‘She’d been raped I suppose,’ Tasmin said, sickness boiling in his stomach.
‘No,’ she choked. ‘Nothing so normal as that. Geroan isn’t interested in sex. He isn’t even interested in dominance, which is what most rape is anyhow. No, the protector said Geroan has something wrong with his nervous system. He can’t feel pain, so it fascinates him. Watching people in pain is the only pleasure he has….’
Donatella shuddered into gulping sobs, and he took her in his arms, pulling his blanket over them both. There was a sound, and they tensed, listening. It came again. Far down the trail, the way they had come, a voice shouting. Had they found the mules? He shivered. Why else would they call out?
Following that sound, he felt only fear, her fear, shared, her trembling and his, their bodies cold under the hasty covering, their senses strained for the first breath of sound that would presage the arrival of the adversary, the enemy, perhaps Geroan, who would use them for an arcane and terrible pleasure, perhaps someone else merely seeking their deaths and not particular about how these deaths were to be brought about.
He was caught in the story she had told about Spider Geroan. What did such a man think or feel, or remember? Did he humiliate and degrade his victims so he could come to despise them, making murder seem a deserved end rather than a despicable corruption? Did he feel anything about them? Did he remember at all? Was his pleasure physical? Was it transitory? Was there some quiet orgasm of the mind that substituted for pleasure of the senses? Since he could not feel pain, could he feel anything? How did one communicate with someone who could not feel at all?
It would be, he thought, like being killed slowly by a machine. Pleading would mean nothing. The device would be programmed to inflict pain, and it would not care what the victim said or did.
Tasmin clenched his teeth tight to keep from shaking. He had always feared pain. The prospect of pain filled him with horror. He imagined blood, wounds, deep intrusions into organs and bone. Bile filled his throat and he gulped, then blanked it out. His way of dealing with the horror was not to think of it. He had seen students, mad with fear of the Presences, run directly toward them, and he wondered what it would take to break his own mind and make him behave in such a way. He had learned to blank out such thoughts, and he did so now, erasing them, thinking only of darkness and quiet.
Donatella was remembering the body of her friend and was wondering whether she had the courage to take her own life before she fell into Geroan’s hands. Her knife was under the mattress, where she could reach it. She was not sure reaching it would be enough. She clung to Tasmin, thinking of begging him to help her, not let her be taken by that man. The terror built into a spasm of shaking, and then ebbed away, leaving her limp.
Her face was buried in his shoulder, against his naked skin where his shirt had come unfastened under his Tripsinger’s cloak. Her cheek was on his chest, her breath moving softly into the cleft of his arm, where the hairs quivered, as in a tiny wind.
The tickling breath came into the blankness Tasmin had evoked, came as a recollection, a summer hillside, grass beneath him, Jubal trees along the ridge, himself lying with his arms around Celcy and the warm, moist breeze of summer cooling the pits of his shoulders. Celcy’s head was on his chest, her lips on his skin. Now, as then, he felt the hairs moving in a dance of their own and responded to the diminutive titillation as he had then, by turning a little, moving her body more solidly onto his own, moving his arm more closely around her. One of her legs fell between his, a sudden, unexpectedly erotic pressure, and he raised his own leg in surprise, bringing it into intimate contact with her.
She gasped, becoming very still, and he felt the quick heat between them. They breathed together, her lips opening on his skin, her hand moving between them to pull her shirt away. Then the skin of her breasts was naked against his own, her nipples brushing his chest as she thrust herself up from him to tug at the belt around her waist.
He felt a ripple across his belly as the silken belt that had held her full trousers tight around her slender form pulled free. He saw the sash through half closed eyes, a ribbon of scarlet. Then there was nothing between his leg and the furry mound of her groin except the fabric of his trousers.
Blood beat in his ears. He shut his eyes, not wanting to think or see, wishing he could shut his ears as well and let the surging feeling wash over him in silent darkness, with only the sunlit meadow filling all the space around him. She made no sound, merely raised away from him a little so he
