Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

He passed out.

He came to from the pain of being moved. Even the light of the branch of candles near the door was pain, gouging through his eyes to his brain. He threw up again, doubled over this time, his wrists manacled behind him, being drawn steadily up. He tried to straighten, tried to move to lessen the agony in his shoulders, but the rope or chain on the manacles kept pulling up toward the ceiling, dragging his arms up behind him. Hannibal had spoken once of his lunatic uncle, fixated on the Spanish Inquisition, and January recognized what this had to be, from old woodcuts: a ceiling pulley, a set of wrist-chains, a rope, and a demon to pull on it until the victim's feet lifted from the floor and his arms were wrenched from their sockets. The light was like an ax in his skull.

"Did you tell anyone?"

That mellow golden contralto: Begin again. The rope twisted up a few more inches and he cried out.

Thin and flexible, the whalebone training-whip tore the backs of his naked thighs.

"Did you tell anyone?"

"No."

A cut across his belly. He felt blood. How he knew what she wanted he didn't know. Maybe because she was white.

"No, m'am."

It was hard to look at her, hard to make his eyes focus. She wore a ball dress of turquoise silk with what they called a Mary Stuart bodice, the candlelight salting her black lace with gold. Queenly, gracious, lovely as she had been that afternoon, apologizing for what Emil Barnard had written. Black-lace mitts on her hands. On the floor beyond her skirts another woman lay with arms and legs folded into an iron contraption that locked between her ankles; January could just see this slave woman's eyes, brown and huge, staring incomprehendingly at him.

Delphine Lalaurie beat him until he fainted again, beat him without a word or a sound and without change of expression on her face. The agony in his shoulders brought him to twice, when he slumped; he wasn't sure when he woke up the third time if it was true consciousness. He only knew that his ankles and wrists were being locked together behind his back, and that her skirts were close enough to his head to smell the patchouli in their folds.

He thought she said-if he wasn't dreaming-"You say Suzette must have seen him come in?"

"She must have, Madame. The kitchen door was open."

"And, of course, she didn't bother to tell you about it.

"No, Madame."

Hallucinatory in the candlelight, he saw Bastien put a shawl around her shoulders. Sweat bathed her face and made black circles in the armpits of her gown, and she'd taken her hair down, as a woman does for her husband. In the leaping shadows the gray did not show; it hung crow black below her hips. The few pins still snagged in it winked like rats' eyes.

She put out her hand, resting it on Bastien's shoulder. No expression changed her face, but she closed her eyes. Straight and cold, for a moment it seemed to January that Delphine Lalaurie was strapped into the self-shouldered bonds of her own perfection, like one of her husband's infernal posture-correction devices. In the silence he heard her draw breath and release it, like a woman convincing herself that she has to be strong. Whatever the cost, she must go on, to some end known only to herself.

"After all I have done for her," she said. "After all I have done."

"Yes, Madame."

"For the girls. For Nicolas." Had she been anyone but Delphine Lalaurie she would have trembled. In her face was the echo of that yearning ecstasy it had worn in the fever wards, as she held a young man dead in her arms. "Not one of them knows how much."

Then she opened her eyes, calm and reasonable and flawless once more. In utter control, obeyed in all things. "I'll have to speak to her."

She picked up the whip from the table and went out. He was dead.

He was dead and in hell. Though Bastien had taken the candles-as if suspended in space somewhere above the yard January could see the two of them, descend ing the square-angled spiral of the outside stair-he could see also, clearly, Liam Roarke sitting slumped against the wall near the door, the contents of his opened veins a black slow-spreading ocean around his thighs and his bright blue eyes fixed on January.

"You know you didn't have to tell your smelly friend Shaw, Soublet's name," Roarke said, with an evil smile. "You'd told him it before. He knew."

January couldn't argue with him.

There were other people in the room. Sometimes he could only hear them, twisting and groaning softly in the darkness: could smell the blood and filth, and hear the scrape of metal, and the sobbing of the woman on the floor. Sometimes in spite of the darkness he could see them, by the light of red flame whose heat consumed them all: his father, Rose, Ayasha. Ayasha, lying on the bed, raised her blackening face and shook back the long coil of her hair, and said, "You didn't come. And now you're chasing some other girl. You didn't come because you were lying with Rose." Then she threw up all her intestines, and the child she carried inside her, and died again, her hand reaching for the pitcher of water.

January tried to say, "I'm sorry," but only the serpents of hell crawled from his mouth.

Ants covered him in a gnawing wave, eating his flesh to the bones.

Distantly, Hannibal played the violin, a jig that had been popular in Paris two summers ago, before the cholera came.

If he could only get to his Rosary, thought January, he'd be safe, he'd be all right. The Virgin Mary would get him out of this.

Delphine Lalaurie would be returning. From his vantage point above the courtyard he could see her, gathering up her heavy skirts to climb the stairs. Her husband Nicolas was with her this time, a sheaf of notes tucked under one arm and one of his experimental postural correction devices in his hands.

Virgin Mary, get me out of this.

Heat consumed January, smoke rising through the floor to suffocate his lungs. The building was on fire, plunging down like an avalanche to Hell.

The building was on fire. He woke and knew it.

There was a little light, coming in through the cracks in the barred shutters that led out onto the gallery, enough to let him know that it was day. Smoke was pouring up through the cracks in the floor.

The woman on the floor, skeletal with prolonged starvation, began to writhe in her shackles, her breath coming in little puffs of pain. One of the men on the beds-there were two beds in the room, he now saw, the manacles dangling from the ceiling pulley between them-stirred and groaned, then lay still again. The man wore an iron collar around his neck, and some kind of iron contraption on one or maybe both of his legs. January's own shoulders were lost in a maze of pain. Agony shot up through his leg muscles, his back, from every welted, bloody inch of his skin.

In the smoke that filtered up through the room the flies were humming wildly around the ceiling, their drone a frantic bass note to Cora's voice-it had to be Cora's making inarticulate shrill grunts beyond the thin wall. January tried to move and was instantly sorry, his head throbbing, so dizzy he nearly fainted again.

But he had to get out. He had to get out. They'd all burn...

Somewhere he heard shouting, a yammer of voices below. "Sir, I'll thank you to mind your own business," came the yapping tenor of Nicolas Lalaurie's voice, and a deeper voice, harsh but familiar-Judge Canonge's?-replied.

"It's a grave allegation and I think it needs to be looked into."

"Do you call me a liar? I'll have my friends call on you in the morning, sir."

"You have your friends do whatever you want, sir, but I'm going to have a look upstairs."

"This man would say or do anything to discredit me and my wife, sir. For years he's spread rumors..."

"You can't tell me that child didn't fall off the roof, two months after you moved into this place!" That was Montreuil's voice. Behind it there was a clashing, a distant thump of feet. January squirmed, gasping in an ocean of heat. If he cried out-maybe if he cried out they'd hear him...