POV: zahel
Summary
*It's funny*, Zahel thinks, *how many times I've been chained to the ceiling.* He hangs naked from his wrists in a dark circular room lined with aluminum sheets — even spren cannot sense him through the lining. Weeks, he guesses, since the invasion in which he was taken from Urithiru; he has had to keep erasing his own memories of the pain to keep the long-term trauma from breaking him, and the count is gone with them. Torture, he reflects sourly: it never tests well even in subjects who *can't* edit out what is done to them. The research has always been clear. Not that he is a man of research any longer, or, if he is being honest with himself, much of a man or a god of anything these days. He groans and pulls himself up by his arms to stretch.
The brightest colour in the cell is a parrot in a cage just out of arm's reach — crimson and cherry, maroon on the darker wing-feathers. Sad bird. She has stopped looking at him. He has been around enough birds in enough centuries to know that a quiet parrot is a bad sign. Other than the bird, the room offers his own dried blood on the floor, a bookcase along one wall, and a mattress on the other; his captors have stopped using the mattress for weeks now. He sags in his bonds. Friends failed. Most recently a woman, abandoned, who had believed in him. He had told himself he was retiring. The honest answer was that he had simply run. Not for the first time, he wonders why he keeps going.
For the bird's sake, he tries. He calls to her. Twice. The stupid creature only hunches lower. Then, on a whim, he tries something gentler — the kind of thing he has used with frightened toddlers in another century. *Peeky time.* He looks away. He looks back fast. *Peeky time. Peeky time.* The bird perks. She tries the words back at him in her avian voice. *That's right*, he tells her. *Hey. It's not so bad. You're going to be all right. You—*
The door opens and Axindweth walks in, rings glittering on her fingers, her bright green Aviar on her shoulder mimicking her tongue-click. She greets him as *Vasher* — *playing games, are we?* He tells her he has to pass the time somehow; he figures it will take her forty more years to die at this rate, and he has outlasted longer captivities than that. She laughs — *always blustering, Vasher* — and opens a small box on the table to show him what she has finally acquired: a painrial, spike-tipped, shaped roughly like a handgun. A more efficient way of making him hurt.
Same trade as before. Half his Breaths — a sum he could honestly part with and never miss — and she will let him go. He knows perfectly well that she will not. He gave her too much already by bringing as many Breaths to Roshar as he did; that was the original mistake, and he had known it. After half, she would want more, and after more, more again. This is not a negotiating tactic and it is not a path toward freedom; it is the next step in breaking him down.
So — sorry, for the parrot's sake, that the bird has to watch — he says nothing further, until she makes him start to scream.