4.105: Interrogation

One of the sekuranti settled a cloak over my shoulders, concealing my hands shackled behind my back. Ralphie adjusted his collar to hide the tattoo on his neck. Ralphie left, half a minute later the tall bald guy hustled me out, and the last one waited until we were a ways down the corridor before following us out.

Oh. This was a discreet arrest.

That was… probably not good. Probably quite bad, actually. Being arrested was one thing; being secretly arrested in plainclothes as a suspected spy, two days before all of your friends expected you to disappear anyway, was quite another. This was… yeah, this was absolutely not good.

No need to panic. For all I knew, this was common procedure for arresting someone in a school. No need to make a scene, after all. Or maybe these guys didn’t believe Fiore’s claims, and wanted to do this quietly so they didn’t look stupid when they had to let me go.

Or maybe I was about to be Disappeared by a corrupt government.

Should I make a scene? Call out if we ran into anyone? Make a break for it and try to run through a crowded area? No. Being a noncompliant prisoner would probably cost me more than what a few witnesses would gain me.

We walked past a couple of students. They totally ignored us.

Okay. Okay. What could I do, here? I needed a way to talk my way out of this. To be found innocent, to get released, to go and save the world. How doable was that? On the one hand, I was genuinely innocent of everything that Fiore suspected me of doing. Kylie and I –

“Hey,” I asked the sekuranti, “is Kylie okay?”

He checked a tablet. “Kylie Nic Fionn was apprehended without any trouble,” he told me. “She is not hurt. We’re well aware of the dangers posed by exceeding the range of your familiarity bond, if that’s what you’re worried about. She’s close by.”

“Can I see her?”

“No.”

Fair enough. Didn’t want the suspects collaborating before interrogation. Anyway, Kylie and I weren’t spies, and we hadn’t sabotaged anything, so we had innocence on our side. On the other hand, we very much were guilty of what Fiore had suspected we were going to do, even if he was mistaken in thinking that it was for Fionnrath. We had been planning to go back down into the centre of the school and rip its guts out. We had everything ready to do it. And we didn’t really have an alternate explanation for a lot of what we’d packed.

So maybe – here was a daring thought – I could tell the truth. Yeah. If we were going down anyway, might as well warn people of the danger, right? Maybe someone else actually would do something about it.

And I had to leave the janitors out of it. With us out of the picture, they could try again. They’d been clear that we were the best chance, but maybe that was wrong. After all, there was nothing special about us except what had been done to us at the school itself, and the fact that Kylie had Fionnrath’s Destiny. If they could somehow find another spell that was smart enough not to kill a human familiar, they could try to recreate the conditions, make another vessel. Right?

Okay, so. I just had to be really careful to leave out anything that connected the janitors to anything. That shouldn’t be too hard; it took us forever to realise that they were involved. I could probably expect Kylie to have reached the same conclusions as me, so no worries there. No; my main worry was how they were going to question me.

If I were lucky, they’d just use normal interrogation techniques. I didn’t actually know what those were, but I was pretty sure it just came down to asking questions, perhaps trying to confuse the subject and stress them out to get them to admit things that they might be hiding. I intended to mostly tell the truth, so I wasn’t worried about that. But, they did think I was a spy for a foreign power. So they might use… something else.

There were a few different ways to magically compel the truth from someone. There were truth potions, like Fiore had tried to use. There were some spells that could be used to either detect or compel the truth. And there was of course the fallback of putting somebody under geas. To my (admittedly pretty vague) understanding of how this kind of thing worked, interrogators were usually pretty reluctant to pull out these methods unless they had to. They certainly hadn’t tried any of them on me when questioning me about Lydia’s death. The problem with magically compelling the truth was that ‘truth’ was a very nebulous concept. Should the subject speak only words that were technically true (to the best of their knowledge), no matter the implications? Should the subject refrain from deceit on any level? Should the subject explain the entirety of a situation as thoroughly as possible? All communication was messy; any thing one person said to another was a small fraction of the message they were trying to convey, with so much built up in emphasis and implication that trying to separate solid communication from active deception got really fuzzy at the edges. There were old stories of people who had mastered the art of wordplay and implication to the point where they could circumvent even the most deception-proof of truth potions.

Of course, I wasn’t one of those people. There were quite a few spells and potions that they could give me that I’d be all but helpless against. I’d have to be careful, if they decided to do that.

But being put directly under a truth-compelling spell wasn’t something I was particularly worried about. If Fiore’s little trick was any indication, I’d be incapacitated while ensorcelled, and they wouldn’t be able to question me. Something like a truth-detecting spell, I wasn’t sure about – that might not affect me, if it acted on the caster rather than me, right? But such a spell would be a knowledge-gathering prophecy, like Malas’, and his scans always affected me. In any case, it didn’t matter; if they could detect the truth from me, good. I didn’t need to conceal much. I just needed to make it look like what I was concealing was for some innocent reason, like it was something irrelevant but embarrassing, or something that made me angry but didn’t affect the case. I’d had plenty of practice at that sort of deception with Fiore.

I also thought it was unlikely that they would put me under a truth-telling geas. Compelling someone to tell the truth like that was really, really dangerous. The geas I was under was dangerous enough if I went poking at is edges, one as nebulous as ‘answer all questions on this subject honestly’ would have the victim tying themselves up in knots immediately. Even after removing a geas, the consequences could remain; that kind of a spell could permanently cripple someone’s ability to communicate. I didn’t think they’d use that on me except in the most desperate circumstances – after all, they might want to question me more later, and I’d need to be able to communicate for that.

Come to think of it, my existing geas probably offered me some measure of protection. I’d gotten it as a criminal sentence, so it had to be on my record; my interrogator would know it was there. If they cared about keeping my ability to communicate intact at all (and they would, if they wanted to be able to question me more later), then they’d be reluctant to do anything that might force me to try to speak on the nature of curses. So they probably wouldn’t magically compel truth unless and until it they were sure that ‘the nature of curses’ wasn’t relevant to my confession.

Of course, given the whole ‘secret arrest for being a spy’ thing, I couldn’t bank on the idea that these people cared about my health out of the goodness of their heart, or anything. Maybe they did, maybe Sekura Refujeyo treated prisoners really well. But maybe they didn’t. But they would care about getting clear information, and they’d care about keeping me intact so that I could give it. I was safe from magical compulsion so long as the risks of that compulsion outweighed the benefits. Meaning that, to protect the janitors and give the world a chance, I had to give them what they wanted without magical compulsion.

Not a problem. That was what I wanted to do anyway. Tell them most of the truth, let them think it was the whole truth, and then… whatever happened, would happen. There was no sense worrying about that, no sense freaking myself out. I couldn’t affect it. I had this job to focus on. This one thing. I had to focus on that.

I was lead into unfamiliar halls. We turned unfamiliar corners, passed unfamiliar rooms. Finally, my guard lead me into a large office with desks set up all around the outside, all empty. The middle of the room was clear, except for a single chair sitting between four thin metal pillars. A bright light shone directly down from above the chair.

I’d seen this setup before. They’d interrogated me in a room just like this after Lydia’s death; I knew what to expect. When uncuffed, I made my way to the chair, and wasn’t surprised when I passed between two pillars and the spaces between all four of them went black, all outside sound dying. A one metre squared room made of one-way force fields.

If Max were there, his eyes would light up and he’d correct me, telling me that the force fields weren’t one way, but selectively two way. They stopped me from exiting, and stopped light and sound from entering. He’d probably have a lot to say about how airflow wasn’t impeded but sound was.

But Max wasn’t there, or anywhere else. I sat down and waited.

And then waited some more.

I wasn’t sure how long I waited. It had to be at least an hour. I’d lost my tablet during my brief scuffle with Fiore, so I couldn’t check the time.

I jumped when a single clear voice cut through the silence. “You and Kylie Nic Fionn had bags in your room, packed for a journey. Where were you planning to go?”

So I told them. I explained everything, leaving out anything to do with the janitors, as clearly and precisely as possible. I told them about the prophecies, and about going down into the Labyrinth of Dreams and finding nothing, and about us later figuring out that Malas had erased our memories. I told them about the fragments of memory of the event that I still had, because of the way Kylie’s prophecy had etched itself into my mind how they always do, and how we’d pieced together the danger that Fionnrath’s Destiny and the prophecies I’d met during the Initiation and again back down in the library had meant. I couldn’t explain how much I knew of the library under the lake, of course – that all came from videos given to us by a janitor – but I exaggerated how much I remembered, and they seemed to take me at my word.

There were a couple of curve balls. When they asked why our room was full of Max’s notes, I just shrugged and said that Max had always wanted us to have them. They probed me in depth about my relationship with Saina, which confused me until I realised that they were still operating under the suspicion that I was a Fionnrath spy and that it might have been my job to get close to the High Crone’s daughter. (Which, frankly, was putting a lot more faith in my social skills than I would. Maybe there were some super cool teenage secret agents out there who could Seduce The Enemy or whatever, but I definitely wasn’t one of them.) I answered all of their questions. No tricks. Very little sidestepping.

And then they asked again, and I answered again.

And then again.

I knew what they were doing. I’d been through this before, after Lydia’s death. They were checking for inconsistencies between the versions I told, and they’d presumably cross-reference them with Kylie’s versions, too. Anything that was too different between versions might be a lie. Anything that was exactly the same might be a prepared script. And the fact that it was making me tired and frustrated and less careful with my words and emotions was probably part of the plan, too.

I was in the middle of my fourth retelling, explaining the time when Fionnrath’s Destiny had told Max that to break the world he would need to break himself three times, and how we would need to rely on my sense of direction to successfully save the world, when a new, very familiar voice cut in.

“So that’s when you decided to destroy our entire society?”

“Saina?” I looked around, like I was going to be able to see her, but of course the only thing I could see were black walls, suffocatingly close.

“You’ve been lying to me this whole time? You pretended to be this, this nice, gentle guy, but the whole time you were secretly planning to blow up the school?!”

“No! That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid!” I stood up, but there was nowhere to go. “Saina, the entire world is at st – ”

“Yeah, I heard your stupid conspiracy theory. ‘Oooh, an untrustworthy spell designed to help our enemies kind of vaguely hinted at something bad happening in a couple of centuries, so it’s time to start blowing things up and declare war on Refujeyo’. Do you have any idea how you sound?”

“It’s not vague!” I snapped. “It’s going to happen! We have evidence!”

“Oh, yeah? What evidence?”

The word of a secret cadre of ancient maintenance workers with wisdom beyond ours, but I couldn’t say that. Instead I sat down and mumbled, “You don’t understand.”

“You’re damned right I don’t. I loved you, you know. And you’ve been using me this whole time? I can’t believe this. My mother was right about this school.”

“I wasn’t! I love you!”

“Funny way of showing it.”

I tried to plead with her a bit more, but there was no response. Maybe she’d left the room. I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see or hear outside my little box. After a couple of minutes, the interrogator interrupted my plea with, “And what happened after you spoke to the Faith of Fionnrath?”

So I finished my story.

And then I told it a fifth time.

After that, I was left alone for a while. Well, nobody spoke to me, anyway. It was entirely possible – likely, in fact – that there were still people in the room. After another wait of incalculable length, the force fields around me suddenly went transparent without warning. The room was empty, except for one person in neat, official robes, with a neat bobbed haircut, flipping through papers. My lawyer, Casey.

“I can explain,” I said.

“No need.” They didn’t look up from the papers. “Unless there’s something you left out of your confession that you need to tell me?”

“No, I told them everything – ”

“Then I have everything.”

Several seconds of very awkward silence stretched out as Casey read quietly, before they finally looked at me. “Kayden, what the fuck?”

I shrugged.

“When I agreed to represent you for accidentally knocking someone off a roof, I didn’t expect to eventually be defending…” they frowned at the page in front of them… “an attempt to destroy mage society in order to stop a demon from arising to end the world in two centuries.”

“It might be as little as a hundred and fifty years,” I said.

Casey raised an eyebrow.

“And it’s not a demon, it’s an inscrutable amalgamation of the spells collected under the school… that… okay, I know it sounds ridiculous, but – ”

“You think? Kayden, I can’t help you with this.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Do you really? If you’d flipped out and killed a guy for power or revenge, we could talk reparations. You could’ve slit the Grand Master’s throat for a silver dollar and I’d be able to at least attempt to make a case that avoiding prison and sending you to Fionnrath on the proviso that they don’t let you leave would be in everyone’s best interests. But this? You’ve been accused of committing terrorism for a foreign power and you defence is, ‘oh, no; actually, I’m committing terrorism for a doomsday cult’.”

“I don’t think it’s a cult if there’s only two of us,” I said.

“It’s lucky there’s only two of you, we have enough doomsday cults as it is. Kayden. I promised, years ago, that I’d represent you in legal matters. If you want me to, I’m bound by that promise. But I can’t actually help you here. No lawyer can. If you’d rather someone who’ll lie and promise that they can help, I’ll put a request in to trans – ”

“I know you can’t help,” I said. “It’s fine. I don’t want anyone else.”

“Fine. Then I’ll… do my job, I suppose.”

I went to reply, but the force fields went black around me once more, the room silent.

I sat, and I waited.