Prisoner of Conscience (22 page)

Not having seen him come from his daily work, these five days past, with that drunk drugged look of utter satiation on his face, and still always ever eager for some more.

“I beg your pardon if I have offended you.” Koscuisko was doing nothing of the sort. He didn’t care. “It is only out of respect for your Administration. We must tolerate no such discrepancies. I want this one remanded to Dramissoi today, Administrator, if there are no charges against
him
.”

And, oh, wasn’t Koscuisko rubbing Belan’s face in the dirty little problem he’d uncovered. A torturer through and through. If it hadn’t been Belan, Darmon almost might have wanted to feel sorry for him.

“Of course, your Excellency.” Belan wasn’t happy, but there was next to nothing that Belan could do about it. “I’ll launch an investigation into how this might have happened, and report back to you. Was that to be all for today, Doctor Koscuisko?”

Darmon didn’t envy Belan his position; it had to be uncomfortable, Pyana on one side of him, Koscuisko on the other, family ties and friends cut off from behind him by the choices he had made for his life and nothing to look forward to. It couldn’t be enjoyable. And Belan deserved every bit of it.

“Thank you, Administrator Belan. I know that you could not but be as shocked as I that such a thing could happen. We’re just lucky in this case that we caught it before things went too much further.”

How many people had this torturer murdered asking questions that they couldn’t answer about crimes that they had not committed?

Koscuisko walked down the row of holding cells, and stopped in front of him. Darmon stepped back from the security grid. He had no desire to be struck with a shockrod for the crime of standing too close to the front of his cell in the presence of an officer.

“I will with this war-leader start while we are waiting,”
Koscuisko said to his green-sleeves, looking at Darmon with a measuring eye. “War-leader Robis Darmon, I understand. Or are you to claim to be Marne Cittrops, instead? It will delay the progress of the exercise. I will not disguise that fact, from you.”

Now the torturer was talking to him. Darmon knew that he was afraid, because he had no illusions about the sort of pain that he was going to suffer. The more he could control the interchange, the better off he’d be. Even the illusion of control could help a man cope —

Darmon filled his face with as stupid a look as he could muster. “Excellency, there must be some mistake.” If he looked at the Pyana standing with Koscuisko’s Bonds it was easy enough. “My name is Lerriback.”

The Pyana guards started forward to pull him out of his cell and beat him for his insolence. Darmon wondered whether it might not be worth it even so, for the look on Koscuisko’s face.

Koscuisko held up his hand, and the guards came to attention.

“Oh, indeed you must be,”
Koscuisko said. “I can see the family resemblance. How you have managed to grow back your hair in such short order is a wonder to me, Lerriback. And taller as well? There must be some unusual healthful effect in the water here.”

Darmon knew a moment’s grim panic. Family resemblance — there was a family resemblance, for people who knew how to look. His son was beardless yet, but Chonniskot was his son. He had his father’s green-gold eyes, and that not usual among Nurail.

Was the torturer playing with him?

“Take for me this prisoner to work-room, gentles, if you please. You know what to do.”

No, the torturer was just playing.

Why not?

The Domitt Prison was his own resort, in a sense. A private recreation field for those that could find recreation in such work as a torturer performed.

Koscuisko might not know that the war-leader of Darmon had even had a son, or that Chonniskot had escaped with Farlan and Sender. If Koscuisko knew and Chonni had been taken — taken or killed, identified, one way or the other — Koscuisko would surely let him know about it, to increase his despair, to impress upon him that he had nothing further to lose.

There were worse ways to be taken to torture than with good hope for his child’s freedom, by an Inquisitor who seemed at least as interested in scoring off the Domitt Prison’s Administration as paying attention to his work.

And still Darmon was afraid, because he knew that he was being taken to torture.

###

This was a torture cell, then, and would be his final battleground. Darmon looked around him as the torturer’s green-sleeves stripped off his shirt and shoon and everything that had been in between, cutting away his boots, binding his wrists with chains.

It didn’t look like much.

But it smelled.

He’d always thought of torture cells as dark, and this one wasn’t, every corner was clearly illuminated. He didn’t understand most of what he saw, though: a large square block in the middle of the room, coming waist-high. Some sort of a raised pan set against the wall, but not the obvious, because there were no coals, no smoking irons.

The grid on the wall and the hooks in the ceiling he could understand altogether too well.

The torturer said nothing, looking at the beverage-server on the table next to the armchair that waited there for the officer’s comfort. Darmon suppressed a shudder: it was cold, and he was afraid. Naked he could urinate on his torturer in contempt, though that would probably not be worth the pleasure he would derive from it. He wasn’t sure he had the water to urinate with. He was that frightened.

Fear was shame to nobody.

No war-leader worthy to send other souls to death could have illusions, though it was important sometimes to pretend. People had fear. It was a natural response. Courage lay in going forward with fear, not in the absence of fear.

Once they had finished stripping him, they uncoupled the chain between his wrists and hooked the manacles to tethers in the ceiling, drawing his arms well out in two different directions. Shackled his ankles, he was disappointed to note, and anchored them to the floor. No kicking, then. He would have had to get in a lucky hit to do the torturer any damage, barefoot as he was, but it was still a shame to have the fantasy taken from him.

“That will suffice for now,”
the torturer said. Oh, good. Then he could go back to his cell. No, of course not, it was the Security that the torturer addressed, and Darmon knew better than that. It was a lame joke, if a private one. Jokes helped. “I will call you when I want you. Go away.”

Now they were alone together.

Darmon considered blowing a kiss, but restrained himself.

There was no sense in being provoking.

At least not yet.

He would save his provoking till later, when things were far enough along that if the torturer lost his temper for one moment he might make the critical mistake that would let Darmon out of this.

Seating himself in the armchair, the torturer looked Darmon up and down; then spoke.

“I am Andrej Ulexeievitch Koscuisko, and I hold the Writ to which you must answer. State for me your name, and your identification.”

“My name is Marne Cittrops. But my mother’s people — ”

Wait.

He didn’t know what Cittrops’s weaves had been.

The torturer had taken a little book from out of the front plaquet of his uniform, and opened it, sitting there with a stylus in his left hand, waiting. Smirking. Darmon thought hard and fast.

“ — would not share so much as the name of their weave with any damned Pyana. Or their pet torturer.”

The torturer would know very well what was going on; or he would guess. Koscuisko smiled more broadly.

“I am a Judicial officer, War-leader, and the Bench transcends all of your petty ethnic differences. I am particularly anxious to hear your weave, Darmon. I am collecting. See?”

Koscuisko said “petty ethnic differences,”
but without much pretense at conviction. It occurred to Darmon that Koscuisko was an odd sort of a torturer: but the book that he held up, what could that be?

“I can’t see from here. Sir. Why don’t we trade places, and you can swing on these ropes for a while, and I’ll sit down and admire your work close up.”

Koscuisko was collecting weaves?

“It would mean nothing to you unless you read church music. It is an Aznir script. You are evading. I have asked you for your weave, for posterity’s sake. If you are Marne Cittrops, you will give me — one. If you are not, well, all to the good, I will obtain another.”

Nurail had been murdered here by this man, but if the weaves were passed — the tune and the telling, or even the telling alone — the knowledge they contained would not be lost. The people that had been killed on the work-crews, crushed to death or in some other manner, had not been given time to pass their weaves before they died. How many had they lost?

“If I was not Marne Cittrops I would have the same answer.”

No. Perhaps not.

It was true that some of the weave-lore was outdated. The hill-people had started to sing the weaves as a way to preserve technical knowledge about land navigation; and their importance as maps had gradually become outdated as the Nurail had spread throughout their worlds.

By then the weaves had collected much more than just land-lore. Words and music, the telling and the tune of it, there was history in them, genealogy, contractual and family relationships centuries deep and as much a part of a Nurail as his very skin. Nurail were passionate for a start, and the emotion that invested the war-weaves could inspire fighting men to awesome feats.

They were defeated and dispersed in this generation, but there would be Nurail in the next, and the weaves their only inheritance now. The music. The knowledge of the Nurail collective unconsciousness preserved in old lyrics and older tunes, the voices of the dead speaking to the living yet with words of advice and of admonishment. The power.

He was the war-leader of Darmon, and his mother’s people had held the most powerful war-weave of them all; but his daughters — to whom he would normally pass his mother’s weave — were dead. If Koscuisko wrote down weaves it would be there, and if someone should find it later — if Koscuisko were telling him the truth, and not making a joke at his expense, and the document did not simply get lost —

Koscuisko closed his book and put it away. “I’m sorry to hear that. I was looking forward to it. Well, then, which is it to be? Marne Cittrops? Or War-leader Darmon?”

This was too obvious to be allowed to pass, even if he was bound naked in chains while the other man sat at his ease in an armchair. “Why don’t you tell me? What possible profit could there be in being a war-leader, of all things? Rather than the harmless innocuous little slave-laborer that I am — ”

The torturer looked him up and down with insolent amusement in his eyes. “I would not have said ‘little.’ And it is of course your choice to remain Cittrops as long as you can support the pretense. You are here on good suspicion of being the war-leader, though, and therefore I have it at command to put you to the Question until you confess to being the war-leader, whether you are or not. It is only a question of time.”

“Oh, well, in that case, yes. I’m the war-leader. The one that rogered your mother at her mam’s knee. If you kept your mouth shut and looked stupid you could pass for Nurail, did you know that?”

The chains that stretched his wrists out to the ceiling rubbed uncomfortably. Darmon tried to resist the temptation to worry at them. He wasn’t going to get any more comfortable than he was right now. That was a given. “Then you could be the war-leader. We’ll trade places.”

Now Koscuisko was on his feet, plucking a record up from his side table. He carried the document over to where Darmon stood half-stretched to the ceiling, turning so that Darmon could read the text on the clear assumption that Darmon could read plain Standard; or was it part of the trick to get him to admit to his identity?

“War-leader Robis Darmon. Your family is dead, it says here, you have no one to protect any longer. If you will not provide the Bench with a confession you know what will come of it. The exiles will cherish your memory and those left on site will romanticize you until the whole thing starts over in the next generation but one. Confess, and it will help in the integration of the Nurail into Jurisdiction, with a better life for what hypothetical grandchildren you might have.”

He could read plain Standard, come to that. His family was dead, the record listed them out — and well it should be so, because if the record said his daughters were killed no Nurail could be tortured to death for the crime of being heir to the war-leader.

But there was no mention there of Chonniskot.

“You already said that you can make me confess to being whomever. And I believe you. What’s the point?”

“Collaterals,”
the torturer said, and he sounded a little surprised. “In order to restore the Judicial order, the Bench needs to assure itself of war-leaders, generals, lieutenants. I want your evidence, and what you know of other persons of authority hiding under assumed names, as you were.”

Poor Ceelie. Darmon kept his face as blank as he could. He’d known as soon as they’d come for him that Ceelie had been pressed beyond the limit of his endurance. He could not afford to exhibit any grief for someone he could not admit to having known; and still it burned. It was his fault Ceelie had suffered, and Ceelie had died, because he had failed against Jurisdiction. Ceelie and so many others . . .

“So you torture a man till he names a name, and then you torture the next. That’s not good evidence. That whoever you took away from work-crew, that Shopes Ban, he may have called me out as the First Judge for all I know, why should you believe him?” The shackles cut against his wrists. Already his elbows began to ache; but then he was not a young man, any more.

The torturer frowned. “I have had no Shopes Ban, I’m sorry. You’re unraveling the wrong plait.”

All that Ceelie must have endured before his death, and the torturer would not so much as admit to knowing of him. Robis’s voice was a little sharper than he’d expected, when he spoke. “No doubt you’ve had too many of us, torturer. I wonder you can keep any apart.” Sharper than was prudent for use by a chained man, for a fact. Koscuisko just stared.