Bilal was not taken to a slave market. He was a State Secret.
He was dragged deep into the subterranean dungeons beneath the fortress of the Tusculani family—the corrupt, ruthless Italian nobles who currently controlled the Papacy. The air down here was thick with the smell of mildew, rusted iron, and old blood.
Bilal was stripped to the waist and chained by his wrists to a heavy wooden wheel. His 105kg frame had wasted away to a gaunt, shivering shadow of eighty kilograms. His white hair hung over his sunken eyes.
A high-ranking Roman Cardinal, dressed in immaculate crimson silk, walked into the dungeon. He covered his nose with a perfumed handkerchief. Two massive torturers stood beside him holding iron tongs and a brazier of hot coals.
"We do not want your life, Demon," the Cardinal said in slow, heavily accented Latin, holding up a piece of the rag paper Bilal had invented. "We want your mind."
The Cardinal pointed to a crude drawing of a Trebuchet and the chemical symbols for Saltpeter and Sulfur that his spies had stolen from the ruins of Axiomra.
"The formula for the Green Fire that burns on water," the Cardinal demanded. "The ratio for the stone that cures in the sea. And the blueprints for the spring-steel. Give them to the Holy Church, and we will let you live out your days in a monastery. Refuse, and we will peel the skin from your arms inch by inch."
Bilal hung his head. He was broken by grief, drowning in the guilt of his dead citizens. He didn't care about his own life anymore. But the 21st-century logic buried deep in his shattered mind knew one absolute truth:
"If I give the Church gunpowder in 1028 AD, they will not just conquer Europe. They will massacre the Middle East. They will colonize the world five hundred years early. I cannot let my science become their apocalypse."
Bilal slowly raised his head. He looked at the Cardinal with dead, hollow eyes.
He didn't scream. He didn't curse them. He simply closed his mouth, locked his jaw, and stared into the dark.
The Cardinal sighed, dropping his perfumed cloth. "Break his fingers. Slowly. Start with the right hand."
For three weeks, the Giant endured the unthinkable. They crushed his knuckles. They burned his back. But Bilal retreated deep into his own mind, reciting the Quran, remembering the smell of Astrid's hair, refusing to speak a single word. He became a tomb of silence.