I don't want to do this. The words gyred stupidly through his mind as he crossed the tiny room, hoping weirdly that the door on the other side would be locked. Hoping like a child in a nightmare that he wouldn't have to see what he knew he was going to see. At first they didn't look human, or anyway not like living men who had once walked the levee, sang to ladies, maybe eaten mangoes with the juice running down their chins. The way their arms were chained-elbows together above and behind the head, wrists together in a travesty of an upside-down L, ankles locked to the bands around their waists-it took January a few moments to understand that they were men at all, and not misshapen fetishes carved out of knobbed brown-black oak. Unable to move, they knelt in their own waste, on the other side of a table where a whalebone riding whip and a cat-o'-nine-tails lay with items only barely guessed at. Starvation had rendered them almost unrecognizable as men. It was only when the thing hanging on the wall moved and tried to make noise that he realized that it, too, was alive.
It was Cora.
He didn't know why he recognized her. Maybe by her size, rendered still more childlike by advanced emaciation. Her tiny feet, hanging ten or twelve inches above the floor in their heavy leg irons, looked no bigger than a turkey's claws. There was an iron gag in her mouth, the kind he'd seen in old museums labeled a Scold's Bridle, locked behind her head and forcing her mouth open. Flies crawled in and out, over a thin, constant stream of drool.
January's mind stalled, blocked by what he was seeing. He realized he hadn't the faintest idea what he should do. These people obviously couldn't walk, couldn't make it down two flights of stairs. He had heard the phrase, ran screaming-he hadn't known what it had meant, he realized. All he wanted to do was flee, shrieking, down Rue de levee, blotting this sight from his mind forever... His hand shaking so badly he could barely manipulate the latches, he unfastened the iron cage around Cora's head, pulled it off as gently as he could. The girl made a horrible noise in her throat, then spat out maggots. "Gervase."
She nodded to the room's inner door.
It was locked. January set his candle on the table, looked among the horrors there for a piece of thin wire that he could use to work the pawls-theoretically, at least. He'd never picked a lock in his life, though Hannibal had assured him it wasn't difficult. In the watery uncertainty of the single flame the tools were terrible, each a silent word of pain: levered clamps, intricate mechanisms of screw and strap, something like a half-unfurled speculum mounted on a screw. Ants and roaches crept over the laked blood. From among them he picked a vicious little hook, turned back to the door. There was a dim scraping behind him, one of the chained men trying to wriggle across the floor. January brought the candle close to the lock, bent to work the hook.
He heard Cora scream and started to straighten up, his head moving straight into the numbing blow from behind. His body hit the wall. He had a brief glimpse of Bastien raising an iron crowbar for another blow, and remembered nothing more.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Pain brought him to, unbelievable pain in his neck, back, shoulders. He thought someone must surely have run iron needles under the scapula, through the cervical joints, into his ribs, everywhere, but in the utter dark, the abyssal stench and heat, he couldn't tell. He couldn't move, was too disoriented to even judge in what position his body was pinned. He threw up, the spasms rending his shoulders like the rack, and the vomit ran warm down his naked chest and belly. Blinding pain drilled through his skull, enough to stop his breath.
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,