Chapter 12: Imago

Lito’s men had found and captured Salva Santori that morning. Lito had agonized about the upcoming interrogation for hours, and when she could stand it no more she had called Elaene in for advice. Elaene had, as usual, been slightly less than useless.

Lito prepared for the session in the same way she prepared for most everything. She worked on her garden.

The vines had been growing around the broken weapons nicely. She had been adjusting and guiding them each day, to ensure they took as intricate and elaborate a path as possible. But despite her efforts, weeds had begun to sprout in her indoor garden—she knew not from where.

She ran her hands around the broken swords, and pulled each weed out, one by one. The weed itself wasn’t doing anything wrong. It just wanted to grow and survive, as all living things did. It wasn’t the weed’s fault that her indoor garden couldn’t support it. The weed had been dead from the second it sprouted in Lito’s garden.

The sides of the swords ran against her sides, cutting her shallowly. She ignored it. Lito would be scratched, often to the point of bleeding, while working on some of the thorny gardens in Raven’s Run. This was no different.

Once she had pulled out all the visible weeds, she collected them and burned them. She let the smoke run through her nose and the ash settle on her hair.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Salva Santori sat in front of her. He hadn’t been bound, not yet, but that didn’t mean he was free. Two members of her guard stood behind him, looming tall and silent.

The guards did not need to be there, in all truth. Vesper Grant was a fierce soldier, as was his partner, but neither of them were as quick or as accurate as Lito.

Santori was not a fighter. Shirtless, Lito could see that he was a little fat around the stomach, although he had strong arms from carrying and moving boxes. Any one of the soldiers in the room could have killed him in an instant, and Santori appeared to know it. The guards were only there to help tie Santori up, when the time came for that.

“We know you have been working for the Carpenter,” Lito said. “We know you have access to some members of high rank in his forces.”

Santori made no reaction.

“We also know you have a wife and children. They live in a stone house near the Summer Rush, on the Avian Way.”

Santori licked his lips, and broke eye contact.

“We know you have friends. Roc Renner, Dane Wrickon, and Cisco Forell.” Lito sat down on the table, looming above Santori. “But for the moment, Salva Santori, we are only talking to you. Don’t make us extend this conversation.”

“You’re not murderers,” Salva said.

“We’re not,” Lito agreed. “We have no intention of killing anybody. But I think… in a few hours, you will wish that we were.”

Salva shook his head. “You’re not like the Carpenter, either. Besides,” he shrugged. “I don’t know anything. I’m willing to tell you all that I know, but I can guarantee that you won’t like it.”

Lito stood up. “In time, Salva Santori. In time.”

The guards stepped forward, and roughly picked Salva Santori up from the chair. He expended no energy in the struggle, which Lito thought was wise. He was saving it for later.

Her guards laid Salva Santori onto a stone table, facing up. They tied him tightly, hands, feet, and chest to the table. Lito gave them a motion with her hand, and they left the room.

“What do you know, Santori?”

“The Carpenter wants to overthrow you.”

“This much, I know,” said Lito. She walked over to a table behind her victim.

Santori craned his head, slightly panicked, to follow her. “Getting your first toy?”

“Don’t act confident, Santori,” Lito said. “It doesn’t amuse me, and it will do you no good, in the end.”

She poured herself a glass of cool and clean water, and walked back over.

“I don’t have toys, Santori. Let the Carpenter waste money and time on his childish elaborate schemes. This is not how adults war.” She pulled her swords out of their scabbard, and laid them across Santori’s chest. “These are the only implements I will ever need.”

They were a pair of butterfly swords. Each blade was about as long as her forearm, wickedly sharp in places and immaculately cleaned. On each sword, the top half of the blade had a crisp edge. The bottom half was left blunt, in order to block other swords without damaging the cutting edge. A small cross guard extended behind each blade to catch and hook an opponent’s weapon. The cross guard also curved in front of the blade, around to the bottom of the hilt, in order to provide protection to the hand, although it could also be used as brass knuckles in a pinch.

The butterfly swords were expertly made from a sword smith in Invercard, and there were few like it on the Island. Lito tended to carry both swords in one sheath on her side, to give the appearance of only carrying one weapon.

“Light, endlessly versatile, with quite a sting. These are the Wasps. We can start whenever you are ready,” Lito said.

Salva Santori looked her in the eye. “Do your worst.”

Lito picked up the Wasps, and began.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Lito reversed her grip on the Wasps and worked Salva Santori over with the cross guard for a time. She was holding back on her strikes slightly; the purpose was to cause Santori as much pain as possible without damaging anything permanently.

Salva kept quiet for the entire process, apart from the occasional gasp and groan of pain. When she had finished, there were bruises on the inside his arms, around his ribs, and up the length of his legs by the joins. She had paid special attention to the head and neck, striking in such a way to keep the brain and neck intact, but cause a considerable amount of trauma.

Lito got herself some water. “Bruising draws the blood to the surface,” Lito said. “Making your vitals more accessible.”

“I’ve seen blood,” Salva said, wearily.

“As have I,” Lito said. She went back to the table and brought out a ceramic bowl. It was filled with dirt, and they both could see long worms crawl in and out of the surface. “I picked these up from my garden,” Lito said. “I could cut your bruises open and rub in a mixture from this bowl. The worms wouldn’t last long in such an environment, but a dead worm can cause more infections than a live one.”

She put the bowl down. “I’m not going to do this, though. I am not the Carpenter. So let’s talk. Would you like some water?”

She offered the pitcher towards him, and poured a bit into his mouth when he nodded.

“Tell me things. You work in shipping. What use could the Carpenter have for someone who puts boxes in a river?”

“I don’t know what goes into the boxes,” Salva said.

Lito stood up. “Your eyes say otherwise,” she said. Lito reached for Salva’s left hand, which was tied to the table. He clenched it up into a fist. Lito rolled her eyes. “Do I need to call Vesper back in?”

“I suppose you may as well,” Salva said.

Lito frowned. “Salva, if you still have the energy and will to be so charming under my blades, I need to assume that you still have the energy and will to lie straight to me. This will only get worse until I start hearing some true desperation.”

“Bring in your gods damned lackeys,” Salva spat.

“That’s better.” Lito knocked on the stone table a few times, and Vesper came into the room to tie Salva’s individual fingers down.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Lito carefully sliced along the back of the fingernails of Santori’s left hand, separating them from the skin behind. She lifted up the tip of the nail carefully with her left hand, and cut sideways with the sword in her right, separating the nail entirely from the skin below. When she had finished, pink exposed skin remained at the tips of Santori’s fingers, droplets of blood beginning to well up.

Lito was breathing heavily. Santori may have screamed throughout the process; Lito honestly could not remember. All she could smell was smoke.

“Where were the boxes going, Salva?” She asked again.

“Drown in hell,” he gasped.

Lito cut along Santori’s exposed skin along his index finger, shallowly. She could see his muscles bulging under the ropes.

“They were going to the Drain,” Salva cried at last. “We were sending supplies down to a group of prisoners in there. Explosive powders, small blades, many things.”

“Why?”

“So they could break out,” Salva gasped.

Lito stood for a moment in shock. “That’s impossible,” she said. “The guards can cut the bridge in a moment if there’s trouble incoming; they can shoot down climbers with bows and arrows. The cliffs above are as smooth as glass. How could you break out?”

“They’ll find a way. They’re clever, they’re desperate. They have to.”

Lito slammed her fist onto the table. “Even if they did, what’s the point? Why would you unleash murderers and thieves on the island? Gods, they won’t care that you got them free, they’ll kill everyone.”

“Most will,” Salva agreed. “But what can the Carpenter do about it? He has no standing army.”

Lito’s blood went chill. Salva kept talking.

“That’s not all I know,” Salva said. “I know that Dane isn’t ours. Why else would you keep him in your service? He’s a wreck. He’s useless. I didn’t want to believe it at first… but I get captured a week after I recommend him? Dane’s your plant, he has to be. We’ll find him, Lito. We’ll find him and make him pay for this betrayal.”

“You won’t have the chance,” Lito said, and picked up the Wasps from where they lay on the table.

“I’ll get the message out,” Salva said weakly. “And if I don’t, they’ll know you took me; the Carpenter is smart, he’ll figure it out. Dane’s a dead man.”

Lito brought the Wasps to Salva’s neck and drew them across swiftly.

The Sunset Knight didn’t hear a sound, and the only thing she could remember smelling was the ashes of burnt weeds.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Lito sat at home. Her hands were raw from wiping the blood off.

She had lit a fire to illuminate the room. Lito had wanted light to work by, and there was no moon this night. In the dim firelight, her hands didn’t look any cleaner.

When she had first gone to war, it had been against the famers in Glen-Clachan. They had objected strongly to Altor’s programs, and had rebelled. The Sunset Knight had been sent down to help deal with them.

Except Lito Laeth wasn’t the Sunset Knight then. She was just Little Lito, the girl who had been chosen to be a soldier. She had been disciplined, fierce, utterly merciless, and she hadn’t understood anything about the consequences and realities of war. Lito had been taught how to kill, but she had not been taught how to die.

The leader of the uprising had been well hidden among the straw and thatch houses scattered along the countryside. They would approach one, and find it full of non-combatant farmers. The man was always on the move, and never stayed in the same place. Her commanders had discussed options; they said it was going to be as hard as finding a needle in a haystack.

Not if you burn the haystack down, Lito remembered saying. And search through the ashes.

They had set off a perimeter surrounding the area they were certain the leader was hiding in, digging wide trenches devoid of any living thing. Then they set the farm lands afire.

The rebellion stopped the next day.

The Sunset Knight remembered one man who had ran out of the flames towards her. Little Lito had drawn her sword, panicked, and stabbed the man through the gut as he leapt the trench.

“I’m dead,” the man had repeated, over and over, first in breathy gasps and finally in whispered moans.

As she held the man in her arms, his blood pooling around her, she had been disgusted to imagine that he was an infant, being rocked to sleep, saying his first intelligible words.

I’m dead.

Such words, Lito had thought, would have been equally true on both occasions.

Lito didn’t sleep for the remainder of the night. She stared into the dwindling fire, her Wasps clenched in her hands, whispering two words to herself. Remembering.

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