‘Excellent, Watcher.’ Nightmarish, said her younger self, and the other half did not disagree.
Seablast was a broken man.
Gone was the proud bearing of the warrior King, that sense of power he had conveyed only the day before. In its place was a downcast creature, his eyes dead, his black hair unkempt, his armour replaced with a dirty and torn white shirt. He even seemed thinner, shrunken, as if the loss of his lands had physically deflated him. He sat on a wooden stool before a stone table, and his legs and arms were shackled, like some kind of Doubter or common criminal.
Katrina stood at the back of the cell, pressed against a clammy wall. She wished she already had a mask of her own, when Seablast looked up at her. But he did not seem to see. His eyes looked through her, into nothing.
Aranfal took a seat opposite the King. He did not wear his raven’s mask, but laid it on the table, in front of Seablast. The King seemed to come to life when he noticed this strange object, this black, alien artefact that had made its way into his world, signifying the end of so much he had once held inviolable. Aranfal could have looked into the heart of the King, if he only chose to wear his mask. But it did not work like that. A Watcher only used his mask when he had to. Sometimes, wearing the mask actually hurt.
‘Do you recognise this?’ Aranfal had a certain tone to his voice, sometimes. Katrina pressed herself against the wall, willing it to suck her in.
‘That is a mask, Watcher,’ said the King. ‘I know all about you people. You live in a tower on a hill by the sea, and you run around with little masks on, and you think they are a gateway into people’s souls. Sometimes the masks are trees, sometimes they are people, sometimes they are cats, and sometimes they are dogs. Sometimes the masks are even made to look like sweet little birdies.’
He grinned at Aranfal, but Katrina saw through the smiles. He had lost everything, he was a husk of a man, yet still he felt the need to be combative. That wouldn’t do much good against Aranfal. That wouldn’t do much good at all.
Aranfal nodded, once, short and sharp. ‘Very good, King. It is a mask. But that is not what I meant to say. What I meant to say is, do you recognise this mask, in particular?’
Seablast thought this over for a moment, casting glances at the raven, which stared up at him from the table, waiting and watching. Katrina hated that bird, and feared it too. Seablast seemed unafraid. That will change.
‘Yes,’ the King said. ‘It is the raven of Aranfal, the renowned Watcher, Brightling’s hand-servant and general dogsbody. It is the mask of a weak man, who torments his victims by hurting their loved ones. It is the mask of a non-person.’
And then Seablast spat at Aranfal. It was a pathetic effort, the detritus of a dried and parched mouth. But it was not the quantity that mattered; it was the act itself.
In one cool, swift movement, Aranfal was on his feet. He leaned over the table and smacked the King with the back of his hand, sending a crack echoing in the cell like a shot from a handcannon. Seablast was knocked back, and would have fallen from his stool had it not been for his chains. He righted himself and glared at Aranfal through watery eyes, the right side of his face blooming red.
‘So, this is how the Watchers of the Overland treat kings,’ he said, his voice trembling.
‘King? You are a king no longer, Seablast. But don’t worry about that. You will have a place in history. You will always be remembered as the last independent ruler on the Plateau, who lost his lands through his own idiocy. Your name will echo through the ages. Children will sing songs mocking you, and drunks will lie in the gutter, puke drying on their lips, and thank the Machinery that they are not Seablast, knowing that it could be worse.’
Aranfal shrugged.
‘I am still a king,’ Seablast said. ‘One is born a king, by dint of one’s blood, which flows through the ages like a river. One is not Selected to rule by a machine; one is Selected to rule by one’s ancestry.’
‘Ancestry? Let’s look at your ancestry. Your father was a great man. He was respected by everyone in our land. He was a true diplomat, and he would have kept his people free, if he sat on the throne today.’
‘He was a weak streak of piss, and he only kept us free by placing us under the boot of the Strategist and your bitch of a superior. That is not being a king.’
‘Then what is being a king? Not only have you lost your kingdom, but through your mischief-making you have brought Anflef and Siren Down and all the other little kingdoms up here to their knees, too. All these old countries, gone forever, because of you. Not that it is a bad thing. Your subjects – apologies, our subjects – will now revel in the glory of the world.’
‘The Machinery? You don’t even know what it is!’ Seablast laughed. ‘You just trust the Operator, some fucking trickster who lives in another realm and pulls the wool over your eyes. He is a king, Aranfal the raven, just as I am. Except he will never give up his power, not to anyone in the world.’
‘And yet you handed your lands over to us, freely.’
‘Hardly freely. And it was my worst mistake. I should have kept fighting, without allies. I should have let my daughters die. It would have been better than this life.’
Aranfal sighed, and leaned back in his chair, knitting his hands behind his head.
‘I don’t think this little philosophical chitchat is getting us anywhere.’
Seablast shook his head. ‘No.’
Aranfal turned to Katrina. ‘Is this what you imagined an interrogation to be?’
Katrina started, and pushed herself off the wall. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘Maybe? What does maybe mean?’
‘No, it’s not what I imagined an interrogation to be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re not asking him any questions.’
Aranfal snapped his fingers together. ‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’ He turned to face Seablast again. ‘Your Majesty, if I were a Doubter, in the kingdom of Northern Blown, where would I be most likely to hide?’
Seablast laughed. ‘Everyone here is a Doubter. You have given them nothing to believe in.’
Aranfal’s eyes widened. ‘Everyone? You know, we have a prison for Doubters, in the South of our lands, in the heart of the desert of the Wite. It’s been there for ten millennia, yet none of us know what’s in there, or even who mans it. You know why that is? Because no one ever leaves the Prison of the Doubters. So if all your people are Doubters, do I need to send them all down there?’
Seablast looked away from Aranfal.
‘Because I could do that, Seablast. It would be pretty hard work. There would be a lot of carts and carriages and horses and so forth. But we’re the masters of a continent, now. There’s not much we can’t do, when we put our minds to it. So I ask again – should I send everyone down there?’
Seablast did not reply.
Aranfal nodded. ‘I’m getting fucking tired of you, and this place. I’m from the North too, Seablast, though it’s colder and nastier than anywhere you’ve been. I don’t want to be in the North any more, understood? I want to go home. So let me ask you again – where would I find the Doubters in this fucking dump?’
Seablast met Aranfal’s gaze. ‘I tell you truthfully, I do not know any Doubters. They could be anywhere.’
‘What about your lieutenants? Those pricks in the throne room, back when you were a king? A few of them have gone missing, haven’t they? I bet they’re out and about now, planning to right