But I think I’ve changed my mind. I believe I’ll have you force-fed, instead. The results could be even more amusing, in the long run.”
Mark shivered sickly for the first time. Ryoval felt it, beneath his probing fingers, and grinned. The man had an appalling instinct for the target. Better he should keep Ryoval focused on the chimera? Better we should get the hell out of here.
He took a breath. “I hate to burst your bubble, Baron, but I have some bad news for you.”
“Now, did I ask you to speak?” Ryoval’s fingers traced back up, to pinch the flesh around his jaw. “This isn’t an interrogation. This isn’t an inquisition. Confession will gain you nothing. Not even death.”
It was that damned contagious hyperactivity. Even Miles’s enemies caught it.
“I’m not Admiral Naismith. I’m the clone the Bharaputrans made. Your goons grabbed the wrong guy.”
Ryoval merely smiled. “Nice try, Admiral. But we’ve been watching the Bharaputran clone at the Durona Clinic for days. I knew you would come for him, after what you did to try and get him back the first time. I don’t know what passion he inspires in you—were you lovers? You’d be amazed how many people have clones made for that purpose.”
So. When Quinn had sworn no one could possibly be following them, she’d been right. Ryoval hadn’t been following them. He’d been waiting for them. Swell. It had been his actions, not his words or his uniform, which had convicted him of being Naismith.
“But I will obtain him too,” Ryoval shrugged. “Very soon.”
No, you won’t. “Baron, I really am the other clone. Prove it to yourself. Have me examined.”
Ryoval chuckled. “What do you suggest? A DNA scan? Even the Duronas couldn’t decide.” He sighed deeply. “There’s so much I want to do to you, I scarcely know where to begin. I must take it slowly. And in logical order. One cannot torture body parts that have already been removed, for example. I wonder how many years I can make you last? Decades?”
Mark felt his self-control cracking. “I’m not Naismith,” he said, his voice going high with strain.
Ryoval grasped Mark’s chin and tilted it up, his lips twisting in ironic disbelief. “Then I will practice on you. A dry-run. And Naismith will be along. In time.”
You’re going to be astonished at what will be along, in time. ImpSec would have no hesitation whatsoever about taking Ryoval’s House apart around him, no inhibitions even by Jacksonian standards.
To rescue Miles.
He, of course, wasn’t Miles.
He reflected worriedly on that, as the guards entered again at Ryoval’s summons.
The first beating was unpleasant enough. It wasn’t the pain. It was pain without escape, fear without release, that worked upon the mind, tensed the body. Ryoval watched. Mark screamed without restraint. No silent, suffering, manly pride here, thank you. Maybe that would convince Ryoval he was not Naismith. This was crazy. Still, the guards broke no bones, and ended the exercise perfunctorily. They left him locked naked in a very cold, tiny room or closet, without windows. The air vent was perhaps five centimeters across. He couldn’t get his fist, let alone his body, though it.
He tried to prepare, to steel himself. To give himself hope. Time was on his side. Ryoval was a supremely practiced sadist, but of a psychological bent. Ryoval would keep him alive, and relatively undamaged, at least at first. After all, nerves must be intact to report pain. A mind must be relatively unclouded, to experience all the nuances of agony. Elaborate humiliations, rather than immediate flaying to death, must be first on the menu. All he had to do was survive. Later—there wouldn’t be a later. The Countess had said Mark’s going to Jackson’s Whole would force Illyan to assign more agents here whether he wanted to or not, that alone being a sure benefit of Mark’s journey even if he accomplished nothing personally at all.
And what, after all, were a few more humiliations to him? Miles’s immense pride could be shattered. He had none. Torture was old news to him. Oh, Ryoval. Have you ever got the wrong man.
Now, if Ryoval were half the psychologist he clearly imagined himself to be, he would have grabbed a few of Miles’s friends, to torment in front of him. That would work beautifully, on Miles. But not, of course, on him. He had no friends. Hell, Ryoval. I can think of worse things than you can.
No matter. His friends would rescue him. Any time now.
Now.
He kept up his mental defiance till the technicians came for him.
They returned him to his little cell, afterward, presumably to give him some solitude to think about it. He didn’t think for quite some time. He lay on his side breathing in tiny gasps, half-conscious, arms and legs slowly starfishing in rhythm to the pain inside that didn’t stop.
At length, the clouds lifted a little from his vision, and the pain eased fractionally, to be replaced by a black, black rage. The techs had secured him, shoved a tube down his throat, and pumped him full of some repulsive high-calorie sludge. Laced with an anti-emetic, they told him, to prevent him getting rid of it later, and a cocktail of metabolic aids to speed digestion and deposition. It was far too subtly complex to have been designed on the spot, it must be something House Ryoval kept in stock. And he’d imagined this was his own private and unique perversion. He thought he’d done himself harm before, but Ryoval’s people took it far beyond the limits of merely toying with pain, under the eye of their master, who’d come to watch. And study him, with a growing smile. Ryoval knew. He’d seen it in the man’s sly, pleased eyes.
Ryoval had stripped his very own rebellion of all its secret pleasure. The one somatic power that had been his call, his control, taken from him. Ryoval had hooked him, gotten under his skin. Way under.
They could do to you all day long, and you could just not-be-there, but it was as nothing compared to getting you to do to yourself. The difference between mere torture and true humiliation was in the participation of the victim. Galen, whose torments were physically much milder than anything Ryoval contemplated, had known this; Galen had always had him doing to himself, or thinking he was.
That Ryoval knew this too, he demonstrated later, when he administered a violent aphrodisiac to Mark by hypospray, before giving him to his—guards? or were they employees borrowed from one of the bordellos? So that he became a glazed-eyed participant in his own degradation. It doubtless made a great show for the hovering holovids, recording it all from every angle.
They brought him back to his little cell to digest this new experience much as they’d brought him back to digest the first force-feeding. It took a long time for the shock and drug-fog to clear away. He oscillated slowly between a drained lassitude and horror. Curious. The drug had short-circuited his shock-stick conditioning, reducing it to something like a case of the hiccups, or the show would have been much duller and shorter. Ryoval had watched.
No. Ryoval had studied.
His consciousness of the man’s eyes had become an obsession. Ryoval’s interest had not been erotic. Mark felt the Baron must have become bored with the stereotyped banality of every possible physical act decades ago. Ryoval had been watching him for … reflexes? Small betrayals of interest, fear, despair. The exercise had not been arranged for the sake of pain. There had been plenty of pain, but it had been incidental. Discomfort from the force-feeding, and running out of neurotransmitters, mostly.
That wasn’t the torture, Mark realized. That was only the pretesting. My torture is still being designed.
Suddenly, he saw what was coming, all whole. First, Ryoval would condition him to this, addict him by repeated doses. Only then would he add pain, and pin him, vibrating, between pain and pleasure; require him to torture himself, to win through to the dark reward. And then he would withdraw the drug and let Mark, conditioned to the scenarios, continue. And he would. And then Ryoval would offer him his freedom. And he would weep and beg to stay, plead to remain a slave. Destruction by seduction. End-game. Revenge complete. You see me, Ryoval, but I see you. I see you.