He did not normally view administrations of the Black Flame, but such was the impertinence—and, though he hated to admit it, the ingenuity—of the prisoner, the Warden made exception.

  The pit was built into the structure of the prison itself, descending through the core of its southernmost tower. The tower’s foundations were pure granite. They had to be strong, for fires fed by sufficient Daimonsblood could undo stone. Many sieges had ended that way. And many palaces had been ruined by the folly of their owners.

  A pulley-system, whose wheel was attached to a series of pyramidally wrought wooden beams, had been erected over the pit. At its base, some forty feet below the tower’s peak, lay a pool of fresh Daimonsblood, the acrid stink of it assaulting their nostrils and making their eyes water.

  The reek of the fuel—a kind of acidic bone-smell—at least covered the stink of burnt flesh.

  The Warden stood at the lip of the pit. The prisoner, Telos, stood next to him: bound, gagged, and watched by four guards. A fifth guard manned the pulley.

  “Fit him,” the Warden said.

  Long ago, he had performed a whole ceremonial ritual, recanting their crimes and pointing out the fitness of the punishment, but not only did he find such rituals tedious, he also found that the terror was so much greater when things were done without explanation or purpose. The torturer who felt no need to gloat or prevaricate was the one to be truly feared.

  Telos made some muffled protestation. The guards dragged him to the edge of the pit. His foot slipped over the edge and he teetered. His eyes stared downwards into the abyss that awaited him, scorched black by flame. The Warden knew what was running through his mind: Should I jump, should I end it quickly? He was glad to see Telos beginning to show signs of humility.

  “Do not let him fall,” the Warden reminded the guards. They nodded.

  The pulley-rope concluded with a series of complex chains. These were wrapped about Telos until he was tied like a hog, his ankles and wrists bound behind him. The guards spun him one way, then the other, like a bauble in the hands of a hesitant buyer. They laughed at his wild eyes, his fear.

  The Warden approached and removed the gag from Telos.

  Telos’s eyes blazed. The Warden saw his hatred. He was used to being hated. He had been hated his whole life. His own father had told him, many times, that he was a “hateful boy”. Of course, his father had tried to beat what he did not like out of his son. The beatings never stopped, so apparently whatever it was within him his father did not like could not be removed.

  When the Warden had turned thirteen years old, his father had contracted the Kiss of Eresh, a plague feared across Erethia, a plague that rotted mind and body alike, that turned men and women into living corpses with rotting limbs and gums. He had asked his son to pray to Eresh for his recovery. Only the goddess of sickness and renewal could save him, or so he believed. The Warden had made pilgrimage to the temple, as his father instructed. And he had prayed—but not for his father’s recovery.

  Over the next few days, his father started to heal. It was a miracle, the local physician said. The goddess had acted on his behalf. Gangrene receded. His father began to feel like his old self.

  The beatings resumed.

  That was the moment the Warden realised there were no gods, only blind chance. And it was up to men of strength, men of courage, to impose order upon a world in which there was no rhyme nor reason.

  Two things followed this revelation. Firstly, the Warden developed a sudden love of poetry. It was the rhyme and the reason, the sweet and delicately balanced order, he so loved.

  Secondly, he had crept into his father’s room one night when the wind howled and pressed a pillow over his face until he stopped breathing—and stopped beating.

  The Warden saw the same hatred in Telos’s eyes he had seen in his father’s moments before his death. It was the hatred of the powerless for the powerful. It brought to mind words:

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  “From the mists of Sumyr come the shades,

  met to view the last of me,

  and all my world turns now to darkling jade.”

  He spoke them aloud. They were lines of the Warden’s own composition, based on an older Sumyrian epic. Telos’s eyes widened with surprise, laced with disgust.

  “I thought you couldn’t get any worse,” Telos said. “But now you quote bad poetry too?”

  The Warden regarded him coldly. Little peacock, he thought. How proud you are. But all that will change.

  “Lower him,” the Warden commanded.

  The guards gradually loosened their grip on the pulley’s chain-rope and Telos descended into the pit. He made a retching sound as the full force of the gutter-thick blood-stink assailed his senses.

  “Flame!” the Warden commanded. The nearest guard, Grygory, produced a torch and placed it in the Warden’s hand. The Warden waited until Telos was low enough, then gave the signal for them to hold their position. The chainlinks gleamed in the combined light of moon and Nilldoran. Below, Telos spun in the dark. The Warden gave him a few more moments to inhale the bitter fumes—then he let the torch fall.

  The flaming brand streaked like a comet down. No sooner than it touched the brackish bottom of the pit than fire erupted, like a nest of black serpents stirred by invocation. They hissed, spat, licked.

  Telos screamed.

  The fires climbed quickly, dangerously ferocious. The guards made to raise Telos up, but the Warden held out a hand.

  “Not yet. Let him feel the full force.”

  Telos’s screams reached a pitch of agony that sent a chill of wonder and excitement down the Warden’s spine. If only he could have made his father scream like that! But there was no returning to the past. The past was dead. There was only the future and how it could be shaped. As Telos writhed and contorted below, the flames engulfing his whole body in black tendrils of chemical reaction, The Warden saw the future: he saw a world in which the lies and illusion of religion had been melted away; he saw a world in which men of sound reason might shape the ideals of society, rather than their society remaining beholden to freaks of nature and the memories of savages; he saw a world cleansed of its evil.

  And then he saw something else, something that should not be there, something that cut across his mind’s eye like a blade, dispelling the glorious fantasy he had momentarily glimpsed.

  There was someone else in the fire. A man. Or man-shaped.

  Horror of a kind he had never before experienced filled the Warden’s soul. Well, almost never. The day he had watched the decay ebbing from his father’s limbs, the day the progress of the flesh-eating rot had stopped, that had conveyed a similar dread.

  “W-who? Who is that?” he whispered.

  The guards stared down in the fire.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There!” the Warden screamed. “There in the fire!”

  He pointed, aware that his voice had risen a few octaves, had obtained an edge of desperation that was unseemly before his subordinates. But he could not hold back the terror, rising from the graveyard of his dreams like the revenant of his father.

  “I see… I see it!” Grygory cried. “There’s… a man?”

  Telos no longer screamed. And the man, the man burned in the very heart of the black flame, like an unbreakable diadem in the frenzied heat of a smithy’s forge. The flame was all around him yet did not seem to touch him. He was pale, slender, beautiful in a way that struck the Warden as unnatural.

  “What are they doing?” Grygory asked, his voice shaking.

  The Warden was not sure. The flames obscured his vision. But he could hear something. Was it voices? They were talking together, Telos and the other man… Impossible. Unless, of course, some kind of magic was involved. But even that seemed a remote possibility, for the Warden had burned alive many Daimomancers in his time. Parlour tricks were hardly sufficient to overcome the heat of Daimonsblood.

  The Warden drew his mace from his belt. Whatever was going on, he would end it at once.

  “Bring him up!” the Warden cried.

  “Who?”

  “The prisoner!” the Warden snarled. “Bring him up! Now!”

  The guards began to wind the pulley.

  Slowly, turn by turn, Telos ascended out of the pit.