Len Vey’s mind returned not as a sudden awakening, but in jagged, disjointed shards of cold physical senses.
The first sensation was the draft—a freezing, wet current of air blowing across his damp forehead. It smelled of stale sewer slime, coal gas, and the bitter-salt bitterness of old lime mortar weeping from the brick joints. The second was the weight of his own left arm. It felt as though it had been placed across an iron anvil and struck repeatedly with a sixteen-pound blacksmith’s sledge. The arm was bound tight against his belly by his own leather belt. But every tiny breathing of his chest muscle pulled against the fractured radius. It sent sharp, white sparks of pain across the front of his brain.
Every beat of his heart sent a dull, throbbing blast through the marrow of his shattered radius and forearm bone, a deep, sickening shaking that made the teeth in his lower jaw ache with a sour, metal heat. The bone-skin nerves, bruised and torn by the dynamic shock of the iron rail, fired in ragged bursts that made his stomach convulse with dry nausea.
He was propped against the curved brick wall of the eight-sided chamber, his boots resting in two inches of cold, moving sewer runoff that lapped against his heels with a soft, oily slap.
