There had been a sound, a thunderous sound like a leadshotter going off… and screams. Not Thalric's scream, though, for they were not done hunting him. Thalric was one of life's survivors. Even brought to Capitas in chains as a traitor, he had got out of it – though he'd had to marry the Empress to do so.
Osgan shuddered, on recalling the hints Thalric had dropped about that situation, when his tongue had been loosened by drink down in the palace cellars. Terrible things, terrible secrets. Osgan's life contained enough terrible things on its own, without Thalric loading him with any more. Was that the price he must pay for Thalric's unreliable patronage – to be steadily eroded by ghastly secrets that he had no place knowing? He had survived his own moment of horror, while crouching there by the Emperor's side as He, as the avenging monster, had come for them both.
Osgan felt the terrors building in him again, his muscles twitching with them, making the chair creak. He was in some half-stripped room, some abandoned upper storey where the Rekef were hiding out. If he cried out, only the guards would hear, and then they would strike him again. His face was already overwritten with their despite of him.
But He had been there. They did not understand. Even Thalric had not understood. He had followed Osgan to Khanaphes. He had been hovering over the summit of that pyramid. Osgan had not actually seen that cruel face, nor any material form, but he had known it as sure as if the Mantis had stood there in plain view.
It did not matter that he had already seen the man dead, his blood mingling with the Emperor's. It only mattered that he was here, and that he had found Osgan at last.
Osgan whimpered, feeling the shakes build up inside him, and this time he could not control them. He fought against his bonds, wrenching the joints of the chair, while he cried out in fear and frustration. He cried out for help, though in all the world there was not one with the ability and the inclination to help him.
Perhaps it was his mother that he cried for, in the end.
The door kicked open and he flinched, but it was not one of the guards this time. It was Marger, supposedly Thalric's second at the embassy, now revealed as a Rekef double-agent all this time. Not even the senior man, he was a puppet, a mere mouthpiece. Sulvec and the Beetle were both his masters, and Marger was a man dethroned.
'Shut up,' Marger told him, 'or we'll gag you. Don't think you won't get your brain boiled if anyone hears you and comes looking.'
There were tears in Osgan's eyes, amongst the puffiness of the bruising. Marger came over and examined him more closely.
'Waste it, just look at you. What's the point of you? You were a fool to come.'
Oh how true, but Osgan could say nothing. His lips were pressed tight to keep himself from sobbing.
There was an uncomfortable expression on Marger's face, which might have been pity or disgust. 'Call yourself an Imperial soldier?' he asked, shaking his head. 'Curse you, but they did a proper job on you, no mistake – not that it'll make much difference in the long run.' Marger was talking too much, hiding some nervousness.
'And… and you?' Osgan got out. 'How are they treating you? What's it like as a professional betrayer?'
'In the Rekef? Ask your friend Thalric, should you get the chance.' Marger shrugged easily, but it was clear that there was something else on his mind. 'We're going back tonight, you know.'
Osgan felt a moment of freezing horror. 'Back to the… to the…'
'To the ziggurat. We've had it watched all day, and nobody's come out. That means Thalric's still in there, skulking somewhere about. Maybe he's waiting for darkness too. If so, we'll be ready for him, because we're going in and we're taking you with us.'
'No!' Osgan choked. 'No, you mustn't! You don't understand what's in there!'
'So tell me.'
'It's… It's Him.'
Marger rolled his eyes. 'Don't make me slap you. Just tell me who's him now?'
'It's… I saw him… the man who… who killed the Emperor.' There, it was said, but Marger just shook his head.
'How long have they left that arm without tending it?' He scowled. 'You better not get so feverish that you stop making sense. Give me a plain answer and I'll get you some more wine. You'd like that, right?'
'I'm serious…' Osgan started, but saw the man's face turn sour. 'What do you want? What do you want from me?'
'Thalric, ideally. Then we can all get out of this backwater. We'll take you into the pit because Sulvec reckons if we start cutting pieces off you then Thalric might -might – come running. No guarantees, though, because he might not be such a sentimental bastard as all that. Unless you've got any better ideas?'
'Please,' Osgan whispered. 'Kill me here. Kill me now. Kill me slowly. Just don't take me back there. Not with Him.'
Marger frowned at him, clearly a little shaken. 'Nothing about this damn job makes sense,' he complained. 'Nothing about this damn city makes any sense. And that place.' He shuddered – not his customary shrug but a shiver that Osgan could well relate to. 'There's something not right about all of this, so give me answers. Right now, while it's just you and me. Don't make me call the others in here to cut it out of your hide a strip at a time.'
'What do you want to know?' Osgan asked him fearfully.
Marger took a moment to formulate the question, with a glance at the door that suggested he was not supposed to be conducting this solo interrogation. When he spoke again it took them in a new direction.
'What in the wastes has Thalric done?' he demanded.
'When? What?' Osgan replied weakly. His head was beginning to ache, and the entire room seemed to shift around him as the fever rolled back over him.
'Tell me what the pits is so important,' Marger insisted, his voice now a hushed whisper. He crouched beside Osgan's chair like a conspirator. 'Why do they want him dead so badly?'
'Ask your big Rekef man out there,' Osgan suggested. 'Surely he's told you.'
'Oh, they haven't even told him,' Marger said. 'But they've told him just how far they intend going just to have him dead. Do you think the Empire really cares two spits about Khanaphes or those Scorpion savages? Oh, maybe the Scorpions would make good Auxillians, but that's not the point. They're here just for Thalric, all of them. All the thousands of them currently attacking the bridge out there – they're here because the Empire wants Thalric dead.'
'I… don't understand,' stammered Osgan.
'No, I don't understand,' Marger told him, 'because it makes no cursed sense at all. Someone wants Major Thalric the Regent-General so very dead that they've sent Skater assassins and a Rekef team and engineers and leadshotters and a whole desert full of Scorpion-kinden, and they'll see forty thousand Beetles dead so long as his corpse lies somewhere amongst them. I swear they'll kill every living thing within miles of here just to make sure he's dead. That's what it's all for, because the Empire doesn't care a toss about this city. Someone very highly placed within the Empire wants Thalric dead, as dead as he can possibly be and – and this is apparently the important thing – every trace of how it happened buried under the rubble of a dead city so that nobody can ever pick up the pieces of what went on or work out who to blame. Now what in the wastes is going on?'
Osgan goggled at him. 'Why are you asking me?' was all he could say. 'It's nothing to do with me.'
'Because I hoped you would know,' said Marger, abruptly exhausted by the whole business. 'I really did. Because nobody is talking about it but we all know it's mad. Something's gone wrong back home, to have all this happening out here in the sticks. I mean, I don't dislike Thalric as a man. I really don't. But when orders come down from the bloody palace to see him dead by any means, including exterminating an entire people, then you jump to obey.'