Cameron Johnston - God of Broken Things

Inserted under the nails…slid into the eyes…piercing the tongue…the other bits…

I crossed my legs and pulled my great coat tight around me. I hated the bloody Arcanum – their brutal rules and rites had broken my old friend Lynas. He had never been the same afterwards. How dare they put innocent initiates through this! And yet… I now understood and acknowledged the necessity of magically enforcing loyalty to Setharis. You can’t begin turning people into living weapons and let them do anything they wish without a measure of control. After the catastrophe three months ago that we now called the Black Autumn, there could be no denying it. It didn’t mean I liked it.

The door to the Forging Room finally creaked open and I sat up straight, wincing as my spine complained. Pain was now my constant companion.

A young magus poked her head out. Her chestnut hair was pulled into a neat tail and she wore plain brown robes entirely lacking the ornamentation and wealth worn by most others – the dark stains marked her as a healing magus of the Halcyon Order. Once their robes had been pure white, but now they all wore cheap and practical brown. Me, I couldn’t stand robes and the status they proclaimed. Plain old peasant tunic and trousers had always suited me just fine.

Her eyes were wide and nervous. “Councillor Cillian bids you enter, magus.” She swiftly stepped back to make way for me. There was no sneaking about as an unknown face for me these days – every fucker and their horse seemed to know who and what I was. I suppose that’s what happens when you kill a god and save a city. Most seemed to doubt it was true that Nathair, the Thief of Life, had died at my hands, but many magi had heard enough rumours to make them nervous in my presence. And as for those that actually knew the truth of my part in it all, well, who could blame them for being afraid.

The sour stench of blood, sweat and piss mixed with vinegar assaulted me as I stepped inside, almost overpowering a sharp clean scent reminiscent of the aftermath of a lightning storm. Behind a wooden privacy screen, the room was ornate and bewilderingly complex. Copper pipes and bundles of golden wire covered one entire wall, humming with power like a hive of angry bees. Trapped inside glass jars, lightning crackled and spat. Brass cogs ticked and turned with mesmerising regularity. Five artificers wearing odd ceramic gauntlets sat studying arrays of glowing crystals and moving rods that flickered and danced in tune with whatever was happening to the poor naked git strapped to the table in the centre of the room. To me it was all just pretty lights.

Steel manacles bound the young Gifted initiate’s limbs to the table and leather straps held his head and body immobile for his own safety. His head was circled by an open helmet containing an array of needles, some of which were already embedded in his skull, connected to wires running back into the arcane machinery on the wall. A steel grate was situated directly below the table to deal with the subject pissing themselves from fear and pain. I shuddered, remembering that particular bit of humiliation only too well, and that was only a herald of far worse to come.

Cillian’s demeanour was unusually severe today as she bent over the initiate and slid another needle in, this time into his chest and heart. She attached it to a wire and stepped back. The nearest artificer nudged a lever up slightly. The boy convulsed and screamed as magic I knew nothing about poured into him.

I winced, his panic and pain seeping into my mind through my cracked Gift. I couldn’t keep the thoughts of others out entirely anymore, not after what I’d been through. The buzzing machinery gave off a whiff of magic that smelled reminiscent of my own. Not entirely surprising since all this weird and unsettling machinery was designed to do one thing – to burn loyalty to Setharis and the Arcanum into a Gifted mind. It was a relic built at the very founding of the Arcanum in the years following the destruction of ancient Escharr. Those refugee magi had created it using long lost knowledge for unknown reasons, and I had to wonder if this was one path of knowledge that they had purposely let fade away.

The initiate’s eyes rolled to me, pleading to make it stop. Tears wet his cheeks.

“Ah, Edrin,” Cillian said. “I am glad my messengers finally found you.” I always forgot how tall she was, and how beautiful. She was wearing her formal azure silken robes and an elegant gold circlet to restrain her unruly mass of long dark curly hair. Her pale olive skin appeared sallow and waxy from exhaustion. Knowing her she hadn’t stopped for more than a short nap every night for three months solid.

I eyed the torture table; there was no other suitable word for it. “Enjoying yourself are we?” Messengers she said! More like a pack of armed wardens hauling me straight to her whether I liked it or not.

She ignored my jibe entirely, which in all fairness is a wise tactic when faced with annoying people like me. Her lips pursed. “It is only a few hours until nightfall. I had not expected it to take quite this long to find you. I assume they checked all the ale houses first, then the brothels… which were you in?”

“Neither. I was in a hospital.”

She looked concerned for a moment, but I was an experienced magus and with magic we didn’t have much need for powders and potions and healing in general unless it was from enormous trauma. If it didn’t kill me outright I would generally be back on my feet in a ridiculously short time.

“I work there on occasion,” I added.

Surprise flickered through her expression, but not as much as I might have expected given my blackened reputation. “Well well. It is good to see you putting your unique talents to use. Speaking of which, I have a task you are especially suited for.”

A ruby began blinking in the machinery and she held up a finger. “Do not go anywhere. This may take a while.”

She leaned over the delirious, moaning boy and began asking him questions:

“Are you loyal to Setharis and the Arcanum?” “Would you ever take coin or favours from foreign powers?” “Would you ever consider using blood sorcery?”

The questioning went on for an age, and whatever the machinery and needles did to him they seemed to force truthful answers. When they uncovered an answer they approved of an artificer would pull a lever and his body would shudder with crackling energy, leaving him gasping and sobbing. They were burning it into his mind so that betrayal was not something he could ever seriously consider.

Once or twice they came across opinions or inclinations that they did not approve of and an artificer would lean forward to study the instrumentation and then call over to Cillian – who would then get to work inserting needles and applying shocks and pain and magical manipulations until those opinions were bent back toward compliance, then burned into place. I was living proof that it didn’t always hold entirely, but then I was messed up in the head in all sorts of ways.

It would have been easier and less painful if I did it for them, but that was not a role I would ever volunteer for, and in any case the Arcanum would never trust a wastrel tyrant like me to make a proper job of it.

Cillian and her machines got to work on keeping away the Worm of Magic, that seduction to use more and more magic until all of your self-control was eaten away and your body and mind were warped into a mere shell for magic itself. My mouth went dry. This part was the worst. “Open your Gift,” Cillian said, pressing a wooden rod wrapped in leather between his teeth and securing it there. “Let as much magic as you can flow into you.”

At this stage in his development nobody knew if the youth’s Gift would mature enough to become a full magus, but they enforced their hidebound rules all the same. Better now than too late. When the artificers read certain arcane signs in the machinery they gave the word that the subject’s Gift was straining, and then the real agony began. Needles jabbed and bottled lightning sparked into human skin, releasing a stench of burnt hair into the room. The machinery whined as magic poured into the boy’s skull to stamp a single message: overextending your Gift was a very bad thing. This agony waits for you if you try! He screamed through the gag until blood mixed with the spittle.