Miles shuddered at the tone of wonder in the man’s voice, at the eagerness with which he spoke of torture—but he saw Renunzio was waiting, and thought it best to humor him in small things. He took his cue and croaked, “What?”
“She went mad. For a while I thought she was shamming, but the thumbscrews and the baton on the soles of her feet wouldn’t make her admit to being Ledora again. She insisted she was some sort of countess, though anyone could see she was only a peasant, though I’ll admit she’s a graceful one.”
Is! Miles’s heart leaped with relief, but he was careful to keep the look of foreboding that had been growing within him. “I might have thought she was lying,” Renunzio went on, “if she hadn’t answered every question I asked—and with no more pain than thumbscrews and baton, though I had to watch my phrasing. Asking her what she had done was useless; asking her what she remembered did the trick.”
Miles let the look of foreboding deepen to impending doom. Renunzio leaned forward and hissed, “Five years! She told us this rot has been growing for five years! It’s amazing that it hasn’t infested the whole of the army—or perhaps it has. There was no way to tell how far it stretched, for before she was strong enough for a second bout of questioning, she fell sick with some sort of brain fever. Again, I would have thought she was faking, but every other prisoner in that wing fell ill, too—it’s obviously some sort of epidemic, and only one brave cook is willing to go in to shove food to those madmen.”
Relief washed over Miles, though he tried hard not to let it show. The cook must have been a convert to the New Order, and had laced the prisoners’ gruel with some sort of herb that made them rave, made them temporarily mad.
At least, he hoped it was temporary.
Renunzio leaned even closer, breathing his words right into Miles’s face. “So, since I can’t ask her—I’ll have to ask you.”
Ledora had told Renunzio a bit more than that, it seemed—he threw out random bits and pieces as he talked with Miles, enough to make him sweat with worry, not enough to give him any idea of the limits of the torturer’s knowledge. All he could be reasonably sure of was that the nurse hadn’t told Renunzio the identities of any of the substituted officials, for he hadn’t received word of any arrests before he was taken himself, and as he paced the dungeon hallway with the inquisitor, none of the groans he heard seemed to be in familiar voices.
But why had Renunzio taken him out of his cell? Two guards marched behind them, and Miles went down the corridor side by side with the torturer, not daring to resist too much, but feeling the fear gather and build within him.
“She told us about you, of course,” Renunzio said for the tenth time, “told us the leader of the traitors was one Miles, who was masquerading as an inspector-general. It took quite a bit of searching, mind you, for inspectors-general disguise themselves as all manner of wanderers. We brought in a hundred vagabonds, at least, and found three of them to be real inspectors-general indeed, which took some fast talking—but finally we found you.” He gave Miles a toothy grin. “Or are you going to try to tell me you aren’t the leader of this foul little nest of traitors?”
Miles chose his words carefully. “I don’t think I’ll try to tell you a single word, Renunzio, since you won’t believe anything but what you want to hear anyway.”
“Oh, but you will,” the vulture purred. “And you’re wrong about what I won’t believe. Come watch!”
He clamped bony talons around Miles’s upper arm and dragged him through the door at the end of the hallway. The guards followed.
They stepped into a nightmare.
The room was windowless and dank, filled with vile smells, lit only by the orange flames in half a dozen braziers, each of which held pokers and branding-irons and other instruments that Miles didn’t want to know about. A man was strapped down to a table with a wheel at the end, arms stretched tight above his head, groaning. He was naked except for a loincloth.
Renunzio came and sat by the victim, smiling. “Hurts a bit when you’ve lain stretched out like that all night, doesn’t it? But I promise you the pain will be much worse, my chuck, if you don’t tell us what we wish to know.”
The victim eyed the irons heating in the brazier and moaned, “Anything!”
“Ah, you wish to cooperate! Still, let us be a bit more sure that you’ll tell us the truth. Torturer, fit the thumbscrews on him.”
“I’ll confess! I’ll confess!” the man cried.
“Confess that you lay in wait for the Protector and struck at him with a sword?” Renunzio asked.
“Yes, yes! I’m not so much a fool as to deny it!”
“Of course not, since a dozen guards saw you do it, before they beat you senseless and dragged you in here. But I’m not so much a fool as to think you were able to sneak into that shrubbery by yourself, or forge your own sword, either. Who helped you?”
“No one!” the would-be assassin cried in mounting fear. Renunzio gestured. The torturer turned the screw, and the prisoner howled with pain. Renunzio made a chopping gesture, and the torturer backed off the screw. “Tell me their names,” the inquisitor urged.
“I … I can’t think of any,” the prisoner panted.
“Surely you can,” Renunzio coaxed. “Bring a hot iron, to brand it on his memory.”
The prisoner screamed even before the iron touched him, screamed raw and hoarse as it bit his skin. As the iron came away, Renunzio asked, “Was it Okin Germane?”
Miles started with dismay. Okin Germane was a Protector’s Minister!
“Who?” the man gasped.
Renunzio signaled to the torturer again.
When he could stop screaming, the criminal gasped, “Yes! Yes, it was Okin Germane!”
“Liar!” Renunzio snapped. “Okin Germane is the most trusted of the Protector’s Ministers! He would never move against his master! Now tell me the truth!” He gestured again, and the torturer moved in.
So it went, with Renunzio playing a fantastic, warped guessing-game with the prisoner, wherein the man on the rack had to guess whether or not to agree with the inquisitor, and Miles became more and more sick within as he watched. Finally he realized that Renunzio was drawing it out far longer than necessary, just to make Miles realize how horrible the torture could be. Guilt struck deep then, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.
But perhaps there was! “Stop, stop!” Miles cried. “Let him die! I’ll tell you everything I know!”
“That you will, but it’s not your turn yet,” Renunzio chuckled, and gestured to the torturer again.
That sickened Miles more than the torture itself; that struck the terror more deeply into him than the victim’s screams—the pleasure Renunzio took in his work. He could only watch from then on, sick and weak with the pain of the poor thing that writhed and shrieked before him.
Finally Renunzio must have been satisfied in some strange way, for the creature on the rack gargled an answer, and the inquisitor nodded. “So I thought,” he mused, “so I thought.” He turned to the head torturer. “Take him off the rack, and prepare him for his execution.” He rose from the stool, sighed as he stretched, then came over to Miles and clapped a hard hand on his shoulder as he led him wobbling out of the chamber. “A waste of time and effort,” Renunzio sighed, “since his ‘confession’ will probably turn out to be bogus, merely something he said to make the torture stop, telling me what he knew I wanted to hear.”
“Knew” because Renunzio had prompted him, Miles realized, and the names the inquisitor had used were those of high-ranking officials—the High Bailiff of the Protector’s Guard, a general of an army in all but name; three ministers; and one he didn’t recognize, but felt sure was a man of high rank and great influence. True or not, Renunzio now had evidence to use against them, evidence which he could horde, claiming he needed to wait for opportunities to prove it by the testimony of other such prisoners, but really waiting until a chance came to use it as a weapon in the constant intrigues within the top echelons of government, to gain greater power and rank himself. Miles realized the man had decided to become a minister, though not by the usual route of examinations and years of successful administration.