An Exchange of Hostages (12 page)

There was some scuffling involved in the stripping process, it seemed. But it was brief enough; and when it was done, the Security had returned his subject to the kneeling position, the only discernible differences being anger and frustration as well as contempt on the prisoner’s face and rather less clothing on the prisoner’s body. Andrej stood up and beckoned for more rhyti. He was beginning to get hungry. That was bad news; it meant he was sobering up.

“Let’s talk about the crozer-hinge.” If the prisoner didn’t want to make conversation he’d have to try and interest the Security. “Peculiar to the Nurail, usually confined to the male of the race; vital to the deployment of the famous crozer-lances. Specifically, a sort of a biological fulcrum, and a little more wicked than most.” Or, rather, an odd arrangement in the shoulder joint, beneath the shoulder cap. Andrej had found it a fascinating study in anatomy, but he’d not been able to convince the lone Nurail in his class at Mayon to let him do any hands-on exploration. Not surprising, really, because the crozer-hinge was vulnerable to dislocation from one specific angle, and joints when out of joint were almost always intensely painful — no matter what the class of hominid, no matter what the species of animal.

He was expected to hurt the Nurail. He was required to. lf he made a test of the crozer-hinge it would hurt the Nurail badly, and still not harm him to any permanent degree. If he could persuade the prisoner to cooperate in that way, it might smooth the course of the exercise for him. Andrej took half a glass of rhyti and handed the remainder back. It was handy having the extra Security present. It was supposed to be intimidating. Andrej stepped closer to the Nurail, choosing a shoulder.

“It’s one of those structural oddities that complicate our lives. You can put eight and eighty units of pressure against the joint from this angle, and it has no effect whatever.” At least the prisoner had the basic decency to begin to look worried. It was about time. Andrej didn’t care how drunk he seemed to be, he knew his anatomy.

“And on the other hand the wrong degree of torque from the back angle can tear the whole thing out of alignment.”

It needed two fingers at the inside joint, a little help from Security to rotate the elbow in the right direction. Or the wrong direction: The crozer-hinge popped out of the protective hollow of the shoulder, a large white lump of cartilage and bone deforming the skin of the upper arm like a very large and exquisitely unpleasant bird’s-egg bruise on one’s head.

The Nurail’s body jerked with the shock of the pain, his face gone white with it. Andrej stared at the Nurail, frowning. There was something peculiar about the unwilling contortion of the prisoner’s body, his muscles tensed in pain; what was going on? “Abstract knowledge is never wasted, my friend. One has so few opportunities to examine such a complex jointure. Feel free to speak up if you should find yourself with anything to say.”

No answer; only a stifled sort of gasping as the Nurail’s body convulsed with pain. Skeletal pain in itself was usually a referred phenomenon, but there was no brighter or more brilliant sort of pain than that associated with the joints, especially the smaller ones. Watching his prisoner writhe against the constraining hands of the Security, Andrej found himself keenly apprehensive of the pain the Nurail suffered from his shoulder. Suffering was noxious stimulus. He had spent long years in school on Mayon learning how best suffering could be relieved. But the prisoner did have to talk to him. Any of the instruments that the Administration expected he employ would cause more gross physical damage, so this was a conservative approach — although the prisoner could not be expected to appreciate that. And he could put it right in a moment, once the prisoner had surrendered up his name.

The prisoner wasn’t talking.

Andrej backed up to the chair that stood ready for him. Motioning for the Security to bring his prisoner forward to kneel close in front of him, Andrej sat down, fascinated by the struggle on the Nurail’s face. The choking sound of the Nurail’s breathing and the clear cold sweat of pain running down his cheeks was giving Andrej a very peculiar feeling in his stomach.

“Your name.”

He was supposed to be after information, not so interested in his prisoner’s evident agony. Andrej took the Nurail by the jaw to angle his face up to the bright lights in the ceiling. The Nurail’s lips had gone white, and there was a stuttering sound as though his teeth were chattering; but the jaw was clenched so tightly Andrej could not imagine any teeth chattering. Intense. Yes. That was what it was. Intense.

“Tell to me your name.”

No answer.

Andrej couldn’t have that.

What could this miserable Nurail mean by defying him in this manner?

He was tempted to make the prisoner suffer for his stubbornness.

Loosening his grip on the Nurail’s jaw, Andrej struggled with an unnamed temptation for a bitter eternity during the time it took to draw a breath and let it out once more. He felt his irritation as a physical sensation, a flush of humiliation and resentment that reddened his face and prickled his skin from head to toe.

“You, there, be so good as to take his head. How are you called, Mister . . . ?”

He wanted to be able to watch the Nurail’s face carefully for his reactions, and for that he would need help. The troop at the Nurail’s right bowed as best he could while holding to the shivering body of the prisoner.

“Curran, if the officer please — Sorlie Curran,” the Security troop added quickly, in evident response to the confusion Andrej felt. Curran? But yes. The Curran Detention Facility was where Joslire had been condemned to the Bond. Any bond-involuntary similarly processed through the Curran Detention Facility would bear the name.

Andrej was reluctant to call him Curran, though.

“Sorlie, then. Keep his face well lifted; I want to be able to look at him.” Oddly enough the flush of irritation he’d experienced had not faded away but settled on him somehow, making his extremities tingle not unpleasantly. His hands. His lips. His . . .

The Nurail’s eyes were tightly shut, his body trembling. Andrej reached out to touch the taut skin across the displaced hinge, delicately. The instant his fingertips made contact, though, the prisoner cried out closemouthed with a high keening note that seemed to find a sympathetic echo of some sort in Andrej’s belly. Or perhaps not his belly, perhaps it was his fish that was responding to that cry, thickening with involuntary interest . . .

Oh, what was it, what was happening to him?

He wanted more.

Laying his hand over the Nurail’s shoulder with deliberate pressure, Andrej cupped the deformation of the hinge beneath his palm. The Nurail’s whimpers of reluctant pain felt like the caress of a lover’s hand to Andrej, arousing him with lust for more of the same music.

He moved his fingers delicately, warming his palm on the heat of the skin, testing the boundaries of that heat with a mild disinterested pressure of his hand.

It almost seemed too soon before the Nurail found words and spoke at last.

“My — name — is — Rab. Luss — man.” Rabirt Lussman, yes. Meant something like Rab-the-small-herbivore-snarer, if Andrej remembered anything of Ingles Chapnier’s dialect aright. “ — I — am — accused — of — ”

Almost abstractedly, almost dispassionately, Andrej stroked the Nurail’s shoulder as he waited for the man to finish his statement, massaging the inflamed skin over the joint between his thumb and forefinger.

“ . . . — of — will. Of. Willful. Destruc. Tion. Jurisdict — ion prop. Erty. Pl. Pl. Please.”

Then in a sickening instant of insight Andrej realized what was happening to his body.

Quite suddenly Andrej understood that the Nurail’s suffering had aroused him; and the uncertain sensation in his belly twisted into a spasm of ferocious nausea. Spurning his prisoner’s body to one side with a savage gesture of rejection, Andrej pushed himself out of the chair and turned his back, unable to find his balance in time to avoid falling to his knees on the hard cold decking.

Sick to his stomach.

He tasted the fluid in his mouth and knew that he was going to vomit in revulsion; but the sensation could not be denied. His fish strained eagerly against the fabric of his trousers as though the Nurail’s pain were the most enticing ocean his fish had ever dreamed of in which to disport itself. Eager to get out. Passionate for more pain.

“The officer is unwell?”

Security, careful and reserved, beside him. He could not spew what little he had in his stomach out onto the floor. Such a thing would be disgraceful. Drunk. Yes. Drunk, that was it, he would pretend that he was only drunk, and not so horrified at what he thought he felt that his very vitals rose in protest against the sinful desire that had come on him so suddenly, so strongly. Drunk. Yes. That would do the trick, very well.

He had to set the Nurail’s shoulder straight.

“Your pardon, gentlemen, a surfeit of wodac merely.” He could hardly choke the words out, and the strained high pitch of his own voice was nothing he would have recognized as his. They would know he lied. One of them helped him up onto his feet, and for a moment Andrej stood where he was and eyed the door at the far end of the theater longingly. He could just leave . . .

Yes, and go where?

He could just leave, but if he did, he would only have to do this over again, and in the meantime the prisoner suffered from a dislocated shoulder, and for no good or necessary reason.

Reluctantly Andrej turned back to his task.

The trick with the crozer-hinge was working all too well. Rab Lussman knelt constrained and suffering, waiting for painease. Swallowing hard, Andrej approached his prisoner; it had to be done soon, or the Nurail was going to lose consciousness. Could he touch Lussman’s body, and not be disgraced by his own? Two hands on Lussman’s shoulder, the dislocated joint hot and swollen beneath his hands. Andrej readied himself for what was to come, half-breathless with the conflict between abject horror and frank shameless lust.

Soon; and cleanly —

With his fingers tight against the shoulder and his two thumbs pressed against the ball of the joint, Andrej forced the crozer-hinge back under the cap of the shoulder blade into the shoulder-joint, where it belonged. The Nurail shouted aloud with the ferocious shock of it, his body convulsing against the Security who restrained him, his feet kicking out from underneath him in spasms of uncoordinated protest at the pain.

Andrej fell back heavily into his chair in turn, staring hungrily at his prisoner, savoring the tense drawn lines of agony on Lussman’s face.

Oh, yes,
his body said to him, as clearly as if flesh could speak high Aznir.

Oh, yes, indeed.

His prisoner, living flesh, subject to his will, and all in lawful support of the Judicial order. Why - Andrej asked himself - had he been afraid that it would be difficult?

Or had he in fact been afraid that it was going to be this easy, all along?

His father had been right to send him here, and he had known from the beginning how wrong it had been for him to try to resist his father’s will. He had been misguided and mistaken, and he could have had this pleasure all along, because it was all his for the taking. Lussman had to confess. It was up to him to see that Lussman confessed, and in good form, and convincingly.

He had weeks of lost time to make up for.

Saints, Saints, Saints under Canopy, what was be thinking of? How could he even imagine he was to torture an unarmed man, naked and in the presence of his enemies, and find joy in such savagery?

Andrej swallowed back the bitterness in his mouth, almost scornful of his own weakness-his pity, and his shame under the influence of the passion that overwhelmed him.

There was no need to appeal to the imagination.

As real as Lussman’s pain, as real as agony, as real as blood-that was as real and sharp and quick as the delight that he felt in it.

Wasted time.

And no time like the present to claim his native right and enter into his ancestral place. The Church had tried to teach him: Sin merited suffering in atonement. His teachers on Mayon had taught him differently, that suffering was to be avoided and alleviated by every possible means a man could find at his disposal; and he had believed them. He had swallowed the alien philosophy as though it could nourish him throughout all his long years in school.

He was sick to his stomach with the poison of the alien creed.

He was thirsty, hungry, starved for the sweet sound of pain in Lussman’s voice, famished for the pleasure that he had in Lussman’s fear of him, desperate with ferocious need for Lussman’s helpless pain to feed upon and pleasure him.

All of those years.

How could he have been so blind to the simple truth?

And what could be more true than honest pain, and the brilliant scintillating sweetness of strict torment?

Rab Lussman half-lay against the Security troops behind him, with his face turned up to the light and his mouth trembling. Andrej rejoiced to see the signs of awareness returning to the man; because he had plans. And each new concept of atrocity was more beguiling than the last had been.

“Lussman,” Andrej said.

The Nurail’s head rolled restlessly against Sorlie Curran’s steadfast grip, but he said nothing.

Rising unsteadily to his feet, Andrej took a whip up from the array that lay ready on the table for his use. A short, stout black-oiled whip with a heavy butt, the weight of it was welcome to his hand, and every fiber of his being seemed to strain to the utmost in anticipation, eager to be gratified.

“Come now, we were discussing.” He was not going to vomit and flee. He was going to complete his exercise. And he was going to enjoy it. “Truly I must insist you pay attention, Lussman, answer as I bid you, or I will suspect that you are not listening to me. Yes?”

No answer.

Andrej wrapped the striking length of the whip around his fist so that the weighted butt swung free at a short drop. He took the measure of his distance and gauged the angle of approach, eager to test his grasp of the Judicial process against the shaking body of his prisoner.