Fathoms of Forgiveness (Sacred Breath, Book 2) (25 page)

When Visola woke up again, she was no longer in her hospital room bed. Gone were the white tiled ceilings; they were replaced by the darkness of an abandoned mineshaft. She could feel that her fever had departed, and that her health had vastly improved. She could also feel that there were iron shackles around her wrists and ankles. When she pulled on them, the chains jangled against each other discordantly. Somehow, this was still far more pleasant than finding plastic tubes in her nose.

“You’ll have to forgive the accommodations,” said a familiar masculine voice echoing off the cave walls.  “My employer was becoming impatient, and there is much we need to learn from you.”

Turning her face away from the source of the voice, her tongue felt for the security of the tiny rubber capsule concealed in her mouth. Even without the pill, she knew that she would never reveal anything about Adlivun, but it did give her comfort.

“You remember how this works, don’t you?” he asked.

Visola wondered why he was being so condescending. She was growing impatient. She almost longed for the mental challenge that torture presented. It had been a good while since she had been on the receiving end. Was this karma? She was curious to learn what karma felt like.

“We’re going to begin with the routine procedure of correcting your attitude,” he told her. “You will need to answer a few simple questions, truthfully and respectfully. Are you ready?”

She did not respond. Correcting her attitude? Let him try. She did not even look at him—she knew she could bear any amount of pain, but she would prefer not to witness the emptiness and cruelty on his face.

“I asked if you were ready.”

She felt cold metal digging roughly into her neck, followed by a powerful jolt of electricity. It caused her body to convulse, as sharp searing pins and needles ripped through her nerves. Still she did not speak.

“It’s time for you to begin cooperating. Let’s begin with an easy one. Say my name.”

Visola could not believe that he was going to do this to her. He was going to go through every step, just as he would have done to any common prisoner. Did Vachlan not remember teaching her everything he knew about torture? Did he seriously think that he could convince her to adjust her attitude? She would not break. She would not speak. He might as well get right to the point, and get to the seriously maiming and disfiguring bits.

When the next burst of voltage was administered, Visola felt all of her muscles instantly contract and become rigid. It felt like there were fish hooks being driven into her entire body, and she was being dangled from them. This painful tension lasted until the electricity was removed and her muscles relaxed. The saxitoxin pill was tucked away in the corner of her mouth where she would not accidentally bite down on it. She did, however, wish that she had a piece of leather to bite into. It should have been common courtesy for Vachlan to provide one.

“Follow my instructions, Visola. I asked you to say my name.”

When she refused to respond, he grabbed her and turned her to face him. Looking into his eyes was much more tortuous than the electricity. She realized that the gun that he had used on her had effectively paralyzed her body, and her muscles all felt like jelly. This could be a problem. Visola had to accept that there was no escape. She was his prisoner, and she could not defeat him. She had not expected that she would be able to—she had only wanted to free her sister. Anything that happened to her now was meaningless. It was still a difficult concept to accept for one who thrived on fighting.

The natural thing to do was to steal a few pages from Elandria’s playbook. In fact, she would steal all the pages and write a few of her own. She would never speak to Vachlan again. Not with her voice, and not with her hands. She would withdraw into herself, and become unresponsive. She would not focus on denying him satisfaction—she would focus on self-preservation. She wondered if the two were one and the same.

“I asked you to say my name,” he repeated in a deathly whisper. When she did not respond, he grabbed her face and smiled at her. “Last chance, Viso. If you don’t be a good girl, you’ll never walk again.”

She tried to be expressionless, but a cold sweat was beginning to break out on her shoulders. Her pulse was beginning to race. She knew that he was completely serious. She closed her eyes, trying to escape the ghastly look on his face. Had he always been so cruel?
Yes,
part of her answered,
but never toward me.
She felt his fingers release her face, and she heard him shuffling about the room. There was the clinking of metal against metal.

“I am not the monster that the world thinks I am. Not really. I will give you one last chance, Viso—and to be fair, I will ask you a polite question. Polite, because I could ask you anything at all. You know that I could ask you to say my name for days until you cracked, but I respect you too much. I know you’re getting bored, so let’s get straight to the point.”

Vachlan paused, and Visola felt the fabric of her dress being slid up her thighs. She felt something cold against her knee. She wanted to open her eyes, but she had a feeling that seeing whatever he was doing would not help her situation.

“Why were you unfaithful to me?” he asked.

Her eyes shot open at this question. She stared at him in surprise, unable to keep the emotion from her face. She wanted to respond, and she wanted to tell him the truth, but it seemed pointless. He would never believe her. She observed the frightening fact that he was holding a
pickaxe
. He was polishing it with a white cloth, and he had apparently used the same cloth to clean her knee. He was going to smash her kneecap unless she answered.

“Answer the question, dear. If you ever want to walk again.” He finished disinfecting the pickaxe, and tossed the cloth aside. He positioned the pickaxe over her knee, and he began practicing his swing. “Why did you cheat on me?”

Visola gritted her teeth together, and stared up at the jagged rocks of the mineshaft. Her eyes narrowed. It did not seem to her like these were questions that interested the Clan of Zalcan. What would his employer say if he knew what Vachlan was doing on the company clock? She felt the metal weapon prodding her leg roughly.

“Visola! Why did you betray me?”

He was going to do it anyway. Whether she responded or not. If she told him the truth, if she told him that she had never been disloyal, he would think that she was saying it to save her legs. She knew that the pain from his lack of faith in her would hurt more than her busted kneecap would. It already did. He believed the worst of her and she could not change his mind. The impossible tragedy of the situation brought a small little smile to her face.

“Why are you smiling? Was it so much fun to hurt me? Answer me, Visola! Why?”

He had been hurt? This distressed her. She had never considered that he had been hurt. She could not look at him without feeling remorse and sadness for this situation which had been out of her control, so she turned away. She wished she could go back in time and find the moment that someone planted these lies in his head. Like Iago. It was a strange moment for
Othello
to pop into her head, but it occurred to her that Vachlan had been manipulated in the exact same way.

“Visola!” Vachlan roared. “Answer me! Why did you fuck Kyrosed Vellamo when you were married to me?”

She gritted her teeth together, silently waiting for the impact of his swing. She almost wanted him to stop these horrible accusations and hurry up with the mutilation. Then it came. Visola saw him swing the axe back over his head, and she instinctively tried to move away from the target location of the strike, but her legs were still too paralyzed from the electricity. She saw it happen as if it was in slow motion, and when the pickaxe smashed into her knee, the pain was blinding.

Visola barely managed to keep from crying out. Her breathing did quicken perceptibly as she gasped. Tears came to her eyes without her permission, and sweat began rolling down her forehead as she struggled with the pain. He was right. She would never walk again. Not that it mattered, because she did not foresee escaping his custody anytime soon. Would she be dragged around like a punching bag wherever he went? For how long would this torture last?

She moved her tongue over to touch the saxitoxin capsule, but she would have felt like a wimp if a smashed kneecap was all she could handle. Her breathing was already calming down, and she was already becoming used to the pain. She was a warrior; it was hardly the first time she had suffered a broken bone. Besides, it was only physical pain anyway.

Vachlan casually swung the axe back over his shoulder, and turned to leave the room.

“Next time, just answer the question,” he advised her calmly as he retreated.

Oh, he was good. She allowed her eyes to close, since sleep was the best painkiller she knew, and the only one to which she had access. Strange words randomly drifted through her mind, but she could not remember where she had heard them.
Go deeper; in order to survive, you must.
As long as she did not speak, she could maintain the upper hand.
Hope is shallow—you dip your toes in it all the time.
There was power and poise in silence. She would never be disgraced.

This was disgraceful. Vachlan was excellent at torture. Everyone always said he had a true gift. Visola was not surprised with his capacity to make her feel pain; she expected him to be impressively creative. What confused her was that he was not attacking her psychologically the way he normally plagued his victims. She knew what he was capable of—and while the pickaxe had been very characteristic of his usual style, (it was his signature to use interesting weapons) she could not help but wonder why he had taken it easy on her for weeks after that incident.

Her leg was in a brace, and she could not even attempt to move it without excruciating pain—but that was the normal state of a prisoner of war. Nothing was special about the fact that while she was almost starving, Vachlan was eating scrumptious meals a few feet away from her, and orating long monologues while he leisurely enjoyed his meals. He really was still fond of the theatre. Nothing was special about the fact that he waited until her stomach was growling loudly, and she felt faint from hunger before he dangled a spoonful of something delicious inches away from her lips, and asked for her to tell him what he needed to know before feeding her.

“Come on, Viso,” he would say, “you know that you’re going to lose all of your gorgeous muscles unless you have a bite to eat. So how about you tell me exactly how large Adlivun’s army is? Precise numbers only, please. No estimates.”

Hence, her muscles were shrinking. There were no mirrors in the grimy little mineshaft where she was kept, but she could see when she looked down at herself, that her bones were becoming more and more visible. This was frustrating. Her only comfort was that she had still managed to remain silent throughout these weeks of harassment.

What surprised Visola was that Vachlan had not attempted to rape her yet. Not that it would be an attempt, since she was shackled quite well, and probably weaker than she had been since the age of two or three. No, it was well within his ability, and she was surprised he had not taken advantage of the situation—what was stopping him from torturing her in that manner? Was he saving it for a special occasion, to really crush her spirit? She thought that it might. She thought that desecration of that one thing which had been so special between them might actually break her enough that she took the pill—but she almost wanted the chance to find out how strong she really was. She almost wanted more of a reason to hate him.

“A person’s sexuality is deeply connected with their sense of identity,”
Vachlan had said to her many years ago. This had been his reasoning for why it was always easy to break someone down emotionally by torturing them sexually; man or woman.

She considered this as he now slowly bent back her fingers to break them.
“There are more nerve endings in the hands and the face than in any other part of the body.”
He had told her this, as he had caressed her hands and kissed her face while making love to her.
“That’s why they are the most sensitive parts to torture with either pain or pleasure.”

 
Vachlan was an expert at multitasking. He was also an expert at focusing directly on one thing for long periods of time. There was no man like him on the planet, she thought to herself, as he broke another one of her fingers. She gritted her teeth, and watched. She watched as if from a distance. The more he tortured her, the more detached she felt from her body.

It seemed that torture was making her a spiritual woman. Harrowing near-death experiences often did that. Sometimes the effects were reversed, and sometimes they remained. She wondered what would be left of her after her husband was finished. He took another one of her fingers into his hands, and prepared to break it.

“Just speak, Visola, and I won’t break your finger,” he said gently. “All you have to do is answer my questions. That’s easy as apple pie, isn’t it?”

She wanted to smile at the phrase, but she could hardly remember how to move her frozen lips. She had worked so hard at remaining expressionless. She stared at the finger which he held, and she still felt a pang of fear inside of her. Why should she feel fear? Why should she care? Pain was not important. Did this really even matter? She had already broken her fingers herself when she had learned of what he had done to Corallyn. Being here meant that Sionna stayed in one piece. Having this happen to her was the price she paid for Sionna’s freedom. So she would pay it without complaint or fuss.

“Do you know how many of my men you killed on your little rampage into Zimovia?” he asked her quietly. “Three hundred and twenty four. How did you manage that?”

The number surprised her. She had not been keeping count. She was sure that at least half of that number were only paralyzed.
Adrenaline,
she thought to herself, although she would not allow herself to speak.
I knew my sister was at the end of those defenses.
Another, more foolish part of her being, the part that she had tried to kill, answered differently.
I wanted to see you,
she thought.
I knew you were waiting for me at the end of those warriors.
She felt a small rush of anger at herself for thinking this.

She was surprised when he released her finger. “Visola… why won’t you speak to me? I actually have a special present for you today.”

The soft singsong tone of his voice made her swallow the lump in her throat. That was his sickeningly sweet Destroyer-of-Kingdoms-voice. It was the voice that preceded ultimate agony. She weakly reminded herself that she had gone through the pain of childbirth. That had been Vachlan’s fault too. Surely nothing he could do would rival the pain of forcing his kid out of her. She shuddered at the memory. It occurred to her that she had never made him pay for that. She knew that it was her own fault. Everything was her fault.
I really should have known better than to marry someone nicknamed ‘The Destroyer of Kingdoms’ in the first place,
she told herself.
That was a real smart move, Viso.
She tried to move her hands for some reason, and had to fight back the urge to moan when sharp waves of pain overwhelmed her. Broken fingers were very disagreeable.

Vachlan began whistling a tune, and Visola turned to observe his actions. She paled considerably when she saw what he was holding: very large nails. Her eyes widened when she saw that he was disinfecting them. It was never a good sign when he began disinfecting an item. It usually meant the item was about to end up inside her body.
No. No way. He’s not really going to…
As she tried to block out the annoyingly jolly tune he was humming, she could not help remembering a recurring nightmare she used to have. She would always wake up writhing in pain, and moaning out loud. It used to be her husband who offered a comforting embrace.

“Shhh, Viso. What’s wrong?” Vachlan had asked, shaking her gently. “Seizure, bedbug, cramp, or nightmare?”

“I’m sorry,” she told him, as she jolted out of her dream. “It’s the same stupid dream. We’re in New Holland, and King Kyrosed brings out a massive carved wooden trident. He smiles, and he orders me crucified.”

“Crucified?” Vachlan asked in surprise. “Don’t you need a cross for that?”

“I don’t know.”

“If there’s a trident, we should make up a new name for it. How about Tridentified? Trixified?”

“Vachlan! It doesn’t matter. The worst part is that he orders
you
to nail me to the wood. Then I scream and beg for you not to do it, but you go ahead and nail me down anyway. Isn’t that weird?”

“Sounds kind of kinky. You have the wildest imagination,” Vachlan told her. “Hang on; I’m going to write this down. Maybe I can use it in a play later.”

Why did he have to write everything down? She mentally cursed herself. If only she had known the dangers of telling her husband her nightmares. Why did he have to be the kind of artist that delighted in bringing fiction to life? Well, he could try to break her down in this way, but one element of her nightmare would be very different. Visola would not scream and cry for him to stop. She would be silent and take it like a man.

When he pulled out the expertly carved wooden trident, Visola nearly opened her mouth to say something acerbic. Vachlan was insane. There was no getting around that simple fact any longer. He was completely insane. As he set up the trident-cross, while whistling, she began to fidget in her shackles. She liked shackles. They were comfortable—she did not treasure the idea of being nailed upright for long periods of time. It did not seem like it would be relaxing.

“You know the interesting thing about crucifixion?” Vachlan asked her, as he tested the sturdiness of the trident. “They’re not quite sure how exactly it kills you. There are lots of different ways you can die, and it depends on the person, their health, and the way it’s performed.” He moved over to her and undid her shackles. He grasped her upper arm roughly as he pulled her upright. It was the first time she had stood on her smashed kneecap, and she wanted to lie down again very much. She had no choice in the matter. Vachlan dragged her over to his wooden piece of art. “How would you like to be my very own garden ornament, Visola?”

She looked at where his hand gripped her arm, and felt nauseated at the sight of her emaciated biceps. His hand fully circled her upper arm. This was normally the point at which she would fight, but this sight alone dissuaded her from doing something foolish. She cast her eyes on the ground—she could only wait and endure. If it ever became too much to handle, she had her safety blanket incased in rubber in her mouth. There were moments she felt so hungry that her body almost instinctively yearned to chew down on that capsule, but she maintained enough discipline not to.

Torture often turned a person into an animal fighting for survival, and Visola was determined not to let this happen to her. She had seen it too many times in her victims, and it simply was not attractive. Not that she cared about appearing attractive before her captor. She just cared about her dignity.

Vachlan seemed to notice her arm too, but he still forced her against the trident. He disinfected her right hand thoroughly before lifting it to the wood. He retrieved one of the cleaned nails and a mallet. “One of the ways they say you can die from crucifixion is through suffocating. They say that when your arms are stretched out for too long, your lungs become weak and unable to breathe. Interesting, no?” He saw that Visola’s eyes were fixed on the ground, and he forced her chin up with his free hand. “Viso, all you have to do is speak to me, and I’ll stop treating you like this. Just tell me what I want to know. Can you do that for me? For old times’ sake?”

She fought the urge to spit in his face. She fought the urge to demonstrate any kind of hatred or anger, and she just stared back at him blankly. His grey eyes were still too difficult to behold, and she would much prefer to have the nails driven through her hands. She could not reconcile the man who was mistreating her now with the man who she had experienced such happiness with. She could not try. His eyes bewildered her.

“Just answer the question, Viso. You know the one.” He moved his face very close to hers, and for a moment she greatly feared that he might kiss her. It terrified her that somehow, her body still seemed to yearn for his. She remained very still as he examined her face. He frowned. “Are you shaking?”

She had hoped that he would not notice, but yes, she was shaking. It was more of a physiological reaction than a psychological one. At least this is what she intended to believe.

“Why were you unfaithful, Visola?”

She felt the cold sharp edge of the nail against her palm.

“I’m going to ask one more time, and then I’m going to nail you to the trident. Just like in your nightmare. So save yourself a whole lot of pain, and tell me a little story. You were always really good at that,” he said. He positioned the mallet on top of the nail. “Why did you have an affair with Kyrosed Vellamo? He told me, you know. He told me himself. Why did you choose him? Why did you go to him? Answer me, Visola! Answer me now!”