra, except for two things: she’d made herself a — perhaps the — leader of these people, at least temporarily, so talking to the prisoner that she herself had taken was her responsibility; and the Wayfarer had told her in no uncertain terms that she looked forward to the prisoner answering their questions. Questions that she, the goddess, apparently knew most of the answers to already, but wasn’t allowed to tell them because of divine politics, System restrictions, or some similar bullshit.
So, there she was, leaving the camp for a smaller clearing just outside the glade. They wouldn’t need a translator; Pirta assured Ana that the Binder spoke “Inter-guild,” which was apparently what Ana herself had been speaking this whole time.
The captured Binder was a human woman. Ana would have guessed that the prisoner was in her early thirties, but it was hard to be certain with the way that Vitality slowed aging. And it didn’t matter. Unless the Binder had some very good arguments to give them, she wasn’t likely to get much older.
The prisoner sat on a round platform of stone, raised and smoothed by an Earth-mage, presumably the [Elfin Stoneshaper (19)] who sat guard. Ana recognized him as one of the conscripts, though for all her Acuity she couldn’t remember his name. He was constantly feeding a slow trickle of mana into a ritual circle carved, not drawn, around the platform’s circumference, on the outside rather than the surface. Ana couldn’t read the runes, but she had a good guess as to what the circle did. While the Stoneshaper’s aura held anger, loss, and patience, she couldn’t feel anything at all from the prisoner, and the air and ground nearby both felt, for lack of a better word, dead.
“Something to keep her from Shaping?” Ana asked, gesturing to the runes on the outside of the platform.
“Not quite,” Pirta said. “I know of no way of preventing that. The circle does the next best thing. There is only the faintest trace of mana inside that circle. Just barely enough to keep her alive. She could try to shape, but she wouldn’t have enough to work with to even begin a construct. She can’t even kill herself by burning herself out. Standard procedure for imprisoning a mage, though there would usually be a cell or cage inside the circle.”
In the case of their prisoner, they’d made do with rope. Lots of rope. The woman had her arms bound behind her, her legs bound together, bent, underneath her. Her wrists were bound to her ankles, and the whole mess of ropes was attached to several stone rings extending the platform around her. She wasn’t going anywhere. Hell, she could barely move an inch — Ana would have been surprised if she could even fall over. On top of that she was gagged and blindfolded, globs of coagulated blood sticking to the gag where she’d snorted them out of her livid, swollen nose. She couldn’t even glare at them. Not that she tried. The woman sat so still that, if not for Ana’s superhuman hearing picking up her strained, whistling breaths and the beating of her heart, Ana might have thought that she was looking at a propped-up corpse. It was to the point where just looking at the woman filled Ana with an undefined discomfort.
“Do we really need all those ropes?” she asked, getting two hard looks in return.
“Death-mage,” Marra said, and spat on the ground. “We’re not taking any chances. At her Level, if she manages to get any part of herself, her head, even a finger, outside of the circle, she might be able to start draining the mana out of anything or anyone nearby. Starting with Ari here.” She nodded to the Stoneshaper, who nodded back.
“So we can’t afford to let her out of that circle.”
“Not unless she gives us some very compelling reasons to trust that she’ll behave, no,” Pirta said. “But that doesn’t mean we have to execute her. We could simply feed enough mana into that circle to keep it active for a week, then walk away.”
That got a reaction. A minute shudder ran through the prisoner at the mention of being left there to die from thirst or the predators that might find her. Ana wouldn’t want that for herself — it would be a nasty way to go, and even without Kinesics Ana would have been able to read the fear in the prisoner’s reaction. She filed it away for the coming conversation.
“Shall I?” Marra asked, gesturing to the prisoner’s gag. At a nod from Pirta, she circled around so that she stepped onto the platform from behind, then quickly untied the gag and pulled it away along with a large wad of cloth that had been shoved into the Binder’s mouth. She then quickly stepped back down from the platform, muttering, “Gods beyond, that’s a nasty feeling.”
The Binder coughed, took her first deep breath in hours, and croaked, “Do your worst!” in accented Inter-guild.
Pirta shrugged. In one long stride she was in reach of the prisoner, whom she grabbed by her broken nose. Then she twisted, hard enough that Ana heard cartilage pop. “Mistress Falk? The gag, please. Nose, too,” she said, as the Binder howled and thrashed against the ropes.
Marra stepped back up, shoved the wad of cloth back as the prisoner stopped screaming to breathe, and tied the gag back into place, pulling the cloth up so it covered her nose as well.
“Take it off,” Ana said after a minute, then, when nothing happened, repeated herself. “Take it off!”
The Binder was thrashing, her chest straining to pull in air, but by the wet sounds coming from her she was getting more blood than oxygen in her lungs, like some kind of extra fucked up waterboarding. Soon enough she’d pass out, and then what? They’d ask some questions and do it again? Maybe break some fingers? Worse? Ana knew that Pirta had a brace of healing potions with her — what possibilities did that open up? Traumatic amputations, acid, high-coverage burns… as long as you could keep them alive through the shock, there was so much you could do to a person without killing them. And that was without the psychological aspects of dangling healing in front of someone, removing scars, restoring mutilations, and fixing other permanent injuries.
Ana forced herself to stop. They’d barely started, and she already hated this. She hated where her mind went, and how easily it went there. It made her feel like the monster she’d been accused of being, and she just didn’t see the point.
Marra looked questioningly at Pirta. Ana snapped, “Do it,” putting everything she had behind the command, and Marra hopped to it, getting the gag out in seconds. The Binder immediately started coughing violently, blood dribbling down her chin and speckling and spattering the stone all the way to the edge as she hacked and retched, only the ropes keeping her from falling forward.
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Ana snatched her canteen from her belt and approached the prisoner with a few quick steps. Stepping inside the ritual circle was absolutely awful, like a really bad fever — fatigue, nausea, pain, everything. Ana grit her teeth. It wasn’t worse than she could handle, and on the bright side she couldn’t feel anything from Ari anymore. Deadening yourself to the auras of others was apparently not really a thing, and with how high Ana’s Connection was getting it was a welcome break.
She squatted in front of the prisoner and rinsed the woman’s face quickly, then put the opening of the canteen to her lips, only pouring some in her mouth once she closed her lips around it.
“Rinse,” Ana said, “and I’ll give you some more.” God dammit, she thought, as the prisoner spat and then accepted some more water, which she swallowed. How did I end up being the good cop?
She pulled the blindfold off, so she could look her prisoner in the eyes. “Listen,” she said once the woman had stopped coughing. “Things don’t look good for you. I’m not going to stand here and tell you that we’ll let you go if you tell us what we want to know. I’m not even going to tell you that we’ll let you live. But there’s dying, and there’s dying, right? These three—” she gestured around her, “—they’ve all lost people they cared for, and if I let them, they’re going to hurt you. Not kill you. Not intentionally. They’ll ask you a question, and then they’ll hurt you until you tell them what they want to hear. Then they’ll ask you another question, and hurt you again. And another question, and so on. We have plenty of healing potions, too. You understand?”
The prisoner stared back, silent and defiant, until Ana looked at Marra and said, “Marra. The gag, please.”
Marra had only taken a single step when the prisoner spat out, “Wait! I understand!”
“Good,” Ana said, stopping Marra with a gesture. “Now, I’m also pissed about all the deaths your side is responsible for, but I’m detached. I don’t particularly care either way if you suffer before you die. A friend of mine told me that I’d probably make a good Death-mage. You understand?”
Fear, Ana’s Kinesics Perk told her as the prisoner shifted, her eyes widening, pupils dilating as she said, “Yes, dammit. I understand.” This time she answered without the threat of the gag and what might come after.
“Good. So, here’s what I’m willing to offer you: answer our questions, completely and honestly, and I’ll choke you out, quick and clean. You won’t even feel it. Hell, I’ll even give you an opportunity to try and convince us to keep you as a prisoner instead of executing you. But refuse to answer, lie to us, or do something stupid, and I’ll walk away. I’ll leave you to the woman whose Splinter is falling apart, and the one whose husband may be dead. You don’t want that.”
The Binder, whoever she was, looked Ana in the eyes, and to Ana it looked like the woman shrunk. She may be a higher Level than almost everyone Ana knew; she may be a Death-mage, with everything Touanne had told Ana that meant regarding empathy and how she saw other people. But in the end she was human, a frightened woman who probably had an impressively high Sense Motive, and who saw in Ana’s eyes a promise of terrible suffering — suffering which she could do absolutely nothing about.
The woman blinked. She glanced at Pirta and Marra, who stood behind Ana, before looking back and licking her lips. From the way her faced shifted, the little changes in her posture, Ana could see her weighing her options, anger and hope warring with her fear. Then the defiance melted away, and the fire in her eyes died entirely.
“I’ll—” she started, but her voice failed her. She swallowed thickly, and Ana gave her another sip of water. After wetting her throat she tried again, and managed to say, “I’ll answer your questions.”
Ana turned to look at her companions. Marra gave her a frown and a shrug. Pirta nodded. That would do.
“Good,” she told the prisoner. “Now, stay honest with me, alright? What’s your name?”
“Saareng,” the prisoner sighed.
“Just Saareng?”
“Yes.”
“And who are you with, here on this Splinter? Which guild, which group?”
“It’s not a guild effort.”
“But you must have a leader.”
“Karti. A high-Level summoner,” the prisoner volunteered. Ana looked to the others. Marra shook her head; Pirta frowned, considered, then followed suit. “He brought us together,” Saareng continued. “Brought us here through a portal.”
“And you’re the ones who have been stealing people from somewhere else, and infecting them with this ‘void plague,’ or whatever it’s called?”
“I am not a Summoner! I’m—”
Saareng’s words faltered as Ana pushed hard on Intimidate, trusting Arresting Gaze and Predator to help her defeat the woman’s resistance. “Yes, or no?” Ana asked, her voice hard.
“Yes,” Saareng said when she got her voice back. “But I have nothing to do with the changelings.”
“What do you do, then?”
“I’m a Binder. I control demons. Bind them into the bodies we wish to use, and then bind them to my will to protect the others.”
“That’s how you could keep Pneron and Stretia by your side, without them attacking you.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“What?”
“How do you control them?”
“With magic. Death magic. I have Abilities that—”
“The Summoner with you, was he the one controlling the crazies? The changelings, I mean?”
“No,” Saareng said dismissively. Ana hardened her eyes again, and the prisoner quickly added, “They can’t be controlled, not truly! Kamov and his underlings only drew them in and kept them from attacking us.”
“Is that how you sent them at the outpost?”
“No, that’s— it wasn’t necessary.” Some of the fire came back into the woman as she spoke, building to something like a religious fervor. “They’re drawn to the cursed Waystone, and anything that perverts the natural flow of mana. They exist to restore the balance of the planes, to—”
“Do we need the gag again?”
The prisoner’s jaw clicked shut, and she uttered a terse, “No.”
“So that’s why you want to kill half a thousand people, and gods know how many others if the collapse of this Splinter destabilizes others? The natural flow of mana? The balance of the planes?”
Ana stared her prisoner in the eyes until the fire died again, and Saareng looked away and muttered, “It is necessary. Yes.”
“And disabling the Waystone is how you’ll do that?”
“Yes. In time.”
Saareng’s eyes flickered, and Ana suspected that she wasn’t being entirely honest. Pirta clearly agreed, saying, “She’s holding something back.”
Ana nodded and stood. “I’m done here. She’s all yours,” she said, turning to leave.
“No!” the prisoner cried behind her. “Don’t! I’ll tell you! There’s an obelisk! When Karti brought us, he did so with an obelisk, and it came with us! It competes with the Waystone, draws in mana and uses it to destabilize the Splinter instead of stabilizing it. That’s all I know, I swear! I’m just security!”
Ana nodded thoughtfully. “Captain, Marra, take over for a moment, would you? Get some numbers, things like that. I need to think.”
As her two companions started asking questions, Marra opening with one about what happened to the expedition, Ana stepped to the side. The obelisk matched what Jisha had told her. Ana had thought it was just some kind of focus for their rituals, but clearly it did more. What the prisoner had said about the Splinters destroying everything, though…
Is that anywhere close to the truth? she asked into the part of her own mind that she thought of as her hotline to the Wayfarer. About the Splinters causing problems with the balance of the planes or whatever?
No! The reply was immediate, like the goddess had been waiting for a question, barely able to stay silent. That’s absolute madness, a centuries old lie used by the unscrupulous to deceive the lost and weak minded. But never mind that. Ask her who is behind this. Ask her which treacherous, murdering, shitbag of a deity is pushing their buttons. Make her admit it, so it’s out there, and I can slip at least one of these cursed restrictions!
Alright. When the goddess was so worked up, how could Ana refuse? She’d been keeping one of her focuses on the interrogation, and as it wound down she strode back, asking, “Do we have what we need?”
“More or less,” the Captain answered.
Saareng claimed not to know anything about the expedition, other than having heard that their own scouts had seen “a group of Delvers” follow some revenant sapients into a large Delve. Not sharing information freely was apparently the norm in her group — almost everything was on a need-to-know basis. She insisted that she herself hadn’t been involved, and Pirta reluctantly admitted to believing her.
The enemies were fewer than she’d expected; only two dozen or so high-Level casters, the strongest being their leader, Karti, an elven Grand Summoner at Level 37. With them were twice their number of Cultists and other support staff, taking care of everything from hunting and cooking to helping to power rituals.
The number of crazies, or changelings as Saareng called them, was more concerning. “Almost a hundred,” she said. That was how many people they had taken and infected on their most productive day. The Bluesky Guild had killed thousands; there could be thousands more out there.
Ana put that out of her mind for now. “Good,” she said as she went back inside the ritual circle, squatting in front of the prisoner again. “Who do you serve,” Ana said quietly. “Which deity?”
“I—” the woman looked away, then back, and her eyes filled with hope. “The Sentinel! I serve the Sentinel!”
The gods-damned Sentinel! The Wayfarer crowed triumphantly. Oh, it feels good to have that out in the open!
Marra, Pirta, even Ari all gasped at the prisoner’s words. Clearly, this was a shocking revelation, something that put even the Captain off balance, and Ana had only one question: “Who the hell is ‘the Sentinel’?”
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