Pain.

There’s a near-infinite variety of it. Most will do almost anything to avoid it. That’s its purpose, after all: to tell you ‘this thing that’s happening? It’s bad. You should really do something to make it stop.’

I’m convinced that, down deep, the thing that separates a true Evil Overlord from some garden variety sick bastard who strangled a puppy at a young age and got his first stiffie because of it, is that any Overlord worthy of the title has known pain, intimately, and they hate it as much as they respect it. They know its worth and its cost. They have taken its measure, and the measuring stick was their own person.

Without that kind of knowledge, you will never be able to wield it effectively, to… calibrate it.

Pain and suffering. Physical, mental, emotional. They are the sharpest tools at an Evil Overlord’s disposal, and because of it, they should be deployed like a surgeon’s knife, not a butcher’s cleaver. They are to be handled with the deference and respect – and, yes, fear – that they deserve.

‘But Gar,’ I hear you mewl, ‘how am I going to achieve Utter Domination if I don’t inflict pain and suffering on those who oppose me? Am I supposed to confront my enemies with flowers and backrubs?’

You’re saying this because you have missed my meaning. I never said you weren’t going to crush your enemies and see them suffer. I believe I have said quite the opposite on any number of occasions. But the threat of pain and suffering will keep your thralls in line far more effectively than daily displays of entrails or what have you. That’ll just make them become inured to it, or worse, prod them to take active measures to end your little pain parties.

If you’re getting your jollies off of daily torture in the public square, then the sheeple will eventually realize it’s better to try and overthrow you than wait passively for their turn. Dead is dead, after all, and if they go down fighting at least they won’t be shitting their pants daily, wondering if their lottery number is next.

Because that’s another kind of pain. And pain, as I have already explained, is there to tell you ‘this thing that’s happening? It’s bad. You should really do something to make it stop.’

Pull the rotten tooth. Rebel against and behead the sadistic dictator who drew and quartered your mom/uncle/first love.

Sometimes you have to cause yourself some extra pain, to make the pain stop. And sometimes you’ve had so much of pain that you go beyond it, and you can’t hear its message anymore. You become, if not invulnerable to, then at least heedless of consequence.

And then; and then.

And then you are truly dangerous.

I don’t pray, but if I did, I would thank pain in my prayers for making me who I am today. It was my single greatest teacher. But, like any diligent student, I absorbed its lesson and grew beyond it.

~ ~ ~

As I staggered drunkenly past the makeshift sally port of Catapult’s camp and into the no-man’s land in front of the bastion, part of me was expecting arrows or bolts to come whistling down from its walls to put some sharp metal into my soft bits. Honestly, just then, I didn’t really care. I had never had the shit beaten out of me so thoroughly, and anyway it was difficult for me to think, much less worry. A concussion was more than a possibility, as were broken ribs and fingers. I’d lost at least one tooth somewhere in the back, which I knew only because I’d choked on it; my whole mouth felt as if I’d been chewing on rocks and broken blades.

Arrows were something I had no control over and not enough mental muscle to fear. They’d fall or the wouldn’t, that was all.

They didn’t.

“Kid.” Hrazz’k sounded rough.

I grunted.

“Nasty stuff, salt. I can’t believe you freaks just put it in your food.”

“One man’s meat, blah blah etc.” I wasn’t really in a talking mood.

“Yeah, I suppose. Anyway, I owe you one. You didn’t have to rescue me.”

Actually, I did, but I didn’t tell it that. Instead, I said, “That’s good. Might have to call it in soon.”

I reached the bastion’s portcullis in no worse shape than I’d started my walk, which wasn’t saying much but at least I hadn’t become a pincushion. It was firmly closed, massive vertical and horizontal iron bands held together by equally massive iron studs at the joins.

Empire work, my mind informed me uselessly, and then just as uselessly wondered if it had been transported here, or assembled on site.

It took me a while to realize there was someone on the other side of the portcullis.

He was a small man, his head reaching no higher than my nose, and I am not particularly tall. Brown as a nut, with brutally short hair and not an ounce of fat on him. Wiry. In his late fifties or early sixties. His face was all planes and angles and his eyes looked mild until you noticed their weird, glittering quality.

Something told me, unequivocally, that this man was stone cold mad.

“You’re not one of mine,” he said, his tone neutral.

“You must be Titus,” I said through split lips.

“Are you here to kill me?” he asked with faint curiosity and zero fear.

“Catapult would like me to try,” I mumbled.

“Catapult?” he cocked his head slightly.

It took me a while to remember her real name. “Grim.”

“Ah. She made me curious about you. Which was her aim, I suppose. She’s clever. Shame she’s a girl.”

He was starting to go in and out of my vision. The whole world was, actually. Blackness was creeping in at the edges. I put a hand on the portcullis for support.

“I tried to kill her. I failed.”

“Obviously.”

“If you don’t let me in, she’ll definitely end me. I won’t be able to get away.”

“That seems to be a fair assessment of the conditions that obtain, yes. I have my own problems.”

“If you let me in, I can be useful.”

“Forgive me if I am dubious. And losing interest.”

“I can fight. And if I can get away from this null space, I can do more.”

“My interest returns, and my curiosity is reinforced.”

“I’m a pyromancer.”

“Theoretically useful. If we weren’t mewed up. Definitely interesting.”

“You. You could make a break. For.” It was no good. The darkness at the edges of my vision was rapidly closing in on the rest of it. My knees buckled. I slid down the portcullis, more out of the world than in it.

“Raster, give the gate a double turn,” I heard the old man say. “At the very least he’s got some meat on him, and Hawley’s almost used up. We’ll be down to marrow soup tomorrow.”

Then I knew nothing more.

* * *

I’ve no idea how long I was unconscious. When I woke, it was to a lightless cell. I was thirsty and disoriented, and in endless pain. I tried to sit up and instantly regretted it; broken ribs ground against themselves, nearly sending me back down into the depths. I waited for the agony to recede a little, then explored with my hands, the broken fingers of the left protesting strongly. Bare flagstone. I quested farther, and discovered that I had been chained to the floor, wrists and ankles. I inhaled, slow and deep, which also upset my ribs, and smelled nothing but dusty stone and my own less-than-fragrant self.

I searched my person as best I could. Nothing missing except the book and the ax, not that I’d been carrying much. A few coins and an interesting-looking pebble. Not the most useful things, to break out of a lightless cell.

The blood on my face had had time to dry, which told me at least that hours had passed, if not more.

Everything hurt. That was all I really knew. I slept again, despite it and the thirst. When I woke once more, after minutes or hours, nothing had changed. This time I listened, since it was the only sense I had that was passive and useful and didn’t cause me agony.

Somewhere, faint and far away, possibly above me, I could hear small signs of life. The suggestion of a voice. A barely perceptible thud.

Somewhere, faint and far away, definitely below me, a long slow something that I could not name, at first. But over long hours, I discovered it had a rhythm, imperceptible to anyone without hours to lie still and listen without much by way of distraction.

It was a heartbeat.

The lub-dub beat stretched out over fifty-seven slow breaths. I counted, because what else did I have to do? Anything to take my mind away from the aftereffects of my mauling, and my thirst.

I slowly realized there was no way I was hearing that heartbeat with my ears alone. Null space or not, there was something fucky going on in the bastion, which I would have given exactly zero shits about and even less attention to, were it not the only thing I had to occupy my mind with. Besides suffering, of course.

With my broken ribs, I could barely do more than wheeze much less shout, so I didn’t waste any effort shouting for jailers who wouldn’t come, or if they did would just beat me quiet. I didn’t think I could survive another stomping. But I did call out, silently, for Hrazz’k. I’d never really tested how close it had to be to hear me and respond, but I did know our connection was more mental than physical, so I held out hope that it was close enough to pick up my thoughts. That hope went away pretty quickly when I got no response.

It wasn’t that the demon could do much for me – or rather, it might be able to, if the plan I’d hatched in Catapult’s tent, suitably altered to reflect my current situation, worked. It was a big if, though, since it depended on the kindness of a demon. Which, well. You’d have to be desperate to put any weight on that thin reed.

I was pretty desperate.

It turned out to be a non-issue, since Hrazz’k never answered my mental hails. Either it couldn’t or wouldn’t, and there was fuck-all I could do about it.

Titus came eventually.

* * *

I don’t really want to talk much about the next couple of days. It isn’t that I’m particularly squeamish or embarrassed – I’ve made no secret that this is an unvarnished memoir. Just take the following advice: There’s no point trying to be brave during torture.

Your tormentor isn’t going to suddenly be moved by the ferocity of your will, have an attack of conscience, and release you with an apology, so you might as well go on and scream and cry and piss your pants, honestly. I did. You can also beg for mercy and offer them anything they want just to stop, which I also did. It didn’t work for me, but you never know. The chances are slim, but what have you got to lose?

No, I won’t go into detail about what I went through. It’s my memoir, after all, and if you don’t like it then you can go and get yourself tortured and write about it in exacting detail. If your fingers can still hold a pen.

Titus was deeply insane, and caused me great agony for no particular purpose that I could fathom. To recount all the awful things he did to me down in the dark would serve no useful purpose for the reader. Unless the reader gets his or her jollies from reading about the degradation and torture of others, to which I will only say that this isn’t that kind of book, so go fuck yourself, honestly.

Titus came to me a half-dozen times. He inflicted great pain on me, the kind of pain you don’t forget, and then left. Until the next time. He had the kind of knowledge about how the human body is put together, where the weak and vulnerable bits are, that could only come from a thorough study of the subject.

At no point during the torture did he speak, which was maddening. Only when he was finished with each session, just before he left, would he say anything. It was always the same thing.

“You are nothing.”

Pain was Titus’s only purpose. He wasn’t torturing me for information or confession or any of the other normal reasons. It was pure, psychotic cruelty, and it almost broke me.

Almost.

If he’d had a few more days with me, I likely would have gone mad.

While I lay there between agony sessions, I reflected on those I had hated, or thought I had hated, before falling into Titus’s hands. Breen. Chortle. Catapult.

I realized how wan and childish my hatred of them had really been. I thought deeply about how it had seemed to me they’d controlled or directed my life, in one way or another. Breen with a stick and scriptures, Chortle with a dagger, and Catapult just by being more competent than me.

There’s a line in the Book of Light (yes, I know, but it’s a damned big book and just from a statistical point of view there are bound to be useful bits): Childhood ends.

That time with Titus is when my childhood truly ended, and I entered maturity.

Down there in the bastion’s dungeon, I came to accept the fact that I had allowed everything that had happened to me in my life, through weakness, ignorance, cowardice, or just plain dumbassery. I was where I was because I simply hadn’t been hard enough or calculating enough to avoid this fate.

I had been petty, both in my motivations and in my actions, and while an Evil Overlord can certainly get away with being petty in their actions, their motivations must be grand.

Jot it down.

There was no shame or embarrassment to my thoughts. It was just a sort of clarity that the pain brought. An epiphany, of sorts: If I survived, I would have to become something more than Gar the hapless dipshit from Thrudd, half-clever and vaguely amoral.

I’d have to be something far smarter than the goblin killer, savage but easily led.

I would have to become something that people like Titus bowed their fucking heads to, if they didn’t want it to get lopped off.

At some point a memory came to me. It was of Chortle, of all people. I’d asked her what she wanted as we stood on the Bridge of Sighs, and for a wonder she’d answered me with complete, open, non-hostile honesty.

“Everything,” she’d said, her ambition utterly unconstrained.

Down there in the dark, I decided that Chortle’s goal was good enough for me, too.

* * *

In time, the thirst began to claim more of my attention than all the broken bones. They say a person can live three days without water. Titus cut it pretty close.

When the cell door opened for the last time, the little flickering tallow candle he carried blinded me. I turned my head away and squeezed my eyes shut. Well, eye. The other one was still mostly swollen to uselessness.

“Still alive, then,” he said. “I had my doubts.”

“Water,” I croaked, my tongue a dry piece of leather.

“Do you know why you haven’t died yet?” he asked.

“Water?”

“You haven’t died because, like the rest of us in this keep, you have a fire inside you that cannot be put out. Betrayed, abandoned, faced with the insuperable, still you draw breath. Live or die. This was your test. You are worthy of what comes next, and I rejoice. Now it is up to you to climb.”

He unlocked my wrists and ankles. I heard him leave, taking the candle with him. I did not hear him close the door. I turned my head and saw the light retreating in the hallway beyond my cell.

“Water,” I breathed, and endured the bright, brutal pain that getting from my back to my belly lit across my ribcage. Then, after I had panted and shuddered my way back from the worst of the agony, I began to crawl.

I don’t know how long the hallway was. I don’t know how many stairs I crawled up. There’s no measuring these things; distance isn’t the correct unit of measurement and I’ve never yet seen a scale of pain that did more than mocked with its approximations. You could tally the distance I traveled by the number of screams, sobs and groans, and it would be more accurate than feet, inches, yards. But I didn’t count those, either.

Eventually there were no more stairs. Instead, an expanse of mottled black and gray granite came into view, clean and dully gleaming. I looked up, with difficulty, and saw that I was in what must have been the inner bailey.

The room wasn’t very large, but the ceiling was higher than it had any right to be. And the windows, though really more arrow slits than anything, had stained glass in them. Then I noticed the pews, three on each side.

The chamber was fitted out as a kirk of the Light.

Across the room, I saw Titus standing in front of the altar. He was wearing a father’s robes. There were three other men sitting in the pews. They were praying, paying me no mind. Titus, on the other hand, was staring at me, and though his face was passive, his eyes glittered even more feverishly than when I first met him.

I had no clue what the fuck was going on. I also didn’t give a shit. All I cared about was slaking my thirst before I literally died.

Titus had other priorities.

“Water,” I croaked, and kept crawling towards the altar, because I could see the customary silver chalice sitting atop it, next to the Book of the Light and, for some reason, the book that held Hrazz’k.

That definitely shouldn’t be there, a little corner of my mind observed. But the far bigger portion was focused on the chalice, which should be full to the brim, unless service had already ended.

When I got close enough, Titus put a booted foot on my shoulder and pressed me down to the floor.

“Water, damn you,” I croaked.

“Only the light has the power to damn. The thirst that torments you is nothing more than the withdrawal of its grace.”

“It’s lack of water,” I mumbled to the floor. I don’t think he heard me, though.

“The light tries you, as it tries all of us.” He took his foot off of me and squatted down.

“Look at me.”

With difficulty I raised my head. I saw that I had been mistaken about what he was wearing. They weren’t the robes of a father. They were the robes of an inquisitor; the golden rays bordered with crimson.

“Why are you playing dress-up?” I asked.

“Am I?”

“You’re a bandit chief. A petty overlord.”

“Am I indeed? Well, I suppose you’d have no way to know otherwise. My brethren and I,” and here he nodded to the other men in the pews, out of my sight, “have endeavored to keep up that appearance. Would you like to know why?”

“If I say yes will you give me some water?”

“If you say no you certainly won’t get any.”

“Tell me all about it then, you sick fuck.”

“Have you heard the heartbeat, down in the depths? Of course you have, demon-touched as you are. An ancient evil was chained here, an age and more ago. Chained, caged, imprisoned in a space dead to magic. But not destroyed. It was beyond the powers of those who set against it, though their works, shattered as they are, still dwarf any man has made in these lesser times. We are the watchers, that’s all, set here to ensure no one is foolish enough to try to wake what lies beneath.”

“I don’t care,” I said, because anything less than the truth was beyond me. But Titus didn’t seem to hear me. He was going to say what he was going to say to his captive audience – which, I should caution, is simply bad form for any Dark Lord to do. It’s petty, and it gives your enemy a chance to keep breathing when they should be about the business of dying.

“Do you know why we haven’t surrendered to the mob outside?”

“Pretty sure you’re going to tell me.”

“We swore an oath, we four, to defend this place to our last breath, whatever it cost us. First it cost us our dignity – in order to survive this godforsaken land, we had to bring it to heel. We could only do that by recruiting the lightless scum that inhabits it.

“Now our oath costs us our humanity.”

“Did it cost you your water? Is that why you’re not giving me any?”

Titus smiled. Well, grimaced. “Brother Gorith, would you put this demonist in a pew and feed him some water?”

One of the men behind me muttered a ‘yes grand inquisitor’ and lifted me up under the shoulders and set me in a pew. The pain was so intense I nearly fainted. He pulled a leather flask from his belt and unstoppered it. I reached for it and he slapped my hands away.

“Open your mouth. Drink too much at once and you’re like to vomit it back up.”

He gave me tiny splashes. I wanted to tear the flask from his hands and guzzle it, but that was physically impossible. It was all I could do not to beg for more when he’d emptied the contents into me. I did ask for more, mind you, but I didn’t beg.

“I believe you have had sufficient to pay attention, now,” Titus replied for brother Gorith. He sat down next to me on the pew.

“None of this has anything to do with me,” I told him. “I don’t care.”

“You may not care, but what I am telling you has much to do with you. It has everything to do with you. You see, we have done terrible things to survive, breaking the laws of the Light and humanity itself to honor our vows. We have caused murder and destruction. We have stolen, cheated, lied. We have caused untold suffering, all to keep this bastion secure and the great evil safely imprisoned.

“We are besieged. There is no more food. There has not been for weeks. And still we stand.”

“I don’t – what is it you want, Titus? Do you want me to clap?”

“We have consumed the flesh of men, demonist, in order to survive and keep our vows. We have fallen as low as you, according to the book of the Light.”

I knew what he was talking about. How could I not, having copied out the passage at least a half-dozen times? At the very bottom of the barrel of sinners were those who consorted with demons, those who preached against the faith – and those who ate the flesh of men.

Titus and his inner circle, for all that they were apparently inquisitors of the Light, were cannibals, and thus doomed to suffer an eternity of torment. The Light would never shine on them. There was no reprieve, and no excuse was acceptable.

Thank fuck I didn’t believe in any of that.

“Still not seeing how that has to do with me,” I said.

“You are our salvation, demonist.”

“Eh?”

“The Light sent you to us. You are the chance we have been given to atone for our sins.”

“There’s no atoning for cannibalism. You know that, if you’re really an inquisitor.”

“When has a child of the Light been forced to commit the most heinous sin in service of the faith? Never before now, surely. And so the Light has sent you to us, that we can have that sin burned from our souls, leaving us cleansed.” He stood up and pointed to Hrazz’k.

“There, brethren, is a demon, who shall be purged by water.”

“All praise the Light,” they murmured.

He pointed to me. “There, brethren, is the blackened soul it treats with, and he shall be purged by fire.”

“The Light burns away the darkest shadow,” they replied.

“And when it is finished, our sins will be forgiven and we shall be embraced by the Light once more.”

“Merciful is the Light,” the three sighed as one.

For the first time since its groan in Catapult’s tent, I heard Hrazz’k speak in my mind.

“Ah, shit. This is not good, kid.”