Like a fool, a man who trusted himself too much, he had gone alone to the Church of the Great God Rile. There he had sat with the Archpriest and had tried to outwit his enemy. He had imagined that he could surprise or trick Makh into revealing the secrets of the Church. But he had been wrong.

The Archpriest wanted his secrets.

Makh’s hands were like shovels, like cudgels. With impossible ease, he had made King Bifalt’s spy helpless, unable to move any muscle that might have saved him. Then he had extended his power into Elgart’s mind. Eagerly, he had commanded agony.

Obedient to the Archpriest’s will, Elgart had felt exactly what his captor told him to feel, for as long as he was told to feel it. He remembered screaming.

The Archpriest had demanded Elgart’s secrets. All of them. Any of them. But in particular, he had wanted locations. Warehouses. Hidden cellars. Abandoned storerooms.

Bullets.

It was probably a mistake that Belleger’s kegs of gunpowder, dozens of them, were kept with the ammunition for the realm’s many rifles. Crates of bullets by the scores would be destroyed if any of those kegs caught fire. Any single explosion among them would reduce an acre of the Open Hand to rubble and splinters. But where else could the gunpowder be kept? In Belleger’s Fist? King Bifalt feared a blast among the old keep’s foundations. More than the Fist would be destroyed. The realm’s accumulated rifles were there. Belleger could survive the loss of a warehouse or two. The loss of its rifles would deprive it of its best weapon.

The Archpriest wanted to know where those kegs and crates were held. If the men and women he had seduced by sorcery could get at the bullets and gunpowder, Belleger would be crippled in the coming war.

As crippled as Makh had made Elgart.

But had Elgart given up that secret? Any of his secrets? He did not know. He remembered screaming. Oh, he remembered that. But he did not remember speaking. While he fought the impulse to confess himself, the horrors that Makh instructed him to feel had become his whole world.

Until—

—something.

Had the Archpriest been interrupted? Had there been sounds of violence? Elgart did not know. His head had been lifted. He had been given a drink of some kind, a rich wine like a kiss of sweetness. The taste had lingered in his mouth. It was still with him.

That taste should have been familiar. It had made his lassitude delicious. He wanted to remember his first taste of it.

Now he could recall every hurt that Makh had inflicted on him. Each detail was etched with acid. But the more distant past—Elgart’s former life—had become as vague as mist. In pain, he had forgotten himself.

Still, choices he had not made continued to affect him. Slowly, he began to awaken.