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“For I am Rokur Gepta, and I’m going to torture you until you beg for death!”

• XVI •

“SABACC!”

Lando Calrissian slapped down the cards in triumph—a triumph that turned to embarrassed agony when he saw he’d hesitated too long between shouting out his victory and sealing it in the stasis field of the gaming table.

In the brief interval between the acts, his perfect twenty-three had transmuted itself into a losing hand.

The seventeen-year-old would-be professional gambler writhed inwardly. He’d practically begged for a chance to join the game in the back room of the local saloon. He’d lied to his family, ducked out on school, broken or severely bent several ordinances about minors and environments such as the one he found himself in now.

He wished that he was home in bed. He wished that he was home under his bed. He wished he’d never seen a deck of card-chips in his life, never practiced with them, never imagined himself a dashing rogue and scoundrel.

It was all a dream, a foolish, idiotic dream.

“All is illusion, Captain Calrissian!”

Lando shook his head. The back room of the sleazy hometown saloon had vanished, and with it the embarrassed memory of humiliation and mistake. Actually, he’d gone on to win that game, taking home more money than he’d ever had together in one place before. Why hadn’t he remembered that?

Replacing the saloon in his field of vision was a broad rich lawn, trees at the horizon, Flamewind spouting, roiling, and coruscating overhead. That was where he’d seen all those people on the approach to Oseon 5792. Where had they gone?

“The sights you see at this very moment are no more real, no more substantial than the memories you have just experienced so vividly, my boy! That is the fundamental truth the universe has to teach us, and like nearly everybody else, you have not managed to learn it until the uttermost end of your life!”

The hiss in that voice was unpleasantly familiar. Lando twisted his head around—he was tied up!—but couldn’t find the source. The range of his vision was limited by the upended picnic table, a cold, synthetic marble of some kind, to which he had been bound. All he could see was the garden before him.

And the Flamewind.

The soft sound of slippered feet on grass. A shadow passed around the table—from the angle, Lando guessed it had been propped up on a bench—and turned to confront him.

“Rokur Gepta!”

The voice was filtered through a smile behind the turban windings. “And you thought I was dead, a victim of the uprising on Rafa IV. No, Captain, I have been quite thoroughly alive for a vastly longer time than you could guess. I am hard to kill and highly reluctant to let strangers terminate my existence.”

Lando bit back a witty reply. In the first place, this was not the time for it, not when he was staked down and helpless. The tractor cuffs were anchored to the table, the beam of force between them lying in close and inseparable contact with the marble surface above his head. Likewise, another pair of manacles had been added to his spacesuited ankles. He and Gepta had moved from the bubblecavern in the asteroid’s free-fall center to the surface, beneath the domes.

And he couldn’t remember a moment of it.

“No remarks?” the sorcerer taunted. “I see that you have at least learned some discretion. This is not a moment for repartee, but a time for contemplation. You are about to experience an agony so excruciating, so unprecedented in the history of intelligent life, that being one of its first experimental subjects is a privilege and a signal honor.

“You have had a sample of it: torture by chagrin.”

The sorcerer waved a leather-gloved hand.

A jail cell on Rafa IV at dawn. The open-fronted chamber looked out on a graveled yard. The noise was deafening: they were waking up the prisoners for a day of murderous labor in the life-orchards.

The guards beat on the bars. Lando had awoken with a start; now the fear of what was about to happen filled his being to the core. He backed into the cell, trying to escape the noise, his unsteady breathing slowly