“No,” I said. “No deal.”
“WHAT?” Eligor’s cry of fury was so loud it toppled me onto my back. “Do you want to see her burn right now? Burn until there’s nothing left? RIGHT NOW, YOU LITTLE INSECT?”
“Don’t do that, please.” Eligor was so much more powerful than me, than pretty much anything I knew, that it was exactly like having fallen into the lion’s enclosure at a zoo. The only thing I could do was move very, very slowly and hope that he didn’t destroy Caz out of sheer irritation. “It would be a mistake.”
“You have a couple of seconds to explain before I render you into individual atoms, each one extremely pain-sensitive.” Eligor’s face was shifting now, as though I’d made him so angry he was having trouble looking even remotely human. I saw a hint of goat horn, a glimpse of suppurating skin, a glint of shiny metal skull, flashes that came and went all in a moment.
“Look, I’ll give you the damn feather—I don’t want it. I only came here because you sent Smyler after me, looking for it. But you have to let us both go. Me and the Countess.”
“Both?” Eligor was pushing his anger down now, but I could tell he wasn’t enjoying himself. “Why should I do that?”
“Because otherwise I’ll just keep saying no. Then you can torture me forever, or kill me when you get bored. You can torture and kill Caz, too. I could never stop you, and the only thing I have that you want is the feather. So let me go and let her go or forget it.”
He raised an eyebrow. He had regained his composure, was handsome and incredibly successful Kenneth Vald once more. “I’ll say this for you, Doloriel. You’ve got balls like grapefruits.” He moved his finger and Caz was gone so quick I didn’t even have a chance to look at her face again, in case it was the last time I saw it. Then he flicked his finger at me and the conference room, the donuts, the spilled coffee, everything around me disappeared, and I was alone with my pain and the horror of my recent memories in yet another version of the conference room, this time floating in an endless space as empty and gray as the evening fog coming through the Golden Gate back home.
Emptiness is another form of torment. Loneliness, too, especially when they both go on forever and ever, and ever.
thirty-four:
thing
I DON’T KNOW how long I hung/lay/floated there in the gray nothing. Forgive the confusion of verbs, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what I was doing. I was in my hell-body, the Snakestaff body striped like one of the antelopes of the African veldt, naked and helpless. I wasn’t wearing restraints, but that didn’t make any difference, because I couldn’t move anything but my head and neck.
Obviously, that was better than being actively tortured, but only for the first thousand or so hours, after which I began to go a little crazy. I know, I know, you’re saying, “Hey, he’s already said he was tortured for hundreds of years or something, and now this.” You’re right, time does pass in Hell, even if it passes differently than in the real world, and the subjective time I’d experienced would have made at least a bunch of years of earth-time, but the key word here is “subjective”—as long as I was Eligor’s prisoner, I was out of normal time altogether. He could make it feel like whatever he wanted. It was entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that this was still the same morning of the day I entered his hospitable clutches.
Still, for the first time since I heard the grand duke’s voice and knew he’d caught me, I felt something a bit like hope. Not much, but he’d offered me a deal. It might be just another trick, but the mere fact that he’d taken a break from flaying my skin and boiling my nerves like vermicelli suggested he wasn’t sure what to do with me. Paradoxically, my threat to let him torture me to death was keeping me alive, at least for the moment.
I wasn’t bluffing, either. I had realized, somewhere in the worst of it, that my situation was truly hopeless. Eligor was just too strong. I couldn’t escape him, I couldn’t fight. The only thing I could do, I realized in that cauldron of pain, was suffer. But I could keep on doing it if I had to. Yes, I would beg for mercy. Yes, I would tell him anything, say anything. But as long as I kept refusing to actually do what he wanted me to do, he could only subject me to more torture. He could torment and kill Caz in front of me, but he could do that to her whether I helped him or not. The only way I could do anything for her was by refusing to do what he wanted and forcing him to bargain.
So I hung, or floated, or lay there suspended in nothingness, forever or even longer, trying to build up my strength for when the hurting would start again. And I knew it would start, because I would have to prove to Eligor that I wasn’t bluffing. I would have to make him give up on pain.
It started again. I won’t bother to describe it. After a few millennia, even Eligor seemed to get bored and left me to the eager attention of something named Doctor Teddy, which looked like a plush bear toy but had the stunted fingers of a human child and the eyes and whisky breath of a terminal alcoholic.
Doctor Teddy made Niloch’s torturer look like the weekend amateur he’d been. Not only did he give me everything all over again, Doctor Teddy also had a few cute ideas of his own, but even my furry new friend seemed to run out of ideas after a while, and at last I was sent back to the gray place again, weeping and trying to remember my name, even though I knew that if I remembered that I would also remember why I was here and what was happening to me. They’d done something strange to me so I couldn’t sleep, and although I could tell time was passing by the slow easing of my suffering, there was nothing else to make the hours and days pass in that dreadful, empty, uncolored place.
When things finally changed, I was at first aware only that something was in the gray with me, and that whatever it was wasn’t quite in or out. The best way I can explain it is like being underwater, somewhere there’s more shadow than light and distance distorts things and plays tricks. For long moments what I was looking at was only a slantingly vertical shape, wildly distorted as though coming at me from a dimension I couldn’t entirely see, and then it stood over me, gray corpse face and pinhole eyes, that weird underslung jaw hanging open like a fish’s as it stared at me. The rest of it was gray, too, gray dead skin stretched over bone. Smyler hadn’t gotten any prettier since our last encounter.
I didn’t even care much anymore, to be honest, but I still flinched a little at the sight. “What do you want, Handsome?” I said when I found my voice. “Getting impatient? I’m sure you’ll get to play with me when your master’s done.”
Smyler leaned in so close I could see the lines on his skin clearly for the first time ever in the flat, medical light of the gray, and I realized that they were not just random wrinkles or even a tattoo but something much more intricate, much more strange. The murderer was covered in writing—trails of tiny letters laboriously cut into the skin with something very sharp, thousands of characters in some illegible text that covered every exposed inch of his skin. I looked down to the grayish hand pointing the four-bladed knife at my face and saw that the skin on his gnarled fingers was decorated too. His other hand was hidden behind his back, but I would have bet it was the same, covered in little scars as numerous as crawling ants.
“Why did you do . . . what was reason?” Smyler still ran his words together in the same slow but breathless way, monotonous as a bored priest reciting a too-familiar catechism. “Why you not run?”
“I don’t know what you mean. Look, if you’re going to stab me or something, just do it. It’ll give me something new to think about.”
“No.” He leaned even closer, until the leathery flesh of his face was almost touching mine, and I could see his eyes moving wetly in the deep holes. His voice was strained, even desperate. “Tell it. Tell it why.”