Prisoner of Conscience (27 page)

Because there were only two out of those four ideas that seemed likely to be true; and if Morse Wab had not been lying, it meant that the Administration was committing systematic murder in full knowledge that its conduct was criminal. And under a Bench authorization, at that.

“Directly. Your Excellency.”

He knew what to do.

But as he moved to invoke the prisoner calls, Koscuisko leaned over Kaydence’s shoulder to peer at the com-access, putting his hand to the back of Kaydence’s neck so that his thumb lay at the base of Kaydence’s skull and his fingers rested naturally and comfortably around the side of Kaydence’s throat.

“How could such a thing be managed?” Koscuisko seemed to be talking to himself, puzzling out a problem. “But there is money to be made, and the staff is Pyana. I do not know what to think of it. I tremble, that it could go further than this prison alone.”

The muscles of Kaydence’s neck, the muscles of his shoulders, the muscles of his upper back surrendered up their tension gratefully at the touch of Koscuisko’s hand. The officer was not going to stand off from him. He was still Andrej Koscuisko’s man, though he was a bond-involuntary.

Relief and gratitude betrayed Kaydence to himself. He had always suffered the embarrassment of having a sentimental nature. Kaydence caught his breath and bowed his head; Koscuisko, startled, started to move, started to take his hand away. Kaydence didn’t want Koscuisko to take his hand away. He couldn’t ask. He couldn’t explain. Had he been able to explain, he wasn’t sure but that misplaced pride might have prevented him from speaking anyway.

Kaydence raised his right hand to cover Koscuisko’s hand instead and hold it to him, claiming his status without words in terms Koscuisko himself had taught him meaning to.

Turning the chair on its seat-pivot, Koscuisko folded his arms around Kaydence where he sat, and held him close. Kaydence wept. There was no way in which to make Koscuisko understand. The thing about Andrej Koscuisko was that it had never been necessary for him to understand in order to be able to understand, nonsensical as that was.

After a while Koscuisko offered Kaydence his white-square.

Kaydence grinned, though his eyes ached. It was a joke of sorts. Chief Samons had put him on extra duty for being out of uniform more often than any of Koscuisko’s other Bonds. Boot-stockings not mended. A bit of seam come undone and not sewn back. A frayed under-collar not made right. Failure to carry a clean white-square at all times.

He had a perfectly good white-square in his blouse-plaquet.

He’d use Koscuisko’s.

Tradition.

“Pyana, sir?” Kaydence asked, just to show that he’d been listening.

Koscuisko seemed to shrug, fractionally, uncomfortably. “Nurail are to Pyana as Sarvaw have been to Dolgorukij, which is to say cattle. Also, like Dolgorukij and Sarvaw, Pyana and Nurail are more alike than not so, deny it though they will.”

Ethnicity and prejudice, then. Of course. Koscuisko spoke on. “In the history of the Dolgorukij Combine the most savage atrocities have been most constantly committed against precisely those people who are most like Aznir Dolgorukij. I do not mention Chuvishka Kospodar, Kaydence. But he was my great-great-grandfather.”

Well, if the officer said so. “His Excellency would be interested in a staff profile, then.” In order to be able to judge with more precision the extent to which Pyana held the majority of the influential positions in the prison. Affecting their potential willingness to commit murder in the full expectation of getting away with it, accordingly.

“Forgive me, Kaydence.”

Kaydence froze, electrified. He had never thought to hear — he had never wanted to hear — but Koscuisko continued speaking in a quiet but utterly determined tone of voice, not waiting for an answer. Not expecting one.

“I never thought to sink to such a thing, not even with everything else that I have done. And I am so ashamed, but my shame cannot answer to your suffering.”

He couldn’t let Koscuisko talk like this.

He couldn’t handle it.

“The officer is who the officer is.”
You are what you are, your Excellency. There is no getting around it for anybody
. “It’s just something we all have to deal with. Together. Sir.”

This was too true to allow for argument or exploration.

The officer knew better.

Had the officer forgiven him for being alive, while Joslire was dead?

He hadn’t realized he’d even been worried about it.

Now he could put the whole thing out of his mind and concentrate on pulling a report on prison staff for Koscuisko’s use and analysis.

###

Robis Darmon’s world coalesced gradually around him from a dark stifling mist of aching agony into a small cold stinking torture cell in the Domitt Prison, and he groaned aloud to realize that he was not dead yet. Not though he longed to be. Not though he waited for it. Not though his death was the salvation of those whose names he might have been able to remember once upon a time, lost now to pain and dread.

He was terrified of the sight and sound and smell of the torturer, who brought new pain with every breath.

His torturer, who tipped the cold sharp rim of a glass of water against his lower lip, lightly enough that Darmon did not recoil from the pressure against the broken skin but drank instead. His torturer was good to him, careful to see that he lacked for nothing that would preserve his life for more pain.

Still something seemed a little unusual.

He didn’t seem to hurt.

His body ached, yes, and his flesh was sore, but where was the huge sharp transcendent all-consuming agony that had been his constant companion now forever?

He remembered this.

He could remember a life without pain, without physical pain, a world in which agony of spirit had been his only burden, grief for his dead, fear for the living, rage against the wrong that sought to grind them all into the mud and make good citizens of them. Yes. He could remember.

There was that glass again, and Darmon drank. The fluid caught a bit going down; his throat was rough. Screaming would do that.

“Talk to me,”
the torturer said, softly. “Your Shopes Ban, the one whose fate so troubles you. Describe to me this man, if you would, please.”

Drugged.

That was what it was.

Drugged to put away his pain, but if the torturer was using drugs against him he was for it.

The desperation was swathed in cotton-wool, muffled in a resistance field; only dimly reverberating through his mind.

They had to have been powerful drugs.

“Thinking.”

Because the torturer would know that he could hear, and speak. Shopes, poor Ceelie, what had been done to him? Of all the atrocities he’d seen since he had come to the Domitt Prison, it was this unknown horror that preyed most upon his mind. There was a point to be made. Somewhere.

“Middling tall for a Nurail, about your height, about. Dark in his features. Scar on his arm, from the fire, don’t know how old he was. Couldn’t have been above the age of twenty-five years, Standard.”

“No, that won’t do.” Darmon felt a moment’s panic; but the tone of the torturer’s voice was light and humorous. And he was drugged. “That won’t do at all. I have Shopes Ban outside this room right now, and he looks nothing like the man you have described. You simply must do better than that, for me.”

This was a joke. It had to be. Yet if it wasn’t . . . “Ask him about me, then. You will find. The man he knows is different. Let’s bet.”

“What do you say?” The torturer sounded genuinely startled. Darmon wanted to laugh.

“There are more than one of us. Shopes Bans. Marne Cittropses. None of us either Ban or Cittrops. Couldn’t be. Not for months now.”

There was a warmth at the wall beside him, and it made him uneasy. A sound of shifting fabric; the torturer sitting down on the floor beside him. Why?

“Explain,”
the torturer suggested. And tipped the tumbler to let Darmon drink, once more. Darmon hated himself for being so grateful for a swallow of cool water: but hating himself did not change the fact of his gratitude, or its shocking depth. “What is your experience of this place, that you should say such a thing?”

It had been so long.

He had suffered, since.

And still the anguished outrage that he’d felt when he had realized that Nurail were to be burned before they were so much as dead rose up into his throat and nearly choked him.

If Koscuisko wanted to hear, he could tell things that would make Koscuisko heartily sorry that he had asked.

“There were people in the cart. Fallen on the way. Young Haps, dragged. By heels. Not dead. They took him to the furnace — ”

He started at the beginning, and went through the middle to the end, when he had been taken out of work-crew to the torture. It took a long time. Every so often the pain began to build within his shattered body, from his savaged joints, his lacerated skin, his broken hands and feet. Every so often the torturer pressed him in his recitation and fed him a drink of water. And more drugs, he suspected, because the pain would fade away till he could almost forget he even had a body.

Years.

Centuries.

Centuries upon centuries, but Darmon kept at it, trying to remember, trying to make sure each man who had been drowned screaming in the water at the bottom of the ditch would be numbered, every man who had been beaten with shockrods until he bled from the eyes and ears and nose would be remembered, every man who had been worked and worked and worked — and tossed into the grillwork of the gravel-crusher, or taken living or dead to the furnaces, when he could no longer work — was named and tallied up.

The names of the dead. The names of the overseers. The names of the guards. The names of the dogs that had been set on exhausted prisoners to provide some amusement for their captors once they could no longer shovel earth.

And ever and always, the soft clear voice of his torturer, asking questions, probing for details, calling out the threads that formed the braid that was the Domitt Prison. Ever and always, the furnaces, smoking in the background of his mind.

Why did Koscuisko want to know?

Why should he care?

Finally he was finished, Koscuisko was done with questions at last, giving him to drink of cool sweet water in grave silence. And there was no pain. Nothing like the pain that there had been. Nothing like the pain that there would be, once the torturer tired of this game, whatever it was, whyever he was playing it.

Darmon drank the water and thought hard.

“You understand, such evidence must be tested before it can be freely relied upon,”
the torturer said. “I have in mind a speak-serum, because you are very close to dead here and now, did you but know it. I will a dose of wake-keeper administer, excuse me for one moment to fetch it.”

To confirm evidence was all very well, though Koscuisko had not confirmed any previously offered evidence that way. If Koscuisko had obtained evidence. Perhaps he hadn’t. Darmon really didn’t know, any more, what he might have said; and what managed to conceal.

One thing he had decided, though, during the long day’s telling of his story. It was not the painease that decided him. It was because Koscuisko had heard the long list of the dead, and taken it into Evidence. Darmon had lived to the end of the Domitt Prison in at least that sense, howsoever small. He had survived for long enough to bear witness.

Longer than this he had no wish to live. So long as he could only get one final thing out of the way, before he died —

He remembered the first day, it had been two hundred years ago. Koscuisko had a book. Koscuisko was collecting weaves.

Darmon heard the torturer put the glass down, shifting to get up. And had sat beside him on the floor all of this time, leaning up against the wall, comforting him with the warmth of the proximity of another human body. Or a torturer’s body. It had still been a comfort, in the cold of the cell.

“One thing the more, torturer,”
Darmon said.

Koscuisko stilled beside him. “You have something else to say about my parents, and how closely it was that they were related?” Koscuisko replied, gently, so that Darmon knew that he was listening. Darmon thought about smiling. But it would take too much energy to smile.

“If thy mother had but known. How much she could have saved us all, by hanging herself.” But Koscuisko already knew that. “It’s something I only imagined. I think I may have heard a weaver, once. Take out your book and write it down. If I can remember the weaver said it was the Shallow Draft.”

The torturer had dealt honestly with him, through all the obscenity of his craft. Had not forced the weave from him in all this time, that Darmon could remember. Had not asked him any questions about —

“Are you sure of what you do?” Koscuisko asked, quietly.

“There’s no telling. The weaver may have gotten the threads mismatched. But it was a persuasive weave. I can remember it almost as well as if it were my own.”

Blame it on a weaver. That would do nicely. Scum of the earth; with power that transcended it. It was a weaver who had first coded the song in the pattern of a piece of cloth, a way of writing before there was writing among the Nurail.

All a man could properly sing was his mother’s weave, unless he was a weaver. A weaver could sing any weave; and make new weaves when the occasion warranted. Stricken with the calling from on high, destroyed and exalted at once; with the power to communicate any passion they felt to any Nurail within hearing distance, but powerless to control that communication —

Oh, had there been weavers here, to die in the Domitt Prison?

Koscuisko’s book was like a weaver, then, if it held a store of weaves. That made the torturer a weave-keeper, and the thought was as good a joke as Darmon could imagine. Weavers were depraved, though it was not their fault; it resulted from the divine disaster that marked them as separate and apart, outside the secure ward of decency.

And weave-keepers, having weavers in their charge, participated only in the degradation; and had no share of the respect a man could not but grant the force within a weaver. Oh, sympathy, yes, that. Koscuisko a weave-keeper . . .