The Gentleman Bastard series by Scott Lynch begins as a fairly amusing story about a fictional city's first group of con men. Then the tortures begin...
Spoilers below.
- The tortures: a gang member has a bag of broken glass forced over his head and ground into his face and eyes. The main character is drowned (temporarily) in a barrel of horse urine. And when the heroes capture a villain responsible for the deaths of several friends, they play a game called "Scream in Pain 'til You Answer My Fucking Questions," which involves cutting off all of the villain's fingers with a red-hot knife. Once he's answered the questions, they cut out his tongue.
- Nazca. It really says something when it's considered a relief that she was killed before being pickled in horse urine, rather than having drowned in it. And all to send a message to her father.
- Plagues are a very real danger in Camorr and happen often enough that quarantine measures are an almost regular occurrence. One district is named Catchfire, due to it having been cleansed with fire on more than one occasion to destroy particularly virulent epidemics. One such disease that frequently blights Camorr is called the Black Whisper. It's highly contagious and any person older than twelve that catches it is doomed to a miserable death, leaving behind scores of orphans.
- Oh, but the fun doesn't end there! You see, now that these children have no guardians to look after them, once the quarantine gets lifted, slavers flock to the place, ready to snatch up any poor kid they come across. Even though slavery is illegal in Camorr, the city watch couldn't care less and are more likely to sell the children themselves for some extra drinking money. If the child manages to evade the slavers, they now have to find a way to sustain themselves. Needless to say, that's a very tall order and most of them end up either starving to death or getting executed for criminal activity.
- Wraithstone, which "Gentles" the mind of anyone who inhales the smoke, nulling out practically all conscious thought and leaving a docile creature without any survival instinct- they won't even eat or shit without being prodded and coerced to. In the first book, the Grey King plans to do this to every single noble of Camorr at once, as revenge. Even the children. Locke and company risk their lives, despite not being initially involved in that portion of the plot, to save their worst enemies from such a cruel fate.
- In the second book, Locke meets a man whose family adopted a Gentled kitten. Locke is appalled, asking why the hell anyone would do that, and later finds out that the kitten came from a litter that was Gentled because some noblewoman's children wanted to torture them because they were bored.
- During the attack on the Poison Orchid, Locke and a few others are assigned to repel boarding parties. They're helped out by some horrific sea-monstrosity that sucks the blood out of some poor bastard through his pores. After that, the boarding party does its best to get the fuck out of the water.
- All marine life on this world is nightmarish, from a 50-ft monster which trails vessels to a creature that telepathically tries to convince sailors to throw themselves overboard. In-universe, the sea is so feared that even a mile-long swim in the outer harbour of Tal Verrar is regarded as near suicide.
- Stiletto Wasps, who are the size of small birds and whose stingers are the size of a grown man's middle finger. Anyone with a fear of bees will cringe when reading about these creatures. They are considered so dangerous and invasive that possession of a hive or even a queen wasp is punishable by death in every part of the civilized world.
- We get a good look at just why people fear these little horrors. Requin managed to come into possession of a small hive of Stiletto Wasps and placed a gambler who incurred heavy debt to the Sinspire inside a cage where he has to fight against no less than 120 wasps in order to pay it off. To make things even worse, the wasps are released via numerous holding pens with a clockwork mechanism that opens up their cages at random. Sometimes it will open just one, other times it will open two at once, or three and so on. The poor man manages to kill eight until four wasps are released against him. They quickly swarm him and their stings cause him to hemorrhage blood and foam at the mouth before collapsing into a twitching heap. Even then, they don't stop attacking him.
- Most of the powerful people in Locke's world are not the types you want to cross, as they will get their revenge, but Requin takes it to another level. After an attempt on his life that backfired and harmed someone else, Requin went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge that started with him killing random people and cutting all the skin on the left side of their bodies off, and finished with him taking the man who attempted to kill him, chaining him into a frame, filling the left side of the frame with cement, and leaving the man to die horribly.
- Oh no, it's much worse than that because the man wasn't left to die, he was deliberately kept alive just so he could continue to suffer even as half his body rotted inside the concrete and he begged for death.
- The last man who started a fight and drew blood in the Sinspire was tied down and had his kneecaps cut out and replaced with fire-ants.
- What they do to red-headed girls in Jerem, which is so wrong that even the Thiefmaker- who in Sabetha's own words would "suck a diseased rat's cock for a few coppers," and has no problem murdering pre-teens if he thinks they've screwed him- went out of his way and spent his own coin on hair-dye for her just to keep her safe from this fate. Jeremites pay large sums for red-headed girls so that they can use them in a sick ritual. The girl is circumcised and then raped continuously to death by anyone who will pay the price. People with "rotted cocks" who want them cured will take a turn, deviants who want to sleep with a red-head, and all other sorts of lowlifes will rape the girl until she dies from the trauma they inflict. Apparently it's considered good luck to "be the one riding her when she dies." And the shrivelled cherry on this maggot-ridden cake is that they don't care how old the girl is. Even Sabetha, who is a dangerous thief and con artist, fears this fate so much that she's anxiously awaiting the day her hair goes grey, so she can stop dyeing it to hide her true hair colour.
- The other reason the Thiefmaker kills any of his orphans that he thinks have crossed him is that, unless they have an incredible level of skill like Locke and can be unloaded to another gang, they're essentially worthless to anyone except slavers. Chains mentions that while the Thiefmaker isn't anywhere close to an altruistic person, he wouldn't sell any of his children to slavers "for all the coin in Camorr" and regards killing them as the far more merciful option. The scary thing is that Chains agrees with that sentiment. One can only imagine what the life of a slave must be like to warrant such an aversion in a man like the Thiefmaker.
- Jerem itself seems to be a particularly nasty place, even by the low standards of places like Camorr and Karthain. Slavery is clearly practiced there and nobody, from the Theifmaker to Capa Barsavi, has anything good to say about it. Makes you wonder just what else Jerem does that earns it such a dismal reputation.
- The human chess in the second book. Basically, when pieces are taken, a penalty is placed on the piece in question - which can be and often is anything short of actual death, from being brutally beaten to being pelted with rotten fruit. Worse, the spectators are never there for the game, they're there to see the penalties- and occasionally the people who inflict the penalties go too far and kill someone by mistake, and nobody cares.
- The entire city-state of Karthain. It has a ruling government, but it's really ruled by the Bondsmagi, who have magically altered all the citizens as they saw fit. And none of them think that there's anything wrong with that.
- The Ghostwind Isles. Nobody knows how many there are, and there are only nine at the most that people have set foot on and come back from. There are and were three settlements in total on the Isles: Montierre, Port Prodigal, and Hope-of-Silver. Montierre was destroyed in a war, Port Prodigal is alive and thriving, but Hope-of-Silver... it was thriving, until one day every single person in the settlement went missing. No trace of them was found- the only conclusion was that something came and took them all. There were only a few people ever found- sailors, who'd set off in a hurry, and had ended up lashing themselves to the highest point of their ship to escape whatever came for them... and it didn't work, because all of them were found dead, having killed themselves to get away from whatever the fuck it was.
- The Magician's Guild, including the story of why no one messes with them, which coincidentally is why there is no longer an emperor running most of the world: The Guild proclaimed that they would no longer bow to any authority, and anyone who wanted to hire them would have to pay absurd amounts of money, so much so that divine intervention is expected to be more likely to happen than for someone to hire a mage. The emperor decided that he didn't want that, and sent his army. End result, six mages, out of hundreds, dead, and an entire army laid to waste. And then, the mages summoned destruction on a level previously unimagined by man, destroying everything and everyone in the entire imperial capital... except for the throne, which sits empty and intact even centuries later, as a monument to the guild's power. This act led to the empire breaking apart, and centuries of war, famine, and chaos. And the guild gives exactly zero fucks about any of that. The mages are considered the most dangerous people in the world, and if the Falconer mage is any indication of what the average mage is like, then they've not changed one iota since the day they had murdered an entire city of innocent bystanders just to prove they could.
- Then came Republic of Thieves, which explains that the Bondsmagi believed that the Eldren drew the attention of something that at best made them run away, and at worst wiped them all out. And all things considered, they might not be wrong. Apparently the guild itself was founded to limit the use of magic worldwide so that they don't attract the same attention.
- What the Falconer does after he realizes that he can still control dreamsteel, and uses it to get his hands and voice back. First he uses the dreamsteel to kill Eganis, the man Patience left to care for him, by using dreamsteel to crush his head to a bloody pulp. Then he takes control of an enormous murder of crows, and-Eyes, nose, cheeks, lips—there is no time to be merciful. The ball of sorcery-maddened crows pecks and claws at anything soft, anything vulnerable. Patience barely has time to scream before she is blind and on her back, flailing as more crows pour out of the sky like a black cloud given flesh.She remembers her sorcery, and half manages a spell. A dozen birds flash into cinders, but a dozen more take their place, seeking neck and forehead, wrists and fingers. The Falconer presses Patience down to the pavement, the writhing flock a pure extension of his will, a crushing dark hand. Grinning madly, he channels a thought-sending to her, hurling his sigil against her shattered mental defenses, and then:Is this weakness, Mother?You never understood my talents.The truth is, they never made me weak.THE TRUTH IS THAT THEY GAVE ME WINGS.The beaks and claws of the carrion birds are driven by human intelligence; in moments they have opened Patience’s wrists, pulped her hands, peeled the skin from her neck, torn out her eyes and tongue. She is helpless long before she dies.
