Grailstone Gambit

His gaze narrowed, Grant asked, “How can you do that?”

Esau’s shoulders jerked in what appeared to be a nervous tic but was an attempt to emulate a shrug. “By a variety of measures. The drugs help, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But I have the ability to stimulate certain parts of his brain so I can flood his nervous system with endorphins.” Esau paused for a handful of thoughtful seconds, then asked, “Do you know what those are?”

Grant nodded. “I do.”

“Then you know that when the nervous system is exposed to endorphins, a biochemical reaction takes place. The reasoning parts of the brain are inhibited.”

“And therefore easy to control,” Grant interjected.

Esau’s smile widened. “It doesn’t work the same for everybody. It helps if you’re a self-indulgent voluptuary in the first place, like Shuma.”

“I gathered that,” Grant replied dryly. “So you’re really the boss and Shuma is just the front man?”

“Something like that. Clever, wouldn’t you say?”

Grant nodded in grudging agreement. “I suppose so…Roamers would never take orders from a crippled little pissant like you.”

Esau’s lips tightened and he stepped closer to Grant, staring at him unblinkingly, as if challenging him to look away. Grant did not. “Are there any further questions?”

“Plenty of them, but first, where is the Wright woman?”

Esau’s brow acquired a line of concentration. “Oh, I do apologize. I should have reunited you much sooner. She can actually answer most of your other questions.”

“You don’t even know what they are.”

In a voice barely above a whisper, Esau stated, “You would ask me to reconsider leading the Survivalist Outland Brigade and join with Cerberus in an alliance against these so-called overlords…whatever they are.”

Grant stirred uneasily. “How do you know that?”

“Because that is what the Wright woman asked.”

“And what did you tell her?”

Esau turned toward Shuma. On the right side of his massive head, a thick vein pulsed. Shuma lumbered forward, grasped the back of Grant’s chair and lifted it clear of the floor without apparent effort. He turned it and set it down at a different angle.

Peering through the gloom, Grant saw heavy wooden beams supporting the ceiling. Four chains dangled from a block-and-tackle assembly attached to the rafters. The ends of the chains were tipped with sharp meat hooks of the type used in slaughterhouses.

From two of the hooks hung a naked body, gutted like the carcass of a pig he had seen once since in a butcher’s shop. One of the big hooks had been inserted through the underside of the chin, and the tip of another pierced the left armpit.

Through the fog of horror clouding his vision, Grant looked into the glassy, dead eyes of Wright.

Teeth clenched, a wordless snarl of rage vibrating in his throat, Grant hurled himself against his bonds, rocking the chair back and forth, hoping to tip it over on Esau. Shuma’s huge hands fell onto his shoulders, pressing him down, holding him motionless.

Esau lurched into view on his crutches, staring levelly into Grant’s eyes. “She told me quite a bit, but not everything. You’ll do that for me, Mr. Grant.”

“Goddamn you to Hell, you little mutie piece of shit.” His voice was so guttural with fury it sounded more like the growl of an animal.

Esau leaned forward, stroking the side of Grant’s face with tiny baby fingers. “God has done enough to me already, Mr. Grant. I do the damning to Hell here.”

His unnaturally large eyes suddenly seemed to increase in size, as if they were squirming from their sockets. Tiny red flames flickered within the pupils. Grant sensed rather than heard a multitude of tiny voices, all chittering like faraway crickets. The sound slid along the edges of his awareness, and terror pushed away his rage. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.

A nova of pain exploded within the walls of his skull and he heard himself crying out, as from a million miles away. His body spasmed, thrashed. He felt his mind being pulled into a whirlpool of dark energy that sucked his blood and bones and soul out through the pores of his skin, and turned them to dust.

He whirled, orbiting every instant of his life, spiraling through memories of joy, of loss, of grief, of victory and defeat. He spun through a sea of images, and no matter how hard he tried to stop them from flying to the forefront of his mind, he knew Esau saw them, rifled through them, memorized them.

The most intense pain gradually abated but didn’t fade completely. There was a ringing in his ears and numbness in his extremities. He felt blood inching from his right nostril and flowing over his lips. He breathed shallowly because of the bile burning in his throat. Then he doubled over and vomited between his legs. He felt as if a violent tornado had ripped a mile-wide path of destruction through the field of his mind.

Slowly raising his head, he squinted through his watering, blurred eyes toward Esau. The vein on the little man’s temple pulsed violently as if a worm squirmed just beneath the thin layer of flesh. The network of broken blood vessels on his forehead appeared to be even more livid. His arms trembled as if he was having difficulty maintaining his balance on the crutches.

“Interesting,” he said in a faint, tremulous voice. “Far more interesting than I thought it would be. I’m going to keep you alive a while longer, Mr. Grant…at least until your friends come to rescue you, an eventuality of which you seem certain. But it wouldn’t be so if our situations were reversed.”

A small, bronze-hued curve of metal clinked to the floor at Grant’s feet. He recognized it as the Commtact.

“You are quite isolated, my large friend,” Esau went on. “You live only at my sufferance and my continuing interest in your memories. Many of them are intriguing to the point of fascination.

“Shuma, I think he needs some fresh air. Take him to the cage.”

Chapter 5

A cold rain pattered down through the leaves that formed a loose canopy over the top of the cage. Grant shivered in the early-morning chill, but he turned his face upward so the raindrops fell into his open, as-dry-as-dust mouth.

The water soothed the cuts on his lips and cheek lining and eased his thirst somewhat. When the drizzle intensified, his torn T-shirt was quickly soaked through and plastered to his skin.

“Well, here I am,” he rasped, a little dismayed by how hoarse and weak his voice sounded.

Grant retained little memory of being half dragged, half carried to the cage by Shuma. His arms and legs refused to function, the muscles feeling as if they were filled with half-frozen mud. He wasn’t sure if the impaired movement was due to his being in a chair or an aftereffect of Esau’s psionic rape.

He tried to dismiss the concept, but he felt violated. Esau had virtually torn open his mind and ransacked its contents. Although he didn’t know exactly how the little man had accomplished it, he knew with a grim certainty there would be a final reckoning.

When the sun came up and filtered feebly through the interwoven branches, he moved carefully to the entry gate of the cage. Sliding his hands between the wooden slats, his fingers explored the iron padlock. He briefly considered ripping loose a splinter of wood and using it to pick the lock, but he discarded the idea when he saw a pair of armed men approaching him.

Grizzled, bearded Roamers, they didn’t warn him not to touch the lock. All they did was glare, and he withdrew his hands.

Biting back a profanity, Grant sat down and listened to the camp stirring around him, watching dim shapes hustle back and forth between shacks and cook fires. He grew cold in his wet clothes, but he maintained his stoic exposure. As a Magistrate, he had been taught techniques to manage pain and discomfort, but he wasn’t a Mag anymore. He realized with bleak humor that he had experienced more periods of physical suffering in the five years since his exile than during his entire two decades as a hard-contact Magistrate.

In his first few years as a Mag, as he rose up the ranks, he had undergone periodic training exercises to toughen him and increase his stamina, and that included exposure to extremes of temperature.

Even now he recalled those exercises with loathing. They were days of pure, unadulterated torture, of walking naked in a desert or clambering among rocky mountains, waiting for the commander to ration out just enough food and water to survive from one dawn to one sunset.

But Grant learned to live by instinct, reflex and training, to focus solely on putting one foot in front of the other and slogging on. Those of his fellow Mags who didn’t learn didn’t survive.

Despite the twinges of protest from his knee joints, Grant sat cross-legged and stared at a white spot on the floor of the cage, where the bark had peeled back from the wooden slat. He tried to relax his neck and shoulder muscles, working his way down to his bare, cold toes. He concentrated on regulating his respiration, putting himself into a quasihypnotic state.

He was trying to achieve the “Mag mind,” a technique that emptied his consciousness of all nonessentials and allowed his instincts to rise to the fore. He had been trained to do it while serving the Magistrate Division of Cobaltville. He used it for handling pain and dealing with exhaustion. Brigid Baptiste had referred to it as a form of yoga, but Grant still thought of the process as Mag mind.