Student Noycannir kicked her prisoner again, at the point of his jaw this time. Joslire recognized that maneuver from the index-Level tapes as well. On the index tape, the Student Inquisitor had indeed kicked a prisoner while he was down, and hard enough to bring blood to the victim’s cheek.
Joslire knew that Tutor Chonis had temporarily forgotten about Noycannir, absorbed in watching Koscuisko. He’d been absorbed in watching Koscuisko, too, but he had a better excuse — not that he was going to hint that to Tutor Chonis, who took one look at the companion screen and smashed his fist against the emergency-call toggle.
“Administrative orders. All exercises to cease.”
The signal went to both theaters, and Joslire watched his officer lift his head toward the talk-alert with a look of confused apprehension on his face.
“This is Tutor Chonis. I repeat. Administrative orders, all exercises to cease. Students will disengage at once.” Toggling off-braid, Tutor Chonis pushed himself angrily out of his chair, swearing at himself and moving so quickly that he was halfway to the door before he’d finished his directions.
“Son of a cuckoo, useless excuse for a . . . Hanbor, come with me. Curran, shut down the monitors before you go and collect Koscuisko. Perdition take . . . ”
There was a world of difference between kicking a prisoner’s face and kicking him at the back of his head or up from underneath the point of his jaw. From the unnatural angle of the prisoner-surrogate’s head as he lay, Student Noycannir’s blow had compromised Idarec’s spine — perhaps fatally so.
Alone in Observation, now, Joslire closed down the monitors and secured the tapes. Koscuisko would be expecting him.
Koscuisko was all he had to worry about.
###
Student Noycannir crouched down beside the prisoner where he lay, desperate to discover whether he was only trying to put a joke on her by feigned unconsciousness. The bastard couldn’t be unconscious. She hadn’t hit him that hard, didn’t she know as well as anyone how hard you really had to hit before some thickheaded gravel-stamper finally lay down to be quiet?
The prisoner didn’t move.
She could have shrieked in frustrated rage, but strangled the curses in her throat so fiercely she was sure only she had even heard the sound. He couldn’t do this to her. He was pretending. She could deal with pretense, she knew how. Snatching the man’s limp arm out to the farthest extent of its length on the floor she hammered the elbow joint with the heavy cudgel, once, two times, three times. Pain never failed to get a man’s attention, it had never failed her before, but the prisoner did not respond. She could hit again, but she couldn’t be sure that she was clear to damage the joint more severely at this Level. She didn’t dare. If she should splinter bone, they would hold it against her as proof of her lack of fitness for the Writ.
Mergau stood up.
A man who lay silent and unmoving through such blows as she had given his elbow was not pretending.
If he was unconscious, how could she gain confession? Sudden mindless fury swamped her heart and mind and soul. This was unfair. They had no right. They had given her a weakling for a prisoner, a man so fragile he escaped to silence before he had so much as said his name. They would blame her for it. It wasn’t her fault, it was their fault, their fault and his fault, the fault of the prisoner who mocked her where he lay in unresponsive stillness.
Be damned to all of them, she decided. All of them be damned. Their tricks. Their superiority.
“Get up.” Snarling at the prisoner, Mergau did not bother trying to disguise her disgust, her contempt. Let them make of it what they liked. “I said get up, you pathetic coward.” He didn’t move, and by now she knew he wasn’t going to. It made kicking him all the more satisfying, a good solid blow striking sharp against his ribs. When he woke up again, he would know she had meant to punish him. “Don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re trying to pull.”
She kicked again, and at his head this time, to see if she could take a few of his teeth for souvenirs. She was beginning to feel better. As long as he was unconscious anyway, why shouldn’t she?
There was a sharp click at the talk-alert, and suddenly Mergau wondered if she had overstepped somehow.
“All exercises to cease. Students will disengage at once.”
Tutor Chonis’s voice, and sounding very intent. What, there was a problem?
What had Koscuisko done?
Was it her imagination or were the prisoner’s lips turning blue?
A mistake. She had made a mistake. Terror seized her bowels and bones, but Mergau dampened it sternly. She’d made a mistake, but the last thing she could afford to do was show it. Show weakness and there would be no mercy.
She knew what to do when she’d been caught doing something wrong. Her ability to project innocent nonchalance was part of her survival. Turning her back on the prisoner on the floor, Mergau set the truncheon back with the other instruments on the table, arranging them neatly. She would not have long to wait, she was sure.
Tutor Chonis’s signal was almost welcome.
“Student Noycannir. You will return to quarters, instruction to be forthcoming.” He was excited about something, but she — quite naturally — could have no idea what it was. Mergau schooled her face to a bland mask of mild, concerned confusion to overlay the turmoil in her heart. It didn’t have to fool anybody. All it had to do was get her safely out of here.
Mergau bowed to her Tutor and left the theater, standing aside to let the medical team through as she passed.
She was glad to go to quarters.
She had to understand what had gone wrong.
But more than that, she had to decide how she was going to cover up for it.
###
“Administrative orders. All exercises to cease.”
The sudden announcement startled Andrej. He lost his focus on the lash, stumbling clumsily to one side as he missed his prisoner entirely.
“This is Tutor Chonis. I repeat, administrative orders, all exercises to cease. Students will disengage at once.”
Staring at the wall-monitor, he tried to understand Tutor Chonis. Disengage? How could they ask him to disengage when that meant he would have to leave his prisoner? Had he made an error in procedure? They’d been given instructions about command disengage, true. Under emergency circumstances the Tutor would call the exercise. No hints about what emergency it might be were forthcoming from the now silent wall-monitor; and after a moment, Andrej shook himself out of his paralysis of arrested movement.
He didn’t want to disengage.
If he didn’t disengage at the Tutor’s instruction, they might make him wait before they gave him another prisoner, though. It wasn’t worth the risk, regardless of how little he liked the idea.
What had Lussman been trying to say about risk?
“Very well, friend Rab.” Folding the whip back upon itself, Andrej handed it off to one of the Security. The lash was heavy and dark with the prisoner’s suffering; it had stained his hands with blood. He couldn’t afford to stop and think about it. He wanted more. It would only make it more difficult for him to accept postponement of his pleasure. “Since I have failed to make myself understood thus far, perhaps we could revisit these issues in the morning.” According to the Prisoner’s Brief, the prisoner’s offense was severe enough to warrant sequential invocation of the Fifth Level if he couldn’t gain confession in the Fourth. He and Noycannir had been warned about such a possibility.
Was this an administrative trick of some sort?
Or had something gone wrong with Noycannir’s exercise?
“Take him down, yes. No. One moment . . . ”
The prisoner seemed scarcely conscious. Security would handle him roughly, if efficiently; and Andrej did not like the idea, somehow. He moved to stand in front of Lussman where he was bound, nodding his signal to Sorlie Curran. “If you will. Now.”
Lussman cried out when his wrists were loosed from the anchor-bolt in the c
eiling, falling heavily forward to his knees. Andrej braced himself against Lussman’s weight with one hand at Lussman’s side beneath the uninjured arm, catching the prisoner at the side of his neck with his other hand in an embrace which did the trick, howsoever awkwardly. Lussman did not fall over, and Lussman did not pass out, and Andrej stood and steadied the man for a moment so that he could regain his balance. He wasn’t sure why he cared one way or the other. All Andrej could do was to hold Rab Lussman for now and hope to sort out his precise feelings about it all later.
“With respect, the officer need not concern himself, there is a requirement to return the prisoner to holding — ”
“A moment,” Andrej insisted, his thumb tucked across the base of the Nurail’s throat. Joslire had arrived; Security would be wondering why he didn’t leave. He’d been anxious enough to leave after the other exercises. “Give us a moment, he will return to himself, and he will be able to walk with you.”
The pulse beneath his thumb was steadying and strengthening, but Security’s evident confusion made Andrej apprehensive. They would probably be within their rights to insist on dragging Lussman off immediately. Andrej didn’t want that. He wanted Lussman to find his center before they thought to suggest such a thing. If he moved his other hand to the base of the man’s neck, he could perhaps find the right nerve bundle as it entered the spine.
There was an uneasiness and a shuffling of feet in the room as Lussman stiffened suddenly. What, did they think that he was hurting the man, still? The exercise had been called. Andrej wasn’t sure he even wanted to hurt Lussman now.
What had happened to him, that had fired him body and soul with pleasure in response to Lussman’s pain?
It was the right nerve bundle, that was a plus; Lussman shook his head several times — as if to drain his ears of water — and started to rise clumsily to his feet.
“There, now. That is better.” He continued to apply a steady pressure against the Nurail’s spine as Lussman stood, dampening the noxious messages of pain from Lussman’s shoulder. “If you care to go slowly with him, he can walk. Be careful with the shoulder, gentlemen, we are done for the moment.”
High time he was out of here, because he had probably reached the limits of the interference he would be permitted. Since he was to be able to do nothing with or for Rab Lussman, it was best for his own peace of mind if he were to get away before something unfortunate should happen. “Thank you for your effort, gentlemen, and I will see you all in the morning, I suppose. Joslire, let’s go.”
All that he could do for his prisoner, he had done.
And now there was nothing left for him but to consider what he had done to Lussman, as well.
He left the exercise theater like a man walking in his sleep, responding to Joslire’s polite directions without thinking about where Joslire was taking him. What had he done? How could he have enjoyed it? And, oh, how long would he be forced to wait until he could do it all again?
Quarters. That was where Joslire was taking him. That was a surprise. Swallowing hard, Andrej frowned at the time-mark on the screen of his study-set. Surely it was some eights yet to third-meal?
“What is this, Joslire, we are not to practice today? Not that I object.” The idea of going to exercise was suddenly more attractive than it had ever been before. Andrej felt that he could profit from mindless and repetitive activity, something to distract his body and numb his mind with purely physical demands — something uncomplicated. Unambiguous. Safe.
“The Administration excuses the officer at the end of the practical exercises, now that the Preliminary Levels have been passed. If the officer please.”
Joslire stood well away from him, eyes carefully lowered. Joslire watched his exercises — Joslire and Tutor Chonis alike. His shameful behavior was on Record.
Gradually the red haze of his passionate pleasure in Lussman’s pain began to clear from the foreground of Andrej’s mind to reveal the gaping chasm of horror that lay beneath it.
“Let me have a look at the next Level, then.”
If he looked into the fathomless pit of his own heart, he would lose his balance and fall in. Andrej shuddered at the thought. He had to find something to hang on to, something he could use to steady himself. Review was unnecessary; they’d studied the protocol before this. But it would excuse his staring at the screen. He could take his supper early, go shut himself behind the thin barrier between his sleep-rack and Joslire before time. He was strangely exhausted, but the discomfort of his body would not permit him to wash and change into his sleep-shirt. Not just yet. Bad enough that they had watched him in exercise. That the residual signs of his flagging desire should betray him so obviously to Joslire was more than Andrej could accept.
It would take Joslire a moment to call up the correct packages. Andrej went into the washroom to clean the blood from his hands, struggling to understand. He couldn’t begin to feel clean until he had changed his uniform. Catching a glimpse of his face in the reflector, Andrej stared at himself for a long measure, confused for a long moment about whose face that was, staring back at him with so much shock and distress. He would never be able to wash the stain of this away, no matter how he tried. Rab Lussman’s blood had soaked clear through his flesh into his soul, and he was filthy with it. A prisoner, and he had tortured the man, and before the Canopy he had had such pleasure in it . . .
This was different in kind as well as in degree from the previous Levels. His challenge and his shame had been to simply do the distasteful thing. And today he had done the distasteful thing, and he had not minded it. He had accepted it, embraced it, submitted himself to it, and taken pleasure from pain as his reward. The message of his body was unequivocal. There was no mistaking the source of his newfound ability to strike a helpless prisoner, or the effect that it had. What had happened to him?
What door had he opened to what ancestral demon, in his desperation to find his way through this place?
Joslire had gone away from the study-set, probably seeing to some domestic chore. Andrej remembered at last to rinse his hands and shut the water-stream off. The instruction tape was loaded on-screen; Andrej found his way to his place and sat himself down heavily. The Fifth Level of the Question. A paradigmatic exercise, a prisoner naked and bloodied. A vise, a cudgel, the restraints at the wall and the pulley in the floor to stretch a man’s joints from one another. The ragged sound of the Nurail’s panting breath still sounded in Andrej’s ear; he shivered with the memory, and knew that the source of the shudder was not horror or pity but something unacceptable. Something unthinkable, shameful, sinful.
Something powerful and passionate, basic and fundamental to his being, more intense than any explicitly sexual experiences had ever been . . .
Half-unwilling and half-greedy for renewed pleasure, Andrej watched the tape scroll forward. The image in the cube-viewer was as it had always been to him — horrible and pitiful. As long as he did not indulge in imagining trying these pleasures for himself — on the chained body of Rab Lussman, and tomorrow, a scant few hours from now — he felt no differently about those images than he had when he’d first seen them. It was an abomination under the Canopy of Heaven to do such things to sentient creatures, whether or not the Church agreed with him. Therefore, necessarily, he was an abomination, regardless of any pretensions he had cherished in his life to decency or morality. Andrej’s moral conviction was unchanged by the epiphany he had experienced, as profound and absolute as anything in his life.
The rule of Law was no excuse for torture.
He could not do these things.
How could he hope to live with the shame, now that he knew he had an appetite for pain?
He would make a stand. He would refuse the duty; he would take vows and go to cloister. The Church would deny him if his father turned his back, but the Church would have to take him in if he repudiated his name and elected the Malcontent. The Church could not deny a man who chose to elect the Malcontent. He could forget that he had
ever been Koscuisko, and take sanctuary. Then at least no one would ask him to strike a prisoner, or tempt him with the seductive promise of the sound of agony.
Nor would he have a chance to help, to heal; no chance at all to try to right the balance and atone for what he was to do. And prisoners would still suffer torture, and they would still die, whether or not he was there to delight in their anguish. So what good would it do him to seek sanctuary, when he took the longer view? He would be able to escape self-censure for crimes committed against feeling creatures, whether or not Church and Bench and Fleet pretended to believe that Judicial torture was no crime.
But he could never put himself behind him. Nothing he could do would ever change what had passed with him today. He had sucked the pain from Lussman’s captive body and feasted greedily upon a man’s torment. All that he could gain from running away, now that he knew this about himself, would be the thinnest veneer of self-respect; and in return, he would have to forswear forever any potential chance he might have in the future to do a bit of good within the work to which he was to be condemned.
He could never hope to run away from himself.
Hadn’t the Holy Mother known from the beginning what she had done, when she had shaped him?
What was he to make of himself?
If he closed his eyes and summoned up the image of the Nurail, his prisoner, with an elbow locked in the vise or a hand bloodied with the fingernails split . . .
Andrej searched the confused landscape of his inner state with anxious care. He had to know. He could not afford to deceive himself, to conceal his own truth from himself. Forcing himself to dwell on details both remembered and imagined, he sought to grasp what it might be within him that had felt so differently about it all during the exercise; and he took a measure of bleak comfort from the fact that it did not delight him now to muse on what had beguiled him so keenly less than two measures gone.
There was no question that he had taken intense pleasure in the work.
An Exchange of Hostages Page 12