Chapter 117: Are you ready for your first question?

“And yet I notice your utter failure to ask me any questions at all. Holy flame but you're bad at this entire thing aren't you.”

He ignored that comment.

Jerome was nodding. “Good. Now we're getting to the heart of the matter.”

“But seriously,” I continued. “What are you going to do next? I'm not an unimportant man. People are going to come looking for me. Some very important men in the church not least. You think you're going to hold them off with your twenty five knights, a few squires and a handful of actual soldiers.”

I thought I heard someone snigger but I couldn't be sure.

“I mean, I managed to sneak past your perimeter and cause a whole bunch of damage and I'm nothing but a lowly scholar. What are you going to do when actual trained killers start coming for you. Do you think that they're going to be frightened off by your silly little stockade that is sinking into the ground that you put it in?”

“More will flock to our banner.” Sansum intoned.

“No they won't. These people are terrified of you. Who's going to come and help you?”

“We have friends. Powerful friends.”

“Not as many as you might think.” I told him. “If you're talking about Lords Barton, Polis and Telisson, then you should know that Kerrass and I have already paid them all a little visit.”

I left it intentionally vague there.

There was some shifting in the men watching. I could hear them shifting their weight from foot to foot and guessed at the sidelong glances.

“Suddenly, your men don't seem as confident as they had been before.” I told him. “So you face the very real possibility of a church army and an imperial army on your doorstop in the very near future. What are you going to do then? Preach at them? yell at them? Depend on harsh language and the threats of eternal damnation? Soldiers are taught that their Sergeants are the flame personified and that to disobey their superiors is to commit the blackest heresy. You will not convert them to your cause.”

Sansum came back, no implement of pain in his hands.

“I think you're bluffing. I don't think you've had the time to visit all of our friends, but despite that, how do you know that you got them all?”

“Simple.” I said. “I asked them. They told me where to find you, how many you were and where you got your funds. They told us everything. You see, unlike you, we actually know how to ask some questions.”

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“I do not believe you.”

“Yeah? Lord Polis was the first one that we went to speak to. Tall man, thin red hair. We talked to him on the back lawn outside his house where he was practising his archery and getting increasingly frustrated. He admitted to us that he was ill with something and none of the healers could figure out what was going on but he knew that he was dying. He had no children as his sons died fighting against Nilfgaard when they crossed the Yaruga. He had decided, in the way that such men often do, that he must have lived an extremely sinful life and so deserved all the calamity that had occurred to his family. As such he wanted to make amends to whatever God he had angered and pledged the remainder of his fortune to the foundation of the knights of the burning sword.

“All of this after you, in the guise of a Bishop, promised him that you would “personally see to his moving into grace,” in the event of his death. He had been under the impression that the knights would be a roving band of do-gooders. That they would travel the roads, saving villages from bandits and monsters in the same way that the old knights of the flaming rose used to do before they got absorbed by politics.

“He told me that you invoked the name of Sir Siegfried in speaking to him and about how that good and noble man was an inspiration to you in doing your part.”

“Take not the name of Sir Siegfried in vain. St Siegfried was a good and noble man.”

“He was. I won't deny that. He was a good man who worked hard to save the common folk from all that might be done to them. He just made the mistake of following the wrong master is all. But we were talking about the men who you expect to come to your aid. We told Lord Polis of what we had seen and what we had heard. He rode with us, despite his failing health, to see some of the things that we talked about. To be fair to him, he didn't want to believe that you would betray him in such a way.”

“We have not betrayed....”

“I use his own words you fuck.” I spat. “He was a sad, sick and broken old man and you took advantage of him when he was at his lowest.”

I got a smack across the jaw for my trouble. I must have bit through my lip and needed to spit some blood mixed with phlegm onto the floor.

“Don't worry though.” I told the room. “We left him at his notary's house changing his will so that you won't get any support from his death.” Thanks for reading on ManaNovel!

The majority of our audience didn't even know who Lord Polis was, was my guess. They just knew that they had powerful friends. But I saw a couple of people shifting their weight uncomfortably.

“So let's move onto Lord Barton. Nice man I thought. Married a bit beneath himself though.”

“Lady Barton is a good and holy woman and....”

“And a clear fifteen years younger than Lord Barton who is clearly devoted to her. I can see why. She struck me as a good woman, don't mistake me and she was the very light of Lord Barton's eye. He hung on her every word and we soon found out that he was paying into your coffers in a manner to keep her happy. But you miscalculated.”

“Did I now.”

“Oh yes. This time it wasn't Lord Barton that we needed to convince, it was his wife. We talked to her about the cruelties that had been inflicted and she was horrified. Absolutely horrified. And as fast as the money started to flow into your coffers, it soon started flowing out again as Lady Barton fluttered her, entirely sincere, eyelashes and wept her anguish into her husband's face. She pleaded with him to stop supporting you. Pleaded with him. What's an older man to do in the face of his young and beautiful wife's tears?”

“Lord Barton is a true follower of the flame....”

“Lord Barton loves his wife.” I snarled. “As is right and proper. He was swearing to build a hospital to help all the people that you have hurt when we left.”

Sansum was grinning at me.

“But not Lord Tenisson. You won't convince him so easily.”

“No we didn't.” I said. “You mistake me. We didn't convince him. And you would know about that if you would patrol properly. When we went to him we found his people in misery and he had surrounded himself with guards who shared his tastes. It was him and his friends that would stay in your little guest chambers wasn't it. He would stay there and torture whatever little heretics you found for him. You turned his already natural sadism into a religious fervour that was not being sated despite him spending his rage on his wife, his children and his household staff. His wife was broken when we found them. His children were cowering and his household staff let us in.

The chief cook told us where to find the kids Grandfather and we took them there after we burned Lord Tennison and his entire manor house to the ground. If you checked your surroundings properly you would have seen his funeral pyre from the top of your tower.”

“You lie.”

“Why would I lie?” I retorted. “I am going to destroy you. I'm going to destroy you and everyone that follows you. I am going to take your name and drag it into the sewer where it belongs. I am a flame fearing man and I know, I know that my deeds are going to be judged when I stand before the scales of fire. There are things that I am not proud of in my past and names that weigh on my conscience. But you, you and your little rabble of torturers and murderers....

“I will have to answer for what I've done but if I had just walked on by, I would have had to answer for that as well.

“You don't know it yet but every single one of you is dead already. Your only hope is to throw down your weapons and flee from this place and beg the holy flame, Kreve, Veyopatis, Melitele or the divine Sun for their forgiveness because I will not forgive you for the women's tears, the ruining of good and pure souls and the corruption of people's love for each other that you have perpetrated you unspeakable, unholy fucks.”

I was out of breath and panting with a dim kind of feeling that I was approaching the end of my tether.

Sansum turned around and headed back to the table with all of the torture implements on it. He spent some time looking them over, picking up this one and that one, turning them over in the light to examine the way the firelight shone of the sharp edges.

It's an odd feeling when you start to disassociate with yourself. That moment when your body and brain is on the verge of just giving it all up as a bad job. Panic and adrenaline were prevalent in my system, I was tired, stressed and exhausted and knew that I was only going to be heading for more pain, the longer this went on.

But I sat there, the hallucination of Father Jerome sat next to me as we watched Sansum take his time choosing whichever sharp and unpleasant blade he was going to use to torture me with. I could see it from a distance, as though through a long tunnel. If I thought about it, I could almost see it happening from Jerome's point of view, along with his thinking on the subject.

“He's re-exerting his dominance over the room,” I thought to myself. He's telling everyone who is watching, me not least, that he's in charge and that he's going to take his own sweet time over doing whatever it is he's doing. He's telling his followers that they shouldn't be afraid. After all, he isn't afraid and therefore, why should anyone else be afraid.

In the end he selected a small knife, no longer than the length of my thumb. I was reassured by the fact that it looked relatively clean.

“Do you know why we chose to keep you alive?” He asked me.

“Finally,” I said, doing my best to infuse the words with as much sarcastic relief as I could muster. “You're finally going to start asking me questions. It's about fucking time. What was all that other bullshit that you were talking about.”

Sansum considered this.

“You are not incorrect.” He told me. “We have been giving you the time that you might be hoisted on your own noose. To someone as well trained as I am, it was always obvious that you are a heretic so awful and black that to not kill you would, in and of itself, be a sin. However, my average follower hasn't had my level of training and as such they need to be convinced that you are as evil as I say you are. You have spent the last hour or so convincing them all of that. Therefore they know that all of the things that we are about to do to you are entirely justified.”

“Ah, so you're justifying your acts to yourself. Trying to convince yourselves that you're not the scum-fucks that I know you to be.”

“Quite. I have not explained the rules to you yet. To be fair though, you haven't stopped talking for long enough to let me get a word in edgeways. But here it is. I'm going to ask you a series of questions. You are going to answer them. If you lie to me, or if you try to hide anything from me then you will be punished. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I know how torturing works.”

he smiled thinly.

“You know? I imagine that you do don't you. But still, are you ready for your first question?”

“There's more than one question?”

He sighed, before turning to one of his colleagues. “Pull out one of his toe-nails. One of the smaller ones.”

It's an odd thing when I think about it. In my time I've been beaten, stabbed, slashed, burnt, poisoned, bitten, screamed at, posessed, fallen, bled and all of the other kinds of pain that I could think about. I've even had my soul removed from my body and had it used as the plaything for an otherworldly demonic entity which, quite frankly, made the torture that I was undergoing under the hands of Bishop Sansum, seem quite....tame.

But despite all of that, I still get squicked out by the thought of someone pulling my nails out.

I don't know why.

Even the thought of having my teeth pulled out is less terrifying than that.

You know what? It was agony, but on balance, it wasn't that bad.

“Did that hurt?” Sansum asked me, sarcasm dripping from every word, after I had finished screaming and swearing and promising every pain that I could imagine on the person holding the pliers.

“I don't know.” I told him after sucking down a few extra breaths in preparation for what I knew was going to come next. “Could you do one on the other side, just to see if it could be balanced out?”

Yes it hurt, but the joke was worth it and I was still laughing as I finished screaming.

“Flame but you're bad at this.” I told them.

“I see you take the point as to how it works.” Sansum told me, still playing with the knife, turning it this way and that.

“Of course I fucking have.” I told him, “Will you just get on with it and ask me some fucking questions already so that I can get on with refusing to answer you.”

“I can see that you are eager for it. Some part of you still hoping for redemption I suspect.”

“I think, as far as you're concerned, that ship has sailed. Why haven't you killed me yet? We both know that you can't afford to keep me alive. If I survive this, I'm going to use my time to systematically destroy you. If you tried to keep me captive then I would need to watched day and night. So why do I still survive?”

“You are correct. We can't kill you, yet. Because we need to know who helped you.”

“Who helped me?”

“Yes. How many friends do you have in the darkness. There is no way that you could have done this alone so we need to know who the traitors are in our midst. I would remind you of the consequences of a lie or a misleading answer.”

I closed my eyes and did my best to hide the victory in my thoughts.

Kerrass had been right.

In that moment I went back to Father Jerome's chapel listening to him speak. I was weak then as well, horribly tortured in body and mind at the hands of another monster. A thing that was worse than the so-called Holy man that was stood over me.

“Interrogation is an art form.” Jerome told me. “Don't get me wrong, it's a sick and twisted art-form to be sure but an art-form nevertheless. But one of the misconceptions about it is that the main part of that art is the torture. Torture is merely one of the tools in the collection of a proper interrogator and by some margin, it is the least effective. At best, torture is a means to an end. You use torture when you just need to extract a confession despite whether or not the person that you are interrogating is guilty.

“It's the blunt instrument of that aspect of the work. You just going and going until they beg you to stop. You tell them that they can stop as soon as they make their mark next to the confession and, sooner or later, they will.

“But you learn nothing from that. You don't learn whether or not they actually did it. You certainly don't learn anything new and more times than not, that kind of interrogation is just a political one. We need to execute this person because they disagree with the King or one of the other people in charge, but he's quite popular with the rabble so we torture him until he confesses to something so utterly horrible that even the people on the street will agree that he's a bastard and we can have him killed. It was primarily what we had to do when we were working against all the magic users in Novigrad. Torture them until they admitted to plotting against the King and then we could burn them.

“But torture is all but useless as a method of trying to extract information from a person. This is because, sooner or later, the persons sanity will simply snap and they will tell you anything that they think you want to hear, simply in an effort to get the pain to stop. That information is very rarely reliable and will always, always need verifying by another source before it can be acted upon.

“Real interrogation though. Real interrogation happens in the mind and that's the bit that is fascinating.”

“Can you give me an example?” I had asked, trying to show some interest.

“Certainly. The most common form of it is having someone present during the interrogation who is pretending to be the subject's friend. “Tell me what I need to know,” he will say, note the use of the word “need” in that sentence, “and I can help you.” Practice has shown us that a friendly approach is much, much more effective than shouting, screaming and torturing has ever been. Pretending to be the subjects friend works. Not all of that torture, or the causing of pain and most interrogators know this.

“But torture is a tool to extract confessions. It's also well known that people in power don't want to believe that torture doesn't work. They see the confessions mounting up and they think to themselves, “Ah well, if it's having such a massive effect then it must be working”.

“What they don't know is how many innocent people those confessions sent to the flames, or how much false information that we were forced to swallow just to satisfy their lust for blood.”

He had seemed so sad, I remember thinking at the time. So very sad.

“What should I do, if I ever find myself in the torturers chair?” I asked him, trying tot urn him back towards a more positive topic of conversation.

Strange how that seems like an odd sentence to say right here and now.

“Think it through. Plot your strategy.” He told me without hesitation as though he had already been thinking along those lines. “The simple fact of the matter is that no-one can withstand torture forever. No-one can. Everyone has their limits. That part of them that they cannot bear to allow it to go any further so that sooner or later, something inside them will just snap and they will start spewing information out at a rate that is overwhelming, both to them and to their questioners.

“There's a reason they call it “breaking” after all.

“So here's the trick. Stay in control. When you feel as though you need a break, or if you can't take it any more, then reward yourself. Give them something. Something small, something that they could probably figure out anyway. Ration the truth that you have to give though. Don't give them it all at once or they will think that you are lying to them. Take your time with it. Just a little bit of truth before returning to silence.”

“Should I lie to them?”

“You can, but be careful. If they catch you in a lie then the consequences are dire. So wrap it up in truth if you can.”

I nodded to myself and opened my eyes.

Maybe a second had passed. Not even that, and Sansum was looking down at me, his face twisted with scorn and hate.

“How many friends do I have in the dark?” I asked him. “Is that what you want to know?” I said it through gritted teeth.

He nodded at me.