SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”I wouldn’t want to be in his position, young master.” Caelum went down the last of the steps ahead of him, the lamp steady in his hand. ”Two years, and no notion any of it passed. A man lies down for a nap and wakes to find the world’s moved on without him. There’s a cruelty in that most people never stop to think about.” A pause, even and mild. ”I don’t say it to pity him. I say it because it happens to be true.”

”No.” Trafalgar watched the dark rise up to meet them. ”I wouldn’t waste pity on a man like him either.”

”He’s given you no trouble?”

”None a sleeping man can give.” Caelum’s tone didn’t shift. ”His body’s held. I’ve kept it fed and turned so it wouldn’t waste away on us. Whatever you want out of him, it’ll still be in there to be had. I saw to that much.”

Trafalgar didn’t doubt it. Keeping a man asleep and whole for two years was no small thing, and he knew what it had cost. One of Caelum’s own bodies spent doing nothing else, down here in the dark, for as long as Trafalgar cared to spend it. Caelum had never once complained of the waste. That was the unsettling thing about him, in the end. Not that he wore so many bodies, but the way he’d bind any one of them to a task for years on end and think nothing of it at all.

The stair ended at a door, heavy and plain. It opened for Caelum without a hand laid on it, and the room past it breathed out cold, stale air.

Inside was small and bare, stone on every side, no window, a single lamp burning low in a bracket. The air smelled of nothing at all, scrubbed down to a dead flatness that was worse somehow than any stink would have been. In the middle of it stood one bed, the sort you’d find in a hospital ward, and strapped down to it at every point a body could be held, wrists and ankles and chest and brow, lay a man.

Esmond. He hadn’t moved in two years, and it showed in the slackness of him, in the shallow rise and fall of a chest that did nothing else. Whatever Caelum did to keep him under kept him thoroughly. Two years of it had left their mark all the same, in the hollow of his cheeks and the grey cast of a face that hadn’t felt sun or seen a waking hour in longer than most men would have lasted.

Trafalgar crossed to the side of the bed and looked down at the man who had once cut open the family that owned him, laid their bloodline out on a table, and walked out of Aurevane without a backward glance.

”You brought it?”

”I did.” Caelum reached into his coat, to some inner pocket, and drew out a small bundle. The pieces from the mine, the burnt rod and the stub of tubing and the glass with its dried black residue, the proof Trafalgar had carried up out of the Black Basin. Caelum laid them out on the little table beside the bed, arranged neat and deliberate, where a waking man’s eyes would find them the moment they cleared.

”Alright.” Trafalgar stepped back. ”Wake him.”

Caelum produced a vial from somewhere on his person, a thumb’s length of pale liquid, drew the stopper, and tipped the man’s head back with the ease of someone who had done it many times over. He poured it slow past Esmond’s lips, careful not to spill, and withdrew.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then Esmond came back to the world all at once.

It began in his hands, a twitch, a clench, and rolled up through the whole of him like a current finding a wire. His eyes flew open on nothing, wide and wet and seeing none of the room. A sound tore its way out of him that had been building for two years without his knowing it, raw and high and scraping, and his body heaved up against the straps, thrashing, trying to curl in on itself and bolt at the same time. Cold sweat broke across his grey skin. He screamed again, and if there was a word buried in it, the word came apart before it reached the air.

He couldn’t move. The straps held every part of him, and all his terror earned him was the discovery of precisely how little they gave. He pulled anyway, over and over, an animal in a trap, until the fight in him had nowhere left to run.

Trafalgar watched every second of it without a flicker, hands loose at his sides.

He’d wondered, somewhere on the way down, whether he might feel a thing watching a man dragged back into a life that had been stolen out from under him. He didn’t. This was a man who had opened people up for a fee and out of curiosity and slept soundly after. Trafalgar could stand here as long as it took.

By the time the screaming thinned to ragged breathing and small broken sounds, some of the wildness had drained out of Esmond’s eyes, and they had begun, at last, to take in where he was. The stone. The straps. The two figures standing over him. And then the little table at his side, and the things laid out on it.

Trafalgar watched the exact moment the man’s gaze found the burnt rod and the length of tubing, and watched what it did to him. The thrashing had been terror with nothing behind it. This was worse: a man who understood, all in one breath, exactly what he was looking at, and exactly what it meant that it had been set out where he’d see it.

Trafalgar leaned in a fraction.

”Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.”

Neither of them so much as blinked at it. The name meant nothing to Caelum, waiting patient against the wall, and less than nothing to the wild-eyed wreck strapped to the bed, and why would it. It came from a story out of a world neither of them had ever heard named, dredged up from a life Trafalgar had given up explaining to anyone a long while ago. He didn’t trouble to now.

He tilted his head, almost pleasant about it.

”How did you sleep?”