Chapter 5 - Part 1

CHAPTER FIVE – GOOD-BYES
11th of Olarune, 993 Y.K., in the Cyran city of Eston

Pienna sat in the one chair that had padding. The bunker had been built for utilitarian function, not comfort. There were three other chairs, and a fold-up table. A covered water pitcher and three cups stood untouched on one chair.

There were two doors in the room. Each had been carved from a single piece of stone and enchanted in a joint effort by House Cannith and House Kundarak. The one ahead of her led to the three stories of stairs up to ground level. The one to her left held the room that she had only glimpsed once. She had seen a steel table that had ankle straps, wrist straps, and blood gutters. Shrieks of pain could now be heard, muffled by the thick door.

Click-clack. The constructs shifted position again, like clockwork. There were three of them, things with spindly spider legs, crystal eyes on stalks, and body-mounted crossbows that glowed with a mean light. She had glanced at the runes on the bolts. Any wound caused by them would not close naturally. She was beginning to understand the Ashbound sect.

All was quiet behind the stone door, and then another howl. She wanted to throw up. The man named De’Breeves was in there, because of her. Because of her investigations. Pienna had started out following the teachings of her sect, to protect the natural world from the unnatural, and had ended up violating the teachings of her sect, albeit not directly. The Gatekeepers condemned pain for pain’s sake, marking it as a trait of the buried abominations.

Du’Bray did not see it as such. He was in there now with several other men, including armored one from the meeting. Why Du’Bray trusted the armored one she did not know, and she did not want to. The inner machinations of the House, her House no longer, she rejected it, revolted her.

Four soldiers were atop the stairwell. While she was usually alone with the machines, one of the human guards would knock on the door and inquire of her welfare every ten minutes or so. Du’Bray told them that if a drop of her blood was spilled they would be sent to Xen’drik with nothing more than socks and a putty knife, so they were naturally solicitous.

De’Breeves screamed again.

She got up and paced. The constructs ignored her, except to get out of her way. These were unthinking machines, easily programmed. Du’Bray had made them himself, they were not on the market. Not yet anyway.

She moved away from the door, ignoring the whispers of sobs and demanding questions. She had honed her hearing after years in the forest, where an enemy could be behind any tree, and the ability to understand the slightest sound could mean life or death. Now she hated it, wishing the stone door would muffle even more.

A knock came at the door. It was five minutes early. She looked up, eyes narrowing. If this was an attack, she was prepared.

The door opened and the soldiers were familiar. This time they had a prisoner. An unarmored warforged with its arms tied behind its back by heavy rope.

“Iron Orphan!” she said with happiness, standing up to greet him.

A Cannith guard stepped in front of her. “Ma’am, this unit is malfunctioning in a dangerous way. He has attacked one guard and threatened the life of another. I think you need to keep your distance.”

“Hello, Pienna,” the warforged said to her in a bitter tone. “I’m very dangerous, apparently.”

“What’s this about?” the druidess demanded.

“Ma’am, please don’t ask me to reveal –”

She spoke a word of nature’s power and touched the chain mail that he wore beneath the Cannith tabard. The shiny new armor instantly changed color to a deep rust-red, pitting, corroding, and shriveling to nothing. It fell away from him, smashing to powder on the floor. He gaped, surprised to find himself in only pants and an undertunic.

“Young man,” she said carefully. “If I wanted to, that could have been your skin and not your armor. Understand?” He nodded, careful to say nothing. “Now, what is this all about?”

“He was found with extensive wounds and two dead assassins on the other side of the bars from his cell. They were known criminals from Metrol but were using scrolls and a magical crossbow. How he defeated them through the bars is unknown, as he will not answer questions and he threatened my lieutenant with violence. Ma’am.” The soldier had finally stopped to breathe.

“I know why Du’Bray summoned him,” Pienna told the unarmored man. “I will wait with him until my cousin is ready. You fellows go back up the stairs to ground level.”

“But Ma’am my orders are…” He stopped as she raised one hand which had begun to glow. “Yes Ma’am!” He and his companions quickly exited, closing the stone door with a slam.

She laughed. “Glad to see they have energy. Here let me help you with your…bindings.” The Iron Orphan had already slithered out of them. “Nicely done,” she complimented him.

He ignored her, staring at the wall behind her.

Click-clack. The constructs had moved again.

“Orphan?” she asked, reaching up to touch his face. He jerked back. “Don’t be afraid, it’s me, Pienna.”

“I know who you are,” he said, taking a step back. “But I can’t trust you anymore.”

“What? Why?”

“I can’t trust any of you, Pienna. I’m sure that some of you may be nice, but I don’t care.”

“Any of ‘you?’ Who is you?”

“Fleshed ones,” he said. “Breathers.”

“Orphan…” she said, surprised at the ugliness in his tone. Only yesterday he had been excited about butterflies.

“I said don’t touch me!”

The constructs whirled and pointed crossbows at him. He stared, waiting. She waited. After a minute or so the crossbows were lowered.

“Fine, I won’t touch you,” she told him. “But I would like to speak to you.”

“I don’t want to speak to you,” he told her in a surly voice. “I don’t want to speak to any of you!”

“Don’t be childish!” she said. Then she stopped, realizing what she said. “I – I’m sorry. I should not have snapped at you. What I mean to say is that I hope you will talk to me. I enjoy talking to you.”

“You’ve been trying to find out my weaknesses,” he said suspiciously. “Pretending to be my friend!”

“I am your friend.”

“We can’t be friends, you’re a regular living being and I’m property.”

She sighed. “We were being friends before, what changed?”

“What changed?” he exclaimed, his voice raising. The crossbows came up again but he did not seem to care. “They tried to kill me, Pienna! For no reason! They didn’t even know who had paid them!”

“Was I the one who paid them?”

“I don’t think you were, but I don’t know!” he told her. He gripped his fingers together and pumped his arms in frustration. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!” His eyelids were blinking rapidly.

“Orphan,” she said gently. “Think. And calm down so these constructs don’t get the impression that you are attacking me.” He stopped pumping his arms. “Calm yourself. Treat this as yet another internal battle and force your emotions into order, into law. Then ask yourself the following questions. If I could cast a spell that made that man’s armor vanish, what would it do to you? Even without metal plating, there’s still enough metal within you to make your body unravel.”

“I would die,” he realized.

“Yes,” she continued. “So I have the means to kill you, should I choose to do so. And I have the means to escape cleanly, by a spell that makes the sky a solid ground for me to run on, or by turning myself into an eagle. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, he said slowly. “You showed me how you can take animal form just yesterday.”

“And I have been around you how many times? And how many of those times alone, with no witnesses?”

He calmed down at last. “Yes, I see. If it was you then you could have killed me whenever you wanted. You would not have hired mercenaries.”

“That’s right,” she whispered. She stepped forward and hugged him. “I have grown quite fond of you, Iron Orphan. I am not your enemy.”

He seemed confused by the hug, but after a few seconds of puzzlement he put his own arms around her, but lightly. “I am sorry, Pienna, I should have figured it out.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, breaking her embrace to stand on her tiptoes and give him a kiss on his metal cheek. This confused him even more. “Reading about an attack on your life is very different than having it happen to you. You’re entitled to be a little surly.”

He sighed. “I want to believe in the goodness in people, Pienna,” he said. “That higher truth power, it is there, but I wonder why it allows so much evil to go on.”

“No one really knows that,” she told him.

“Perhaps I am foolish to care what it thinks, since it does not care about what I think,” he said, a bitter edge still tainting his voice.

“Are you so sure of that?” she asked. “You survived, didn’t you? An amazing feat, that.”

“I had – um, I – yes,” he stammered.

Her eyes narrowed. The Iron Orphan was bright and insightful, but he would never be smooth. Someone had helped him, and he did not want to tell her about it. Instinct told her not to press the issue.

“I have discovered more about you,” she told him.

His head whipped towards the other door. “There is a man screaming in there,” he said in horror. “But he yells so weakly, so hoarsely.”

She winced. She had forgotten about De’Breeves. “He is being tortured,” she explained.

“What does that mean?” he asked her.

“You didn’t finish your dictionary?” she asked, sickened that she had to tell him.

“No, I kept getting distracted by my other books,” he answered. “You look like you don’t want to tell me.”

“Torture,” she said slowly. “It means making someone feel a lot of pain for a long time until they tell you things they don’t want to tell you, just to make the pain go away.”

He stared at her, and then the door. She could feel the last of his innocence shattering. “That is wrong,” he said. The tone in his voice made the spidery constructs with the crossbows tense again.

“Your programming is unique,” she told him.

“What does that have to do with it?”

“You haven’t talked to other warforged much, so you don’t know that they came out of the forge a much blanker slate than you. You were programmed with some very special knowledge and skills. It isn’t done often, and it is very expensive.”

“I don’t understand why that means a man must be put into long pain.”

“It was done without authorization,” she explained. “From all the evidence, someone in Cannith made you to be a secret killer.”

“Like the men who came after me,” he said, disgust in his voice.

“Yes,” she said. “And likely those men came after you to silence you, because now your secret programming is known.”

“So,” he said slowly. “The man who was behind the attack on me is the man experiencing long pain?”

“We suspect that they are one and the same.”

Another howl of anguish came from behind the stone door.

“Good,” he said finally.

“What?” She was shocked at his coldness.

“Good. Now I don’t have to be afraid of him.” She could tell he meant it.

“A moment ago you said otherwise.”

“I changed my mind,” the Orphan snapped “He’s a threat to me! I’ll do what I have to do to survive.”

“Would you choose to give him long pain?” she asked quietly.

He thought about it. “No,” he said finally. “That would be unnecessary. I would just kill him.”

“Then it would be wrong for you to give him long pain?”

“Yes…”

“Then is it right for you to be happy that someone else is doing it to him?”

His mouth opened and then closed. “I suppose not,” he finally said.

A scream was suddenly cut off, and shouts followed it. She caught her cousin’s voice demanding that someone get ‘his’ mouth open.

Then it was quiet.

The door slid open and Du’Bray was across from her, wearing his expensive robe. De’Breeves stood next to him, holding a clipboard and a pen. Two attendants were mopping up blood.

A naked man with several burns, cuts, and bruises all over his body lay dead on the table, a bubbling foam coming out of his mouth. It was the man who had worn armor to the towertop meeting.

“He had gone into the schema setting area of the forge while De’Breeves was walking around the factory floor,” Du’Bray told her. “There were dozens of witnesses. And a certain chemical was found on his gloves, one he should not be accessing. And he killed the man I had watching him.” One of the attendants was now sponging the man’s chest and face. “When I finally took the bit from between his mouth to hear his confession – it was there so that he wouldn’t accidentally or purposefully bite his tongue off – he bit down on a hollow tooth with some strong poison. Dead instantly.” The attendants undid the wrist and ankle straps and hauled the man’s body off, past Pienna and Iron Orphan and up the stairs.

“Bray,” she said. “You really don’t need to –”

“Why isn’t he in restraints?” Du’Bray asked, stepping into the doorway to examine the warforged.

“I took them off of him,” she said quickly, before Orphan could admit to slipping out of them. “They aren’t necessary.”

“You sent away the guards as well?” he asked, noting the rust on the floor.

“Yes.” She steeled herself for his temper.

“Alright,” Du’Bray said calmly. “Bring the warforged on in then.”

Du’Bray stepped back, the interrogation table empty and available behind him.