“Come here.”
Simon took another step backward. “Come and get me, you great sack of guts.”
Inch’s ruined face screwed up in a snarl and he lunged forward. Simon darted out of his reach and turned to run across the chamber. The other workers gaped as the master of the forge lumbered after him.
Simon had hoped to tire the huge man, but had reckoned without his own weariness, the weeks of injury and deprivation. Within a hundred strides he felt his strength ebbing, although Inch still plodded some distance behind him. There was nowhere to hide, and there was no escape from the forge; better to turn and fight in the open, where he could best use whatever advantage of speed still remained to him.
He bent to pick up a large chunk of stone. Inch, certain that he had Simon captured, but wary of the stone, moved steadily but slowly closer.
“Doctor Inch is master here,” he rumbled. “There is work to do. You … you have …” He growled, unable to find words to describe the magnitude of Simon’s crimes. He took another step forward.
Simon flung the stone at his head. Inch dodged and it thumped heavily against his shoulder instead. Simon found himself filling with a dark exhilaration, a rising fury that surged through him almost like joy. This was the creature who had brought Pryrates to Morgenes’ chamber! This monstrosity had helped kill Simon’s master!
“Doctor Inch!” Simon shouted, laughing wildly as he bent for another stone. “Doctor?! You are not fit to call yourself anything but Slug, but Filth, but Half-Wit! Doctor! Ha!” Simon flung the second stone, but Inch sidestepped and it clattered across the cavern floor. The big man leaped forward with startling speed and hit Simon a glancing blow that knocked him off his feet. Before he could regain his balance, a wide hand closed on his arm. He was jerked upright, then flung headfirst across the stone floor. Tumbling, he hit his head, then lay for a moment, dazed. Inch’s meaty hands closed on him again. He was lifted up, then something struck his face so hard that he heard thunder and saw lightning. He felt his cloth mask pull away. Another blow rocked him, then he was free and toppling to the ground. Simon lay where he had fallen, struggling to understand where he was and what had happened.
“You make me angry …” said a deep voice. Simon waited helplessly for another blow, hoping it would be strong enough to take away the pain in his head and the sickness in his guts forever. But for long moments nothing happened.
“The little kitchen boy,” Inch said at last. “I know you. You are the kitchen boy. But you have hair on your face!” There was a sound like two stones being rubbed together. It took some time for Simon to realize that Inch was laughing. “You came back!” He sounded as pleased as if Simon were an old friend. “Back to Inch—but I am Doctor Inch now. You laughed at me. But you won’t laugh any more.”
Thick fingers squeezed him and he was jerked up from the floor. The sudden movement filled his head with blackness.
Simon struggled to move but could not. Something held him with his arms and legs extended, stretched to their utmost.
He opened his eyes to the tattered moon face of Inch.
“Little kitchen boy. You came back.” The huge man leaned closer. He used one hand to pinion Simon’s right arm against whatever stood behind, then raised the other, which clutched a heavy mallet. Simon saw the spike being held against his wrist and could not hold back his shout of terror.
“Are you afraid, kitchen boy? You took my place, the place that should have been mine. Turned the old man against me. I didn’t forget.” Inch raised the mallet and brought it down hard against the head of the spike. Simon gasped and twitched helplessly, but there was no pain, only a tightening of the pressure on his wrist. Inch hammered the spike in deeper, then leaned back to examine his work. For the first time Simon realized that they were high above the cavern floor. Inch was standing on a ladder that leaned against the wall just below Simon’s arm.
But it wasn’t the wall, Simon saw a moment later. The rope around his wrist was now spiked to the forge’s immense water wheel. His other wrist and both ankles had already been secured. He was spread-eagled a few cubits beneath the wheel’s edge, ten cubits above the ground. The wheel was not moving, and the sluice of dark water seemed farther away than it should.
“Do whatever you want.” Simon’s clenched his teeth against the scream that wanted to erupt. “I don’t care. Do anything.”
Inch tugged at Simon’s wrists again, testing. Simon could begin to feel the downward pull of his weight against the bonds and the slow warmth in the joints of his arms, precursor of real pain.
“Do? I do nothing.” Inch placed his huge hand on Simon’s chest and gave a push, forcing Simon’s breath out in a surprised hiss. “I waited. You took my place. I waited and waited to be Doctor Inch. Now you wait.”
“W-wait for what?”
Inch smiled, a slow spread of lips that revealed broken teeth. “Wait to die. No food. Maybe I will give you water—it will take longer that way. Maybe I will think of … something else to do. Doesn’t matter. You will wait.” Inch nodded his head. “Wait.” He pushed the mallet’s handle into his belt and climbed down the ladder.
Simon craned his neck, watching Inch’s progress with stupefied fascination. The overseer reached the bottom and waved for a pair of his henchmen to take the ladder away. Simon sadly watched it go. Even if he somehow escaped his bonds, he would surely fall to his death.
But Inch was not finished. He moved forward until he was almost hidden from Simon’s view by the great wheel, then pulled down on a thick wooden lever. Simon heard a grinding noise, then felt the wheel jerk, its sudden motion rattling his bones. It slipped downward, shuddering as it went, then splashed into the sluice, sending another jolt through Simon.
Slowly … ever so slowly … the wheel began to turn.
At first it was almost a relief to be rotated down toward the ground. The weight shifted from both his arms to his wrist and ankle, then gradually the strain moved to his legs as the chamber turned upside down. Then, as he rolled even further downward, blood rushed to his head until it felt as though it would burst out through his ears. At the bottom of his revolution, water splashed just beyond him, almost wetting his finger tips.
Above the wheel, the immense chains were again reeling up into darkness.
“Couldn’t stop it for long,” rumbled a downside-up Inch. “Bellows don’t work, buckets don’t work—and the Red Rat Wizard’s tower don’t turn.” He stood staring for a moment as Simon slowly began to rise toward the cavern ceiling. “It does lots of things, this wheel.” His remaining eye glittered in the light from the forge. “Kills little kitchen boys.”
He turned and lumbered off across the chamber.
It didn’t hurt that much at first. Simon’s wrists were so securely bound, and he was stretched so tightly against the wheel’s wide rim, that there was very little movement. He was hungry, which kept him clearheaded enough to think; his mind revolved far more swiftly than the prisoning wheel, circling through the events that had brought him to this place and through dozens of unlikely possibilities for escape.
Perhaps Stanhelm would come when it was sleeping time and cut him loose, he told himself. Inch had his own chamber somewhere in another part of the forge: with luck, Simon could be freed without the hulking overseer even knowing. But where would he go? And what made him think that Stanhelm was still alive, or if he was, that he would risk death again to save a person he barely knew?
Someone else? But who? None of the other foundrymen cared if Simon lived or died—nor could he much blame them. How could you worry about another person when every moment was a struggle to breathe the air, to survive the heat, to perform backbreaking work at the whim of a brutish master?
And this time there were no friends to rescue Simon. Binabik and Miriamele, even should they somehow make their way into the castle, would surely never come here. They sought the king—and had no reason to believe Simon still lived, anyway. Those who had rescued him from danger in the p
ast—Jiriki, Josua, Aditu—were far away, on the grasslands or marching toward Nabban. Any friends who had once lived in the castle were gone. And even if he somehow managed to free himself from this wheel, where would he go? What could he do? Inch would only catch him again, and next time the forge-master might not devise such a gradual torment.
He strained again at his bonds, but they were heavy ropes woven to resist the strains of forge work and they gave not at all. He could work at them for days and only tear the skin from his wrists. Even the spikes that held the knotted ropes against the wheel’s timbers were no help: Inch had carefully driven them between the strands so that the rope would not split.
The burning in his arms and legs was worsening. Simon felt a drumbeat of real dread begin inside him. He could not move. No matter what happened, no matter how bad it got, no matter how much he screamed and struggled for release, there was nothing he could do.
It would almost be a relief, he thought, if Pryrates came and found that Inch held him prisoner. The red priest would do terrible things to him, but at least they would be different terrible things—sharp pains, long pains, little ones and great ones. This, Simon could tell, was only going to become steadily worse. Soon his hunger would become a torment as well. Most of a day had passed since he had last eaten, and he was already thinking on his last bowl of scum-flecked soup with a regret bordering on madness.
As he turned upside-down once more, his stomach lurched, momentarily freeing him from hunger. It was little enough to be grateful for, but Simon’s expectations were becoming very slight.
The pain that burned his body was matched by a fury that grew within him as he suffered, a helpless rage that could find no outlet and so began to tear at the very foundations of his sanity instead. Like an angry man he had once seen in Erchester, who threw everything in his house out of the window, piece by piece, Simon had nothing to fling at his enemies but what was his own—his beliefs, his loves, his most cherished memories.
Morgenes and Josua and Binabik and the others had used him, he decided. They had taken a boy who could not even write his own name and had made him a tool. Under their manipulation and for their benefit he had been driven from his home, had been made an exile, had seen the death of many he held dear and the destruction of much that was innocent and beautiful. With no say in his own destiny he had been led this way and that, and told just enough half-truths to keep him soldiering on. For the sake of Josua he had faced a dragon and won—then the Great Sword had been taken from him and given to someone else. For Binabik’s sake he had stayed on in Yiqanuc—who could say that Haestan would have been killed if the company had left earlier? He had come with Miriamele to protect her on her journey, and had suffered because of it, both in the tunnels and now on this wheel where he would likely die. They had all taken from him, taken everything he had. They had used him.
And Miriamele had other crimes to answer for. She had led him on, treated him like an equal even though she was a king’s daughter. She had been his friend, or had said she was, but she had not waited for him to come back from the quest to the northern mountains. No, instead she had gone off on her own without even a word left for him, as though their friendship had never existed. And she had given herself to another man—delivered her maidenhood to someone she did not even like! She had kissed Simon and let him think that his hopeless love had some meaning … but then she had thrown her own deeds in his face in the cruelest manner possible.
Even his mother and father had abandoned him, dying before he could ever know them, leaving him with no life and no history but what the chambermaids had given him. How could they!? And how could God let such a thing be?! Even God had betrayed him, for God had not been there. He was said to watch all creatures of His world, but He obviously cared little for Simon, the least of His children. How could God love someone and leave them to suffer as Simon had suffered, for no fault other than trying to do right?
Yet with all his fury at these so-called friends who had abused his trust, he had greater hatred still for his enemies: Inch, the brute animal—no, worse than any animal, for an animal did not torture; King Elias who had thrown the world into war and blighted the earth with terror and famine and death; silver-masked Utuk’ku, who had set her huntsman after Simon and his friends and had killed wise Amerasu; and the priest Pryrates, Morgenes’ murderer, who had nothing in his black soul but self-serving malice.
But the greatest author of all Simon’s suffering, it seemed, was he whose ravening hatred was so great that even the grave could not contain it. If anyone deserved to be repaid in torment, it was the Storm King. Ineluki had brought ruin to a world full of innocents. He had destroyed Simon’s life and happiness.
Sometimes Simon felt that hate was keeping him alive. When the agony became too strong, when he felt life slipping away, or at least passing out of his control, the need to survive and revenge himself was something to which he could cling. He would stay alive as long as he could, if only to return some measure of his own suffering to all who had abused him. Every miserable lonely night would be recompensed, every wound, every terror, every tear.
Revolving through darkness, in and out of madness, Simon made a thousand oaths to repay pain for pain.
At first it seemed a firefly, flitting on the edge of his vision—something small that glowed without light, a point of not-black in a world of blackness. Simon, his thoughts floundering in a wash of ache and hunger, could make no sense of it.
“Come,” a voice murmured to him. Simon had been hearing voices through this entire second day—or was it the third?—upon the wheel. What was another voice? What was another speck of dancing light?
“Come.”
Abruptly he was pulled free, free of the wheel, free of the ropes that burned his wrists. He was tugged onward by the spark, and could not understand how escape could be accomplished so easily … until he looked back.
A body hung on the slowly circling rim, a naked white-skinned form sagging in the ropes. Flame-hued hair was sweat-plastered on its brow. Chin sagged on chest.
Who is that? Simon wondered briefly … but he knew the answer. He viewed his own form with dispassion. So that’s what I looked like? But there’s nothing left in it—it’s like an empty jar.
The thought came to him suddenly. I’m dead.
But if that was so, why could he still dimly feel the ropes, still feel his arms yanked to the straining length of their sockets? Why did he seem to be both in and out of his body?
The light moved before him again, summoning, beckoning. Without will, Simon followed. Like wind in a long dark chimney, they moved together through chaotic shadows; almost-things brushed at him and passed through him. His connection to the body hanging upon the wheel grew more tenuous. He felt the candle of his being flickering.
“I don’t want to lose me! Let me go back!”
But the spark that led him flew on.
Swirling darkness blossomed into light and color, then gradually took on the shapes of real things. Simon was at the mouth of the great sluice that turned the water wheel, watching the dark water tumble down into the depths below the castle, headed for the foundry. Next he saw the silent pool in the deserted halls of Asu’a. Water trickled down into the pool through the cracks in the ceiling. The mists that floated above the wide tarn pulsed with life, as though this water was somehow revivifying something that had long been almost lifeless. Could that be what the flickering light was trying to show him? That water from the forge had filled the Sithi pool? That it was coming to life again?
Other images flowed past. He saw the dark shape that grew at the base of the massive stairwell in Asu’a, the tree-thing he had almost touched, whose alien thoughts he had felt. The stairway itself was a spiraling pipe that led from the roots of the breathing tree up to Green Angel Tower itself.
As he thought of the tower, he abruptly found himself staring at its pinnacle, which reared like a vast white tooth. Snow was falling and the sky was thick with clouds, bu
t somehow Simon could see through them to the night sky beyond. Hovering low in the northern darkness was a fiery ember with a tiny smear of tail—the Conqueror Star.
“Why have you brought me here, to all these places?” Simon asked. The spot of light hovered before him as though listening. “What does this mean?”
There was no answer. Instead, something cold splashed against his face.
Simon opened his eyes, suddenly very much an inhabitant of his painful flesh once more. A distorted shape hung upside down from the ceiling, piping like a bat.
No. It was one of Inch’s henchmen, and Simon himself was hanging head-down at the lowest point of the wheel’s revolution, listening to the axle squeak. The henchman turned another dipper full of water over Simon’s face, pouring only a little of it into his mouth. He gasped and choked, trying to swallow, then licked his chin and lips. As Simon began his upward turn, the man walked away without a word. Little drops ran down from Simon’s head and hair, and for a while he was too busy trying to catch and swallow them before they dripped away to wonder at his strange vision. It was only when the wheel brought him down the other side again that he could think.
What did that mean? It was hard to hold a coherent thought against the fire in his joints. What was that glowing thing, what was it trying to show me? Or was it just more madness?
Simon had experienced many strange dreams since Inch had left him—visions of despair and exaltation, scenes of impossible victory over his enemies and of his friends suffering dreadful fates, but he had also dreamed of far less meaningful things. The voices he had heard in the tunnels had returned, sometimes as a faint babble barely audible above the splashing and groaning of the wheel, other times clear as someone whispering in his ear, snatches of speech that always seemed just tantalizingly beyond his comprehension. He was beset by fantasies, dizzy as a storm-battered bird. So why should this vision be any more real?
But it felt different. Like the difference between wind on your skin and someone touching you.