“She wants you dead,” Scratch said, “because you lack the necessary qualities to be allowed to survive. You have the cruelty and the love of death that she thinks we’ll all need in the future to fulfill her plans. But there is a difference in the way you love pain. Your sadism is tempered by your egotism. When you kill or wound, it is to make yourself look better. You play the role of the hero offstage as well as on, always questing after the spotlight.”
“I don’t understand,” the prince said. He did not have the energy, yet, to rise up.
“The rest of us enjoy death and pain for the intrinsic value in suffering. We have no ulterior motives. We kill to kill and not to gain status. It is a cleaner lust than yours. It will lead to fewer failures in the future than your own egotism would.” He tossed the sword away, behind him, brushed his hands together. “Your egotism and need to accomplish taint everything you do. When you have sex, for instance, you sometimes spend as much energy giving your partner pleasure as the energy you spend to satisfy your own needs.”
“Isn’t that the proper thing?” the prince asked.
“Not for us. Not if we’re going to survive. Everything we do we must do for ourselves, for our own pleasure. If the group gains from our actions, it is merely a side product of our own gain. Pleasure. We seek pleasure anywhere it is given. And Bitty Belina has shown us that our kind can find no greater joy than delivering pain. She says that we have been made less than men, but that we are consequently more deadly and more capable than men. Except you, that is.”
“Me?”
“You”
“Please .
“Please?” the devil mocked. “Please?” He leaped upon the prince, his terrible fingers pressing the bones of the warrior’s body from their sockets.
His eyes were pure crimson.
There is a point where the mind renounces its own emotions, blanks them out and utterly refuses to operate again until the causal stimulus ceases to exist. The husband grieving for his dying wife might grow hysterical on notice of her death. But the hysteria cannot build forever, forcing him closer and closer to madness. There is a moment when it will become either catatonia or acceptance. The same applies to terror. Terror is, perhaps, the most difficult emotion the mind must deal with, for it affects the body more directly than either hate or love. It summons up adren alin, sets the heart to beating faster, sensitizes the ears and the eyes. If the mind were not able to short circuit to avoid the more unbearable degrees of terror, madness might very well be the result.
The idiot had existed with terror all his life, living in fear of forces he could neither define nor dismiss. It took him longer to blank out the horror that possessed him, for his tolerance was higher, but he managed it. Tranced, he continued to crawl hastily away from the region of the shafts where he had encountered the head, but he had little idea of what motivated him. Twice, aimlessness overtaking him, he stopped to investigate his circumstances. Both times, enough of the terror returned to spur him ahead faster than ever.
In time, the tunnel terminated in the wall of a darkened room. The grill had been removed to provide a swift exit. He knew there was a chamber beyond, for his fingers could identify wood paneling around the edges of the duct. Too, he could sense that there was a moderately large room with a low ceiling. The air was stuffy, the echo of his breathing flat and short.
He only wished there were more light to see what lay ahead.
He managed to turn around inside the thin walled tube until he could slide feet-first into the room. He cut his thumb on the flared rim of the air duct as he dropped to the floor, but it was a minor wound and only a physical one. He had long ago come to understand, despite ills slow wit, that the wounds of the body were those to be the least concerned about.