Ian's flat delivery was harrowing. Laura felt tears stinging her eyes, but when he glanced over and said, "Do you really want to hear more?" she nodded for him to proceed.
"I knew that I was going to die. Not thought, knew. The pain was so great that mostly I hoped they would hurry up and finish the job. I knew the end was near when they dragged me outside—I couldn't walk—to a patch of land between the royal palace and the city jail.
"Rahmin gave me the a shovel and told me to dig my own grave. The sadistic little bastard was having a wonderful time. The guards had to do the digging since by then I wasn't good for much. When there was a decent-sized hole, they asked me once more if I would reconsider and join the brotherhood of the faithful."
Ian still spoke in a voice of unnatural calm, but his nails were digging into the counterpane. "As you can imagine, my enthusiasm for becoming a Bokharan was low at this point, so I said no, adding a couple of juvenile insults involving the probability that their mothers had mated with wild hogs.
"Rahmin shoved me into the grave and I thought, 'Finally it's over. I haven't disgraced myself, and soon I'll know whose ideas about heaven and hell are the most accurate.' I was ready to die. Damned eager, in fact."
He stopped speaking, his chest rising and falling rapidly. Laura bit her lip so hard that the metallic taste of blood was in her mouth. Then she laid her hand over his.
He caught it, squeezing her fingers so tightly that they hurt, though he seemed unaware of the gesture. "One of the guards had a jezzail, one of those long-barreled Asiatic rifles. He raised it, held it about six inches from my head, and cocked the hammer. I was glad. A bullet would be quicker and a little neater than being hacked up by swords, which I assumed was the alternative.
"But Rahmin had a better idea. He told the guard not to shoot. Instead, at his order..." Ian stopped again, the pulse in his throat beating like a triphammer. "The guard used the jezzail to club me into the hole. Then they... they began to bury me alive. The soil was loose and sandy, easy to shovel in. That's when I broke."
He swallowed convulsively. "I've been afraid many times, but this was beyond fear. It was panic so profound that it squeezed out everything else. There was no room for pain or pride or anger—only terror. Not because I was going to die, but because of how it would happen. The thought of being buried alive—of suffocating under the earth, of feeling the weight and the blackness crushing down, but still being alive...."
He stopped speaking for a long time, and when he resumed, his voice was once more utterly flat. "I was completely shattered. Ian Cameron died in that moment. The pity of it is that his body wasn't killed at the same time."
Chilled by his inhuman detachment, Laura said softly, "But you didn't die."
"No, I didn't," he agreed. "Which is how I learned that some prices are too high. I screamed, I wept, I begged, I groveled. I said that I'd do anything they wanted. If they had brought out Pyotr and told me to shoot him, I would have. Instead, they simply repeated the request that I convert. And this time I agreed. It's very easy. All one has to do is say the Kulna, the Muslim profession of faith: 'There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet.' So I did."
His grip on Laura's hand was so tight that her fingers were numb, but she didn't pull away. "If you converted, how did you end up back in the Well so soon?"
He shrugged. "I didn't even have the courage of my cowardice. As soon as I said the Kulna, I was taken into the palace and a doctor was sent for. I was cleaned up, fed, and treated better than I had been in a year, though I was in so much pain that I hardly noticed even when they circumcised me.
"I spent three days wallowing in self-loathing that was as bad as the fear of being buried alive. So bad that I knew that only death could wipe out my failure.
"Then Rahmin called and said the amir was looking forward to putting me in charge of his artillery. I knew I could never do that, so I said that it would be a cold day in hell before I would work for the amir—that I recanted my conversion and they would have to finish killing me.
"Rahmin was so furious that I thought he would order me to be cut down on the spot, for Muslims hate a heretic or lapsed convert far more than they do infidels. But he managed to control himself. I assumed he would revert to his original plan and have me buried alive, since he'd seen how I reacted to the prospect of that.
"It was a surprise when they dumped me back in the Black Well. Probably the amir needed time to decide the most effective way of finishing me off. Ultimately they decided on a public execution." There was a long lapse before Ian added the final, anguished sentence. "Which is how a couple of months later Pyotr Andreyovich had the privilege of dying for my sins."