That night, they began to torture Westley. Count Rugen did the actual pain inducing; the Prince simply sat by, asking questions out loud, inwardly admiring the Count’s skill.
The Count really cared about pain. The whys behind the screams interested him fully as much as the anguish itself. And whereas the Prince spent his life in physically following the hunt, Count Rugen read and studied anything he could get his hands on dealing with the subject of Distress.
“All right now,” the Prince said to Westley, who lay in the great fifth-level cage; “before we begin, I want you to answer me this: have you any complaints about your treatment thus far?”
“None whatever,” Westley replied, and in truth he had none. Oh, he might have preferred being unchained a bit now and then, but if you were to be a captive, you couldn’t ask for more than he had been given. The albino’s medical ministrations had been precise, and his shoulder was fine again; the food the albino brought had always been hot and nourishing, the wine and brandy wonderfully warming against the dankness of the underground cage.
“You feel fit, then?” the Prince went on.
“I assume my legs are a little stiff from being chained, but other than that, yes.”
“Good. Then I promise you this as God himself is my witness: answer the next question and I will set you free this night. But you must answer it honestly, fully, withholding nothing. If you lie, I will know. And then I’ll loose the Count on you.”
“I have nothing to hide,” Westley said. “Ask away.”
“Who hired you to kidnap the Princess? It was someone from Guilder. We found fabric indicating as much on the Princess’s horse. Tell me that man’s name and you are free. Speak.”
“No one hired me,” Westley said. “I was working strictly freelance. And I didn’t kidnap her; I saved her from others who were doing that very thing.”
“You seem a reasonable fellow, and my Princess claims to have known you many years, so I will give you, on her account, one last and final chance: the name of the man in Guilder who hired you. Tell me or face torture.”
“No one hired me, I swear.”
The Count set fire to Westley’s hands. Nothing permanent or disabling; he just dipped Westley’s hands in oil and brought a candle close enough to set things bubbling. When Westley had screamed “NO ONE—NO ONE—NO ONE—ON MY LIFE!” a sufficient number of times, the Count dipped Westley’s hands in water, and he and the Prince left via the underground entrance, leaving the medication to the albino, who was always nearby during the torturing times, but never visible enough to be distracting.
“I feel quite invigorated,” the Count said as he and the Prince began to ascend the underground staircase. “It’s a perfect question. He was telling the truth, clearly; we both know that.”
The Prince nodded. The Count was privy to all his innermost plans for the revenge war.
“I’m fascinated to see what happens,” the Count went on. “Which pain will be least endurable? The physical, or the mental anguish of having freedom offered if the truth is told, then telling it and being thought a liar.”
“I think the physical,” said the Prince.
“I think you’re wrong,” said the Count.
Actually, they were both wrong; Westley suffered not at all throughout. His screaming was totally a performance to please them; he had been practicing his defenses for a month now, and he was more than ready. The minute the Count brought the candle close, Westley raised his eyes to the ceiling, dropped his eyelids over them, and in a state of deep and steady concentration, he took his brain away. Buttercup was what he thought of. Her autumn hair, her perfect skin, and he brought her very close beside him, and had her whisper in his ear throughout the burning: “I love you. I love you. I only left you in the Fire Swamp to test your love for me. Is it as great as mine for you? Can two such loves exist on one planet at one time? Is there that much room, beloved Westley? . . .”
The albino bandaged his fingers.
Westley lay still.
For the first time, the albino started things. Whispered: “You better tell them.”
From Westley, a shrug.
Whispered: “They never stop. Not once they start. Tell them what they want to know and have done with it.”
Shrug.
Whispered: “The Machine is nearly ready. They are testing it on animals now.”
Shrug.
Whispered: “It’s for your own good I tell you these things.”
“My own good? What good? They’re going to kill me anyway.”
From the albino: nod.
The Prince found Buttercup waiting unhappily outside his chamber doors.
“It’s my letter,” she began. “I cannot make it right.”
“Come in, come in,” the Prince said gently. “Maybe we can help you.” She sat down in the same chair as before. “All right, I’ll close my eyes and listen; read to me.”
“ ‘Westley, my passion, my sweet, my only, my own. Come back, come back. I shall kill myself otherwise. Yours in torment, Buttercup.’ “ She looked at Humperdinck. “Well? Do you think I’m throwing myself at him?”
“It does seem a bit forward,” the Prince admitted. “It doesn’t leave him a great deal of room to maneuver.”
“Will you help me to improve it, please?”
“I’ll do what I can, sweet lady, but first it might help if I knew just a bit about him. Is he really so wonderful, this Westley of yours?”
“Not so much wonderful as perfect,” she replied. “Kind of flawless. More or less magnificent. Without blemish. Rather on the ideal side.” She looked at the Prince. “Am I being helpful?”
“I think emotions are clouding your objectivity just a bit. Do you actually think that there is nothing the fellow can’t do?”
Buttercup thought for a while. “It’s not so much that there’s nothing he can’t do; it’s more that he can do it all better than anybody else can do it.”
The Prince chuckled and smiled. “In other words, for example, you mean if he wanted to hunt, he could outhunt, again for example, someone such as myself.”
“Oh, I would think if he wanted to, he could, quite easily, but he happens not to like hunting, at least to my knowledge, though maybe he does; I don’t know. I never knew he was so interested in mountain climbing but he scaled the Cliffs of Insanity under most adverse conditions, and everyone agrees that that is not the easiest thing in the world to accomplish.”
“Well, why don’t we just begin our letter with ‘Divine Westley,’ and appeal to his sense of modesty,” the Prince suggested.
Buttercup began to write, stopped. “Does ‘divine’ beginde ordi ?”
“Di, I believe, amazing creature,” the Prince replied, smiling gently as Buttercup commenced the letter. They composed it in four hours, and many many times she said, “I could never get through this without you” and the Prince was always most modest, asking little helpful personal questions about Westley as often as was possible without drawing attention to it, and in this way, well before dawn, she told him, smiling as she remembered, of Westley’s early fears of Spinning Ticks.
And that night, in the fifth-level cage, the Prince asked, as he was to always ask, “Tell me the name of the man in Guilder who hired you to kidnap the Princess and I promise you immediate freedom” and Westley replied, as he was always to reply, “No one, no one; I was alone” and the Count, who had spent the day getting the Spinners ready, placed them carefully on Westley’s skin and Westley closed his eyes and begged and pleaded and after an hour or so the Prince and Count left, the albino remaining behind with the chore of burning the Spinners and then pulling them free from Westley, lest they accidentally poison him, and on the way up the underground stairs to ground level the Prince said, just for conversation’s sake, “Much better, don’t you think?”
The Count, oddly, said nothing.
Which was vaguely irritating to Humperdinck because, to tell the absolute truth, torture was never all that high on his scale of passions, and he would just as soon have disposed of Westley right then.
If only Buttercup would admit that he, Humperdinck, was the better man.
But she would not! She simply would not! All she ever talked about was Westley. All she ever asked about was news of Westley. Days went by, weeks went by, party after party went by, and all Florin was moved by the spectacle of their great hunting Prince at last so clearly and wonderfully in love, but when they were alone, all she ever said was, “I wonder where could Westley be? What could be taking him so long? How can I live until he comes?”
Maddening. So each night, the Count’s discomforts, which made Westley writhe and twist, were really sort of all right. The Prince would manage an hour or so of spectating before he and the Count would leave, the Count still oddly silent. And down below, tending the wounds, the albino would whisper: “Tell them.Please . They will only add to your suffering.”
Westley could barely suppress his smile.
He had felt no pain, not once, none. He had closed his eyes and taken his brain away. That was the secret. If you could take your brain away from the present and send it to where it could contemplate skin like wintry cream; well, let them enjoy themselves.
His revenge time would come.
Westley was living now most of all for Buttercup. But there was no denying that there was one more thing he wanted too.
His time . . .