That remark was too important to pass up. “Trained,” I repeated. “By whom? Who does the training?”
“Sometimes nobody, sometimes somebody who knows somebody,” he replied enigmatically. “The best training, I have heard, is from the colony descended from the first scientists to -visit this world, Moab Keep, but that’s thousands of kilometers from here. Don’t worry, you’ll find somebody—the best always do.”
I left him still sitting there and accompanied Ti to the hut. Even though the hour was late and it had been a long day I had difficulty getting to sleep. Thoughts of breaking free of this pawn life, with eventually finding and facing down Marek Kreegan filled my head. And I also thought of Ti, poor, naive little Ti and what they were doing to her. I had built up a whole army I wanted to get even with, many of whom I hadn’t even met as yet.
Chapter Eight
Social Mobility on Lilith
I continued to practice as much as I could while continuing my menial labors. If nothing else, I told myself, these past weeks or months or however long it’d been had accomplished two things. One was to tone up and fine-tune Cal Tremon’s body so that it felt not only totally natural but really mine. Furthermore, its —no, my—muscles developed to a degree I’d have thought impossible not so long ago. I was hefting three or more times my considerable weight without even thinking about it, the aches long gone. I had no doubt that I could easily bend solid steel bars.
But, oddly, it was the second thing that I, as a trained agent, appreciated the most. I had been humbled. I had been bent, then broken, with almost ridiculous ease, and the process had been humiliating.
Now, this might be a curious thing to say, but I badly needed to be humbled. I had been cocky, eager, too sure of myself when this escapade had started. Homo superior—never beaten in an assignment. I still believed that, but the place I was superior was now forever closed to me. This was a totally alien world, a world that operated on very different rules. I was out of my element here; so if I was going to win, I had to be brought down hard in order to build up again, almost from scratch. This fact, Fm sure, was the only reason I was still alive at this point. That and the fact that, though broken in the face of seemingly unassailable power, I had lost my sense of purpose but never my will to survive.
At the end of a day shortly after Bronz’s departure, I walked back to the village for the evening meal with the others. I was already well into the food when I turned and looked at the faces of the others, the dirty and tired pawns of the village, and realized that something was not quite right.
Ti wasn’t there. We almost always met here and ate together, and the composition of the Keep was so regular and unvarying that the few times when she’d had to be elsewhere I had always known in advance.
I started asking around, but no one had seen her. Finally I sought out some of the people she worked with at the nursery and they only said that Kronlon had come for her around the midday meal and she had gone off with him.
I frowned. Although Kronlon wasn’t above taking those he was attracted to for a little fun, this was the wrong time. Kronlon, for all his power in relation to us, was just a shade higher on the scale than we pawns, and he had his own duties to perform. I had a really bad feeling about this. I stopped eating, stood up, and walked slowly through the crowd of pawns toward the supervisor’s area. This wasn’t an act rational people performed, but I wasn’t about to let this go.
Kronlon was in. I could see him off in his little cubby-hole drinking something—probably local beer—out of a large gourd and puffing on what could have been anything from a stinkweed cigar to happy smoke. Pawns didn’t get those luxuries, so I really couldn’t be certain. Since it was so unusual for anyone to approach his quarters voluntarily, he noticed the movement out of the corner of his eye and turned in surprise. When he saw who it was, his face broke into an evil grin.
“Tremon! Well, well! I kinda expected you tonight!” he called out. “Come on in, boy!”
I approached, a little cautious, since even though I could sense, feel, hear, see the Warden organism in just about everything, including him, I hadn’t had any success in actually making use of that sense. Kronlon, it seemed to me, burned a little more brightly than others whom I’d concentrated on—or was that just nerves? You never forgot the feeling he gave you, the incredible agony he could inflict merely by willing it. I had the fleeting impulse to back out, but it was too late and I knew it. He’d seen me, he’d invited me over—and that was a command. No matter what, I was stuck.
Kronlon sat back and eyed me with an amused smirk. “Lookin’ for your little bitch, huh? Missin’ your bed partner?” His eyes flashed with cruel amusement. I knew he was baiting me, the son of a bitch.
I felt a warm, uncharacteristic rush of anger rising within me, but it was partially cancelled out by my fear of him. I just nodded and stayed silent.
Kronlon laughed, enjoying his power and position. Here I was a giant of a man who could physically break him in two and he was my master as surely as if I were tiny and weak, like Ti. He roared with laughter and took another gulp of his beer. “She’s gone, boy!” he told me. “Gone forever. You better get used to an empty bed for a while, son, ’cause she ain’t never comin’ back and you may as well get somebody new. Poor big ol’ Cal ’s just got screwed.” He laughed again.
My fury and frustration was growing almost beyond my control. All this tune I’d been bossed and terrorized by this moronic sadist and I was becoming fed up with it.
“Where has she gone—sir?” I managed, still held back by the threat of that terrible power within him.
My hesitant tone and manner caused him even more amusement. “You really feel somethin’ for her, don’t you?” he responded, as if this made his news all the more a cruel joke. “Well, boy, I got a message midmornin’ to fetch’her and bring her up to the Castle. She didn’t wanta come, I’ll tell you, but hell, she ain’t got no choice.” His stare suddenly became slightly vacant, his tone more serious. “Ain’t nobody got any choice in anything,” he added. I realized that Kronlon never liked to think along those lines. He covered his own fear and debasement by his cruelty and sadism, the only things his tiny ego really had.
I should have felt some pity for him, but all I could see was a petty little man. who had neither the right nor the qualification to wash the feet of the people whom he terrorized from his position of power. I was starting to boil.
“You know what they’re gonna do to her?” he taunted. “Turn her into a human cow, Tremon. You know what a cow is, don’t you? Big tits, no brains!” He roared at his joke.
“You slimy son of a bitch,” I said evenly.
He continued laughing for a moment, and I wasn’t sure he had heard me, nor, at that point, did I even care if he had. I was mad, howling, seething mad, perhaps crazy mad, too. I no longer cared what this worm, this lowest of the low, could do, what pain he could inflict. Agony was a price I was suddenly willing to pay if I could just snap his slimy neck.
He had heard. “What’s that you said, boy? Some-thin’ on your mind? Why, hell, I’ll give you somethin’ else to think about, by damn!” He was almost shouting now, and he stood up. There was no mistaking it now—that sense of the Warden organism within him was stronger, more intense, brighter somehow, now. It was rising within him.
“Hell, boy!” he roared. “Maybe I’ll fix you so’s you won’t get so worked up no more about no women! How’d you like t’be a gelding, boy? I can fix it, I can! I can fix you!”