Chapter 43: Cleanup Aftermath
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 15-28, Month VIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 15th to 28th day of the 8th Month
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Prisoners
The narrative had spun itself, which had been the intention all along.
People who had been at the plaza or heard about it from someone who had, which was most of the village within the first day, began the process that communities do when something significant has occurred within it and the official account has not yet been released: they talked. They speculated. They compared what they had seen or heard with what the person they were talking to had seen or heard, and the composite picture that emerged from this process was incomplete and partially inaccurate and spread outward through the visiting merchants and travelers and workers with the speed that incomplete and partially inaccurate information always travels, which is faster than anything the village could have controlled if it had wanted to control it in the first place.
The village did not release a formal statement. Not yet. This was a deliberate act on their part. A statement issued too early, before the speculation had spread far enough to reach the people it needed to reach, would have replaced the questions with answers that aren't to their advantage before the questions had even done their work. The questions that people asked were useful tools. Because that is how you stir the minds of any neighboring kingdoms and trading partners with attentive officials, people who paid attention to what was happening in a village they had recently formalized relations with or were considering formalizing relations with, would hear the questions ("why was this village attacked") and they would begin forming their own working hypotheses about who had sent those assassins against Maya Village's leadership and why. Those hypotheses, formed independently by people with relevant knowledge of regional politics, would arrive at the same conclusion the village intended to announce and would arrive there with the credibility of independent inference rather than the lesser credibility of a single interested party's claim.
Emperor Janus had received the report of the counter operations success within the day after it had concluded. His seat had been informed through the imperial garrison's own reporting channels, which were separate from the village's own communications and had been operating in parallel throughout the incident. He withheld any official imperial statement for now as the village's protector. He continued to wait and watch as he wanted to see how the village would handle this, and whether his direct involvement was something the situation required or something it was better off without.
In the meantime, the thirty-three survivors were being kept somewhere that was not inside or near the village.
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The Hole
The structure had been built for training purposes originally, which was the reason why it had the features it currently had: the mana canceling walls, the smooth stone interior, the dimensions that made it useful for specific kinds of controlled-environment magical and physical exercise. It had been repurposed for its current use with only a minimal amount of modification, because the original features that made it useful for training made it equally useful for their current requirement.
It was a hundred feet deep hole. Fifty feet wide at the base, with the walls tapering smoothly as they rose toward the dome structure at the top. The walls were not kept as rough stone that offered any scalable handholds and footholds. They were magically finished to a smoothness that did not give friction anything to work with. The single hole at the dome's apex was wide enough for three people to pass through and was the only connection to the surface. The walls were five feet thick at minimum, everything was made from the hardest stone available to them, it was then further covered by the earth around them, the actual infrastructure was built twenty feet deeper before the infrastructure itself and it was a total of a hundred and twenty feet deep in its entirety.
The mana canceling property was the most significant feature. In a space where mana use was suppressed to near nothing, every capability that the thirty-three had built around elemental manipulation was reduced to the same marginal functionality that an untrained person had. They were left with their bodies and their training and whatever resolve they could organize, and while these were not nothing for people the Sovereignty had spent years developing, they were also not sufficient to overcome the geometry of the situation they were in.
The structure was located near the village's eastern boundary, which was a deliberate choice: far enough from the village proper that any noise or activity within it was not a concern to the population, but it was close enough that the guard rotation from Talon Two could maintain the watch without being separated from the village's operational structure.
Talon Two managed the watch around the hole's exterior. At least one Talon Two member was present at all times. The rotation brought additional security personnel through on their shifts. There was nothing particularly elaborate about the security arrangement because the security arrangement did not need to be elaborate. The geometry of the structure was doing most of the work for them, they were only there to make sure that it stays that way.
Inside the hole, the thirty-three were bound with magical restraints that the mana canceling walls made considerably harder to interfere with than they would have been in a normal environment. They had water, pooled at the center beneath the single light source that was the hole's only illumination. They were fed generously once a day. These were the terms, and the terms were better than what the Sovereignty would have offered them if the situation had been reversed, which all thirty-three assassins understood completely because they had been trained by the same institution that produced the Sovereignty's interrogation methodology and they knew exactly what that methodology involved.
They were not being tortured. They were not being extracted for information through pain or deprivation. They were being held in a dark hole with adequate water and a daily meal, which compared to six months in the actual Hell's Pits was a situation they had the psychological framework to endure. The PTSD that the Pits had deposited in each of them, the memories they had spent years trying to wall off, had resurfaced in the dark and in the silence in ways that were unpleasant and beyond the ability of a resolve built in the Pits to fully suppress. But they were alive. They were fed. And the gap between their current situation and the alternatives available to them was wide enough that none of them were making serious plans to escape from it.
A week has passed with nothing but the echoed silence of the chamber and the occasional hum of wind entering the hole. Yet no one ever came down.
So they started to wonder why they were not being interrogated or even tortured.
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August and His Morning Visit
The answer appeared on a morning when the light from the top had just begun to angle through the dome aperture, before most of the thirty-three had fully surfaced from their sleep.
He was already standing at the center of the hole when the first of them registered his presence, which was notable because no one had heard anything. Not a rope drop, not footsteps, nor the creak of the access apparatus. The man was simply there, in the middle of the space that had been empty when the last person had checked it before sleeping, with the composed stillness of something that belonged exactly where it was.
They were able to immediately recognize the aura. You did not forget the specific quality of a person who had taken apart fifteen experienced operatives in five minutes in a forest at night and had not been breathing hard enough after it was over.
August was holding the rope he had come down on. He held it out toward them, the end of it dangling at approximately shoulder height, and looked at the thirty-three with the patient expression of someone who had arrived with a purpose and was prepared to wait for the group to reach the correct level of consciousness to receive it.
"I will grant you a single wish," he said, when the last of the sleepy ones had registered his presence and the hole had reached the quality of attention that thirty-three people give a space when they are all focused on the same person in it. "If you provide me with useful information, I will hear it. But if you want to get out of this hole, you will have to put me down to get out of it. One or the other, your choices don't matter to me. But understand this: whatever aggression you bring toward me I will return to you ten fold. I am not here to negotiate. I am not here to offer more than what I have described. You know what you did and you will face the consequences of it. Those are your choices. Now let us begin."
The thirty-three looked at each other. This was not the interrogation they had been trained to expect. This was something that did not fit the categories their training had given them, and the brain's first response to things that do not fit its categories is confusion, which in people who have built their self-preservation around clear situational assessment produces a specific kind of discomfort.
The confusion did not last long enough to produce good decisions. The survival machinery the Pits had built into them ran underneath the confusion and produced its own answer, which was the latter choice: he is one person and there are thirty-three of us and if we all move at once the numbers mean something.
They all moved at once, it may look like it was synchronized to an outsider's perspective, but to August's perspective it was all but a disorganized chaos.
August took the first of them by the approaching arm and redirected him into the person immediately to his left, and the two of them created a small obstruction in the space between August and the next three arriving, and August used that half-second to dislocate the lead arm of the nearest of the three with the specific efficiency of someone performing a familiar motion rather than a difficult one. The sounds this produced were informative to everyone in the hole regarding the nature of the situation they were in.
Within ten minutes no one was left standing. Everyone was on the ground with their mouths foaming or they were moaning in serious pain.
But they were all breathing, which was the intended outcome. Several of them were cursing in the direction August had been, because he was no longer where they expected him to be when they said the curses, which increased the volume and creativity of the cursing. Their arms and legs that had been dislocated were in a great deal of pain, which was the message the dislocations were intended to carry.
August moved through them with the practicality of someone completing a task, realigning each dislocated joint with the technique that produced the fastest resolution of the displacement, then distributing the healing potions that Theressa had prepared. The potions handled the rest.
Then he left.
"Think hard about your choices," he said, before the rope pulled him back up. "I will be back later, and we will do this again, and we will continue doing it until you make a decision that I like."
The hole was quiet for a moment after he was gone.
Then it was very much not quiet, because thirty-three people who had just had several of their bones put back in their sockets by the same person who had put them out had opinions about this that required expression.
Dragnov did not contribute to the overall discomfort of the others. He simply laid down on the stone floor and thought.
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The Cycle of Choice
The visits continued. One in the morning and evening, in the specific rotation of someone who had decided that this was part of his training schedule and was treating it as such, which it was. August came down the hole and the thirty-three assassins continued to attack him and he addressed this situation with the efficient return policy he had described on the first visit, and then he healed whatever needed healing and left.
They could not land a hit. This was not for the lack of trying or their skills were not there, because by the third day they had organized themselves and were attempting coordinated approaches rather than the simultaneous rush of the first morning. This was more interesting to August and also entirely insufficient, because coordinated approaches that have been organized by people in a confined space over a few days of discussion are not the same as coordinated approaches built by people who have spent years developing instinctive responses to each other's positions, and August could read the former with the ease of someone reading a page of large text.
On the fifth day, one of them stopped before the morning session began.
"I can't do this anymore," he said, which was an accurate assessment of the situation rather than a rhetorical expression of frustration. He looked around at the others. "Why are we even fighting him? We're already dead. Either we die here or we die when we go back. There's no version of this where that isn't true."
He paused, and when he continued his voice had the specific quality of someone who has crossed a threshold rather than arrived at a position.
"I'll tell him what I know. Whether I live or die here no longer truly matters to me, and that means I might as well choose the option that doesn't involve being thrown into the ground again every morning."
The words moved through the group the way words move through people who are all carrying the same weight and have been waiting for someone to say what they have already been thinking. Not everyone was ready to agree. But the threshold had been reached, and knowing where their current threshold was, made it easier to approach it.
Dragnov heard the words and thought about them carefully and found that they caught on something that he could not immediately resolve, because the oath was still present in him in the way that a magical contract was present, which was not as a feeling or a conviction but as a physical fact about his continued existence. What it would cost him to do what his heart was moving toward was a question he could not answer without answering it, which was a different kind of problem than any he had spent eighty years solving.
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Bacheon Speaks
The following morning, before anyone had moved toward the center of the hole to begin the day's futile engagement, August was already there on the stone slab above the water pool. The others saw him standing there and the previous day's conversation was still in the air between them, and there was a hesitation that had not been present on the earlier days, a collective pause before the approach that the first three days had not contained.
One of the thirty-three moved toward him from a direction that did not form any indication of an attack posture. His name was Bachoen. He stopped at a distance that was respectful rather than threatening and addressed the floor briefly before addressing August.
"Master….," he said. The word came out rough, as words do when they have been held back for several days while their speaker made a decision. "I will talk."
August looked at the man in front of him and then at the group around him, reading the atmosphere with the ease of someone who had been watching this space every morning and evening for the past several days and had a comprehensive picture of where everyone was.
"Do not address me with any title," August said. "Sir is sufficient. Tell me what you know."
He had one of the new inventions that had just recently reached the general market, it was a magical voice recorder that was immutable or (untamperable), it was a device he had already encountered in one of the intervals when his other self's experiences had briefly been accessible to him through his Personal System. This version could only capture the voice rather than both voice and image, but that voice was what he needed and the device recorded within a two-meter radius with clarity sufficient for the purpose. He activated it without explaining it.
Bachoen spoke. He gave what he knew about the operation: its origin, the instruction chain, the general methodology of the Sovereignty's shadow unit, the nature of the oath and what it bound them to, the specific orders that had produced their deployment to Maya Village. It was not comprehensive intelligence on the Sovereignty's entire apparatus. It was the ground-level operational picture of someone who had been given the information he needed to do his specific role and no more.
It confirmed what the village already knew and added the specific details that transformed the confirmation into an unrefutable evidence.
When Bachoen finished, August thanked him with the straightforward sincerity of someone who considered gratitude for cooperation to be a correct and appropriate response rather than a performance.
"Thank you for your cooperation. You will be excluded from further morning sessions. If you have any additional information at any point, raise your hand."
Bachoen's expression when he returned to his spot had the specific quality of a weight having been set down rather than moved.
The others had heard every word. The hole's acoustics were adequate. They had heard him being thanked and the thanking alone was, in its own way, more informative than anything Bachoen had actually said.
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Dragnov's Request
The following afternoon, a hand went up from the back of the group.
August looked at the hand and then at the person it belonged to and waited.
Dragnov stood up from where he had been sitting. He did not move toward August and he did not look at the others. He looked at August and spoke with the difficulty of someone who has not said a particular kind of thing in a very long time and is finding the words by feel rather than by habit.
"Sir. I am tired. I have been tired for a very long time and I did not have a word for it before but that is what it is." He paused. "I never wanted this life. I did not choose it. I have spent eighty years doing this because I had no choice, and the things I have done because I had no choice have put more blood on my hands than I can account for. I want to stop. I want to spend whatever time I have left not adding to that."
He looked at the floor briefly.
"If there is somewhere I could go. Anywhere. Any place where I could live without killing, I would like to try and pay for what I have done, that is what I am asking for."
August heard this without the expression of someone who is deciding how to respond, because he had already heard this kind of request before, in various forms, from people whose circumstances had brought them to a village that had been built by and for exactly this kind of person.
"I do not concern myself with a person's past," August said. "We all have our histories and I am not the judge of them. What I am capable of is providing a place and a process to someone who genuinely wants a different life and is willing to do what that requires. There is a process here. If you are a good fit for it, you will have what you are asking for."
Dragnov returned to his spot. August addressed the full group.
"I will keep my judgment fair to everyone here. The choices remain what they have always been: give me the information and make a request, and I will respond to the request as long as it does not involve causing harm to others or to this village. Whatever you ask within those limits, I will take it seriously. Do not take it as something I only perform for the looks of it. It is simply how I operate."
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Out of the Hole
It took the remaining time of the month for all thirty-three to arrive at the same place.
They came one by one, in the order that their individual calculus resolved to the same conclusion, which was that the alternative they had been brought up to believe was the only alternative to the mission's completion was not in fact the only alternative. August had named a different one and had demonstrated through the daily sessions that the opportunity he offered was genuine rather than a strategic one, and people who have spent their entire adult lives being deceived develop an accurate instinct for the difference between a genuine offer and a tactical one.
They were moved from the hole to the fishing settlement at Tagkarit, five kilometers south of the village, where Elder Marck Spense's community of fishers and loggers had been operating with the quiet productivity of a community that was part of Maya Village's extended network without being inside its walls. Thirty-three new residents, under continuous observation, were restricted from leaving the area for a period of six months. The terms were stated plainly, which was how the village stated everything.
August told them what would follow in those six months, if the six months indeed went as it was intended, which was to desensitize them back into the normal world: the choice to become formal village citizens of the village would become open, although they would have to go through the process just like everyone else or they could choose to leave for elsewhere, with the understanding that choosing to leave and subsequently causing harm to the village would produce consequences that were not worth testing.
He did not tell the settlement's existing residents who the new arrivals were. The security presence that accompanied the new group was its own communication for anyone paying attention, and the fishing community had enough experience with the forest and with the village to understand that some things did not require a full explanation.
Dragnov stood at the water's edge on the first morning and looked at the river and at the forest across it and at the sky above the canopy, which was a wider sky than anything he had been able to see for most of his life given that most of his life had been conducted in dark places.
He was alive. He was not required to kill anything today. He did not yet know what to do with either of these facts.
He supposed he had six months to work it out.
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The Wider Consequence
The incident, from the village's perspective, had concluded. The evidence was compiled, documented, and preserved in forms that could be presented to any party that required verification. The voice recordings existed. The thirty-three prisoners existed and had given corroborating accounts. The coded messages that Juan Tamad had intercepted and decoded formed an additional layer of documentation. The material was comprehensive.
What would be done with it was a matter for the diplomatic process that the village was now developing, and for the empire's own response once Emperor Janus determined what response the situation merited. He was still watching. He had been watching the whole time. What he saw appeared to satisfy whatever standard he applied to the question of whether his direct intervention was necessary.
For the Sovereignty of Arwen, the aftermath was already beginning to accumulate. The rumors that had spread outward from Maya Village's witnesses were reaching the principality networks, the trading partners, the diplomatic watchers who paid attention to small things in frontier territories because small things in frontier territories had a history of becoming large things in other territories. The words spread, as words did. The picture they formed was not flattering to a sovereign state that had used its crown-trained assassination unit against a village under imperial protection; it failed comprehensively, and lost thirty-three of a hundred operatives to capture while the rest were accounted for in the forest's belly.
The word failure had specific weight in the vocabulary of regional political assessment. The word comprehensive made it heavier. And the word of the Empire had a specific weight of its own that nothing attached to it could afford to ignore.
The village had more pressing things to attend to than the Sovereignty's diplomatic difficulties. Autumn was already moving forward. The zone four expansion was progressing. The new Talon One members needed training. The three families somewhere in the south were still carrying a letter and a decision.
There were always more things than there was time for, which was the specific situation of a village in the middle of a growth period that had no intention of slowing down.
They had bought themselves more time and they intended to use it.