Mouche stopped in his tracks, his breath coming quickly, as though at some suddenly perceived threat. Questioner told Ornery to stay in place as she went forward to the place Mouche stood.
“What is it, boy?”
“The sound, Madam. Not the mechanical sound, but the screaming? Do you hear it?”
Until that moment, she had accepted the noise as mechanical, as of some unoiled bearing, some ungreased pivot shrieking across a metal plate. A moment’s concentration told her Mouche was right. The ratcheting was machinery, but the other sound could be from a living creature.
Questioner took the lead. They went forward and down another flight as she ran her sensor-tipped fingers along the wall. Here, and there, and then, yes, here, a door. She tried it in various ways until it sighed open, flooding the place they stood with increased noise and a wave of the familiar stench.
They stood in a cellar, stone floored, rock walled, softly lit, luxuriously carpeted, hung with great swaths of satin and velvet and centered by a warm fountain that steamed gently in the cool air. All around them stood the horrid legacy of some nightmare craftsman: ogre-racks of brass and steel, chimeric skeletons of gold and silver, squatted toad bones of hard iron, all wed to springs and cams and drive shafts, soft cushioned in places and fanged in others, all with red-lit eyes staring and metal arms spread wide.
The atrocious squealing and screaming came from the far side of the room, where Questioner went speedily.
If it had not been for her enhanced senses, she would not have recognized Marool. She was no longer a person but only a piece of living meat clamped into a machine that had hung her by her ankles as it thrust at her from above and either side. Questioner took one quick glance at the mechanical linkages, reached forward to an oscillating rod, and snapped it between powerful hands.
The ratcheting noise stopped with a shrill scraping noise. A frustrated mechanical whine built to a howl. The inhuman squealing went on. From behind her, Questioner heard Mouche’s gasp, Ornery’s muffled curse.
“Can’t you do something?” cried Mouche, distraught.
“I can,” Questioner agreed, though with peculiar reluctance. She reached upward, extruded a needle from her palm, and injected a strong opiate into the woman’s body.
In a few moments, the squealing subsided to a dull, grunted moan, endlessly repeated. The machine itself reached a point of no return; a linkage shattered; silence fell.
Questioner turned to find Mouche’s horrified eyes fixed upon her. Of the three of them, he was the only one unsurprised.
“You knew about this?” she asked him.
Mouche gulped, turned his ashen face aside, and told her about the picture in the hallway at House Genevois. This, he said, was the same machine.
“ ‘Mistress Mantelby at Her Pleasures,’ you say?”
He gulped. “That was how it was labeled, Most Honored One.”
“Call me Questioner. We will have no time for honorifics on this journey.” She turned back to the puzzle before her. The machine would not reverse. There was no real way to extricate the woman, for there were linked escapements preventing the machine from going back to its original configuration until it reached the end of the cycle or was unlocked. As if in answer to this need, Marool’s bloody arm flopped downward with the wrist at eye level before them, the key dangling.
Questioner broke the light chain that held it and unlocked the machine, which immediately disengaged from Marool’s body with an intimate, sucking sound, and dropped her to the floor, where she lay, still faintly moaning.
“Marool,” said Questioner, “listen to me. Who did this?”
“Dyre,” gasped Marool. “And Bane … for … ahhh … “
“It is dire and baneful, but who … “
“That’s their names, Ma’am,” interrupted Mouche. “I can tell who it was from the stink. It’s the Dutter boys, Bane and Dyre. That’s their names.”
“My sons,” Marool gasped, her face transfigured by rage. “My sons … for that damned Ahhh … shes.” She cried out, a long angry howl that went out of her interminably, dwindling into a final aching silence.