From time to time, Bernard still sobbed weakly, but there were no tears anymore. They seemed to have all dried up. Everything inside him seemed to have dried up so that it felt as if even his sweat had stopped flowing, even his blood had stopped flowing. Even his swarming panic had become a motionless thing, a weight of dread, squatting on his chest like a gargoyle.

Only his mind … Only his mind kept drifting, floating, losing itself within the fumy substance of that voice. Iago’s voice.

“Let me ask you something, Bernard. Have I ever hurt you? Before this, I mean, when my hand has been forced by circumstance? Have I ever done you personally any harm?”

“That man …” Bernard could barely move his lips to speak. “You … crucified that man.”

“Ach,” Iago said. He laughed pleasantly. “I’ve killed hundreds of people. Tortured lots of them. And laughed? Let me tell you, for comic relief? There is nothing quite so hilarious as other people’s suffering. When they’re bouncing around like pachinko balls, screaming, begging … Oh. Well. One day, you’ll see what I mean. No, no, no, that’s not what I’m asking. You have to listen, Bernard.”

It seemed now that he leaned in close, that he must have pressed his lips right to the sarcophagus lid. The cool voice seemed to pour down over Bernard’s face, queerly refreshing with its tincture of power and freedom. A memory came into the prisoner’s drifting mind of a lover who smoked cigarettes, who kissed him with a lungful of smoke, and released it into his mouth so that he breathed it in while they kissed. Sickening, exhilarating, beautiful.

“I’m just talking about you,” said that voice. “All right? Have I ever done anything personally harmful or painful to you? Or to Harper, for that matter? Or to any of your friends?”

Bernard lay silent under the weight of dread and stone and smoke and pain.

“Nothing of you or yours has been harmed by me in any way,” Iago continued casually. “Not a thing. And if that’s true—if that’s true, Bernard—then all your objections to me, all your fear of me, all your loathing even, is purely abstract, purely philosophical. You hate and fear me because you have an idea—an abstract idea—that the things I do are somehow wrong. That they’re nasty. That one is not supposed to do them. And who taught you that idea, Bernard? Who told you that they were wrong? Hm? I mean, I know that everyone says that it’s wrong to kill, wrong to cause pain, but who cares what everyone says? Everyone is frequently wrong, more frequently than not. No, I mean, who taught you, who tells you every day that what I do is wrong in the abstract?”