Prisoner of Conscience (21 page)

It was hard, so hard. She was afraid. She knew Koscuisko didn’t want to hurt her, but she couldn’t help the fear. She had to go on through it: because knowing Koscuisko didn’t want to hurt her was no longer enough.

Gazing at her in something like horror, Koscuisko shook his head. “There is nothing to envy my gentlemen, Ailynn, Joslire dead and Erish still limping, and all of them to be called into the torture-rooms with me — ”

Closing the small distance between them, Ailynn put her fingers to his lips to stop his speech. Hardly believing that she found the nerve. Sensing the uncertainty of her governor. “Their job to protect and support you. You let them. You give them respect. You permit them their own judgment.”

Not in torture-room, no, she didn’t know about that. But here in quarters, where they shared in partnership to cope with where they were and what they had to do. All six of them. The trust they had in him, and he in them, was astonishing. She wanted in. “I only ask so much as that, your Excellency. It is my job to ease you with my body. Let me help.”

She could watch and wait in passive silence, do as she was told, hope for the best and fear for the worst. Or she could pretend that she had a job as real and as important, in its way, as the job Security performed: if Koscuisko would permit her that privilege. “I don’t want to be pitied for my Bond. I want to be granted self-respect. Pretend you value what I have to offer. Condescend to let me comfort you.”

She wanted to belong.

And it was her job.

The Bench had condemned her to the Bond for punishment and deterrent example, but the Bench had done so equally to his Security. It was worse for them. All she had to do was suffer abuse. They could be required to inflict it.

“I will be frank,”
Koscuisko said, at last. “This is the problem. The problem is that it is not you I want, Ailynn. It is nothing to do with your desirability. It is because of that which is monstrous and unholy in my nature.”

As if she didn’t know that already.

“I will trust you, as my cousins outside this room trust you. And say what is on my mind.” It got easier as she went along. “His Excellency found relief for the lack he felt, last night. Was it not so, sir?”

He only nodded, his eyes fixed on her face. She couldn’t tell whether he was getting angry at her or not; in the dim light there was no separating rage in his face from concentration, for Ailynn. She didn’t know him well enough. She’d been sleeping in his bed for a month; and still she hardly knew him, but that was only the way of her life.

“Take comfort then in a way which is not monstrous or unholy, and it may make it easier for you.” And would let her be truly one with the others, part of the group, someone who belonged. “I will not pretend. That I don’t desire comfort as well, sir. And have had little pleasure of the sort you shared with me last night, for a long time.”

She was sure he would know what she meant.

But would he accept her argument, weak though it was?

Whores were never to solicit pleasure for themselves, not unless it was the patron’s pleasure to assign them that role in advance and pretend to be subordinate.

And still Koscuisko did not let his people lack for food, or rest, or medicine, or anything at all that could be got to comfort them. She would be grateful to have a caress, even purchased with the use of her body. It would be profit the Bench could not keep from her . . . if Koscuisko consented.

“You do not mean to ask to be misused,”
the officer insisted. The tone of his voice was still unbelieving: but he had not rejected her offer. Or not yet.

“If only the officer did not let frustration build within for overlong.” She put her two hands flat against his chest, feeling the warmth of his body through the wrap-tunic. “It will go easier with me if you come more often to embrace me, sir.”

He would admit the sense of this.

He almost had to.

“I have heard you,”
Koscuisko said. “Is this what there was to discuss, Ailynn?”

Her heart turned to stone and sank within her bosom. He would be cold to her. He would not accept. He would not let her in.

“You have not answered me, your Excellency.”

What had she asked him?

“It could be said to be owing,”
Koscuisko murmured, as if to himself. “One does not know if one dares risk it, Ailynn. Kaydence will be very severe with me should there be tears. He is your champion, did you know that?”

“Either that or simply has a weakness.” She had heard the good-natured teasing. “And a question apparently exists over the exact location of it.”

Koscuisko had a beautiful smile, when he was caught off guard and smiled with all his teeth. They were small, even, and regular, but it wasn’t that, it was that being surprised into a smile took layers of weight of care from off his face and made him look much younger.

“Listening to Code, and should’st not, has weaknesses of his own, Code does.”

She had been standing very close to him. Now he put his hand around her waist to turn her toward the door, in perfect friendship and amity. But spoke to her quite seriously, for all that. “It is your right to claim consideration from me, Ailynn, according to the rules that I was raised to.”

Ailynn couldn’t tell if that meant he was agreeing.

It demonstrated well enough that he was listening to her.

She wondered if Koscuisko understood how strange and rare that was.

Just short of the still-closed door he stopped. “You wanted to talk, Ailynn. Have you for now had satisfaction from me?”

His meal would be getting cold; his liquor warm. “I will tell you in the morning,”
she teased, daringly.

Koscuisko laughed, and gave her a quick kiss that had none of the torturer about it.

It might work.

One way or the other she would work in partnership with his people; and belong, belong by choice, for the first time since she had been sentenced to her Bond.

###

Taken from work-crew as War-leader Darmon, locked into a place to wait for torture. He wondered at the luxury of these cells; the sleep-rack was almost a bed, the bedding itself warm and clean and comfortable, water for washing that was sweet enough that a man could drink it at his will. Perhaps this torturer was of dainty sensibilities and only wanted fresh clean healthy prisoners. He hadn’t eaten so well since he’d come to the Domitt Prison.

And it looked as though he was to have his chance to find out about the torturer himself, little interest though he had in the question.

The holding cells were open all along one wall so that there could be no hiding at the blind angle of a room while a door opened. That was probably why it was warm in here; it wouldn’t do for prison staff to take a chill. Darmon was amused by the insight.

There was a trade-off of sorts between closing people off and holding them in solitude to fret and fume until their nerves were raw; or letting them watch their fellows go away one after another and never come back. The Domitt had clearly opted for the latter means of increasing the torment of the condemned.

It was an advantage, to Robis Darmon.

The more he could learn of who and what he faced, the better prepared he could be for his turn when it came.

And it would come.

He watched this young Inquisitor come through the holding area, twice a day, sometimes more often. Bond-involuntary Security troops at the officer’s back, and Pyana turnkeys to open and close doors. A slim but solidly built young officer, an alien name, Anders Koscuisko — no, Aanderi, he had heard. Aanderi Koscuisko. The Writ in residence at the Domitt Prison, and had his mother guessed at the look on Koscuisko’s face when he came out from torture in the evening she would have drowned herself rather than deliver a son who could take such pleasure in the pain of suffering captives. Darmon was sure of it. And Koscuisko not even Pyana.

Morning of the fifth day since he’d been taken from the work-crew, and probably two eights after fast-meal. They were fed three times a day, in holding cell. The torturer wanted them strong and able to answer all of his questions.
What would the torturer do with answers that would compromise the Domitt Prison
? Darmon wondered. Because as satisfying as Koscuisko clearly found his work in and of itself, he was as clearly unhappy with the Administration.

“See you this man, Administrator.” Koscuisko had brought Belan with him this morning. Belan. Fat and well-fed, sleek and stout and fattening on the flesh of his own kind. There was a special place in Hell for such as Belan. He would look much more than merely just uncomfortable there. “As I have warned you. You can read as well as I, this Brief says Lerriback, and says that this is the man we saw in punishment block. Has it been seven weeks? Or eight, now?”

There were only sixteen holding cells; though Darmon couldn’t see everything, the sound carried as clearly as anyone could wish. Koscuisko stood in front of the cell two souls down, with his back to Darmon. And Belan beside him, and the Security, green-sleeved bond-involuntary Security slaves. Darmon wondered what it must be for them to be put to such work as Koscuisko could demand. Bond-involuntaries were not the enemy. The enemy was Koscuisko; and Belan.

“His Excellency has been eight weeks in Port Rudistal.” Belan’s answer had a sound of grasping for a wisp of reed in a current that was sweeping him to destruction too fast for recognition of the danger. “Not quite so long here. You were tired, and I can’t say I remember, sir. It looks like the same man to me, and of course the documentation — ”

“My point exactly.” Koscuisko sounded upset, even angry. “The documentation gives the name, and even could be made to describe the man we saw during my tour. But not this man. You cannot have neglected to notice, this man has no gray, and the Lerriback we met looked nothing like so young. I would expect experience of a prison to age a man. Rather than the reverse.”

Oh, if Koscuisko was confused at seeing two men named Lerriback, how would it be if he should start to count up how many Lerribacks there were. How many Cittropses. Maybe he’d suggest it to the man, when it was his turn to go to die by torture.

“With respect, sir.” Belan was polite, but not beyond standing on his dignity as the Assistant Administrator of the Domitt Prison. A true Pyana under the skin, no doubt, Darmon told himself. No, he did not believe that, Belan was Nurail, no matter how depraved. “I wonder you don’t note the obvious. Almost everyone of your Interrogations to date has proved to yield some assumed name. This prisoner was masquerading as Lerriback, or as someone else named Lerriback. That’s all. I’m sure.”

This was too good to want to miss a word. Didn’t Belan watch where he was going?

“Prisoners coming in under assumed names one expects,”
Koscuisko agreed, easily and freely. “And identified by the face, and their also-called. The war-leader you have brought for me, for instance. Taken for us not as Marne Cittrops, though, but as War-leader Robis Darmon, lately so called. And this is different.”

“Sir?”

Darmon couldn’t decide if Belan sounded confused and resentful because he didn’t follow Koscuisko’s reasoning, or was simply not playing along. Pretending it wasn’t perfectly obvious where the argument was headed.

“So here is described a prisoner on Charges, and very pertinent Charges they are too. Named Lerriback. It is the man we saw, this description sorts with what I remember, see you here? There are notes in the file. Confined in lockbox for fractiousness. I was looking forward to Lerriback, Administrator Belan, and this is not the man, nor is he the same man under the name of another. Who can this be, and how can the Protocols be lawfully exercised against whomever Lerriback, when this is not the man?”

Just as well he was a prisoner here, Darmon told himself, and confined behind security grid in cell. Elsewise he might have kissed the Domitt’s torturer; and the gesture would almost certainly have been misinterpreted.

“Maybe the other wasn’t really Lerriback — ”

“The documentation describes the man I wished to make go back into the lockbox,”
Koscuisko insisted. “And prisoners are referred on documentation. Take me away this not-Lerriback, Administrator Belan. And either bring me Charges against him — whoever he is, but him, charges I can match to the man by more than name — or find for me my Lerriback. Wherever he is. I will have nothing to do with prisoners referred on insufficient documentation. And to do otherwise would be dangerously close to a failure of Writ.”

So either Koscuisko was a raging hypocrite, or the prison administration had made an error. Perhaps both. Darmon knew it wasn’t likely that the last, or next, or original Marne Cittrops had looked anything like him, except by accident.

Would they waste valuable Inquisitorial time on prisoners with no secrets, just because a man could be made to say anything?

No, it had to be that when they referred it was for who the prisoner actually was. Not who the prison administration called them on work-crew. War-leader Darmon, and not Marne Cittrops at all. Someone had something on the prisoner in the cell. The Administration had used that prisoner to fill a place on work-crew vacated by somebody named Lerriback. They hadn’t got the details all updated. The bodies didn’t match.

“Doctor Koscuisko. I protest, in the strongest possible terms. Throwing around language like that.”

That had got Belan’s attention. Failure of Writ. It meant that there were too many procedural or other faults within the system to lawfully support the Judicial function; and therefore the exercise of the Judicial function was not lawful. And therefore the people who had exercised the Judicial function were guilty of violations of Law and Judicial procedure to the extent that they had executed functions lawful only in support of the Judicial Order in the absence of true justification.

It was worth dreaming about.

If the Writ failed at the Domitt Prison, all of the murders would be recorded as such. All of the murderers treated as murderers, not good Bench officers upholding the Judicial order.

It was a lovely fantasy.

And it would never happen, because the only person who could invoke failure of Writ was the torturer who held the Writ to Inquire; and that meant Andrej Koscuisko here and now. The last thing Darmon could imagine Koscuisko doing was putting an end to his own recreation.