“What?” I said, gaping at him as I backed toward the farthest reaches of the room and openly looked for any way, however Grey or obscure, to get out of there and away from Rui.
“Unless you wish to walk about in a tattered and bloodstained dress when I’m done, you’d be wise to remove it now.”
“You’re not going to kill me?”
“Not your body. I have a great deal more for you to do, once you’re perfected and your soul stored away for Purlis’s collection. I think he’ll be particularly pleased to add you to it—since you and your friends destroyed most of my work when you burned down my temple.” His voice rose and sharpened in anger and the red spikes in his aura reached upward like fountains of blood. “It amuses me that his ridiculous scheme will bring our Great Plan to fruition and has finally brought my last enemy within reach.”
“Carlos? All this is about . . . getting even with Carlos?”
“There is so much more than that, but that one small thing adds such savor. He was my master and he abandoned me. I had to teach myself, just like the girl in the story. But he never would have expected me to be stronger for it. He cursed me, tied me to the land of my birth so I could never travel to the great bone churches to sit at the feet of another master, never pursue him, and yet . . . he returned.” Rui chuckled. “Oh, how I will relish using you against him. It’s even worth losing my student and the little girl to do it.”
His laughter escalated into a cackle of sadistic glee. He yanked the lines of energy that spun from his hands to my bones, dragging me toward a table that reminded me more of the equipment in the mortuary than anything from a doctor’s office. “It’s time for you to do as you’re told, senhorina.”
I made enough of a fuss that he had to work to haul me in, but not so much that I exhausted myself. My hope of escape was ragged, but it wasn’t gone yet. As long as he had his bone hooks or an energetic tie to me, I couldn’t go anywhere without him pulling me back, or hunting me down. I had to break the strands that connected us or get him to do it.
Rui seemed to be enjoying himself, grinning as he forced me onto the table. The whole setup reminded me of The Pit and the Pendulum and made me regret all those Roger Corman films I’d watched with reprehensible boyfriends in college. Rui, having gotten me on the table, strapped me down at the wrists and ankles.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, letting panic color my voice. “Why are you doing that? You don’t have to do that—you already have control over me.”
“Ah, but the sounding is easier if I don’t have to maintain your restraints as well. The little burrowers change the tones and I want to know everything about your bones. A few straps won’t interfere once I’ve removed the hooks.” He stoked my shoulder and upper arm, smiling. “Lovely, lovely bones . . .”
I felt sickened. I kicked and struggled and thrashed, but it didn’t gain me one centimeter of slack. It did, however, grant me a view into a few obscure corners of the Grey and across the edges of the temporaclines that lay in the room. He dropped the white threads that connected us and seemed to draw fine white spirals from my body, like ivory worms. I gasped and writhed, but there was as much show as actual pain and disgust—I needed to distract him while I studied my options. If I could get into the Grey long enough while unencumbered with Rui’s hooks and threads, I might be able to escape through the correct temporacline and, though he might find me again, he wouldn’t be able to hold me. . . .
He didn’t bother with my clothes and I guessed that his request that I remove them had been more of a psychological tactic than a necessity. He did take off my shoes, though, and in a moment I knew why.
Whispering sharp, black words, he smoothed his hand very lightly over the top surface of my left foot. As his hand passed, it felt as if my bones strained toward his palm like iron filings rising toward a magnet. I yelped, as much in surprise as pain. I wasn’t sure, at first, that I heard a whistling, singing sound, but it grew louder as he moved his hand up toward the larger bones of my leg.
My left shin lurched upward, and I shouted in startled pain as the bone yanked toward his hand violently, sending out a loud, low tone like a clarinet.
“Ah, that is interesting. Nearly the same as the one Purlis gave,” he said, allowing my bones to fall back into their normal position. “Remarkable that this bone should sound the same as that of a man with legs so much shorter than yours.”
I was panting and tears blurred the edges of my vision. “I broke it . . . when I was a kid,” I said. I’d also screwed up the knee a few years earlier and done any number of other injuries to the joint over the years, but I didn’t think I had to tell him.
“So I see,” Rui replied, touching my leg again right over the place the bone had snapped when I took a dive off a stage. He moved his fingers up and down the line of the bone at that spot, wringing from me a wailing chord of the bone’s song mixed with my own shrieking.
Rui smiled at the sound as if it were heavenly music. “Ah, I must find the right one. . . .”
He put his free hand on my other leg and that bone also jerked toward him, wrenching the joints at knee and ankle and sending another jolt of pain through me as my bones sang a discordant chord, out of tune with my howls of agony. He “played” up and down my tibias for a few moments, replaying every bit of damage I’d taken in the joints and connecting bones over the years, but he was unable to find a more pleasing resonance. He slid his hands around, first displacing my fibulas, then moving upward over my distressed knees—which he rejected and moved past immediately. I almost sighed in relief, except that there was none: His hands slid up my thighs and elicited more reedy tones from my femurs as I screamed.
It was hard to concentrate on finding a sign of a useful temporacline when every movement of Rui’s hands on my body racked me with new colors of anguish. He passed his hands over my hips and up the sides of my ribs, then ran his fingers over them in an excruciating glissando. He toyed with the loud bones of my chest until my voice was cracking. Then he slid one palm flat between my breasts, stroking the length of my sternum. Unable to scream now, I whimpered, and tears ran from the outer corners of my eyes in hot streams.
“Smaller, smaller . . .” he murmured. “A pity about the scar . . .” I thought I could feel the memory of a ghostly knife that had once scored my breastbone. Then he pulled his hands away and stared down at me, his eyes darting from point to point, seeking something.
“What?” I whispered.
“The key. The one bone that aligns to one of mine. How else will I tune you? How else will I bind these songs together? I must have that one for Coca.”
I knew I’d heard the word. . . . What was it . . . ? Not the soft drink . . . “Coca,” I repeated.
“The dragon,” he answered, offhandedly. “Inferno Dragão. The legends align. But there will be no Sleeping King to save them. Only the fiery Coca, before which all others will fail. You see what a clever plan it is? Take their own myth and turn it against them? The dragon has already eaten the knight! He cannot save them!”
“Eaten the knight . . . Oh. The tomb at the monastery,” I whispered, thinking out loud. “But . . . the bones weren’t really King Sebastian. . . .”
“Of course not. A common soldier, but buried as a king. The dust of a great deception will make it seem to burn like flesh.”
He turned away from me in frustration and snatched a bone off another table. As he raised it, I could see it was carved into a flute with rows of strange, blood-red characters running down the length.
He held it up, his eyes shining. “Do you see? This is my own song. I drew this bone from my own body, carved it to my own song. And its twin will lie in our dragon.”