Yazata followed Krahe’s lead, with one of the Red Hoods taking up a guard post at the front door. The inquisitor seemed somewhat perturbed by Juno, but Krahe got the impression that it wasn’t because of her physical state. Yazata quickly gave Krahe’s more refined report a once-over as the two made their way upstairs. Krahe then spent a few moments to defuse some of her wards, and when she finally cracked open the door, the sound of Aldritch’s dismayed struggling rushed out like a gust of grave-stench air.

  The interrogation proceeded far faster than Krahe had expected, in no small part due to Yazata’s ready employment of her own unique magic. It was the simplest thing — the witch made a ream of the same black wrappings that covered her skin to spring out of her sleeve, wrapping it around Aldritch’s forehead. The runes upon it came alive. Within a few seconds his wards faltered, and the binding tightened to the utmost degree, vacuum-sealing around the chain that Krahe had bound him with earlier. Staring him in the eyes, Yazata began to question him about the basic facts of the situatio such as why Juno was here and what he and his collaborators had been doing. Though at first he seemed to cooperate, the glyphs that covered the Black Binding soon came alive with haze-like distortion spilling from the fabric. The distortion began crawling under his skin and leaving glyph-trails of blackened flesh in its wake, much to his audible agony.

  Yazata smirked.

  “Every lie, every willful omission, begets a curse. Cooperate and I may lift some of them,” the witch said.

  “Wgh… What if I don’t know, what then?!” the armless sadist lashed out.

  More curses. More screaming. Yazata glanced Krahe’s way.

  “This is your quarry. I can only get so complete a picture from reading a short report, it would be best if you asked the questions,” she said, holding out her other hand, and from it, another length of Black Binding extended towards Krahe.

  After a moment of scrutiny, Krahe took hold of it, only to find it wrapping around her wrist. A fierce burning sensation spread through her arm, and Yazata gave her a strange look. Then, the burning abated.

  “What a hostile appraisal ward,” she remarked. “The connection holds, for now. Ask, he will answer, one way or another. If I must unravel his mind, then so be it. The filth in this one…”

  “How about an easy one. Any particular reason you picked her?” Krahe asked.

  “Why do you pick a particular cut of meat from the butcher’s rack? It’s the same. This is the best way I can explain it.”

  A faint distortion flickered around his forehead, but then faded.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  With a faint tone of irritation, Yazata remarked: “...Neither a lie nor willful omission.”

  “Now for the one that might actually buy you a bit more life — your disposal method. Who do you send them to?”

  Aldritch stared at her. She could see the cogs turning behind his eyes. The binding flared, but before it could dig its talons into him, he spoke up.

  “I don’t know his name. We leave them at dead drops in a section of the ruined underground. The dead drops have the directions to the location of our payment for the last time, and that place is also the next dead drop location. I haven’t met him since the first time.”

  The binding flared again. The glyph-trails spidered down his face, veins bulging out around them.

  “Not a lie. Therefore, an intentional omission,” Yazata said. “A heretical grafter, perhaps?”

  Aldritch ground his teeth together.

  “I can’t say. Can’t tell you his name, don’t know where he is right now,” he uttered. He jerked his head in place, as if suppressing a tic. “A ah, let’s call him a body artist. Heret- Ngh… Fuck!”

  He started the word heretic or perhaps heretical, but that tic returned, cutting him short.

  “Independent. He’s independent. You know what I mean. Moves around a lot. Did all my work the first time. All at once…”

  Aldritch stared into empty space for a moment, only snapped out of it by the binding’s flaring.

  “Shit, right, there’s a, what do you call it, artist, a comic artist, yeah. Lives at the very south of the city, can’t say exactly where but you should be able to find him. The comic’s about kids exploding a place like sorta like Jas’raba, only deeper and much worse. It’s serialized in an adult comic magazine, but mostly sold on memslates and in collected volumes. The comic artist, he knows where to find the Helmeted Man, he can tell you.”

  Never once did the binding flare up while he spoke, and neither did it do so in the pregnant silence that hung over the room for several seconds afterwards. Only Aldritch’s heavy breathing could be heard, as if he had just undertaken a feat of enormous exertion.

  “I see. I believe I understand the situation,” Yazata said. “It would be best to forgo this line of questioning for now.”

  They continued to interrogate him for some time, and perhaps more frustratingly than if he had completely refused to cooperate, it turned out Aldritch really didn’t know much else. The matter of what he and his compatriots had done, both to Juno and to the girls who had come before her, was one thing — with Yazata’s cursed binding, extracting the exact details of their misdeeds was the easiest thing in the world. Krahe didn’t even really process Aldritch’s strained speech or its vile contents, just jotting down the words as he spoke.

  With lies and verbal gymnastics made untenable, his mask quickly fell apart and revealed the wretched, tiny creature that he really was — not in the literal sense, although Krahe had almost expected him to reveal himself as a baneworm at some point, given his hollow-faced bearing and not-quite-sufficient attachment to his own body. It had become abundantly clear by now that Aldritch Herebor was not really a person. An entity, something illusory, a creature who had long lost his humanity, if he had ever possessed any to begin with. Had he been born in Megacity Gamma, Aldritch would have found tremendous success in the corporate sector, doing no actual work yet appearing at all times to be psychotically overworked, busying himself by politicking and ruining the days if not lives of corporate pawns for his own sadistic amusement.

  Perhaps this judgment was mere projection. Perhaps Krahe was merely drawing conclusions based on a tenuous pattern, based on brief and not exactly personal interactions with this man, but this was, nonetheless, the conclusion at which she arrived.

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