Page 6 of The Magpie Lord
Day picked it up. It was a pack of metal knitting needles. He pulled one out with his mouth and discarded the pack, holding the long needle in his free hand. His face tightened, a man trying to work out an irritating puzzle.
He put the sharp end of the needle back between his lips, and pulled at the other end, and the metal stretched, elongating in sudden jerks, thinning like pulled toffee, twisting and writhing.
“Tsaena,” hissed Merrick and Crane, simultaneously obscene.
Day kept working, face intent, his other hand steady in its clawed position over the floor. Finally he took the distorted needle out of his mouth. It was bizarrely corkscrewed, and obviously sharply pointed.
“That’s iron,” whispered Merrick.
Day wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. There was a faint smell of scorched metal in the air. “Tin. If I could do that with iron, it would be impressive. Right. I’m going to pull this thing’s teeth. It isn’tgoing to be pleasant.” He shifted position, and suddenly the feelings were back, pounding into Crane’s skull, waves of misery wracking his entire body. He wanted to curl up in a corner, howl, die.
“The thing is,” said Day in a hatefully calm voice, “I need to bring it closer to you to see what I’m doing, and take off the hold I’ve got on it. And that’s going to make it quite a lot worse. Can you bear it?”
Crane shut his eyes, bit at the carpet. No, he couldn’t. It couldn’t be worse. He would rather die than have it worse. He just wanted it all to be over.
“He can take it,” said Merrick.
“Lord Crane?” Day asked.
“I know what he can take.” Merrick’s tone brooked no argument. “Do it. Now. Sir.”
“Get on with it, damn you.” Crane had to force the words out through the overwhelming misery that clogged his throat.
“Very well. Mr. Merrick, are you capable of holding him down?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Don’t let him move.” Day paused, and added stiffly, “You have my assurance that I will make this as quick as I can.”
He moved forward without rising, in an awkward shuffle. He was, Crane saw, pushing the thing along the floor, but pushing apparently without touching it, his fingers still clawed above it.
As it came closer, the hairs rose on Crane’s arms. The air was greasy, dry and dirty and foul, like a filthy old sheepskin. He tried to recoil, and was held down hard.
“Don’t move, now,” muttered Merrick.
Day had the thing in front of Crane’s face.
It was gnarled wood, carved in a roughly humanoid shape, riddled with holes. It seemed to be pulsing slightly; looked as though it would feel oily. It was on some indefinable level utterly obscene, and Crane was overwhelming, painfully frightened of it. He pulled his head back.
“Steady,” Merrick whispered. “Come on, Vaudrey, you’ve done worse.”
But he hadn’t, nothing worse than this, because as Day moved his hand away, the malevolence of the thing poured out in a flood of foul cancerous air that flooded into Crane’s nose and mouth and eyes. He knew he was screaming and thrashing, he could feel Merrick’s grip putting pressure on his elbows and knees, but he couldn’t bear it, couldn’t stand another second. The malignancy was all-consuming, shrivelling his soul to a single point of unbearable pain, and he was fighting Merrick hard, and Day simply sat there, probing the device with the twisted needle. Crane cursed him, the fucking vicious ginger dwarf, what the hell had he ever done to him, and Merrick, whose fucking fault this was, and himself, in the foulest language at his command, crying, begging, until Day spoke, in a voice that he could hardly hear through the filthy miasma around him.
“This will hurt.”
The agony came like a knife, pulsed through Crane’s chest and back and arms and upper thighs like screaming burning fire...
And then it didn’t.
STEPHEN SAT BACK ONhis heels and wiped his forehead as Lord Crane slumped forward, boneless. The manservant Merrick straddled his back, white and sweating, blood drooling from his nose where Crane had landed a blow earlier. He glared down at his master, then over at Stephen with a murderous look.
Stephen dropped the gnarled piece of wood to the ground and took a very deep breath.
“You can get off him. It’s done.”
“My lord?” Merrick released Crane’s arms. “My lord?”
There was a sort of muffled sobbing from where Crane’s face rested in the carpet. His body was shaking.
