The Spirit Rebellion(97)
“Oh, you will,” the duke said. He fixed Eli with a slow, cutting smile, and waved his hand. The second his fingers moved, the chair Eli was sitting in threw itself backward. Eli hit the wall with a thud that knocked his breath out, but he didn’t bounce off it. The moment he touched the stone, the blocks changed shape. The stone moved like living clay, wrapping around his legs, arms, waist, and neck, pinning him spread-eagle to the bare wall of the study. He was still trying to blink the spots out of his eyes as the duke walked over and pressed a gloved hand against his shoulder.
“I have a great deal of experience with bringing objectors around to my point of view,” he said softly. “You see, Mr. Monpress, everyone has something they find intolerable. All you have to do is discover what that is, and then, whether it’s a Great Spirit or a man, it becomes your willing servant.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Eli said, gasping against the stone’s chokehold, “but I’m afraid life as a thief has made me remarkably tolerant.”
“That’s all right,” the duke said. “Life as a duke has made me remarkably patient.” He gestured at the stone. “We’ll start with the simplest, physical pain.”
Eli sucked in a breath as the braces holding him in place began to move slowly and inexorably away from one another, stretching him in all directions.
“The stretching is a slow buildup,” the duke said calmly, a connoisseur explaining the intricacies of his art. “The pain will become greater and greater as the joints are stretched past their limits, disjointing the shoulders, knees, elbows, possibly the hips, though most never get that far. I don’t normally go to these lengths. Most people find even the idea of pain intolerable, but I try to keep in practice.”
Eli grunted in reply, panting as his arms stretched farther. The stone crushed into his skin as it pulled, stretching him like taffy. He could feel his sinews pulling, his bones creaking at unnatural angles until he had to clench his teeth to keep from whimpering. The duke saw this, and gave Eli a pleasant smile.
“We can stop at any time,” he said. “Just tell me what I want to know and this will all be over. Otherwise, the pain will continue to grow until you pass out. When that happens, we’ll rest an hour and then start again. Just remember that this situation is completely within your control. One concession, that’s all it takes.”
“You know,” Eli said, gasping as something in his shoulder began to make a horrifying creaking sound, “for someone who claims to have studied me as long as you have, you don’t know me very well. If you’d paid any attention, you’d have stuck with the carrot. Being bullied just makes me more stubborn, and life with Josef has made me very blasé about pain.”
“We’ll see,” the duke said, resuming his seat by the window. “I can wait.”
A moment later, the something in his shoulder snapped, and even Eli’s clamped teeth couldn’t stop the scream that came next.
“Sorry about the cramped conditions,” the elder Monpress said, passing Josef a bottle of wine and a set of mismatched cups. “This place was never meant to hold more than one person.”
“We’ve been in worse,” the swordsman said.
They were crowded into an attic with a sloped ceiling that Josef had to almost double over to fit under. He and Nico were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the wrapped Fenzetti while Monpress sat opposite, cross-legged on top of the trapdoor.
They’d made it to Monpress’s hideout with relatively little trouble. Once the soldiers captured Eli, the streets had emptied to nothing. Now they were waiting for dark, and while, technically, everything was going according to plan, Josef couldn’t shake the feeling that the situation was rapidly spinning out of control. For one, they hadn’t received a signal from Eli. Whenever he’d let himself get caught before, he’d always sent a signal of some kind. This time they’d gotten nothing. It could be because Eli couldn’t cajole the spirits in Gaol like usual, but Josef had a bad feeling about it.
Monpress, however, was keeping busy. He’d already changed clothes from his somber merchant outfit to what looked to Josef like a set of ragged black pajamas. The cloth looped and tied in a dozen places, held close to the old man’s surprisingly lithe body by an intricate network of straps. Once he was dressed, Monpress began slipping tools into hidden pockets with a silent efficiency that impressed even Josef. In addition to two small knives, he had a host of crooked hooks, pliers, straight pins, and other metal objects Josef recognized from Eli’s thief tools but couldn’t put a name to. He was wrapping his feet in padded cloth when Josef finally gave up and asked him what he was doing.