"Climb."
Count Corvane's body obeyed.
He watched his own hands drag him up the scabbed pillar. "STOP." He was screaming at them now, a lord commanding his last two vassals. "STOP. I COMMAND you. I COMMAND YOU..." They climbed. His knees climbed after them, up through heat that cooked the skin off his palms, all the way to the top.
"Impale yourself," said the Demon of Vengeance.
Along the walls, hardened soldiers grabbed for each other's shoulders.
His body folded him onto the point, and his weight did the rest, one finger-width at a time.
The metal went through his guts straight up from the backside.
It was furnace-hot. It burned him from the inside out as it went, cauterizing nothing, cooking everything, and the blood that had nowhere left to run came up his throat between the screams.
His own muscles held him steady on it, and his own hands stayed flat against the pillar, pressing. That was the obedience.
