Iain Banks - The Algebraist

Of late, though, the Archimandrite had had a new playmate to amuse himself with, and he would occasionally visit the chamber some levels below his study where the nameless would-be assassin whose own teeth were slowly killing him was held.

The assassin, a big, powerful-looking, leoninely human male, had been sent without weapons save for his specially sharpened teeth, with which, it had obviously been hoped by whoever had sent him, he could bite out the Archimandrite’s throat. This he had attempted to do, a half-year earlier at a ceremonial dinner held here in the clifftop palace in honour of the System President (a strictly honorary post Luseferous always made sure was filled by somebody of advanced age and retreating faculties). The would-be assassin had only failed to accomplish this task thanks to the Archimandrite’s near-paranoid forethought and intense — and largely secret — personal security.

The failed assassin had been both routinely, if savagely, tortured and then very carefully questioned under the influences of entire suites of drugs and electro-biological agents, but had given nothing useful away. Patently he had been equally carefully wiped of any knowledge that might incriminate whoever had sent him, by interrogational technicians at least as capable as those whom the Archimandrite commanded. His controllers had not even bothered to implant false memories incriminating anybody close to the Court and the Archimandrite, as was common in such cases.

Luseferous, who was that most deplorable of beings, a psychopathic sadist with a fertile imagination, had decreed that the final punishment of the assassin should be that his own teeth — the weapons he had been sent with, after all — should bring about his death. Accordingly, his four canine teeth had been removed, bioengineered to become tusks which would grow without ceasing, and reinserted. These great finger-thick fangs had erupted out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw, punc- turing the flesh of his lips, and had continued their remorseless growth. The lower set curved up and over his head and, after a few months’ worth of extension, came to touch his scalp near the top of his head, while the upper set grew in a scimitar-like paired sweep beneath his neck, taking about the same time to meet the skin near the base of his throat.

Genetically altered not to stop growing even when they encountered such resistance, both sets of teeth then started to enter the assassin’s body, one pair slowly forcing themselves through the bony plates of the man’s skull, the other set entering rather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower neck. The tusks digging into the assassin’s neck caused great pain but were not immediately life-threatening; left to themselves they would reappear from the rear of his neck in due course. The fangs burrowing through his skull and into his brain were the ones which would shortly, and agonisingly, kill him, perhaps in as little as another month or so.

The unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber with bands and shackles of thick stainless iron, his nutrition and bodily functions catered for by various tubes and implants. His mouth had also been sewn up, like that of Stinausin. For the first few months of his captivity the assassin’s eyes had followed Luseferous around the chamber with a fierce, accusatory look that the Archimandrite eventually grew to find annoying, and so he’d had the man’s eyes stitched shut too.

The fellow’s ears and mind still worked, however Luseferous had been assured — and sometimes it amused him to come down and see for himself the progress that the teeth were making into the creature’s body. On such occasions, having what one might term a captive — yet necessarily discreet — audience, he sometimes liked to talk to the failed assassin.

“Good day,” Luseferous said pleasantly as the lift door rumbled shut behind him. The chamber deep below the study was what the Archimandrite thought of as his den. Here, as well as the nameless assassin, he kept assorted souvenirs of old campaigns, booty from his many victories, items of high art looted from a dozen different stellar systems, a collection of weapons both ceremonial and high-power, various caged or tanked creatures, and the mounted, profoundly dead heads of all those major enemies and adversaries whose end had not been so complete as to reduce their mortal remains to radiation, dust, slime or unidentifiable strips of flesh and shards of bone (or the alien equivalents thereof).

Luseferous crossed to a deep, dry tank part-set into the floor and looked in at the Recondite Splicer lying coiled and still on its floor. He slipped a thick elbow glove onto his arm, reached into a large pot standing on the broad, waist-high parapet of the tank and dropped a handful of fat black trunk-leeches into the tank.

“And how are you? Are you keeping well? Hmm?” he asked.

An observer would have been unsure whether the Archimandrite was talking to the human male pinned to the wall, the Recondite Splicer — now no longer still, but raising its blind, glistening brown head, sniffing the air while its long, segmented body twitched with anticipation — or indeed the trunk-leeches, thudding one by one onto the mossy floor of the tank and immediately flexing their way with a sort of sine-wave motion across the surface towards the nearest corner, as far away from the Recondite Splicer as it was possible to get. The brown mass of the Splicer began to shuffle massively towards them and they started trying to climb the sheer glass sides of the tank, climbing over each other and slipping back down as soon as they tried to haul themselves up.

Luseferous peeled the elbow glove off and looked round the vaulted, subtly lit space. The chamber was a comfortable, quiet sort of place set well within the cliff, with no windows or light shafts, and he felt safe and relaxed here. He looked over at the long, tawny shape that was the suspended body of the assassin and said, “Nowhere’s quite as nice as home, eh, is it?” The Archimandrite even smiled, though there was nobody to smile at.

There was a rasping noise and a heavy thump from inside the tank, followed by some almost inaudibly high keening sounds. Luseferous turned to watch the Recondite Splicer tear the giant leeches apart and eat them, violently shaking its great patchily brown head and tossing some bits of slimy black flesh all the way out of the tank. Once it had thrown a still-alive leech up and out of the tank and nearly hit the Archimandrite with it; Luseferous had chased the injured leech round the chamber with a shear-sword, cleaving deep slivers out of the dark red granite floor as he hacked and sliced at the creature.

When the show in the tank was over, the Archimandrite turned back to the assassin. He put the elbow glove back on, picked another trunk-leech from the pot and strolled over to the man attached to the wall. “Do you remember home, sir assassin?” he asked as he approached. “Is there any memory of it in your head at all, hmm? Home, mother, friends?” He stopped in front of the man. “Any of that stuff at all?” He waved the leech’s moist, seeking snout in front of the assassin’s face as he spoke. They sensed each other, the cold, writhing creature in the Archimandrite’s hand stretching out to try to fasten itself to the man’s face, the man sucking breath through his nostrils and turning his head as far as it would go, seeming to try and shrink back into the wall behind (this would not be the first time the assassin had been introduced to a trunk-leech). The tusks digging into his chest prevented him from moving his head very far.

Luseferous followed the movements of the man’s head with the leech, keeping it in front of his lightly furred, leonine face, letting him smell the straining, quivering mass.