"Is the plan to take him with us as evidence, or to see if anyone outside recognizes him or - we cannot possibly escape with all two hundred of them."

"No, we can't. One would be nice though, as an illustration - can you obey spoken commands?"

"You should feel free to ignore me if you wish but I believe it's in your interests to come with us. 

Follow me."

He follows. Slowly.

Well that's not going to make their escape any easier but with the gloves they can teleport him across all the tricky parts. 

"Can you...nod if you understand me? Tap your foot?"

She tries a signed language, which also gets nowhere. 

"All right. I propose you stay where you're expected, for now, and we'll try to pick you up on our way out."

He does not respond to this until she guides him back over to where he started, which he permits. 

"There's probably - more. To the process. We may want to also get a complete one for evidence, but I think they'd be - harder to abduct -"

"One assumes this isn't the intended end result." Even if you're very evil it would hardly be worth all the effort. "I don't know whether it's an intermediate stage or a failed result...I think it wouldn't be worth the risk of abducting someone who'd fight back, but it'd be worth figuring out what they're aiming at. Or how they're doing it." She squeezes the man's hand, drops it, turns back to the stairs.  She feels cold and tired and empty, but that's nothing new. There's another level to the dungeons. The path forward is still clear and that's really the best anything ever gets.

The dungeons are poorly designed, from a security perspective. Most of the voices that used to give snarky commentary in Imene’s head have been quiet a while but Imaginary Matten never shuts up. Imaginary Matten thinks that their fatal flaw was presuming they need only respond to a prisoner breakout, that no one well-armed and well-organized with access to magic would be creeping about and positioned to remove a patrol before they called for help. 

 The cure victims are lined up as sentries, in some places, but are too far gone to raise an alarm; her best guess is that some ringing of a bell or cry for help would summon them out of their turpor. But she would rather not test it. They are unobstructed in reaching the torture chambers to the north, and unobstructed from there in reaching the torture chambers to the south, and unobstructed from there in reaching the storerooms, which are at least well-guarded.

This time she does not dither about murdering people. The torture chambers were rather steadying, on that front.  

She is not very surprised that the cure is horrifying. If it wasn’t, they’d be advertising it. She is surprised that there are just…torture chambers for torment that has nothing to do with the cure. Lucien, blessed be his memory, would conceivably have authorized the ‘cure’, if he thought there was no other way. He wouldn’t have allowed the fort to just fill, like a boat with a leak in it, with petty tormenters who are there just to do horrifying things to people. 

Alaherren is less surprised. If you collar people like animals, tell everyone that they're evil and a threat to the entire world, and lock them away with little to no oversight on the guards…

The storerooms have orders, inventory, instructions.  

Braccus Rex did not, in fact, invent the purging wands that lay buried in his armory in order to shred peoples' souls and make them empty shells that you could puppet.

He didn't need to.

He had dozens of ways of doing that, and making wands for it just meant that other people could do it, and Braccus Rex was not particularly big on delegation, not since Gratiana betrayed him.

Braccus Rex did, sometimes, shred the souls of mortal men. You could twist and warp and torment the shreds of Source left behind when you did this, after all, and make a shrieker, and those were useful. But he didn't use the wands.

Braccus Rex invented the purging wands because they could also be used to weaken sourcerers, and all his serious enemies were sourcerers, and not facing them directly was important enough to merit putting some terrifying power in wands for lesser mortals to wield. 

The fact that any wand that could do real damage to a sourcerer's access to source also shredded the soul of a weak random mortal was barely of interest to him.

It's a bit like someone pulling a fine wine out of your wine cellar and asking if you knew it was also a mediocre hair dye.

She finds herself thinking stupidly, madly, that it would have been nice to find something bad enough to achieve her purposes, but, you know, not actually quite this bad. Her mind is proposing lots of better-calibrated atrocities that would be nearly as politically convenient and not rob anyone of the next world as well as this one.

“Thoughtful of them to put it all in writing," says Alaherren, who continues to not be surprised by the depths of human cruelty. "Is this good enough for your purposes or do you need more?”

Imene is glad to have a practical ally. It would do no good for both of them to be upset.

“This should do. My allies intended to send a boat, when signaled, to the southeast side of the island, near the ruins of Braccus’s tower. We’ll take this, and -” She swallows. The options are really ‘have a civil war they cannot afford while the world is ending’ or ‘confront Alexandar and hope that he agrees a civil war can’t be afforded and is willing to stop the atrocities to avoid one’, which is what she was hoping for, but - which seems wildly naive, now. Or she could countenance it. She supposes there’s that option.

"...And?"

“And then I try to win a civil war,” she says, truthfully, because she’s really not any good at subterfuge. “I had half a hope that Alexandar could be reasoned with, because - it’s such a terrible idea, to be slaughtering each other while the Void invades - but -”

"These notes suggest Alexandar - or Dallis, at least - wants the 'cured' sourcerers for war with the Empire. The world hasn't seen true peace or unity in longer than either of us has been alive… it's not worse, for our collective ability to fight the voidwoken, if the Divine Order are killing each other instead of lizards and elves."

She flinches. “Yes. Better, maybe…if the world needs another Divine it’s hard to imagine them arising in Alexandar’s order.

I thought he’d resign, after the Deathfog. I thought Lucien would resign - but of course the Voidwoken invasion began almost immediately -”

"Men do not usually resign their positions after great victories."

She has to explain.

It is an injustice to Alaherren to ask her to join Imene's quest without having explained, to spring on her at some later date the extent of Imene's involvement in the massacre of her people. Admittedly that involvement was entirely 'tried to prevent it', but. Still. Some people wouldn't want to work with Imene anymore. Imene doesn't really want to work with Imene anymore. She deserves to know the truth; Imene should never benefit from the aid of someone who fully informed would have withheld it.

They are at this very moment in hostile territory with half a dozen men dead on the floor in front of them and at some point, probably soon, those men will be missed.

That's not his true reason; sufficient, maybe, but not primary.