“You do me far too much honor, great one,” said Ruiz.
“Nonsense.” Brinslevos looked up and his face pinched. “Sit down — don’t stand there looking down at me. Have you no respect?”
Ruiz sat hastily, before the annoyance on the Lord’s narrow face could mature into rage. “My apologies, great one.”
Brinslevos glared at him for an instant, and Ruiz looked down at his hands. He was unhappily aware that he was in a great deal more danger than the night he had climbed up from Hell into Pharaoh. The Lord was far more unpredictable than a Helldemon, and possibly more lethal, as the vast hide on his wall seemed to testify.
“Well, no matter,” Brinslevos said. “I’m a tolerant man; I grant almost everyone one mistake. If I love you, I might grant you two, though I don’t advise you to test my affection yet.”
“Yes, great one.” As he spoke, Ruiz looked Brinslevos in the eye and smiled pleasantly, remembering Denklar’s advice — that the Lord found excessive humility as irritating as arrogance.
Brinslevos laughed. He looked for a moment like a child, innocent of malice — a trick of his madness, or so Ruiz presumed. “So. Let us smoke.”
Ruiz nodded, and from his pack he drew forth the simple brass pipe he favored and packed it with punkweed. He wondered that he was as calm as he seemed to be; perhaps Ruiz Aw was mad, too, to be smoking oil with a dangerous lunatic. But now there seemed no way out.
Brinslevos opened a silver effigy box made in the shape of an arroyo lizard and took a porcelain waterpipe from it. He filled the pipe from his own humidor of weed, then added a drop of the cansum oil, first to his and then to Ruiz’s pipe.
The Lord ordered the lamps dimmed, so that the visions would have no difficulty in suppressing reality. Unseen hands saw to this, so that the room was filled with gloom and the bizarre shadows cast from the dead creatures on the walls.
Brinslevos waited until Ruiz had held the bowl of his pipe over the flame and drawn deeply; then he followed.
Lavender smoke leaked from the Lord’s high-bridged nose. After a long moment he released his breath suddenly, and so did Ruiz.
“Ahh… sweet,” said Brinslevos. Strangely, the Lord now seemed calm, as though the oil had reversed some polarity in his head, tipping him toward sanity.
Ruiz felt a tide rising in his body, a tingling flood of unease. His expensive reflexes clamped down automatically, damping the swing toward hallucination. He shook himself, forced those reflexes to relax slightly, so that he could appear to accompany the Lord on his trip into otherness. It wouldn’t do for the Lord to suspect Ruiz of some sort of trickery — this was a world full of hands that were quicker than the eye.
“Tell me what you see,” Brinslevos ordered, after several more puffs.
“Yes, great one,” said Ruiz. He opened the floodgates of his sensorium a little wider, and waited.
Evil dreams scrabbled through on little clawed feet.
He took a deep breath and shuddered it out. He began to babble. “I see myself, a servant in a house where two beautiful monsters dwell. They are less human than the Helldemons who crawl up the wall of the world, but they speak in soft breathless voices, they wear garments of spider velvet, they smell like the desert, clean and dead.”
“What do they look like, Wuhiya?” The Lord’s eyes were like moonstones, a lambent pale gray.
“Like perfect corpses. Their skins are white as the finest porcelain, without a wrinkle, smooth and hard. They have long hair, like black smoke, the male and female both. Their faces seem human, but under the clouds of their hair each hides a hundred eyes, which watch in all directions. Sometimes I see the glitter of these eyes…
“Their fingers are knives, unless they are icicles.”
“Ahhh…” sighed Brinslevos, leaning back and closing his eyes. “You have the voice. Use it.”
Ruiz gave himself more freely to the dream, began to see more clearly the dark things he imagined. He spoke the shapes the drug showed him. “Their feet are perfect, narrow, high-arched, perfumed. They walk like human beings, but where they set their feet down, roots strike deep, tiny white wires, racing downward like worms born of lightning, to take strength from the ground. When they lift their feet from the ground the worms fall away and die, invisible.
“The beautiful monsters wear fine scarlet sashes about their hips, so that their genitals are hidden. Now they remove their sashes and I see only smooth bright metal between their legs. I don’t know what they wish me to do, but never have I been more afraid.” For an instant it was true, and he struggled against terror.
Ruiz fell silent, and neither spoke for a long time. It was so quiet in the room that Ruiz heard his heartbeat, measuring out the seconds.
Sweat streamed down Brinslevos’s face, and he muttered inaudibly. Then the Lord said, in a stronger voice, “I hear the grinding of machinery in the darkness — first the rasp and rattle of tiny cogs and then the pumping of many small pistons. The sound grows and changes, until it becomes a steel music, and I know that a great machine, unseen in the night, rises on all sides of me, up to the stars and beyond. I seem to float, light as smoke, in the center of this machine, which now seems so huge that no world could support it. I can see nothing but the flicker of starlight through the girders and levers and wheels.
“At first I thought myself at the center of the machine, but now I understand that I am trapped in one tiny pocket of it, and that a million others float here, too, each in his own separate cage. It is a cage; I feel that now, and I wonder why I am being kept.”
Brinslevos moaned, a sound of puzzled agony that threatened to pull Ruiz into the Lord’s vision. Ruiz damped his reaction to the drug and swam up from the depths.
Brinslevos spoke urgently, in a rising panic. “Why? Why! The gears grind faster and faster, until the darkness shudders with the motion, and I can hear nothing else, not even my thoughts. I grow heavier, I start to sink, toward the danger below, a gnashing beast of metal, with cogs for jaws and rods for muscles. It’s hungry and I carry no weapon, I am naked and cold and weak.” Brinslevos twisted and flung out his arms. “Something’s gone wrong…. “He screamed, a sound that completely sobered Ruiz. The Lord’s face was suddenly distended with terror, as if some awful creature had forced its way under his skin and was trying to push out. His eyes bulged with insupportable horror, his mouth strained to wring the last bit of sound from his scream — he seemed to be unable to draw his next breath.
Any moment, servants or guards would come running, and what would Ruiz Aw tell them? “I’m sorry; I seem to have poisoned your Lord, excuse me now.”
Ruiz leaned forward and pressed his left pinky ring against the Lord’s corded neck. A full-spectrum antidote and strong sedative jetted into the Lord’s carotid, and the Lord fell back unconscious, face relaxing.
An instant later, something exploded against the back of Ruiz’s head, and he knew nothing for a while.
Chapter 11
Ruiz woke slowly to the sensation of heat and confinement, and the bitter smell of rust. His head thumped with a regular rhythm, a stabbing pain behind the eyes. He groaned and sat up in semidarkness, to discover that he was naked.
His senses swam for a moment, and he touched the back of his head gingerly. Blood was crusted on a split in his scalp, but his probing fingers found no evidence that his skull was cracked.
Where was he?
Beams of hot light penetrated his prison through chinks in the welded iron that surrounded him. Carefully, he rose to hands and knees and put his eye to one of these cracks. His heart sank. He was in the Place of Artful Anguish.