Mirror Dance

Chapter Twenty-Four

Mark groaned. Bright prickles of pain shot through a dark nausea.

“You gonna give him a dose of synergine?” said a voice, surprised. “I didn’t get the idea the Baron wanted this one handled gently.”

“You want to clean up the flyer if he vomits his breakfast?” rumbled another voice.

“Ah.”

“The Baron will do his own handling. He just specified he wanted him alive. Which he is.”

A hypospray hissed.

“Poor sod,” said the first voice reflectively.

Thanks to the synergine, Mark began to recover from the stunner hit. He didn’t know how much time and space lay between him and the Durona Clinic; they’d changed vehicles at least three times after he’d regained consciousness, once to something bigger and faster than an aircar. They stopped at some location, and he and the troopers all went through a decontamination chamber. The anonymously-dressed troopers went their way, and he was given over to two other guards, big flat-faced men in black trousers and red tunics.

House Ryoval’s colors. Oh.

They laid him facedown, hands and feet bound, in the back of a lightflyer. The gray clouds, darkening toward evening, gave no clue as to the direction they were heading.

Miles is alive. The relief of that fact was so intense, he smiled in elation even with his face squashed into the sticky plastic seat. What a joyful sight the skinny little bugger had been! Upright and breathing. He’d almost wept. What he’d done, was undone. He could really be Lord Mark, now. All my sins are taken from me.

Almost. He prayed that Durona doctor had spoken straight about Miles still recovering. Miles’s eyes had been frighteningly bewildered. And he hadn’t recognized Quinn, which must have nearly slain her. You’ll get better. We’ll get you home, and you’ll get better. He’d haul Miles home and everything would be all right again, better than all right. It would be wonderful.

As soon as that idiot Ryoval had his delusions straightened around. Mark was ready to gut the man outright for screwing up his family reunion. Imp Sec will handle him.

They entered an underground parking garage without his getting a glimpse of the exterior of their destination. The two guards hauled him roughly to his feet, and released his legs, which twitched and tingled. They passed through an electronic security chamber, after which his clothing was taken from him. They marched him through the … facility. It wasn’t a prison. It wasn’t one of House Ryoval’s famous bordellos. The air bore a faint, unsettling medical tang. The place was far too utilitarian to be where surgical body-sculpture was done on patrons. It was too secret and secure to be where slaves were done to order, where humans were made into things not humanly possible. It wasn’t very large. There were no windows. Underground? Where the hell am I?

He would not panic. He entertained himself with a brief vision of what Ryoval might do to his own troopers, once he discovered they’d snatched the wrong twin. If Ryoval did not realize the mistake at the very first sight of him, he toyed with the idea of concealing his identity for a while. Let Miles and the Dendarii get a bigger head-start. They had not been taken; they were free. 7 found him! They must come for him. And if not them, ImpSec. ImpSec could not be more than a week behind him, and closing fast. I’ve won, godammit, I’ve won!

His head was still spinning with a bizarre mixture of elation and terror when the guards delivered him to Ryoval’s presence. It was a luxurious office, or study; the Baron evidently kept private quarters here, for he glimpsed a living room beyond an archway. Mark had no trouble recognizing Ryoval. He’d seen him in the vid recording from the Ariel’s first mission here. The conversation where he’d threatened to have Admiral Naismith’s severed head encased in plastic for a wall-hanging. In another man, this might be dismissed as hyperbole, but Mark had the uneasy feeling Ryoval had meant it literally. Ryoval was leaning half-seated on his comconsole desk. He had shining dark hair arranged in elaborate bands, a high-bridged nose, and smooth skin. Strong and youthful, for a centenarian.

He’s wearing a clone. Mark’s smile became vulpine. He hoped Ryoval would not mistake his post-stun tremula for fear.

The guards sat him in a chair and fastened him down with metal bands to his wrists. “Wait outside,” the Baron instructed them. “It won’t be long.” They exited.

Ryoval’s hands were trembling slightly. The skin of his bronzed face was faintly moist. When he looked up and smiled back at Mark, his eyes seemed alight with some internal glow, the look of a man so filled with the visions inside his head, he scarcely saw the present reality. Mark was almost too enraged to care. Clone-consumer!

“Admiral,” Ryoval breathed happily. “I promised you we would meet again. As inevitably as fate.” He looked Mark up and down; his dark brows rose. “You’ve put weight on, the last four years.”

“Good living,” Mark snarled, uncomfortably reminded of his nakedness. For all he’d loathed the Dendarii uniform, it had actually made him look rather good. Quinn had personally re-tailored it for this masquerade, and he wished for it back. Presumably it had been what had fooled Ryoval’s troopers, though, in that moment of heroic temporary insanity.

“I’m so glad you are alive. At first I’d hoped for your unpleasant death in one of your little combats, but upon reflection I actually began to pray for your survival. I’ve had four years to plan this meeting. Revising and refining. I’d have hated for you to miss your appointment.”

Ryoval did not recognize him as not-Naismith. Ryoval was barely seeing him at all. He seemed to be looking through him. The Baron began to stride up and down in front of him, pouring out his plans like a nervous lover, elaborate plans for vengeance that ranged from the obscene to the insane to the impossible.

It could be worse. Ryoval could be making these threats right now to that thin little, vague-eyed, bewildered cryo-amnesic, who would not know even who he was, let alone why these things should be happening to him. The thought sickened Mark. Yeah. Better me than him, right now. No shit.

He means to terrorize you. It’s only words. What was it the Count had said? Don’t sell yourself to your enemy in advance, in your mind… .

Hell, Ryoval wasn’t even his enemy. All these gaudy scenarios had been tailored for Miles. No, not even for Miles. For Admiral Naismith, a man who didn’t exist. Ryoval chased a ghost, a chimera.

Ryoval stopped beside him, interrupting his whispered tirade. Curiously, he ran a moist hand down Mark’s body, fingers curving in precise anatomical tracing of the muscles hidden beneath the layer of fat. “Do you know,” he breathed, “I’d planned to have you starved.

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.

The force-feedings turned out to be on a schedule of every three hours. It was the only clock he had, or he would have thought time had stopped. He had surely entered eternity.

He’d always thought being skinned alive was something done with sharp knives. Or dull ones. Ryoval’s technicians did it chemically, spraying carefully selected areas of his body with an aerosol. They wore gloves, masks, protective clothing; he tried, but failed, to grab off a mask and let one share what they administered. He cursed his littleness, and cried, and watched his skin bubble up and drip away. The chemical was not a caustic, but rather some strange enzyme; his nerves were left horribly intact, exposed. Touching anything, or being touched, was agony after that, especially the pressure of sitting or lying down. He stood in the little closet-cell, shifting from foot to foot, touching nothing, for hours, till his shaking legs finally gave way.

It was all happening so fast. Where the hell was everybody? How long had he been here? A day?

So. I have survived one day. Therefore, I can survive another one-day. It couldn’t be worse. It could only be more.

He sat, and rocked, mind half whited-out with pain. And rage. Especially rage. From the moment of the first force-feeding, it hadn’t been Naismith’s war any more. This was personal now, between Ryoval and him. But not personal enough. He’d never been alone with Ryoval. He’d always been outnumbered, outweighed, passed from one set of bindings to another. Admiral Naismith was being treated as a fairly dangerous little prick, even now. That wouldn’t do.

He would have told them everything, all about Lord Mark, and Miles, and the Count, and the Countess, and Barrayar. And Kareen. But the force-feedings had stopped his mouth, and the drug had stripped him of language, and the other things had kept him too busy screaming. It was all Ryoval’s fault. The man watched. But he didn’t listen.

I wanted to be Lord Mark. I just wanted to be Lord Mark. Was that so bad? He still wanted to be Lord Mark. He’d almost had it, brushing his grasp. Ripped away. He wept for it, hot tears splashing like molten lead on his not-skin. He could feel Lord Mark slipping from him, racked apart, buried alive. Disintegrating. I just wanted to be human. Screwed up again.