Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

I was ready to try anything, of course. I’d had Mask of Jaguar Night yelling and banging and calling for the hierophant through the tube, but he wouldn’t answer. He hadn’t even left a message on his machine. And we had a team of foundation thralls digging down to him, exposing a flight of stairs from the mul sanctuary to the chambers underneath that had been filled in eighty years ago. But since it had to be done silently so as not to alert him, it was going to take days. Anyway, even if we did get to them, the hierophant and his society would follow orders and kill themselves if we cut through to them without giving them the right pass sign.

I’d even suggested we try to strike a deal with Severed Right Hand, that maybe 9 Fanged Hummingbird could give us the key in exchange for a peaceful surrender. But as Hun Xoc and Alligator Root said, 9 Fanged Hummingbird might not even still be alive. Severed Right Hand may have gotten rid of him. And even if they did make a deal with us, why should we believe them? They’d probably give us the wrong passkey and the guy would be dead by the time we got in. Also, if we surrendered the city without trashing it, 9 Fanged Hummingbird might dig up his old tomb again, no matter how many boulders I’d piled above it, and my pickled body would be out in the cold. And time’s pretty cold. Anyway, “peaceful surrender” wasn’t really in these peoples’ vocabulary to begin with.

So finally I’d said they were right. I could hardly stand the frustration, though. Knowing right where the guy was and not being able to get to him. I could tell I was working on an ulcer, on top of everything else. And torturing 2JS wasn’t helping. I mean, not only hadn’t it gotten anywhere so far but it also wasn’t making me feel any better. I would have probably tortured him anyway, of course, after what he did to Koh. But now I had to be careful about it. I pulled the point of the skewer back, slid it onto the mastoid process, and, starting delicately, scraped it against the bone.

Despite himself, he moaned. I drew the point back and across more slowly, and he grunted more. Just like, shall we say, intimate relations, torture gives you that deep, instantaneous reaction from the other party. You have to look for rhythms and be responsive to whether this pain is on an escalating scale from the last one. It’s also like the intimacy of playing a good game against a clever opponent. They’re like three vertices on a triangle.

2JS’s face didn’t change, but the grunting peaked and then faded and I had to stop before he passed out from the pain. The teaser crept over, undid a padded cotton binding from around 2JS’s shoulder, and started massaging his neck. It was important that none of his limbs got numb. Come on, crack, I thought. You’re either going to tell me what the signal is or you’re going to memorize every square micron of a continent of pain nobody else has ever even visited. I’m going to make a skinful of chili peppers feel like Marena’s memory-foam pouf. I was learning. Like they showed in that test, almost anyone can enjoy being a torturer, as long as someone tells them it’s the thing to do and how to do it. It’s for the whole family. The teaser selected an enema bladder and squeezed a few drops into 2JS’s mouth. It was a triple-refined balche flavored with vanilla and honey, almost a cordial. 2JS swallowed involuntarily, even upside down, and I could tell he was getting the pleasure of it despite himself. The idea was to keep offering rewards and respites at odd times, to get him down to an animalistic level of stimulus and response. Torture around here was like a martial art in Asia, it was something to do stylishly, or sometimes comically. In the twenty-first century there were basically two conflicting raps about torture. On the one hand big organizations like the U.S. Army tell their commanders not to interrogate using torture because the subjects will tend to just tell you what they think you want to hear. The second rap is that no one ever holds out for long against professional interrogators. Personally I think they both have some truth to them. It’s true that the first thing a subject usually tells you is whatever he thinks you want to hear. But that lasts only as long as you can’t check his information to see whether it’s accurate. If you can check the information, the next thing is that the subject has to trust the interrogator, at least that if the story does turn out to be accurate, he’ll either stop torturing him or at least, for instance, give him a knife to kill himself.

Aside from that stuff, though, I think the second rap’s truer. As far as I know, whenever you hear about someone who’s supposedly held out against torture, it turns out it’s because the interrogators screwed up. Otherwise, in general you can forget it. Pain’s just too large.

But getting something specific out of a Maya blood was a different story. It was a touchy thing, even though my teaser was a ninth-level master and definitely knew what he was doing. 2 Jeweled Skull was beyond tough. He was getting weaker, and at this point he was just pure will. But I got the feeling he could easily die from pain overload several times before he’d tell me Thing One.

So we’d tried most of the usual non-pain-related tortures first. We’d slashed and desecrated his mats and planned murals of him losing the hipball game in various cowardly poses. We’d paid people to run around spreading rumors about him and then brought in people who’d heard them to make fun of him. We’d gotten together as many of his ancestors’ remains as we could find and let starving dogs teethe on them while he watched. But maybe he’d made his peace with that stuff already, because it didn’t have any effect. Maybe it was because he had so much of me in him, he had extra distance on the situation.

And we’d offered him bribes, of course. Men, money and an escape route. We’d offered to kill off some of his old enemies, almost anything he wanted within the realm of credibility. But he was just totally obdurate. Maybe he could tell we were in nearly as much trouble as he was. Or he didn’t trust any of us at all no matter how many witnesses we brought in. Or he was just set on cheating me of the pleasure of seeing him crack, cheating my world of its chances for the future.

So at the beginning of the second day we’d moved into the physical realm. Which is certainly a little different with somebody who likes pain, or at least is as comfortable as he was with it. But you have to remember there are different kinds of agony, there’s itchiness, there’s suffocation, and neither of those are exactly pain. And there are other things that it’s important for people to take care of that you can let them not take care of. Everybody doesn’t like something, and the trick is finding out what.

The teaser had put in the flesh eels first, to get them started, and then moved on to suffocation. But he gave it up after a couple of hours. Most people go over the edge into sheer animal panic after a couple of near smotherings, but 2JS had just held his breath and tried to burst the veins in his head. Next the teaser had roasted and peeled the skin off the bottom of 2JS’s feet, salted the flesh, and let his dog lick off the salt. That didn’t get anywhere either. He’d defleshed 2JS’s middle finger on each hand, taken off the phalange, and sharpened the metacarpus, crawling his pumice-stone file across it over and over, polishing it down to a fine point, and he’d force-fed him water and tied off his penis, and plugged his anus, and brought in a bowlful of deerflies to bite him, and on top of all that he’d fed him the adrenal glands and also a few shots of psilocybe hallucinogens, the local equivalent of truth drugs. But 2JS had just quivered and snuffled and drooled and his core had never broken. You had to admire the guy.