CHAPTER TWO
A quarter of an hour later – after he and Elsdon had debated engineering problems with the same gravity that Layle usually reserved for determining how the layout of the Inner Dungeon should be altered for the prisoners’ comfort – Elsdon was standing on two stools. This was something of an achievement, given the lowness of the bedroom ceiling. Elsdon was only able to manage it by leaning forward, keeping his balance by placing his hands behind him onto the man-high head of the bed, which had been pulled out from the wall to provide this support. At Layle’s suggestion, Elsdon had folded one of his hands over the other.
The stools were far enough apart to allow room under Elsdon’s groin for a man. Layle, examining their spacing critically, said, “Try moving your legs further apart.”
Elsdon did so, saying, “Layle, I hope you don’t have in mind anything involving a feather, because I’m on the point of dying of laughter.”
Layle smiled up at him, saying, “The man who trained me said that intricate positions always look peculiar to the uneducated eye. He said that this applied to both sex and torture.”
“I’m not going to ask what the connection is here.” Elsdon peered down toward the floor, his hair falling into his eyes. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Just what you’re doing. Are you getting cramped?”
“Not at all. You look as though you’re in a less comfortable position.”
“No,” Layle said softly from where he knelt between the stools, his back upright. “I’m not in this position in the dreaming.”
There was no reply. He turned his attention to the thighs that were parted as though the space between them was a mountain-peak. The golden hair on them shone bright against the ivory skin; he reached out and trailed his finger softly over the hair. From above came a moan that caused his heart to beat faster. He trickled his fingers lightly through the hair, taking care not to tickle, though the moans assured him that there was little danger of laughter now. Reaching higher, he touched the front of the thighs, where the flesh remained mangled from the scrape of the claw.
The moans turned into a weak scream. He stepped back, savoring the sight before him. His master had always said that the positions he found for his prisoners were more creative than that of a high-class courtesan.
The position the youth was in was simple enough and would have been unlikely to cause stares from any of the other torturers who happened to wander in. He lingered on that thought a moment, wondering whether he should invite his master to join him in his pleasure, but he decided that he didn’t have time enough for that. This was the third day of torture, and the prisoner was growing weak.
The confession – ostensibly the real reason for this searching – had been obtained a short time before, when he had pulled the youth up by the pulley. He hadn’t even needed to add weights to the feet or to drop the prisoner with a jerk, so the prisoner’s arm sockets remained intact. At least, he thought they did; taking a second look at where the youth hung, with his arms bound behind his back to the pulley, Layle had some doubts. He hoped that the youth’s body was still whole. Despite what he had said to the prisoner earlier, he actually disliked mutilated bodies, and he had only cut into the youth’s delicate flesh with the claw because his master had ordered him to. He disliked a great many things his master had him do. Some day he would leave this place and . . .
He shook his head, aware that he was perilously close again to his memories, and returned his attention to the prisoner. Though there were no weights upon the prisoner’s feet, each leg had been bound separately and pulled apart so that there was space enough for Layle to walk beneath the legs, provided he ducked his head a bit. It was an interesting position: arms parallel to the ground, torso dangling at an angle from the arms, the legs pulled into a V shape . . .
Above him, he could hear that the youth had returned to his hoarse crying. “Please,” the prisoner whispered. “Oh please, oh please, oh please. Letmedieletmedieletmedie—”
“Certainly not,” said Layle coolly. “I wouldn’t think of releasing you from your pain until I’d given you your pleasure, slattern.” He reached up and tore the last of the youth’s clothes from his body.
What he saw pleased him. The youth was already hard – severe pain could sometimes do that. He trailed his hand over the shaft and heard the youth give a weak whimper. The prisoner had been fearing this moment for three days, but now that it had finally occurred, he barely had enough consciousness left to appreciate it.
That was something of a disappointment. Layle frowned, then decided to take the matter one step at a time. He mustn’t put this position to waste. He ducked his head and began nibbling his way slowly under and over and around the delectable meal before him.
The whimpers above were growing stronger; his own desire waxed enough that he took hold of himself, then quickly released himself. Patience, he thought. If he went too swiftly, he’d have nothing left over for the next stage. He must hold himself back.
The prisoner exerted no such control over himself. He was beginning to thrash in the air now – quite an achievement, given his position. Layle hoped the youth wouldn’t move in such a way that those shoulders were dislocated after all. He took hold of the mauled thighs, causing the youth to scream. At the moment of his screaming, his shaft began to pulse in Layle’s mouth. Only brothel-boys allowed themselves to become the receptacles for men’s seed; Layle stepped back hastily, using his hand to bring matters to completion.
He looked up. The prisoner was hanging limp as a corpse. This was unfortunate; the image might be more than metaphorical. He gave the youth’s leg a tug and was gratified to hear a groan. Good. The next thing to do was to bring the prisoner down from where he was.
Layle did so slowly, first untying the legs, then gently moving the pulley wheel until the prisoner’s feet touched the floor. The youth was still limp; he seemed not to notice that he was on the ground again. Layle frowned once more; he had no interest in raping an unconscious body. He decided that a change of tactics was in order.
He moved forward and wrapped one arm around the youth’s waist while his free hand released the wrists from the pulley. As the constrained arms sprang free, the youth gave a loud groan and began to sob again.
“Shhh.” Layle carefully helped the youth down onto the cold floor; the youth ended up on his stomach, his arms too limp to move. He was still crying. Layle sat down beside him and stroked his hair. “Shh, my dear, it’s all right. It’s all over now.”
“Don’t hurt me,” the youth sobbed.
It was touching. Despite himself, Layle found himself reaching down to kiss the prisoner’s hair. The hair was filthy, of course. Layle let his hand trail over the skin that was clotted with dried sweat and blood as he said in a soothing voice, “I told you, it’s all over. I have your confession. You won’t be tortured any more.”
The youth had kept his eyelids clamped shut during this exchange. Now he raised them, and Layle could see that his eyes were awash with tears. “Are you going to kill me?” he whispered.
There was fear in his voice. Layle had seen this many times before. One moment a prisoner would be screaming for death; the next moment the prisoner would see death coming and would start screaming for life.
“Of course not,” Layle said softly, smiling at the youth. “I’m a torturer, not an executioner. And in any case . . .” He let his hands trail over the body again. “I’m tempted to pretend I found that you were innocent. You’re far too beautiful to face the executioner.”
The youth lay motionless. Tears still spilled out of his eyes, but his gaze was filled with uncertainty. Finally he whispered, “I am innocent. I only said I was guilty so that you would stop the torture.”
“Yes, I can see that now.” He was able to make his voice sound convincing. For all he knew, the youth might be telling the truth. Whether a prisoner was guilty or innocent was of no importance to Vovim’s King; the King wanted confessions, and that was what the Vovimian torturers su
pplied him with. It had always stung at Layle’s sense of professionalism; he instinctively felt that he wasn’t doing his best work in this kingdom. He had heard rumors that matters were handled differently in Yclau . . .
He had to look away a moment to steady himself. When he looked back, the youth was still where he had been, lying on his stomach. His back was deeply gouged from the beatings Layle had given him, especially upon his backside. Layle felt himself grow painfully hard at the sight. He trailed his hand over one of the runnels in the flesh, saying, “Does this hurt?”
“No.” The youth’s lie was brave; he was screwing up his face in his effort not to cry out.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” The youth’s voice was choked.
“Tell me if I hurt you,” Layle said softly. “I just want to check your injuries.” He leaned over, as though to inspect the body, and began to bring his weight down upon the youth.
The youth screamed. Layle rolled off him immediately. He had not moved so fast since the day he had ordered a guard to take a prisoner up to level one on the machine, and the prisoner’s agonized scream had alerted him to the fact that something was seriously the matter with the rack – the prisoner was being torn apart as he watched.
On that occasion, Layle had raced as far as the wheel, wrenching it back down to free the prisoner from his torment. Now he moved a smaller space, rolling to the side of the bed.
He hardly dared move after that. He hardly dared breathe. Elsdon was as he had left him, on his stomach on the bed, shuddering like a prisoner who has just endured a hard whipping. After a minute more, during which Layle wondered whether the best thing he could do for the youth would be to borrow a guard’s dagger and slit his own throat, Layle finally asked in a low voice, “Shall I call the healer?”
Elsdon shook his head. Tears were beginning to streak down his face. “Hold me, please,” he said in a choked voice.
Carefully, delicately, Layle sat up and pulled Elsdon into his arms. The other man burrowed his face into Layle’s chest, his mouth moving in an instinctive kiss. Layle softly stroked the young Seeker, taking care not to stray near the deep gouges in his backside where Elsdon’s father had often beaten him.
Elsdon’s breath began to steady; the tears stopped dripping onto Layle’s chest. At least he could do that much for his love-mate, Layle thought, looking down at the youth. Like a torturer who comforts his victim after the torment.
The pain that accompanied that thought was so great that a groan escaped his throat. Elsdon lifted his head instantly. His gaze flicked over Layle’s face, and then he said in a shaky voice, “It’s not your fault.”
Of course those would be the first words he spoke. He’d probably spoken those words to his father. Layle turned his head away, wishing that his face-cloth was lowered to hide his expression from the Seeker he held.
Elsdon turned round in his arms, taking hold of his shoulders. “Layle, stop! I tell you, it’s not your fault!”
“Then whose is it?” So great was his self-loathing now that it transformed itself into anger. “Did a rat run over your back? Or did your father wander in? Or perhaps you made the mistake of going to bed with a foreign torturer!”
Elsdon stared at him blankly; then comprehension entered his eyes. “Oh,” he said softly, reaching his hand out to brush back the hair from Layle’s forehead. “That’s what this is about? Layle, whatever you did in your youth is over. You were not at fault for that either.”
“Not at fault.” The words were bitter in his mouth.
“Of course not. You followed the orders you were given at whichever of our queendom’s lesser prison you worked at – Blackstone Prison, wasn’t it called? I don’t suppose you even knew that the Code of Seeking existed. In that respect, you might just as well have been one of those barbarian Vovimian torturers. But for love of the Code, Layle, it wasn’t that bad. You were following the civilized laws of Yclau, not tearing prisoners apart without mercy like the Vovimians do. Whatever mistakes you made at your old position, you weren’t a brute. And for the past seventeen years you’ve worked in a dungeon where every Seeker is willing to suffer for the sake of the prisoners. The past is dead.” He leaned forward and kissed Layle.
For a guilty prisoner to be able to forgive himself, the fifth revision of the Code of Seeking read, he must first confess to his guilt. Layle had written those words himself. Time after time he had seen how confession of a crime refreshed the spirit of a prisoner and made it possible for him to face with strength and courage the consequences of his crime. It had happened to Elsdon; it would happen to Layle too if he confessed to Elsdon now.
But the price of that confession would be Elsdon’s pain. Perhaps it would have been possible to tell Elsdon before the first kiss, but in preparation for his training, Elsdon had read the books about Vovimian methods of torture. If Layle confessed, Elsdon would immediately realize what the High Seeker had been doing here – would know that Layle had been taking his past evils and attempting to recreate them in the present through Elsdon’s body and soul. And what would that do to Elsdon, who screamed in fear when Layle did nothing more than lie atop him?
Layle struggled to bring himself back under control. Elsdon was the one doing the comforting, which was absurd. He placed his hand over Elsdon’s and said quietly, “My dear, it was worth the effort, but we can see that this won’t work. The pain in you lies too deep; we must find other ways to heal it. And you must believe me when I say that simply having you in my arms is enough joy to last me till my death. I don’t need anything more.”
Elsdon gave a heavy sigh. “Layle, I don’t doubt that. You know the same is true for me. But you’re not listening to me – I’m telling you, you’re not at fault. What happened was an accident; it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been prepared.”
“For me to have touched you where your father beat you—”
“No, it wasn’t that. You asked me beforehand whether it hurt me when you touched me there – you asked me twice. It wasn’t my backside being touched that made me afraid. It was your weight. I’ve never had anyone atop me before; I didn’t know that it would feel so much like being bound.”
Layle let his hands stroke Elsdon’s arms for a long while before he looked up and said, “My error – my grievous error. When you lay down on your stomach afterwards and looked back at me, smiling, I thought you wanted—”
“It was what I wanted. It was in all my dreamings about us. But I hadn’t known the details of how it would work; I hadn’t been sure which angle you would be approaching me from.” He cocked his head, and a smile crept onto his face. “You said you had a dreaming for every position. Do you have a position for every dreaming?”
Layle drew in a vast lungful of air. “Elsdon, this is madness.”
“So you keep saying. Shall we be mad together?”
Layle did not smile. Elsdon sighed and placed his arms around Layle, saying, “I heard a story about a malfunctioning rack that a prisoner was rescued from only by the quick reflexes of the High Seeker. Is that true?”
“There have been several malfunctioning racks since my arrival at the Eternal Dungeon. They always seem to break when I come near them.”
“And this prisoner – he must have been frightened.”
“Very much so. I’d told him the truth, that Yclau racks were designed to increase tension and fear, but that the rack would not cause him permanent injury. And then I placed him on a rack that acted as though it had been made in Vovim.”
“But he wasn’t permanently injured.”
“No, thankfully.”
Elsdon cocked his head again. “So I suppose you gave up searching him then. After all, you’d badly frightened him and might have caused him grave harm. The obvious thing to do would have been to abandon the searching and let him sort out his problems by less dangerous methods.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Layle began to curse under his breath. Elsdon smiled.
The Eternal Dungeon: a Turn-of-the-Century Toughs omnibus Page 21