Tallah [Book 3 Complete]

Later, they finally found change as they passed a door opening for them with a swish. A cavern opened up beyond the metal hallways. It was a warren of some sort, lit only by firelight, with a spattering of torches hung haphazard on walls. Ratmen sat gathered around fires, none moving, frozen in mid-conversation or eating or, in one unfortunate case, shitting. Still, there was no sign of the boy.

"This leads credence to his words," Christina said as she picked her way among the still bodies. "Either that, or he's particularly boring."

"I don't understand what of this supports what."

Anna remembered the ratmen. They'd taken up camp near the entrance to her Sanctum and she'd let them be since her warm body suppliers could make decent use of them. She herself had only gone up once to see what the creatures were on about, caught a couple, and quickly lost interest in their vivisection. For their size, they were scarcely more complex than any of their smaller cousins.

"If we were to dive into your inner world," Christina went with relish, then stopped. "No, you wouldn't work as an example. Your inner world would be all flesh. Let's consider a normal person."

Anna bristled. "Are you trying to antagonise me?" The nearness of this place to her Sanctum made her defensive.

"Not at all, my dear. But you, like myself, have had a very single-minded pursuit in life. A normal person would have a complex, complicated inner world filled with all manner of random junk that means nothing. So far, the boy's mindscape has been fantastically solid, much like Tallah's. This proves he's had something done to him. Everything is too connected, too intentional." She waved a hand at the scene. "It might be why this place feels so familiar. I suspect something similar to Tallah's affliction might've been used to achieve this compliant little Vergil."

"That makes some sense, yes," Anna said. "That, or both of them might be simple."

One side of the room opened up into more metal corridors. Another led into an ornate, comfortable room that had a fireplace burning against one wall. Two desks framed the room, one filled with tomes, the other with alchemical instruments.

And, there in the centre of the room, Horvath, the Hammer, waited.

The dwarf sat on the floor holding a double-headed axe over his knees. He was using a stone to sharpen the edges of the weapon, the sound contrasting with the absolute silence that had led them there.

He was wearing full-body armour, dented, pitted, and warped from use, of a make Anna had never seen before. There were a lot of spikes involved.

She took quick inventory of the scars she could see on the dwarf's head, the only part of him that wasn't armoured. Either his skull was about five fingers thick, to protect a brain the size of a pea, or his species had developed some incredible healing arts to deal with wounds that extensive. To begin with, she couldn't imagine what sort of creature would survive their skull being dented inward almost down to the cheekbone.

"Greetings," Christina said as she passed into the door. "Interesting place you've set yourself up in. The Meadow, eh?"

Anna only watched the dwarf. It raised a single eye in her direction. The look was sharp, frightfully intelligent, and unwavering. It took her measure and judged her of negligible consequence. The same couldn't be said of how he viewed Christina.

Well, that's an interesting reaction. It wasn't fear in the dwarf—that trait was historically unimaginable in the species—but something cousin to it. Anna couldn't touch him in this space. But Christina? She was seen as an oblivious threat. This was information to be kept on hand for later.

"Where's the boy?" Anna asked. "We've business with him, not you."

"Ye'll be dealin' wi' me," Horvath said, voice the sound of gravel rolling downhill. "Ye won't lay so much as a finger on th' sprig, aye?"

Sprig? Well, Anna supposed, the boy was willowy enough to warrant being called that. The flat refusal put her at a loss before Christina intervened.

"I don't actually need the boy," she said, walking over from where she'd been examining some of the room's features. "I need to see the creature you're entertaining."

"Why?"

The dwarf came to his feet in a movement so fluid that Anna had almost missed it. At his full height, he reached up to her chest, but physical appearance in a mindscape was deceiving. The warrior was almost as wide as he was tall, his limbs so thick and muscular that she wondered how he even managed to move with such bulk.

If he reached out a hand and grabbed her waist, he looked more than capable of breaking her like a twig.

"Because we're going to beat the snot out of it until it vomits out everything we want to know," Christina answered, her tone so light and carefree that both Horvath and Anna stared. "What?" she asked after a polite little cough. "It's the whole purpose of this adventure. Why did you think we wanted to come in here? It wasn't for the decor. The boy needs to get out more and fill his head with more interesting sights."

Horvath barked a laugh, raised his hand, and the scene shifted. The fancy, civilised room melted away and was replaced by the earlier cavern. There, above the fire, now hung a cage made of bones, and a figure rested inside.

"Ah, metaphorical imprisonment," Christina said as she studied the creature cooking slowly over the cook-fire. "Irony is a powerful tool indeed."

"Aye, it is," the dwarf said. When he approached the cage, the thing inside seemed to try and retreat into itself. "Fig'red I'd teach the bugger why it oughtn't test my patience."

Christina's attention caught on something the dwarf had said, given the side glance she threw the thing.

"I don't understand," Anna said. "What's special about this?" She'd only caught some snippets of the boy's conversation with Tallah from earlier, as at the time she was pleasantly engaged in conversation with Bianca.

"This is how we found Vergil," Christina explained. She stood beneath the cage, the fire not touching her. "Putting the creature in the same cage holds conceptual power. It's bound by both our gravelly host here, and by what the cage signifies for Vergil. Now comes the part you'll probably enjoy. Make this thing scream for me, please."

"I've nae managed tae wring a single word outta the damn thing," Horvath said as he came to stand guard. "Thrashed the beast everyway I knew. Won't spit out a lick o' anything useful." He spat. "I'd be right impressed if not so bloody annoyed."

But Anna wasn't listening anymore. "Do I get free rein?" she asked. "No retribution on your part? No loss of confidence?"

Christina smiled almost cruelly. "Darling, we all know what you are. You aren't fooling anyone with the act you've been putting up."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It wasn't an act. Not all of it. But Anna had been keeping her nature in check ever since Grefe, wanting to be part of this endeavour. The exercise with the daemon blood had been eye-opening in what she could achieve once she built a connection. But this newfound trust between herself and the others was fragile. Even when Tallah demanded her strength, it was always with a sense of expectant dread, as if Anna was a wild beast ready at any time to bite the hand holding her leash.

She was exactly that, but she wasn't stupid.

"I know what you can do. For all that you think we don't understand you, I do," Christina added. "So, for this, I need the other sides of you. We're all cruel women in our way. You're in good company."

Now Anna really looked at the creature squirming in the cage. For some reason, it resembled Vergil in general shape. It also bore passing resemblance to the white-faced daemons, but only because it's skin was an inky black. White eyes peered at her from beneath the same shock of messy hair the boy wore.

"I don't need this glamour," she said to the dwarf. "Dismiss it."

Horvath did as asked, once again changing the room. All concept fell away and she was left staring at the true shape of the monster, hanging suspended in a black void.

"This here's the hollow in the sprig's chest," Horvath said as they all regarded the squirming mass of glistening darkness. "Here's where the damn thing was hidin', snug 'neath the sprig's heart."

It was a cancer. Once the dwarf's conceptualisation broke apart, the creature expanded into an incoherent mass, more a disease attached to the boy's mindscape. It pulsed and oozed, its humanoid shape spread out to reach into the black, as if someone had crushed a human and then kneaded it back into some semblance of shape.

She drew on her distant power through the blood connection to Tallah. She couldn't draw much illum for fear of burning Vergil, but she could access enough. With fingers splayed, she placed her palm upon the writhing shape and in an instant knew everything she needed of it.

It understood pain. It understood pleasure. One flowed into the other. There was more. Hunger. Fear. Ecstasy. Suffering. Release. It was as complex a creature as any she'd ever studied, just… built wrong. No, not wrong. It was only wrong by her standard of understanding life. By its own, however, it was the perfect parasite. There were parts of it that had been cut away, all the better to feel human.

It had been fashioned in every way to pretend to be human. It needed the boy's meat to achieve the full impression.

In here, in the concept space, she saw what it had been and what it had been made to be. No wonder if had needed to be hidden. Its will was powerful. But its construction was less robust than that of a human's psyche.

Oh, she could work with this.

"I do wish you'd get a normal face," Christina said by her side. "You grin like one of those carnivorous fish. It's unsettling."

Anna pulsed her power and was rewarded with a shiver from the prisoner.

"I am protected, witch," the flesh said, its voice weak and tired. "You damn yourself by touching the holy work of a Prison's prince."

"Ah, it speaks," she said with more than a little satisfaction. "Don't worry. You'll say much more by the time I'm done with you."

"We've electrocuted it back when we got Vergil," Christina provided. "Via a doppelganger. It was quite aggressive."

Anna looked at the dwarf. He stood by her, axe with its head rested against the ground, both hands holding the pommel.

"Do you have the creature in hand?" she asked. "Well and truly separated from the boy?"

"Aye," he answered. "It's harmless. Just mouthy."

Good. Because the next heartbeat would be an eternity for the creature. Anna threaded her power through what served as the monster's nervous system, eerily familiar in how it mimicked a human's. The flesh reflected in the spirit, and the thing had been flesh once.

She raised her other hand and swatted Christina away from peering over her shoulder.

"If you want me to do this, don't hover about," she said. "Get your questions ready. It won't be long."

"How dare you?" the creature mewled. "I will not be made to reveal anything."

Anna didn't listen. She knew it would be pointless to threaten violence. Everything about the cancerous mass spoke of a long existence steeped in nothing but violence. What she was going to give it was altogether different.

Her work, once she'd gone insane with it, had rarely focused on inflicting pain. That was a simple enough to achieve result, but made it difficult to maintain subjects. What she'd gotten good at had been pleasure. Adjust the nervous system just slightly, and a cut of the knife would be an orgasm to the victim. Do it with gusto, and she could've had her subjects vivisecting themselves for the rewards her skills promised.

Here, she reached out and cradled the monster's central nervous system. Scarring showed it had been fashioned in just such a way that it would seem human. It tried to escape her, the flesh melting to smoke beneath her touch.

Christina reacted first and a bolt of lighting grounded the monster back into the concept.

"Sit still, little thing. I've been looking forward to this for too long," the metal mind said with a tone so hungry that Anna had no choice but reassess her opinion of Christina. "I've got it in hand. Do what you need."

She did. Like with any subject before, Anna's first step was to make sure it wouldn't pass out. So she cut that possibility away. It would feel everything with no escape from her.

"Now, be good and let me know if it hurts," she whispered as she plunged her arm down to the elbow into the flesh.

The creature let out a long moan and wobbled as she set about rewriting what it understood of pleasure and pain. She overloaded its human pleasure centres, working her way through it to attach every other stimuli only to this, and all their triggers to her power.

In the concept space, time meant little. She asked nothing of the creature, only allowed it something it had never had before: to feel good, to feel undiluted joy with no price and no repercussion.

And she turned it all up into ecstasy. Into hunger satiated. Victory achieved. Purpose found and reached.

Everything the creature could ever have wished for, she gave it. Nothing held back. Gently, almost motherly, she fulfilled the monster's every wish and desire and dream.

It lasted a few heartbeats, maybe, then she withdrew her power and took with it the reward.

"No!" the creature gasped out as all its stimuli dimmed to nothing.

Anna had wrapped all of its sensation around her own desire. It would never feel anything again, but she'd made sure it would remember every single pulse of pleasure.

"No!" it said again again. "Give me more. Don't take it away."

Hunger. It was always the first to manifest.

"Ask your questions," she said as she turned to Christina. "Start simple. It'll tell you everything you need."

Already the mass trembled aggressively. Anna kept a hand pressed to it. "Won't you, child?" She excited a nerve just to encourage it.

"Yes!" It said, and Anna repressed the repulsion it felt at its own admission. "Don't stop. Don't take it away."

"Who made you?" Christina asked.

"I am Lord Ryder's instrument," it answered, eager to please.

Anna rewarded it accordingly, then withdrew again, keeping it on the edge of pleasure until it said more.

"I was made of Lady Onda's essence, and Lord Ryder's power. I serve the Prison."

Horvath reacted oddly. One moment he was watching the proceeding with bored interest, the next he was fully alert, axe in hands, pose ready to fight. A low growl escaped his lips.

Christina giggled as she got closer, rubbing her hands together. "Oh, it's so eager now. What was your purpose? And how were you to achieve it?"

A different voice spoke before the parasite could, "I believe I can answer that much better than my poor child could."

They all spun and regarded the man that appeared, without a sound or notice, just behind them all.

"Be at peace, children," the man said. "I will answer your questions. In return, you will cease trying to get your world burned."