Context (24 page)

‘...
you know about the Grey Shadows?’ Woman’s voice.

Shadows...
Blood-red, and hazy.

Steel whip, singing.

‘No—’

Cracked against the backs of Tom’s
bare thighs.

Hood pulled halfway up, the
grey-clad man grinned, halted, waiting for relief to pulse through Tom, then
the realization of false hope ... A feint, to break the rhythm, before it sang
its hymn of blood and steel once more.

Crack.

‘The courier?’ Her elegant tones
swam in and out of Tom’s awareness. ‘Well?’

He shook his head, tried to speak
through swollen lips.

Don’t know.

‘Did it? Why?’ Insistent now.

‘Wha—?’

‘Strelsthorm killed herself. What
happened?’

Shook his head.

Tendril, tightening round his
throat.

‘Enough.’ And with exquisite
insouciance: ‘I’m bored.’

Squinting, he followed her
motion: heading for the fleshy wall... and it opened at her approach. She
walked through—glimpse of plain tunnel beyond—and then it sealed shut.

She wore grey, was hooded like
the torturer.

Toxin.

This was important and he must
remember it. Protective clothing, and wet glistening walls which were surely
pregnant with deadly neurotoxic fluids. There was more than heavy raw-flesh
membrane holding him trapped and helpless.

‘Hey, you know,’ the torturer
clapped Tom’s bare shoulder,
‘I’m
not bored. Not yet.’

He pulled open his tunic a
little, to show the stallion talisman hanging amid a forest of black wiry
curls. Then leaned close as a lover, displaying his twisted grin, his rotten
breath.

‘Thanks for the pretty present,
boy.’

And began to explore new avenues
of inventiveness.

Plotting
escape vectors: squinting, using the part of his mind which, after the Sorites
School’s relentless drilling, never stopped its rational analysis. He modelled
the wet toxic membrane as overlaid scalars of viscosity and toxicity, as a
first draft; then shifted it into a seven-dimensional phase-space of his own
imagining, searching for the minimax flaws which would allow him to—

A crack of pain.

Tom screamed, high-pitched, a
sound that was scarcely human, as a great tsunami wave of black awful suffering
crashed through his being, splitting his logosophical constructs apart.
Rational thoughts spun away, torn in fragments, twisting in the flood like
useless flotsam, never to be recovered or even glimpsed again.

He
tried to hold his bladder, but at some point he had to let go. Sudden urine
spattered off the floor, trickled down his bare legs, wet as blood and hot as
shame.

The torturer laughed, knowing a
psychological barrier had shattered beneath the stress.

‘Now I can use the brass needle,’
he said, ‘up into the urethra. Without getting pissed on, I mean.’

Throat restraint. Tom could not speak.

Some of the wet oily exudate,
leaking from the walls and dribbling thickly along the restraining tendrils,
finally reached Tom’s skin. Torched it, with a deep acidic burn.

‘No—’

It began again.

They
used their whips and needles: for hours, perhaps for days.
Thirty-six hours,
whispered some fragment of Tom’s disintegrating mind: a rational cog in a
shattered machine.

Dehydrated, weak, but no longer
aware of hunger or thirst: he—it—had become an organism overwhelmed by its most
basic chemical perception, an immense and pressing tropic need made worse by
the impossibility of movement.

Pain.

Immense pain. The need to escape;
the trapped despair.

And finally the moment which had
to come, when relentless pressure and implacable dissolution became too much to
bear.

‘Stop…’

Whip, song, blood.

‘I’ll…’

The soiled and stinking animal
which had once been Tom Corcorigan whimpered. It moaned, it mewled, and cried
at last:

‘I’ll tell...’

Woman,
bending close. Intimate yet impersonal, sure of her control over the cringing
mess before her.

Muldavika.
He recognized her now, despite
the hood. One of his first questioners, when he had been Tom Corcorigan, and
life was wonderful had he but known it.

Coughing, almost choking, he
could not speak.

Ring.

‘Damn it.’ She turned to the
torturer: ‘Relax the throat restraint. This
thing
is going nowhere.’

Silver ring,
glinting, and then he got it: the
control locus of the flesh-wall’s unfurling motion. It was big, the control
ring, fitting over the gauntlet, round her forefinger. That was what kept her
safe, granted her passage through the wet raw-flesh barrier, unharmed by acid
exudates or dripping neurotoxins designed to kill.

It moved towards him, that hand,
towards the fleshy restraint which burned his throat, and the ring’s proximity
caused the tendril to loosen: just a fraction, but that was all he needed.

Now.

She was close and his limbs were
enclosed but her face was centimetres from his, hood pushed back a little to
hear his words, and he snapped forwards and sank his teeth into her nose.

Bite.

It was animal desperation, and it
worked.

‘Ah! Get him—’

Bite hard.

Teeth clenched, he hung on.

A civilized human might have
found humour in the situation, but the half-sentient organism once called
Corcorigan was fighting for pure survival. He pinned his victim, sending every
last fraction of his strength into his jaws—
predator’s jaws—
and she
yelled for help, arms flailing.

Bite, and don’t let go.

Bright hot copper taste.

Then her flailing ring hand
struck the tendril which held Tom’s wrist. A loosening ...

Yes!

His hand slipped free.

Half-fist to the larynx, grab her
gauntlet—he twisted, felt the small bones snap, pushed her hand against the remaining
tendrils, and gave an incoherent grunt of triumph as they dropped away beneath
the control ring’s influence.

Danger...

The woman was on the floor, one
hand between her thighs and the other clutching her face, crimson blood
trickling through her fingers. But the torturer crouched before him, raising
his steel whip—then hesitated at the final moment, as though seeing something
in the creature which confronted him that gave life and substance to childhood
tales of Chaos demons, the eternal burning afterlife: pitiful attempts to
instil restraint and sympathy in the uncontrollable boy who became a man of
pain and power and degradation.

The unthinking Corcorigan-thing
was on him then, animal-fast and without restraint, raking the face—darkness
blossoming in eyes which had seen everything—then collapsing the throat, and
the torturer’s twisted life was done.

It burns.

Every barefooted step Tom took
upon the red flesh-floor coated his feet with hot stinging acid. A thinking
being would have howled, but he was something primeval now: crouched prey,
fleeing from the hunt, with death so close he could taste it.