A small stone room, maybe twenty feet on a side. The air is thick and sweet with incense and under the sweetness something older, like meat left in a warm place.
An idol stands against the far wall and fills the space with its presence. It is eight feet of bronze colored metal, an immense woman, swollen and vast, and where her arms should be and where her body should end there are tentacles instead, dozens of them, coiling out of her and into her robes. She is dressed in fine traditional Chinese clothing, tailored and beautiful. At her feet lie little heaps of bone fragment and gray ash.
In the center of the floor a circle is cut into the stone and filled with gold, worked into characters that hurt the eye. Inside the circle sits a long box of glass and steel, the size and shape of a coffin, sealed. And inside the box lies a beautiful young woman, half stripped, pinned flat.
She cannot move. The box is divided along its length into seven narrow compartments by a set of heavy partitions shaped like yokes, and they close over her and under her at the neck, the chest, the waist, the hips, the thighs, the shins, so that each stretch of her is held down and walled off from the next. All that is free is her head, and even that only a few inches to either side.
Above the box, on a rail, rides a glass and wire cage. It can slide the whole length of the coffin, compartment to compartment. Inside it two river rats the size of small cats fight each other for room, scaly tailed, wet nosed, thin from hunger. The floor of the cage is a pane of clear glass, and through that glass the rats can see the bare skin of whatever compartment the cage happens to sit above, and they claw at the glass and cannot reach it, and the sound they make is terrible.
Her face lies beneath a thick plate of glass at the head of the box. She can turn her head a few inches and no more. She can see the cage on its rail above her, and the two starving things inside it.
A man sits beside the box in a plain chair he has occupied for hours. Neat, bespectacled, mild. A small table at his elbow holds a curved blade and a squat clay jar. He is in no hurry at all.
He lays one hand flat on the glass above her heart, gentle, and begins again.
"Let us start from the top. You are tired. So am I. The difference between us is that I have been tired for a very long time, and I have learned how to wait. You have not. You will."
She does not answer. He is patient..
"I am not angry with you. I want you to understand that. You have done nothing to me. You are standing between me and a single name, and that is all you are to me. Not a cruelty. A delay of sorts."
He rises and lays one hand on the cage above her, and rolls it a little way along its rail.
"They call this device the seven gates to heaven. Seven little rooms, and I may open any of them I please, in any order I please. That is the beauty of it. I am never in a hurry, and you can never know where I will go next."
He stops the cage over one of the middle compartments, above the bare skin of her feet. He reaches beneath the cage and slides out the pane of glass that is its floor. The rats drop the few inches down into the compartment, onto her. A hot flash of pain erupts in her feet, as she screams.
"He is not coming for you. Men like him never do. They love the work, and they mourn the woman, in that order, and they tell themselves the word for it is duty. You know I am right. I can see that you know it."
He slides the glass back into place after a moment and lifts the cage away, and the rats go with it, and she is left shaking under the lid. Her lips move, and it is not an answer she gives, it is something small she says to herself, over and over, the way a person in the dark holds onto a railing.
He sighs, the way a teacher sighs at a slow student, and rests his hand back on the cage.
"There are six rooms I have not yet shown you, and I promise you I will show you all of them before I let you rest. So. His name. The house that hides him. Give me those two small things, and I will take the cage away and end this, and the end will be a soft one. That is the last kindness anyone will offer you, and I am the one offering it. Think carefully. I have all the time there is."
She closes her eyes. She has already decided. He can see that she has decided, and it does not trouble him, because he has broken people who decided before, and he expects he will break this one too, one gate at a time.
He settles back into the chair to wait.