Chapter 39 – The Screamer

Linton and Tess entered the internment level of the Arcanex. The clean, intersecting hallways were all but abandoned. Only a dull echo could be heard from the fighting above.

He prepared his mental defenses for the fight ahead, compiling information in tight packets to resist intrusion. It took longer than it should have. The second-hand pain he had taken into himself wouldn’t let up, had him jittery and distracted.

“I got rid of my dad’s bodyguards,” Tess said as they hurried through the halls, seemingly knowing exactly where they were going. “Got them all turned around on Floor 62.”

“They won’t report you missing to Couldess?” Linton asked.

“Trust me, they don’t want to be the ones to deliver him bad news right now. They’ll be looking for a while.”

He nodded. “Speaking of which, how is the old man?”

“Shaken,” Tess said. “I don’t think he ever expected you to make it this far.”

“What can I say? I like to surprise.”

Help… a pitiful voice pleaded within him. A girl. Weak. Hurting. Her name had been Josie.

Someone save me…

Josie died slowly. Blood loss. In utter agony, until her body was too far gone to feel it anymore. Countless cries joined hers, pestering Linton, picking at his sanity. Pleading, at first. Then accusing. Furious.

“I’m sorry…” Linton whispered. He screwed his eyes shut. “I tried.”

Everything distorted. He couldn’t tell which way was up anymore. Couldn’t breathe.

Save me! Josie screamed.

“I can’t,” he whimpered.

The specters pulled him deeper into a spiral of pain and guilt.

“Linton!” Tess shouted. “Linton, please wake up!”

Linton snapped back to reality and opened his eyes, the voices of the dead retreating. He was on his side, a growing puddle of drool and bile on the floor beneath him. Tess stood over him, a soft hand on his head.

“Are you alright, Linton?” she asked. “You had a seizure. Speaking nonsense the whole time.”

Supporting himself against the wall, Linton rose on unsteady feet. He spat bile and took a deep breath. “I’m okay. Just recovering from an old injury.”

Concern, worry, and doubt warred on Tess’s face. “Do you really think you can do this?”

Linton made a toothy grimace. “I know I can.” A lie just as much for his sake as hers.

Tess cast him a long, doubtful look, but eventually shook her head and walked on.

Linton followed, struggling at first to keep up, but finding his stride as he kept moving.

A faint sound grew as they made their way towards the back of the complex system of hallways and cells. Wailing in the distance, echoing off the walls.

The Screamer.

The prisoner no one was allowed to see.

It quickly became clear that this was exactly the person she was headed for. They stopped outside his cell. Constant, hoarse screams emanated from within.

Tess produced a flat key that unlocked the door.

“What’s in there?” Linton asked before she opened it.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Tess said hesitantly. “It’s… horrible. See for yourself.”

She opened the door and stepped inside. Linton followed, curious.

The room was empty, clean white walls with a bar of magelights running around the walls, leaving hardly any shadows at all.

A man was restrained in the middle of the room, suspended by a series of metal hooks attached to chains that stretched his sagging flesh.

No, Linton realized. Not a man. Not anymore.

The thing had no limbs, only four stumps that wriggled uselessly. His mouth had been partially stitched shut with its own flesh like morbid sutures, muffling the unholy noises that escaped his throat.

His manhood had been mutilated, reduced to tatters. The rest of his flesh was warped and scarred, carrying memories of years upon years of intense torture. Linton recognized the signs. This was thorough handiwork.

Someone really hated this man.

The only part of him that remained intact was his eyes, constantly darting between Linton and Tess. He wailed and spluttered, trying to make words, but Linton couldn’t decipher any of it.

“Codes guide me,” Linton said. “This guy is…”

“Yeah,” Tess said. “I don’t know why he’s here, but I know who did this to him.”

“Who?”

“My dad.”

“How’s that?”

Tess pointed to an elevator in the back of the room. “That goes straight to his office and nowhere else, bypassing all his security. I’ve never seen him come here, but… I managed to copy the key a while back.”

“I see.”

Linton approached the tortured man, reached up to his forehead. Perhaps he could glean some insight from the man’s memories.

“Come on,” Tess said, heading for the elevator. “We can come back for him later. There’s not much time.”

She was right. Linton pulled his hand away and followed the woman into the second elevator. She pressed the only button on the display. The man’s screams followed them as he jostled on his chains up until the doors closed.

Linton shook his head to try and put the tortured soul from his mind, focusing instead on the fight ahead. He had hoped to do this with a little more help.

Maybe this is how it was meant to be, he thought. Just me and him.

***

Cat sent several slapshots at the Archon of Public Compliance. A few of them put dents in his already damaged chassis, but most of them bounced off harmlessly.

“Hryna!” she called, making a beam of plasma. Storm raised one arm to block, and it sheared right through his hand, the dead appendage falling to the floor.

Storm went into a sprint. Cat used a Knuph rune to push herself back a few meters, but he was on top of her too fast. He drove his sharp nub of a wrist into her stomach, the metal sliding through her flesh.

She gasped, fighting to stay upright. He used her momentary weakness to punch her across the face, knocking her down.

“Weak!” Storm screeched. He kneed her under the chin. Warm blood filled her mouth as she bit down on her tongue. She fell onto her back, trying to raise her arms in some semblance of a defense. Storm brought his foot down, and Cat felt the bone in her left forearm snap as he pinned it against her chest.

“Go ahead, cry for help,” Storm jeered. “No one’s coming. You’re alone. You will die beneath my boot like the dog you are.”

Cat couldn’t say anything past the blood welling up in her mouth and dribbling over her chin.

“You never learn, do you?” Frost cried, leaping on the construct’s back. “You keep forgetting about my fine self!”

He drove his wand into a gap in Storm’s armor between his neck and shoulder. The implement threw off sparks in rainbow colors, and Storm stumbled back, roaring as his arm spasmed uncontrollably.

He backed hard into a wall and got the albino lubbard off him, but the wand remained embedded in his neck. Frost sank to the floor, grinning as Storm tried in vain to reach up and pull the wand out. He was quickly losing control of his limbs, arms shaking and jutting off at odd angles like some deranged circus performer.

Eventually, his legs gave out. He fell to his knees, the stone floor cracking beneath his immense weight.

Cat rolled around on her stomach, managed to get her hands and knees under her. She stood, spat blood as it continually filled her mouth, and staggered up to the archon.

She raised her hand in the shape of the Baku rune, priming a spell, then made a finger gun.

“Bang,” she said. Blood sprayed from her lips onto his ruined face.

An explosion tore a hole all the way through his armor. She fired off a second, this one bursting the core.

Storm fell over. Dead.

She allowed herself to sink back down into a sitting position, finger trained on the door in case truther reinforcements showed up.

It’s all on you now.

Good luck, brother.

***

Linton created a clone to hold an illusory gun to Tess’s head while he cast a cloaking spell to render himself invisible. He crouched in a corner of the elevator.

Anticipation grew with each floor that zipped past.

“Remember your promise,” Tess said. She faced forward, chin held high.

“Hmm? Sure.”

“I’m serious. I won’t help you if you plan to kill him.”

Linton kept quiet. He had lost his appetite for lies. There was no way this could end, other than with Couldess’s death.

The elevator dinged, stopping at its final destination.

The doors opened with a hydraulic hiss and Linton snuck into Couldess’s office, pistol brandished.

Couldess stood behind his large desk with a glass of whiskey in his hand. He didn’t seem to notice anyone was there at first, facing the large windows leading to the balcony in the back end of the room. Linton skirted around the side of the room and took great pains not to make any unnecessary noise.

Couldess looked just as he always had. Tall, confident, sharply dressed, with those piercing eyes that could make a god sweat bullets. But there was something else about him. He looked tired. Drawn. There were faint circles around his eyes, and his lips were pulled tight at the corners.

“Dad,” Tess said, drawing his attention.

Couldess spun around, and his eyes widened when he saw his daughter with a gun to her head.

Didn’t even sense me coming, Linton thought. He really is shaken.

“Don’t worry, honey,” he said. “I’ll keep you safe.” He focused his attention on Linton’s clone and straightened the collar of his suit. “Well, well. Granhorn. It’s been a minute since we had the chance to talk in person. Let go of my daughter so we can settle this like men.”

Linton got into position behind the minister and aimed his pistol with both hands, breathing slowly to keep the weapon steady. Nothing less than a clean headshot would do. Nagging voices pestered him. Their dying screams shook his calm. He pushed them down, adjusted his clammy grip.

Couldess stiffened.

Linton pulled the trigger.

Couldess leapt to the side, narrowly avoiding the trajectory of the bullet. He landed on one knee, threw up his hands, and the office became a blur of undulating, indistinct illusions, shapes and colors moving in dizzying patterns.

Linton emptied his entire magazine, but there was no indication that he had hit anything. Cursing, he let his cloak fall and dropped into a low crouch. He focused on shoring up his mental walls.

Sharp nails of pain drove into his skull from all sides. He dropped the pistol and put his hands on his head, hissing at the agony of it.

Couldess chipped away at his defenses, ripping away entire sections of carefully constructed, intentionally labyrinthian mental blocks. Desperate, Linton tried to launch a counterattack to throw off Couldess’s attempts, but it was over before it began. He was far outmatched.

Linton felt the minister rifle through his mind as an intense agony spread through every nerve in his body. He screamed, unable to hold it back. He shouldn’t have been able to feel pain. It shouldn’t have been possible. The bark should have counteracted it. And yet, Couldess had him flopping on his back like a fish out of water.

Linton became aware of a face at his side, Couldess crouching next to him. He frowned, watching Linton struggle uselessly.

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Couldess said. “One hardly anyone is privy to. Your friend, the construct, learned it before I killed him. Would you like to hear?”

Linton was unable to respond. He could only scream.

Couldess put his mouth right next to Linton’s ear. “I’m not just a psychomancer,” he whispered intimately. “I’m a vivimancer, too. The combination of those two makes torture so much more… visceral.” He leaned back, raised his voice to a normal conversational tone, as if he were chatting with a neighbor. “The pain you’re feeling is no illusion. It’s real. Every single bit of it.”

Couldess placed a finger on Linton’s chest, and an impossible agony bloomed throughout his whole torso. It was worse than being stabbed, worse than being shot. It was like his lungs were being filled with corrosive acid, eating through him from the inside out while making him feel it in every last bit of tissue.

“Dad, stop!” Tess cried. Linton’s clone having already shattered, she ran up to her father and pulled on his shoulder. “You’ve already beaten him!”

Couldess shoved her aside, causing her to stumble back against the desk. “Not now, dear,” he said. “I’m not done with him yet. He has to suffer for what he’s done to you.”

With agonizing slowness, he reached over and placed the palm of his hand on Linton’s forehead.

Through the fog, Linton managed a single thought. It’s time. Plan B.

He engaged his failsafe just as Couldess threw him into the recesses of his own mind.