“Kaden,” Triste panted, twisting in the chair, pulling against her restraints until blood trickled, black and thick, down the flesh of her wrists.

“Yes,” Matol agreed amiably. “That’s Kaden. Although it’ll be harder to recognize him after we go to work on your eyes.”

Kaden turned to Tan. “You have to stop this.”

The monk shook his head. “What Matol does is necessary. The girl is not what you think.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think—” Kaden began, but Matol’s scream cut him off.

“One more fucking WORD about stopping and I will chain you to the wall behind her and burn off your sad little cock just for the fucking FUN of it. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

“No,” Kaden said, forcing himself to stand straight, to meet the man’s eye. “I do not understand. I don’t understand either your obsession, which looks like blindness, or your methods, which don’t work.”

“Kaden,” Tan cut in, voice sharp with warning. “You are not here to judge.”

Kaden shook his head. “What am I here for?”

“You were here,” Matol said, voice rising, neck bulging, “to tell us something fucking useful. AND YOU FAILED!”

“I told you what I saw, but you are unable to listen.”

Matol looked ready to seize him by the throat, to hurl him to the ground and choke the life out of him. And then, with horrifying suddenness, the snarl vanished. The tendons in his neck and hands loosened. He was smiling, a wide, toothy smile. The emotional swings were almost more frightening than the rage itself. It seemed as though something had come loose inside the man, unlatched, like a stable door blasted open by a storm, hung on a single, rusted hinge, slamming open and shut, open and shut, over and over and over.

“You could help,” Matol suggested finally, waving a long serrated blade in Kaden’s direction. He frowned at the blade, then seemed to think better of it. “Now that I think about it, never mind. You’d probably just fuck it up. Take off a whole leg or a tit or something and have her bleed out.”

“Observe,” Tan murmured to Kaden. “Enter the vaniate if you must.”

Kaden tried to still his pulse enough to find the trance, but the sick twist in his gut nagged at him until he thought he would be ill. Matol hemmed and hawed for a while, fiddled with a vicious variety of blades, hooks, and small vises, before tossing everything back in the box and selecting a lamp from its hook on the wall instead.

“Fire,” he grinned. “Sometimes I get so carried away with the tools that I forget about fire.”

With a practiced motion he unscrewed the base from the glass shield until the naked flame, hissing and reeking of low-grade oil, licked at the air. Triste’s eyes widened. She started to moan.

“Please,” she begged. “I’ve told you everything.”