Gianna swept into Ben's guest chambers, shooed Jane from his breakfast, and congratulated him on the sizable dent he had carved into his pancakes, though she also fretted over his refusal to wash it down with the milk and juices.
She painted a determined smile on her face and informed him that the honor of his presence had been requested at an audience to be convened in his gracious hosts' Tasting Room. Ben asked Gianna if he had any choice, and the poor woman, taken aback, expressed incredulity that anyone would even think to decline the opportunity to commingle in comity with the munificent fathers of modern civilization.
"Won't you please consider taking a bath? I can run fresh water and bubbles."
"No."
"Then I beg you," she said, with an expansive gesture to the elegant ensembles she'd laid out, "please choose more appropriate garb."
"No."
Gianna huffed, "Very well. Come along. It will be my neck, you know."
To treat him to the full experience of wondrous Volterra, she led him on the scenic route, a grand arc of promenades that circumscribed the vast octagonal central courtyard, on a series of herringbone tiled pathways overshadowed by the towering flying buttresses. The marble lanes passed through glass atriums, some filled with butterflies, others stocked with fantastic aviaries of rare tropical birds, and between these fanciful crystal bestiaries stood the most grisly assemblage of topiary gardens, consisting of chained and immobilized humans mounted amid the sculpted evergreens, which grew among their live and fully aware forms, their branches and stems having spread organically below them, above them, and often even through them.
Some of these living sculptures could even speak, and the words that they uttered, as Ben and Gianna walked past, are best left unrepeated.
This cunning artistry failed to gain Ben Swan's appreciation, and he said so, pale with horror. Gianna conceded that Volterra rarely counted human boys among its honored guests, and she assailed the real and ongoing public relations challenges. Still, could he not appreciate the effort for its own sake?
"Just imagine the upkeep," she begged him. "Dozens of acolytes are kept at the gardens night and day, with their hedge clippers and shears. They have time for nothing else, the poor dears."
Ben replied by dry-heaving all over the herringbone tiles.
"Most of our visitors are duly impressed," she told him with determined obstinacy. "I'll tell you that for nothing."
Ben might have succumbed and dropped dead of his own distress, on the walk to the Tasting Room, had he not been rescued from oblivious Gianna by none other than Jane, who returned with Alec for support.
"Get thee hence, wench," said Alec. "Go clean the terrarium, before you make us cross."
Gianna knew better than to argue, when the twins were in a right state, and so she scurried away, muttering to herself, "I'm betrothed, and I'll be wielding the scourge around here, soon enough." Surely they heard, but they carried on with sanguine assurance that they had the run of the place and always would.
In response to Ben's astonishment, Alec sagely provided, "Rank has its privileges."
Ben followed Jane and Alec down a pretty lane decorated by jeweled snowflakes suspended on invisible tungsten wire, and they emerged into the central octagonal courtyard, from whence they crossed directly to the Tasting Room, which Gianna could have done all along.
"She knows the direct route, as well as any of us," Alec insisted, "but she takes guests the long way as though she owns the place."
"I still get lost," confided little Jane.
Not far from the giant carved double doors, Jane fixed her expression in puzzlement and said to Ben, "To err is human, I know. But you're a smart one. How were you ever taken in and hoodwinked by the evil white haired witch, Cythæra?"
This question confirmed Ben's suspicion, that his late June interview with Colleen had something to do with his kidnapping from the center of the meadow.
He told her, "I wasn't hoodwinked. Though she tried hard enough to use me."
"How?" Jane asked.
"She wished me to send a message to Edythe Cullen."
"Oh, her," Jane muttered, irritated by the incursion of Little Miss Perfect into their thread. "Did you convey Cythæra's message?"
"No. I refused."
Jane wore a look of astonishment, a child seated on the front row of a circus, awed by the clowns and dancing bears. "And the witch didn't burn your heart out from inside, as you stood?"
Ben blinked; he shuddered; he thought about it. He finally admitted, "I think that maybe she did."
Jane sighed and traded a sullen glance with her twin brother.
Alec shook his head and said, "Well, come along Benjamin Swan. You'll be treated much better here, we promise you."
Jane nodded avidly, and all three passed through the grandly ornate doors.
The twins ushered Ben into the most grisly room yet, another vast circular rotunda, and he fixed his gaze straight ahead, on the crucifix of giant segmented cubes that hung by enormous chain links over the expansive gilt dais. He focused on the cross to spare himself the view of the encircling columns, with their high plinths, each golden pedestal decorated by a living man or woman, gruesomely vivisected, many still possessed of operable vocal cords, which they used to no productive effect whatsoever. Vampires mingled and strolled by twos and threes all over the room, but Ben focused on just one. He broke into an unrestrained run across the floor of tiled birds and bellowed, as he converged, "You!"
Poor Jane and Alec were so shocked by their guest's unprovoked fury that they needed a moment to recover and coordinate, which they did, and they soon caught up, just as Victor, both satiated and sedate, arose out of his cast iron chair, hair afire, with bloodstains running from his chin all the way to his loins.
"Swan?" he asked. "Swan!"
"This explains everything," Ben hissed, utterly incensed, despite his peril.
Laughter and solitary applause came from the center of the high dais. Ben whirled and noticed the three ancient rulers of the world for the first time: a blond one that sneered from underneath dusty shrouds; another one petrified to his chair, ashen from top to bottom apart from his wide open, bloody mouth, and then the one that clapped, just as old as the others, cauled and veiled himself, yet paradoxically exuberant, as though every moment of this existence conferred fresh wonders.
"Nothing in life pleases me more than the amicable reunion of friends," Aro praised.
Jane and Alec glanced doubtfully between Benjamin Swan and confounded Victor.
Ben hissed, "He's no friend of mine. Is this where I die? Get on with it."
"Die? Die? Who on earth told you that, friend Swan? I shall have words with Gianna."
"We already have," Alec promised.
"Good, good. You're a blessing and a comfort, Alec. Friend Swan, pay this gentleman no mind. Our new friend Victor is just finishing dinner. I hope you had a pleasant trip. Tell me, did you enjoy the Tufted Quail?"
Ben frowned and mumbled, "Umm, I was given pancakes."
"With chocolate morsels," Jane provided. "They were luscious."
Aro blinked with momentary perplexity at Jane, tried for a moment to reconcile his straightforward query with his guest's decohered, non-linear reply, and gave up. With an airy wave of wriggling fingers he said, "One thing is plain: you're fraught with complexity. How singularly captivating."
Aro fixed his bleary red eyes on Ben, placed his hands in an attitude of prayer, and said, "Disregard your enmity toward Friend Victor. Verily, he is here to help. Now, then. Our dear Brother Marcus begs clarification on a simple, miniscule point, and Friend Victor promises us that you can set all to right."
Ben glanced back at the red haired monster with his half-empty goblet of blood, presently set upon the human table with its dripping candelabra. Dozens of cloaked specters milled about the room, and Ben as yet knew only Jane and Alec by name. He could not have picked out Brother Marcus in a lineup. Whoever he was, and whatever his questions were, Ben resolved to die screaming before he would give aid or support to Victor.
Ben slowly said, "Umm, I will certainly try."
"Splendid!" He looked at Ben and said, with a glance over his shoulder at the dais behind him, "We can't ask for more than that, can we, Brother Marcus?"
Ben thereby placed the face of Brother Marcus with the name, since the grateful host in question responded through his dry open mouth, "Uhhhhhhhh."
Aro briskly said, "Now, then. Friend Victor claims to have observed your dominatrice, comely Edythe Cullen, consorting with a particular person of dubious repute, a certain white haired witch– I'm positive this must ring bells–- and that in the service of Miss Cullen as her esteemed pet, you may have gleaned a name that has been uttered by your mistress in association with this person. And thus dear Brother Marcus merely begs to inquire, can you tell us if Cythæra is the name of the witch, or the home of the witch?"
"No," Ben replied, with confidence and authority, that there be no confusion on the matter. Truly he barely understood half of Aro's tangled question, but no committed him to nothing.
Aro blinked with pursed lips. "You can't tell us? Or you don't know?"
"I don't know. Everything from her mouth was a shameless lie."
"Are you lying now?"
"No."
"Would you tell me, if you were?"
"No."
Aro looked vexed indeed, and Ben felt quite certain that this was it. The incensed patriarch of the world's ruling family floated off the dais and drifted not to Ben, but to the redheaded menace who had tried to flatten Edythe's Volvo, along with themselves, by crashing a jet on them. The menace began to squirm. He did not like attention of any sort, not in this hideous place.
"Guest Victor, you assured us that Miss Cullen's human pet would resolve this quandary for poor, forsaken Brother Marcus."
Victor had been demoted, from friend to guest, a fact lost on no one, least of all the wretch who presently belched into his half-full goblet.
"I did not say he would. I said he could. He can, but he won't. His mouth is full of lies."
Caius yawned and chided, "Aro, are we to suffer this interminable bickering in our peaceful Tasting Room?"
Aro felt his hold on the proceedings unraveling, and he had learnt by trials innumerable that the lynchpin to effective crisis management was control. He drifted now to riveted Brother Marcus and whispered in his ear, "We may need to touch this clever, evasive boy. Just a little bit."
The eyes of Brother Marcus never moved, but the mouth said, "No, Aro. This is our honored guest. No touching."
Victor had heard enough; the gallons of blood he had consumed had made him lightheaded, and now he angrily bellowed at the hands that fed him, "I'll touch him, by God! He should have been dead months ago!"
Caius absently ordered the court, "Restrain him."
Not an instant transpired before the colossus, Felix, pinned Victor to the floor with a foot on his neck and a fist clenched around his vestigial gonads.
At a transept wall, acolytes cranked a great oak turnstile, to let out stout forty pound iron chain links, which had the effect of lowering the massive cuboid blocks of the giant granite crucifix to the floor.
Each cube was constructed of many smaller cuboidal building blocks shaped like squares and rectangles, cunningly hinged and clasped together by heavy iron bolts and latches. The acolytes released all the catches, which left all the granite shapes free to wander.
A half dozen brutes carried Victor overhead and on a count of three slammed him down onto the granite cross. Veterans of the Volturi Guard brought forth tapered porcelain white dowels, known among the devout as the Holy Boneshards, stout on one end and on the other sheared down to a point, each makeshift stake the length of a man's arm.
The veterans knelt over Victor's prone body, while the acolytes held him down, and proceeded to hammer the stake points through his crystal body and deep into the comparatively soft, grippy granite beneath him, pinning him to the crucifix like a dungbeetle to a linoleum mortarboard. Dozens of stakes were used, to immobilize every joint, plus his feet, his palms, his hips, his abdomen, his sternum. They drove an enormous tapered phallus straight through his heart, not that it mattered, and hammered another obelisk through his skull.
Finally a set of adamantium pins fixed his jaw, each one topped by an elegant cut ruby.
"No biting," a cruel warrior princess admonished, waving an index finger.
All the while, Felix strolled around the living sculpture with an immense white scimitar, with which he sliced each and every junction between pins, with a woosh and a practiced flourish terminating in an authoritative thok, until poor Victor could not so much as twitch, let alone flex, having been sheared into several dozen chunks.
Then the acolytes at the transept cranked the giant turnstile in reverse, and the chained blocks gradually arose off the floor. Their constituent cuboids and occasional shattered polyhedrons were loosely paired by short chains, so that as the immense cruciform tesseract arose into the air above the dais, the entire sculpture gradually assumed an exploded view, with individual shapes inches or even feet apart, yet the overall shape resembled that of a living man upon a three dimensional cross, chopped to pieces that were spread far and wide, like a suspended schematic.
Victor writhed in agony with every cut, and his constituent pieces could not come back together and reassemble, try as they might. He could not budge a single limb, for trusty Felix had been thorough with the slicing, and Victor had no working joints left to flex, not even fingers or toes.
With his jaw detached and pinned to a granite block of its own, and with an adamantium stake through his larynx, Victor couldn't even appeal. Then again, having never been accused, tried or sentenced, where would he ever have begun?
"Guest Victor is restrained, Brother Caius," intoned monstrous Felix.
From every slice of the scimitar, venom dripped sluggishly into heavy droplets that broke loose and splashed upon the floor. The vile poison would need to be cleaned up, but like the pile of cadavers at the end of the room, one took the notion, 'Why do a thing twice,' and Caius decided to let the mess collect.
Ben detested Victor and had wished him dead all summer, yet this was so much worse than death that now he pitied the poor lout.
Aro graciously said to Ben, "I do hope that guest Victor's unseemly intimidation no longer stifles the free exchange of questions and testimony. I expect that you now have liberty to speak?"
"No."
Aro sighed and clapped his hands, to the accompaniment of, "Demetri!"
The cloaked young man with his dark eyebrows, aquiline nose and umber cowlick appeared before them with fresh viscous blood on his chin. He had been tasting, no doubt, there being no better place for it.
Aro crossly said, "Now young man, there is nothing else for it. We simply must have this elusive Dollyface, Edythe Cullen."
"No!" Ben shrieked.
Aro ignored him; Jane and Alec shushed him, but Demetri concurred.
"Listen to the pet, Father. No dice. I searched the ends of the earth once today. I'm not doing it again." He put his foot down, perhaps with excessive force, on the tiled birds. In truth he had only strolled through the doors, into the octagonal courtyard, but Demetri saw space as Alice Cullen saw the future: everything all at once, a riotous jumble, and the Dollyface hadn't poked so much as an errant eyelash out of the chaos.
"But you must find her, good Demetri. Make a special effort this time."
"I have better things, to do!" he yelled, wiping blood off his chin.
"I've warned you about your tone. Please, Demetri? Do this thing for me, and I'll commission an aeroplane of your very own."
Dispassionate Demetri would not be moved by transparent adulation, but bribery worked like a charm.
"I will not fail you again, Father."
"Of course not; there's a good fellow."
Demetri rounded up his posse once again from the gallery, this time lacking Felix, who was absent. All the same, Demetri excluded poor Jane as before. They swept in a roiling scrum from the Tasting Room, out into the octagonal courtyard, to commence another pass in search of the obscure Miss Edythe.
Ben had been ranting and threatening all of them in a breathless tirade, which they had all ignored, since his opinions were of no consequence whatsoever to the greater trials and tribulations of the world and its sundry vicissitudes, of which he knew nothing.
Aro spoke over him, "Jane and Alec, my darling children, please return our honored guest to his terrarium."
"Yes, Father," they said in unison.
"And while you're at it, see what's keeping Felix. If he and Gianna are rutting like swine again, I wish to be apprised. The cad has gall. He knows quite well that the wench is spoken for."
"I will find Felix and remind him," Alec promised.
"I will return Benjamin," said Jane. "And I will see that he is served lunch."
Aro praised them for working as a team.
Alec swept from Aro's presence on a beeline to the settings of Gianna's most unseemly trysts, and Jane exhorted horrorstruck Benjamin to set his anguish aside and follow her to the kitchens and larders.
However, before any of them could withdraw from the room, Demetri and his thugs returned. Once more they came in seconds, empty-handed, but this time Demetri did not seem nearly so wrathful.
Caius groaned with the weight of the tedium.
Aro sourly speculated, "Am I to be disappointed twice in one day? Please don't tell me that you've failed to find the precocious telepath again."
"I don't have her, 'tis true, but there's no need and no point, Father. The Dollyface is coming here."
"No!" Ben screamed.
"Oh, how perfectly splendid," Aro gushed, "two reunions in one day."
Jane ushered Ben out of the Tasting Room, and she assured him, "You needn't fear that impetuous trollop, Ben. I will protect you from her."
__________________
Next: Chapter 52, PILGRIMAGE.