3 idiots - clip (2009)

Moreover, it is not good for one who invokes the forces of chaos to pay any attention whatsoever to reason....

"Where's Roiga?" Garch demanded of a sudden.

"Where she should be: making ready in your room."

"And Runch?"

"They called him to the gate a while ago. They've sighted the party bringing Buldebrime."

"Then I'll go down to the dungeons," Garch declared, and drained his goblet. "I must be first to learn what that traitor's done!"

There was routine in this mansion, as in the household of any great lord, and to outward appearance it was being maintained. At the corner of two echoing corridors the traveler in black saw proof of this. Thump-thump down the passages to the beat of drums came the nightly provisions for the company at dinner: pies stuffed with game so heavy two men staggered under the load, and the whole roasted haunches of oxen and sheep; then serving-girls with jugs of wine and beer, and butlers carrying fine white linen napkins on their arms, and boys with ewers and basins that the diners might wash their hands in scented water, and harpists, and flautists, and a dwarf. This last hobbled awkwardly in an overlong gown, designed to make him trip often on its hem for the amusement of the gathering.

One could not intelligently foresee there being much laughter in the banquet-hall tonight. The stones from which the building was erected shared the incipient convulsions of the landscape, and overmuch dust danced in the light of the torches.

Intermittently, from beneath the floor, issued screams.

Orderly, with professional niceness, the least spoken-of among Garch's retainers-Tradesman Humblenode, the torturer-had set out the varied equipment for his task: here whips and fetters, thumbscrews there; tongs, knives and nooses at another place; and in the center of all a brazier, at which a little dirty boy worked a blacksmith's bellows in a vain attempt to make the fuel burn as bright as was required. Even here under the courtyard, where the walls oozed continual damp, the pervasive obliterating light-absorption of the strange night made itself known.

At the mere sight of Humblenode's instruments Buldebrime had collapsed into sniveling, and it was long after the thegn's intrusion into his cell that they contrived to make him utter coherent words.

"No, I did not filch any such candle! I have no knowledge of enchantment!"

"Try him with a little red iron," Garch proposed, and Tradesman Humblenode set a suitable tool to the fire.

"Have pity, have pity!" Buldebrime cried. "I swear by Orgimos and Phorophos, by Aldegund and Patrapaz and Dencycon-!"

"I thought you had no knowledge of enchantment?" Garch murmured, and gestured for Humblenode's assistants to stretch the lamp-maker on a rack.

But in a short space from the application of the first iron he escaped into unconsciousness, and not all Humblenode's art sufficed to awake him.

"Is Roiga meantime testing the lamps and candles that were brought with him?" Garch remembered to ask, somewhat belatedly. He had given that instruction, and not checked that it was carried out-though Runch and Roiga, of all his retinue, had most to lose by neglecting his requirements.

"I come from her, sir," a nervous waiting-maid reported, who was trying not to look at the limp body of Buldebrime, or anything else present in the cell. "She assures me she has tested every one, and whatever you seek-uh-isn't there."

Garch drew himself up to his full height. "So the treacherous lamp-man has tricked me," he muttered. "Can he not be aroused by midnight?"

"By no art known to me," said Humblenode apologetically. It was the first time he had failed his master, and he braced himself as though to endure his own style of treatment in consequence.

But Garch swung on his heel and strode away.

He came upon his sister, together with Runch and attendants, at the head of the dank noisome stairway to the dungeons; his private means of vertical transport did not, for logical reasons, extend into this level.

"Have you succeeded?" Scail cried.

"Failed!"

"And midnight nears!" Runch muttered.

"What must be done, must be done," said Garch. "Prepare me for my watch alone."

"But surely tonight it was imperative to conjure Wolpec, and ask his earnest of your ultimate success!" Under her face-mantling layers of rouge and powder, the lady Scail blanched.

"What's to be done will be done now!" Garch snapped. "Like it or not! You have tomorrow's daylight to run away by, if that's your plan. For the moment, leave me - time is short."

Without so much as a brotherly embrace, let alone that other kind which had in the past lent certain crucial potency to his doings, he pushed by them both and was gone.