“You rip away a piece of someone’s soul,” Brother Qown said. “You rip out a piece of their soul and use it to put them in unbearable pain if they disobey you. So unbearable it often kills.” He gave Sir Oreth a significant look. “If you recall, it’s what they debated doing to you.”

Sir Oreth looked uneasy, but he shrugged it off. “So we’re summoning a demon, then?”

Brother Qown would have expected him to fear such a pronouncement or at the very least be disgusted.

Yet Sir Oreth sounded excited.

Senera shook her head. “I said we weren’t summoning a demon. We’re using a Cornerstone.”

Brother Qown straightened. “Which one?”

“The Stone of Shackles.”

“You have the Stone of Shackles?”

“No, but it’s irrelevant.” Senera continued talking as she sketched on Janel’s body. Brother Qown couldn’t tell what purpose the markings served, but perhaps calling on the Cornerstone’s powers required them.

Finally, she stepped back, tilted her head, and examined her work. Senera had drawn a spiraling design that covered the unconscious woman’s vital energy points.

“Now I need you both to be very quiet,” Senera said as she picked up a lion medallion from a shelf, “and I’m not joking when I say that if you defy me in this, you will spend your remaining days screaming.” She looked up at them. “Understood?”

The two men nodded.

Senera tucked her brush back into her hair and gestured toward Janel’s body. The body levitated and then tilted so Janel seemed to stand, her body vertical.

Holding the medallion in one hand, Senera touched the other to Janel’s hands, her neck, her forehead, and held her fingers in a claw shape over the woman’s heart.

Brother Qown couldn’t help but think that last gesture must be symbolic or even performative. There’s no special dwelling place for spiritual energy in the heart muscle.

He kept the thought to himself.

As Senera pulled her fingers back, thin energy strands flowed from Janel’s body to the woman’s hand. The motion reminded Qown of spinning thread: tiny strands of floss pulling from ball to spindle. As soul stuff pooled in Senera’s hand, she shaped and stretched the thread before feeding it into the medallion.

When Senera finished, anyone who held Janel’s medallion could give her any command they desired. Janel would disobey those commands at the cost of her own life.

Janel didn’t move or make a sound. She still walked the Afterlife. She’d have no idea what had happened until she woke, and then it would be the start of horrors lasting all her days.

He searched the room for anything he might use to distract Senera, anything he might use against Sir Oreth. He found nothing. He’d just get himself killed. A dead physicker heals no patients.