The Princess Bride

The Princess Bride Page 91

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…

Prince Humperdinck simply had no time. There seemed to be not one decision in all of Florin that one way or another didn’t eventually come heavily to rest upon his shoulders. Not only was he getting married, his country was having its five hundredth anniversary. Not only was he noodling around in his mind the best ways to get a war going, he also had to constantly have affection shining from his eyes. Every detail had to be met, and met correctly.

His father was just no help at all, refusing either to expire or stop mumbling (you thought his father was dead but that was in the fake-out, don’t forget—Morgenstern was just edging into the nightmare sequence, so don’t be confused) and start making sense. Queen Bella simply hovered around him, translating here and there, and it was with a shock that Prince Humperdinck realized, just twelve days before his wedding day, that he had neglected to set in motion the crucial Guilder section of his plan, so he called Yellin to the castle late one night.

Yellin was Chief of All Enforcement in Florin City, a job he had inherited from his father. (The albino keeper at the Zoo was Yellin’s first cousin, and together they formed the only pair of nonnobles the Prince could come close to trusting.)

“Your Highness,” Yellin said. He was small, but crafty, with darting eyes and slippery hands.

Prince Humperdinck came out from behind his desk. He moved close to Yellin and looked carefully around before saying, softly, “I have heard, from unimpeachable sources, that many men of Guilder have, of late, begun to infiltrate our Thieves Quarter. They are disguised as Florinese, and I am worried.”

“I have heard nothing of such a thing,” Yellin said.

“A prince has spies everywhere.”

“I understand,” said Yellin. “And you think, since the evidence points that they tried to kidnap your fiancée once, such a thing might happen again?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“I’ll close off the Thieves Quarter then,” Yellin said. “No one will enter and no one will leave.”

“Not good enough,” said the Prince. “I want the Thieves Quarter emptied and every villain jailed until I am safely on my honeymoon.” Yellin did not nod quickly enough, so the Prince said, “State your problem.”

“My men are not always too happy at the thought of entering the Thieves Quarter. Many of the thieves resist change.”

“Root them out. Form a brute squad. But get it done.”

“It takes at least a week to get a decent brute squad going,” Yellin said. “But that is time enough.” He bowed, and started to leave.

And that was when the scream began.

Yellin had heard many things in his life, but nothing quite so eerie as this: he was a brave man, but this sound frightened him. It was not human, but he could not guess the throat of the beast it came from. (It was actually a wild dog, on the first level of the Zoo, but no wild dog had ever shrieked like that before. But then, no wild dog had ever been put in the Machine.)

The sound grew in anguish, and it filled the night sky as it spread across the castle grounds, over the walls, even into the Great Square beyond.

It would not stop. It simply hung now below the sky, an audible reminder of the existence of agony. In the Great Square, half a dozen children screamed back at the night, trying to blot out the sound. Some wept, some only ran for home.