eighteenth.'
'I'd have guessed the fourteenth. Or the twentieth.'
'In a day or two, I shall teach you not to interrupt. Where was I? Ah, yes. Well, in my reading, I came upon the loveliest scene, where a certain great lady,' he raised the wineglass to her in a toast, 'was raped by a diseased servant, on the orders of his master. Very piquant. Venereal disease is, alas, a thing of the past. But I am able to command a diseased servant, although his disease is mental rather than physical. A real, bona fide, paranoid schizophrenic.'
'Like master, like man,' she shot at random. I cannot keep this up much longer; my heart shall fail me soon …
This won a rather sour smile. 'He hears voices, you know, like Joan of Arc, except that he tells me they are demons, not saints. He has visual hallucinations, too, on occasion. And he's a very large man. I've used him before, many times. He's not the sort of fellow who finds it easy to, er, attract women.'
There was a timely knock on the door, and Vorrutyer went to it. 'Ah, come in, Sergeant. I was just talking about you.'
'Bothari,' she breathed. Ducking his head through the door came the tall frame and familiar borzoi face of Vorkosigan's soldier. How, how could he have hit on her personal nightmare? A kaleidoscope of images spun through her memory: a dappled wood, the crackle of disruptors, the faces of the dead and the half-dead, a looming shape like the shadow of death.
She focused on the present reality. Would he recognize her? His eyes had not yet touched her; they were fixed on Vorrutyer. Too close together, those eyes, and not quite on the same level. They gave his face an unusual degree of asymmetry that added much to his remarkable ugliness.
Her boiling imagination lurched to his body. His body—it was all wrong, somehow, hunched in his black uniform, not like the straight figure she had last seen demanding pride of place from Vorkosigan. Wrong, wrong, terribly wrong. A head taller than Vorrutyer, yet he seemed almost to creep before his master. His spine was coiled with tension as he glowered down at his—torturer? What, she wondered, might a mind molester like Vorrutyer do with the material presented by Bothari? God, Vorrutyer, do you imagine, in your amoral flashy freakiness, in your monstrous vanity, that you control this elemental? And you dare play games with that sullen madness in his eyes? Her thoughts kept time with her racing pulse. There are two victims in this room. There are two victims in this room. There are two …
'There you go, Sergeant.' Vorrutyer hooked a thumb over his shoulder at Cordelia, spread-eagled on the bed. 'Rape me this woman.' He pulled up a chair and prepared to watch, closely and gleefully. 'Go on, go on.'
Bothari, face as unreadable as ever, unfastened his trousers and approached the foot of the bed. He looked at her for the first time.
'Any last words, 'Captain' Naismith?' Vorrutyer inquired sarcastically. 'Or have you finally run out of words?'
She stared at Bothari, shaken by a pity almost like love. He seemed nearly in a trance, lust without pleasure, anticipation without hope. Poor sod, she thought, what a mess they've made of you. No longer fencing for points, she searched her heart for words not for Vorrutyer but for Bothari. Some healing words—I would not add to his madness … The air of the room seemed clammy cold, and she shivered, feeling unutterably weary, resistless, and sad. He crouched over her, heavy and dark as lead, making the bed creak.
'I believe,' she said slowly at last, 'that the tormented are very close to God. I'm sorry, Sergeant.'
He stared at her, his face a foot from hers, for so long she wondered if he'd heard her. His breath was not good, but she did not flinch. Then, to her astonishment, he stood up and refastened his pants, trembling slightly.
'No, sir,' he said in his bass monotone.
'What?' Vorrutyer sat up, amazed. 'Why not?' he demanded.
The Sergeant groped for words. 'She's Commodore Vorkosigan's prisoner. Sir.'
Vorrutyer stared, first puzzled, then illuminated. 'So you're Vorkosigan's Betan!' His cool amusement evaporated at the name, with a hiss like a drop of water on a red-hot coil.
Vorkosigan's Betan? A brief hope flared within her, that Vorkosigan's name might be a password to safety, but it died. The chance of this creature being any kind of a friend of his was surely something well under zero. He was looking now not at her, but through her, like a window on some more wonderful view. Vorkosigan's Betan?
'I've got that stiff-necked puritan son-of-a-bitch by the balls now,' he breathed fiercely. 'This could be even better than the day I told him about his wife.' The expression on his face was strange and startling, the mask of suavity seeming to melt, and run off in patches. It was like stumbling suddenly over the center of a caldera. He seemed to remember the mask, and clutched its pieces around him, half-effectually.
'Do you know, you have quite overwhelmed me. The possibilities you present—eighteen years were not too long to wait for so ideal a revenge. A woman soldier. Ha! He probably thought you the ideal solution to our mutual —difficulty. My perfect warrior, my dear hypocrite, Aral. You have much to learn of him, I wager. But do you know, I somehow feel quite certain he hasn't mentioned me to you.'
'Not by name,' she agreed. 'Possibly by category.'
'And what category was that?'
'I believe the term he used was 'scum of the service.''
He grinned sourly. 'I shouldn't recommend name-calling to a woman in your position.'
'Oh, you embrace the category, then?' Her response was automatic, but her heart was shrinking within her, leaving an echoing hollowness. What is Vorkosigan doing in the center of this one's madness? His eyes look like Bothari's, now …
His smile tightened. 'I've embraced a number of things in my time. Not least of which was your puritan lover. Let your imagination dwell on that a while, my dear, my sweet, my pet. You'd scarcely believe it to meet him now, but he was quite a merry widower, before he gave himself over so irritatingly to these random outbreaks of righteousness.' He laughed.
'Your skin is very white. Has he touched it—so?' He ran one fingernail up the inside of her arm, and she shuddered. 'And your hair. I am quite certain he must be fascinated by that twining hair. So fine, and such an unusual color.' He twisted a strand gently between his fingers. 'I must think what can be done with that hair. One might remove the scalp entirely, of course, but there must be something more creative yet. Perhaps I'll take a bit with me, and take it out and play with it, quite casually, at the Staff meeting. Let it slip silkily through my fingers— see how long it takes to lock his attention on it. Feed the doubt, and the growing fear, with, oh, one or two casual remarks. I wonder how much it would take to start him scrambling those annoyingly perfect reports of his—ha! Then send him off for about a week of detached duty, still wondering, still in doubt …'
He picked up the jeweled knife and sawed off a thick strand, to coil up and place carefully in his breast pocket, smiling down at her the while. 'One must be careful, of course, not to goad him quite into violence—he becomes so tediously unmanageable—' he ran one finger in an L-shaped motion across the left side of his chin in the exact position of Vorkosigan's scar. 'Much easier to start than stop. Although he's become remarkably temperate of late. Your influence, my pet? Or is he simply growing old?'
He tossed the knife carelessly back on the bedside table, then rubbed his hands together, laughed out loud, and draped himself beside her to murmur lovingly in her ear. 'And after Escobar, when we need no longer regard the Emperor's watchdog, there will be no limit to what I can do. So many choices …' He gave vent to a stream of plans for torturing Vorkosigan through her, glistening with obscene detail. He was taut with his vision, his face pale and moist.
'You can't possibly get away with anything like that,' she said faintly. There was fear in her face now, and tears, running down from the corners of her eyes in iridescent trails to wet the tendrils of hair around her ears, but he was scarcely interested. She had believed she had fallen into the deepest possible pit of fear, but now that floor opened beneath her and she fell again, endlessly, turning in the air.
Some measure of control seemed to return to him, and he walked around the foot of the bed, looking at her. 'Well. How very refreshing. Do you know, I am quite energized. I believe I shall do it myself, after all. You should be glad. I'm much better looking than Bothari.'
'Not to me.'
He dropped his trousers and prepared to climb on her. 'Do you forgive me too, sweetheart?'
