They looked at each other. Aminata wasn’t sure if Faroni was serious. Faroni looked like she wasn’t certain if she’d gone too far. A scream pulled them back to the cell periscope and the drama below.

The prisoner Abdumasi Abd had been chained spread-eagled and facedown in the center of a stone slot. His emaciated body was piebald with acid burns, his shoulders grotesquely protuberant against taut skin. Hug the man too hard and his ribs would probably crown through his skin like baby teeth. Gerewho Gotha beat him, Aminata’s brute, sixteen and vicious; real men needed passion and viciousness was an easy passion when you hurt. This was the first stage of Aminata’s process, the resentimente, old-fashioned hardhanded torture from which no good intelligence could be milked. Prisoners needed something to be rescued from.

Break Abdumasi Abd, Rear Admiral Maroyad had ordered her. We want the names of everyone he’s conspired with. In particular we want the names and location of the Cancrioth.

What’s the Cancrioth, Aminata had asked her.

Irrelevant to your work.

If you won’t tell me, how am I to know if he’s lying?

You will know when he speaks the truth. You’ll hear the madness in him.

Fine. She’d work with what she knew. Fact: Abdumasi Abd had led an Oriati pirate syndicate in a brave and hopeless assault on Aurdwynn. Hate made you do that, she figured. Principled hatred of Falcrest and personal loathing of its people.

She had to focus Abdumasi Abd’s hate down upon a single person. Then she could remove that person, remove the hate, and swap in a substitute, a friend, a confidante, which would be Faroni’s role.

Two years ago Aminata had been ordered to condition her first prisoner into terrified insanity. She’d used incendiaries, hallucinogens, and certain strains of pepper to teach the man that all things contained an inner fire. Everything burnt. When she’d let him see the sun after weeks in the dark, he’d screamed in horrified revelation. It was getting closer: it would never draw away. They were all falling into the fire.

Then the Admiralty sent him back to Devi-naga Mbo. A reputation-builder, they’d told her. He’d gone home in catatonic terror, trapped in a world that smoldered, populated by men and women whose fat would pop and spatter in spontaneous flame, whose eyeballs sizzled as they cried for him with trails of blue-white grease cinder.

Now the Oriati called Aminata the Burner of Souls.

“Tell me the names of the Cancrioth financiers!” Gerewho bellowed, and he caned the prisoner on the soft of his calf: a flick and a line of blood, a step too far, they couldn’t risk infection in an open wound.

“Go!” Aminata pushed Lieutenant Faroni toward the stairs. “Go, rescue him now.”