The room beyond was a long and wide hall, raw pine columns holding up the roof and giving some semblance of dividing the space into a number of individual workstations. But the benches, tools and mobile fences for penning the next few animals in line were all piled haphazardly in the back corner, leaving the place was otherwise bare, except for the piles of sand that had crept in over time, a single wooden table, and two chairs in the centre of the room.

  Upon one of the chairs sat a man with a rough hessian sack over his head.

  “Aren’t prisoners usually tied up in some way?” I said.

  “Usually,” said Dassem. “But he ain’t usual. We’ve restrained him in a more appropriate way.”

  He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. I looked at the prisoner’s hands. Eight thick rods of black steel skewered the pads of each of the man’s fingers and his thumbs, forcing them to splay wide apart. There was another set of the rods between the middle knuckles, and a third down low between the webbing. Two much thicker bars had been inserted at the centre of each wrist and the palm of each hand, keeping them about thirty centimetres apart. The ends of those rods had been spliced and flattened in opposite directions on the outside of his hands, so that he could also not pull them further apart.

  The table was there so the man could gingerly rest his elbows on it, and avoid driving himself insane trying to rest without knocking his hands.

  “I’m happy to show you what you’re asking. But first, he says he wants to talk to you.”

  “He knew I was coming?” I said.

  “Somehow.”

  “What do you want me to say to him?”

  “Whatever he wants to hear. Get us something on the others, how to find them, how to get close to them. Come on, I’ll warm him up for you,”

  He stepped forward confidently. The hessian sack jerked in our direction, like a dog scenting us. It was an impressive feat that he wasn’t unconscious.

  But then, he could draw on reserves no average man could access.

  Dassem made sure to press the toe of her boots down on the man’s exposed feet as he leaned over the prisoner to whip the bag off his head. The prisoner blinked languidly, dazed not just because of the sudden light.

  He was once a well built man, but the squad’s ministrations had caused all his bones to push at the constraints of his skin. He was ill suited to the scruffy red beard that adorned his chin, probably because he wore it so poorly on account of never letting it grow before. He had that strangely poised dirtiness of a man who took incredible pride in his appearance, brushing and plucking and manicuring and massaging, and who had only recently been deprived of those routines.

  “Wakey wakey, Samael,” said Dassem. “I’ve got the Doctor here, the one you’ve been telling us all about. Doc, this is Samael Shint.”

  Shint ripped apart lips that had melted and fused together. I winced. Late stages of dehydration. That thought made my hands spasm. I squeezed them into tight fists and jammed them in the pockets of my duster, where they continued to vibrate like two angry hives.

  Shint tried to speak, but his voice only crackled. Dassem took a skin tied at his hip and tipped water into his mouth in careful bursts.

  “Good to… finally… meet you, Doctor,” said Shint when he could finally speak.

  My surprise must have shown on my face, because the man sneered.

  “Oh, please,” he said. “Were my hands… not thus entrapped, it would be the simplest of feats to make you cry all the blood out of your body drop by drop, and keep you alive and conscious throughout the process so that you can feel the Inevitable slice wafers off your life. Speaking your tongue fluently is one of the skills I’ve found least difficult to master.”

  Shint looked down his nose at Dassem.

  “Leave us,” he said.

  “I give the orders around here,” said Dassem.

  “And yet you receive no answers,” said Shint, sneering. “What I have to say is for this man only. So stay, if you wish, and continue to get nothing from me. Or leave, and perhaps your summoned pet will report back to you.”

  Dassem faced him for a moment. Then he straightened and turned to me.

  “If we see anything out of order, we’ll pull you straight away.”

  “Thank you, but I should be fine,” I said, repeating his gesture of wiggling my fingers.

  He frowned.

  “Shint is old enough that he knows how to make Signs with only his tongue,” he said.

  I swallowed. Despite my bravado, I was clearly out of my depth.

  Shint showed plenty of teeth as Dassem walked away.

  “Sit,” he said.

  I hesitated for a moment, to make sure I wasn’t being compelled. Then I sat opposite him. The chair was hard.

  Shint spent some time licking his lips and working his jaw back into order, though his eyes never left mine. I got the distinct impression he’d like to be drumming his fingers on the table. Finally he leaned forward, just slightly, to engage me.

  “Would you happen to have a rillo?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t hold out on me,” he said. “Offering me such a token would be a savvy way to start our bargaining. It would endear me to you”

  He had a regal accent, as if he had learned Trade directly from a Master Broker. They tended to embellish things a little too much.

  “Truly, I don’t smoke,” I said. “Bad for the lungs.”

  Shint laughed, but only because it was what he thought I would want him to do.

  “Concerned for your health?” he teased. “And yet you engage in combat and the rigours of campaign warfare, activities far more likely to be detrimental, on a much quicker schedule.”

  “Not if I do it well,” I said.

  “If that’s your assurance, why on earth are you here to join this murderous band? My brothers and sisters can set your lungs aflame, quite literally. I wonder: in those final moments, would you regret not indulging in the rush of tobacco?”

  I shrugged.

  “Perhaps less a fear of death, and more a love of life,” I said. “Smokes leave a stink on you, and I’d happily have less days without that than more with it.”

  “And people can smell that stain on you, can’t they? Such a thing would interfere with your work.”

  He watched me closely for a reaction. I said nothing, but even that seemed to satisfy him somehow.

  “You have seen a lot of death, haven’t you, Doctor? But not like this.”

  “No, not like this.”

  “I am to understand you don’t have * in your homelands?”

  I stayed silent. Shint rolled his shoulders. I was beginning to annoy him. I hadn’t yet decided whether that was useful, or an unwise gambit.

  “Oh, do not be such a bore, I beg you,” he said. “This is not a negotiation. We are merely conversing. And even if we were negotiating, you’re meant to make me feel like I am the one in control. Like I have the upper hand over you, in the hope that I become overconfident, and reveal too much. So, agree with me. There’s no harm in it. I already know the truth, so there is nothing I can use against you. So I’ll ask again: you have no * in your army, do you?”

  “I don’t know that word,” I said.

  Anger flared in Shint’s eyes. His nostrils flared.

  “Yes you do,” said Shint. “Vvytches. Sorcerers. Magi. Weavers of the fates. Old women brewing foul concoctions in their bathtubs in the woods. Men and women who can make Signs with their fingers and make impossible things happen.”

  “Fingers,” I said.

  A sneer threatened, twitching at the corner of his mouth before he reigned it in.

  “You must think yourselves so clever with that name,” said Shint. “Collectively we are the Hand of Azhur, so individually we must be his fingers. And there are eight of us, I suppose. Yes, very clever.”

  “How should I address you, then?”

  “If you want to butcher the pronunciation so that it fits your mouth, you can call us the Aravanay. The Literate.”

  Now it was my turn to smirk.

  “You think you’re the only ones that can read and write?”

  “Oh but we are,” he said, his nostrils flaring. He wanted to appear like he was humouring me, but he was really struggling to contain his contempt. “You think you make marks that communicate meaning, whereas you do nothing but scratch rough shapes in the dirt. You think you speak concepts about the world, the physical and the hidden. To us it is as the grunting of beasts.

  “We know something more. Azhur showed us the equations that make up the functioning of reality. And in knowing those signs, we can rewrite the universe as we see fit. Can your scrolls of decomposing wood, with their scratchings of smudged dust and piss, do as much?”

  “Some of them can,” I said. “Some rewrite the truth of history.”

  Shint nodded sagely.

  “As you planned to do here. Conquerors, who became liberators. The same story you tell across half the world.”

  Again he watched me for a reaction. This time I raised an eyebrow, figuring he could do nothing with this confirmation, bound as he was. And he was correct, I did need to give him some concessions to feel smug about. I had taken some classes in diplomacy as part of my education, and hated every minute of them, hated the feints and the pandering of it. It seemed to me that the practice of diplomacy only served to get in the way of anything that might have actual diplomatic consequences. But that hate didn’t get in the way of me being good at it.

  “Yes,” Shint cooed. “Your lords thought this continent was to be the final tile in the mosaic. Would it have finally satiated the beast, if it had been?”

  It was true that the Mercantile Empire thought they were about to secure the last patch of resources in the known world. It was most of the reason why the Burgher Princes had fed the war effort so fiercely, to be the ones to claim the last, untouched bounty in our history. But apparently this was the world known only to us

  “Let us not dwell on that too deeply, for it will not come to pass,” said Shint. “I underestimated them. Your new companions. Much is my folly. But the others won’t. If you were to face any of us in the open field, we would obliterate you from five hundred paces. You did not expect to encounter the disciples of Azhur. You could not even comprehend such beings, could you? Say I’m correct.”

  “You are,” I relented.

  “I am what?”

  We stared at one another. I grit my teeth. But if I wanted to get anything out of him, I would have to indulge him

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “You are correct.”

  Shint tittered. He managed to look indulged, despite the malnourishment, the beatings, and the shackles.

  “Then you realise your quest is an impossible one? I mean, look at you! Not a hero amongst you! No great men or women. And you really think you can cut off the fingers of a god, each of them alone like a sandal to the bug of a hundred of your greatest ever warriors!”

  I continued to nod.

  “And yet…” I said. Then I waited, letting the beginning hang like a fishing lure. Shint snapped it up eagerly, and I suppressed a smile. I leaned forward in my chair, as if I had a secret to share. Shint leaned forward too, enticed by what I might reveal.

  “... they got you,” I finished.

  Shint’s face contorted.

  “They did not deserve-!”

  He began to rise, then wrestled back control of himself, dropping heavily into his chair and flinging himself backwards and away from me in disgust. He looked around the shed, checking if anything had changed since he’d last been free of the hood. But being too prideful to engage with someone so disrespectful, so deliberately ignorant, so beneath him, quickly lost out to the pride of being able to justify himself. In the next moment he was forward again, desperate to reassert his superiority.

  “In a way, I helped them,” he said. “I dared them to do it, even. I was lazy with my defences. And they cheated, of course. Tricked their way into my presence. The girl, the one on the roof, broke my skull against the corner of a porcelain bath. I wasn’t wearing clothes when I came to, being dragged through the streets in front of everyone. Can you imagine? The sheer indecency.”

  “The girl on the roof?” I said. “She’s young.”

  Shint leered at me, and if I had been fooled by his aristocratic airs up until this point, he shredded that visage right in front of me now, indulgently.

  “Now, now, Doctor. We all have our proclivities. At least I do not overindulge in them. I don’t murder. Not for fun, anyway. Our father Azhur charged us with leading the Sunsuga along the Trail he foresaw for them. He saw you coming, of course. I have simply done what has been necessary to prevent you from interrupting our destiny.

  “The Sunsuga recognise this, and choose to worship me because of this, though I discourage them at every turn.”

  “Do you?”

  Shint could not wave a hand dismissively, so instead turned his cheek and rolled his eyes at the high beams of the shed.

  “I did at first,” he said. “Then I began to question myself. Am I not deserving of worship? Why, I have been given the power to manipulate the very fabric of the universe with a wriggle of my fingers. And what do I choose to do with this power? I help the common folk at every turn. I go out of my way to deliver my charges from their would-be conquerors. So why shouldn’t I indulge, just a little? Am I not entitled to it? Tell me, Doctor, in your estimation, why should I not be allowed to ask for some small things that give me pleasure? What could possibly be beyond my indulgence in return for saving the population of an entire continent?”

  “You could never ask for that,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “Come now Doctor. Otherwise why would I bother? I am happy to adhere to your valuation. Tell me how many sick I would have to heal, how many lives I would have to save from your slaughter, before I was allowed to bed just one little girl? A hundred, for one? A thousand?”

  I leapt from my chair, drawing Shint up with me.

  “Of course you would see it as an exchange!” I said.

  “How dare you lecture me, when your entire society is based on the passing of coin from one hand to another!” he replied.

  “That is commerce. This is -”

  “Do you not get paid for your healing services, Doctor?”

  “Not always.”

  “No,” said Shint. “I am not the one known as the Eye of Yingham, but I see through you just as easily. Tell me about the tally in your head, Doctor. How many patients, do you reckon, before the good blood completely replaces the bad stained upon your hands?”

  “Do not try to paint us as the same,” I said. “I have made my errors. But yours are girls, too young to consent.”

  “You have made errors, and I have made so much good in this world. So much that it would put your ledger to shame. The Sunsuga recognise that, and choose to reward me in the ways I most prefer.

  “So they do consent, Doctor. Far more than this land consents to you, coming here and raping it of its minerals, forcing your way of life upon it. Do not call me a tyrant, Doctor, for yours is a well oiled machine of tyranny, with a ruling council of tyrants masquerading as a meritocracy. Have you taken up this same quarrel with them?”

  I sat down heavily, allowing Shint to loom over me. Did I not acknowledge mere minutes ago that I despised this? Yet I had been lured right into it, thinking myself a fisherman throwing a line, all while my own boat spurred towards the rocks of a jagged coast.

  “We are all beholden to something, Doctor. Just as fish beholden to the swooping bird. It is the way of the world. Your people choose their contracts. Mine choose which god amongst my siblings to prostrate themselves before.”

  We sat in silence for a time, each of us breathing ourselves back to calm. Shint peeled back his lips and ran his tongue along the bottom of his teeth like he was trying to saw through it. When he saw me noticing, he snapped his mouth shut and glowered at me.

  “All this power, and yet I am beholden to the simple addictions of the flesh.”

  “All that power, and yet you’re a prisoner on the outside as well as in.”

  Shint sneered at me again. He couldn’t help it. He was too proud, even when he needed my help. But he was not an imbecile. So he raised his hands to eye level and sneered at me in the gap between the two middle bars of his shackles.

  “A real piece of work,” I said.

  “Even I am forced to admit as much,” he said. “It’s the bars through the middle that truly impress me. Had they lopped off all of my fingers, I could still have killed you with a mere clap. A brutish expression of power, it would pulverise your insides.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “It wouldn’t be particularly refined, so primitive it would hardly deserve to be called a Sign. I would prefer my full range of motion to be returned. So, can you undo it?”

  “No.”

  “Now, now, don’t be so hasty. If you do this for me, if you unleash my power, I can use it to give you anything you want.”

  “You can’t give me what I want most.”

  “You are not listening to me,” Shint drew each word out, seductively. “I said anything. And I truly mean anything! Try not to be limited by small dreams. My power knows no limits. Restore my ability to Sign once again, and I will show you things you couldn’t ever imagine. Then you can ask for those!”

  He thought I was trying to bargain with him, trying to drive up my price.

  “It’s you who isn’t listening,” I said. “You can’t grant me what I most desire, despite all your power.”

  “What makes you so certain?” said Shint.

  “What makes you?”

  Shint smiled genuinely at me now.

  “I know where she is.”

  I clenched internally, from my heart all the way down to my balls. For a moment I fell a hundred metres behind my own eyes, watching Shint at the end of the far tunnel. I struggled to swim back into my body from the void. His voice came through to me as a dull echo, but whispered straight into my mind, so that our conversation would pass by our eavesdroppers.

  “Do you miss her?”

  Like Dassem, he was asking questions he knew the answer to, and so I didn’t bother to answer.

  “I can’t undo what they’ve done to you,” I said.

  “Why do you resist?” said Shint. “Why do you trust in them, and not me? They don’t even know where to start, and they won’t know what to do even if they could find her.”

  He had defied my disbelief, tempting me with the single greatest incentive he could. But now he was the one asking the impossible of me. Perhaps the only thing that was preventing me from defecting was that I physically couldn’t. I had been studying the apparatus from up close all this time, growing more impressed and appalled in equal measure.

  “Those vices have been placed strategically, surgically,” I told him. “Each rod relies on another. Were I to disassemble any of them, you would be permanently paralysed, perhaps even from the elbow all the way down. The only quality left to you now is to amputate.”

  Shint looked deep into my eyes. When he found I was not trying to deceive him, he leaned back in his chair, immediately losing all interest in me. In everything.

  “Tell her to kill me, then,” he said. “For the price of returning my powers, I might have betrayed my brethren. But in chaining me so, she has destroyed her only bargaining chip. Any possible life I might live going forward is of no interest to me. I simply won’t bear the indignity. So kill me.”

  He had only endured because he thought one of us could be bought, or that one of us would slip up and give him a chance to escape. Because we were fallible, and he was not. No torture would break him, because he had already been hurt as much as he could be, the moment he was captured. He thought he was above me, above all of us. By quite a ways, too.

  “So be it,” I said.

  I stood. The chair scraped on the boards behind me. He did not try to call my bluff, for he knew it was not one. Dassem pulled the sheet metal aside as I approached, having been observing me.

  I stopped and turned once I was secure within the antechamber. Shint was still watching me, and I made the effort to match his stare until Dassem pulled the sheet of metal back across the hole, severing our connection. Only then did I fumble at my skin and gulp down some water.

  “Different beast when they’re a metre across from you, eh?” said Dassem.

  “Quite,” I said.

  The Captain had found herself a rillo, a thin smoke of tightly bound brown grasses from the border of the Hellish Realms, as long as her hand. It was a contemplative choice, as the tough strands burnt down at the slow rate of a candle wick.

  “Get anything?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Just wanted to see if I could be manipulated into helping him escape your clutches.”

  “And could you?”

  “Help him escape? He wasn’t much chop with a sword, and neither am I. We figured we wouldn’t make much ground against the likes of you lot.”

  She went back to staring at the ground.

  “Any suggestions on how we might turn the screws on him a little more?” said Dassem.

  “Doctors usually heal, not harm,” I said.

  “True,” said Dassem. “But to heal, you have to know how and where the body hurts. Isn’t that right?”

  That was truer than he knew. Or did he know? His singular eye was a lance, straight and sharp and unwavering, and again I wondered whether he knew more about my past than he was saying out loud.

  “You could pour salt water on the wounds,” I suggested.

  “Tried it already,” said Dassem. He rubbed at his jaw. “Ah well.”

  He nodded at the corner of the room. The shadows there moved, making me startle. I hadn’t sensed anyone there.

  A man stepped forward, tall and slim. He wore a duster, as did we all, but his was of black leather rather than brown, and had many intricate clasps to keep it closed across the breast. He must have been hot that way, but his face showed no signs of sweat.

  His hair was long, straight, and black, and hanging loose about his face, apart from the one braid the squad all wore. He had a short, pointed beard, a dagger at the end of his angular face.

  Had he been there the entire time during my first conversation with Dassem? The way he looked at me, he wanted me to think so.

  “Doc, meet Chuckles,” Dassem introduced the new man, who was just as stern as himself. “The weapon you’re so desperately seeking.”

  He turned to address Chuckles.

  “Work him over one final time, and if he doesn’t budge, or even if he does, do as he asks and gut the prick.”

  Chuckles nodded, drew a small knife from his sleeve. There was nothing special about the knife, as far as I could see. It was made of simple, silvered steel, as far as I could tell, unalloyed with any mystical ore found only on this continent. The blade was thin, a skinning knife, too little metal to hold any runes. Chuckles stepped towards the door.

  “Wait, that’s it?” I said.

  He stopped, annoyed at being delayed. He turned slowly to face me.

  “They’re still human,” he said. “They still bleed.”

  His eyes were so cold.

  “You’re telling me that in an empire of a million or more, with the most highly paid warriors and philosophers working on the problem of the Fingers, that no one thought to just stab them?”

  “They thought of it,” said Dassem. “They even did it successfully on a couple of occasions.”

  “Hardly successfully,” I said. “The Fingers always came back.”

  “What all those brilliant minds never figured out, which Chuckles did, was that the Fingers need their fingers to make their Signs,” said Dassem. “The more specific and demanding the intention, the more complex the Sign. So, yes, we’re going to stab him, with a plain knife. The only secret is he can’t escape death if he can’t make any Signs.”

  “And what if we don’t want to hack off their hands, or slit their throats, to take away their power?”

  “There are other ways,” said Chuckles. “They’re just not for him.”

  He waited impatiently to see if I had any other questions. I waved him on, and Dassem moved aside the sheet metal for him.

  “Want to watch?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good call,” said Dassem, replacing the door.

  We stood uncomfortably. The Captain studied me with those blue eyes, hidden behind so many walls of ice that they appeared grey. She tried to lean back against the wall, flinched as the hot tin scalded her skin, then settled her spine against a joist that was thankfully free of exposed rivets.

  For a brief moment she closed those eyes, and without those hardened shields, dented so many times but never punctured, she looked just as war-worn as the rest of us.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” she sighed.

  “We’re all right,” I said. “Imperials still patrol far -”

  “Not the shed,” she said. “I meant the Empire. To this continent. Not like this anyway. We were arrogant. Didn’t do our research, didn’t send any spies or envoys to gather the intelligence required. The Burgher Princes thought we could just roll right over them, like the Corps have done so many other times.”

  “They couldn’t have been dissuaded,” I said.

  “Aye, but they could’ve been better prepared,” said Dassem.

  “Would that have changed anything?” I said.

  “Probably not,” said the Captain. “The only thing that matters is that we did come, and kicked the nest, pissed them right off. Now the Burgher Princes have pulled back the corps to Arradheim, and they’ll abandon even that soon enough. But the Fingers won’t let us simply retreat.”

  “Let them come,” Dassem growled. “Once on our shores, they’ll see how we properly make war. Entrenchments, fortresses, cavalry charges, consistent supply lines -”

  “All of which a single Finger could burn away in an instant with a few Signs,” I said. “Imagine if all seven of them came across at once. They could scour us from the land, like a farmer clearing weeds, and seed the Sunsuga there long after everything is safe.”

  “Which they will, when they see the riches we possess,” said the Captain. “It’s a wonder they haven’t come before.”

  Lush forest dogs, they called us. Incapable of handling the barren, arid conditions of the continent. It was a mark of pride for them, even though they would give it all up in an instant, as the Captain said.

  “I don’t think they knew we existed,” I said, thinking of what Shint had alluded to. “We were two beasts passing by one another in a dark forest. But they’ve got our scent now. So we need to stop them here, where our losses can remain restricted to Trenchers, instead of farmers and their children.”

  Dassem and the Captain swapped a look.

  “You were right,” said Dassem. “He gets it.”

  “Told you,” said the Captain.

  She licked thumb and forefinger, snuffed out the tip of the rillo, and stowed it carefully in her breast pocket. Then she pushed herself up from the wall, straight and sharp and strong once again.

  “Then that’s what we do,” she said.