Reave the Just and Other Tales (10 page)

W
hen he was returned to the cell we shared, he retained nothing except his short, warrior’s robe and his knowledge of
shin-te
. The years of training which had made him what he was despite his youth had not been taken from him. Everything else was gone. His birthplace and family, his friendships and allegiances, his possessions and memories—all had been swept aside. The faces of his masters and students had vanished from his mind. He could not have given an account of himself to save his life—or ours. Not even his name remained to him.

I was familiar with his plight. As was Isla. We had experienced it ourselves.

The look of bereavement in his eyes did not augur well for him. It had settled firmly into the strained flesh at his temples and the new lines of his cheeks, causing him to appear almost painfully youthful and forlorn. He might have been a small boy who had grown so accustomed to blows he could not avoid that he had learned to flinch and duck his head reflexively.

Weariness clung to his limbs, burdened his shoulders. His ordeal had been immeasurably arduous.

Still his skill, and the rigor behind it, showed in the poise with which he carried himself, in the quick accuracy with which he saw and noted everything around him. He had presumably been dealt a killing stroke, with blade or fist. Yet he remained lithe of movement, prompt of gaze—and centered in his
qa
.

So he had returned on previous occasions. That he could continue to move and attend as he did, in spite of defeat and death, moderated his air of bereavement.

His throat was parched from his various exertions. Studying us with his incipient flinch, he tried to speak, but could not find his voice at first. With an effort, he swallowed his confusion and fear in order to clear his mouth. Then he asked faintly, “Where am I?”

It was the same question he had asked each time he entered. With repetition, his voice had grown husky, thick with doubt, but his mind continued to arrange its inquiries in the same order.

That also did not augur well.

As she had each time before, Isla shrugged, glowering darkly from her smudged features.

As I had each time before, I spread my hands to indicate the cell. Its blind stone walls and eternal lamps, its timbered ceiling, its pallets and cistern and privy, were the only answer we could give.

Frowning fearfully, he asked his second question. “Who are you?”

Isla turned her glower toward me. Behind its grime, her face might have been lovely or plain, but she had long since forgotten which, and I had ceased to be curious. The shape of her mouth was strict, however, and the heat of her
qa
showed in her eyes. “Does he never get tired of this?” she demanded.

Her protest was not a reference to the young man standing before us.

“Or she?” I retorted. The debate was of long standing between us. It meant nothing, but I maintained it on the general principle—oft repeated by my masters—that we could not escape our imprisonment by making unwarranted assumptions.

The young man swallowed again. “He? She?”

That question, also, he had asked more than once.

No doubt deliberately, Isla chose to violate the litany of previous occasions. “You answer,” she ordered me. “I get tired, if he doesn’t.”

Simply because I enjoyed variations of any kind, I tried to provoke her. “How are you tired? You do nothing except pace and complain.”

“Tired,” she snapped, “of being the only one who cares.”

Her defeat had predated mine—although neither of us could measure the interval between them. In fact, she had preserved my heart from despair. I could not have borne my own ordeal alone. But my gratitude did neither of us any good.

And she was not the only one who cared.

Smiling ruefully, I faced the young man. “I am Asper.” For entertainment’s sake, I performed a florid bow. “This uncivil termagant is Isla. We are here to serve you. However,” I admitted, “we have not yet grasped what aid you might need.”

Isla snorted, but refrained from contradiction. She knew I spoke the truth.

A small tension between the young man’s brows deepened. He may have been trying to anticipate the next blow. For him the litany remained unbroken. He had not moved from the spot where he had appeared in the cell.

“Have we met before?”

Since Isla had elected to vary the experience with silence, I continued alone. “Several times.”

He did not ask, How is that possible? His masters had trained him well. He remained centered in his
qa
—and in his thoughts. Instead he observed hoarsely, “A mage has imprisoned us.”

This was not an assumption. If it were, I might have challenged it. His conclusion was inescapable, however, made so by the perfect absence of a door through which any of us could have entered the cell. And by the fact that we yet lived.

Keeping my bitterness to myself, I shrugged in assent.

His sorrow augmented the weariness which burdened his spirit. In the unflinching lamplight, he appeared to dwindle.

Sadly, he asked, “What are you?”

The same questions in the same order.

“By the White Lords,” Isla swore, “he learns nothing.”

There my temper snapped. My own memory had been restored to me after my last defeat. I recalled too much death. “And what precisely,” I demanded of her, “is it that
we
have learned?”

She answered at once, crying at the walls, “I have learned hatred! If he makes the mistake of letting me live, I will extract the cost of this abuse from his bones!”

I understood her anguish. We both knew that neither of us would ever see the light of day again, if this
shin-te
master did not win our freedom for us.

Still I was angry. I did not allow her to leave her place in the litany.

Smiling unkindly at the young man, I performed a small circular flick with the fingers of one hand—a gesture both swift and subtle, difficult to notice—and at once a whetted dagger appeared in my palm. Without pausing to gauge direction or distance, I flipped the bladepoint at Isla’s right eye.

My cast was true. Yet the dagger did not strike her. Instead it flashed upward and embedded itself with a satisfying thunk in one of the ceiling timbers.

She adjusted the sleeve of her robe.

We both gazed at the young man.

Curling his hands over his heart, he accorded us the
shin-te
bow of respect.
“Nahia,”
he said to me. And to Isla,
“Mashu-te.”

In our separate ways, we also bowed. We could not do otherwise. He had named us, although he remembered nothing.

“Your mastery is plain,” he observed unhappily. “You must have answered better than I.”

Opening his hand, he indicated what lay beyond our cell.

“If that were true,” Isla snapped, “you wouldn’t be here.”

For myself, I added, “Neither would we.”

There was nothing for which we could hope if his mastery did not prove greater than ours.

Fortunately, he appeared to understand us without more explanation. We had none to offer. Nothing had been revealed to us. If our captor had placed any value on our comprehension, we would not have been deprived of our memories while we fought and failed.

Shouldering his dismay as well as he could, he asked the question which must have given him the most pain.

“Who am I?”

Because we were familiar with his distress, both Isla and I faced him openly so that he could see that we had no reply for him. We knew only what he had told us—and he remembered only
shin-te
.

For the first time, he varied our litany of question and response himself. Slowly, he raised his hands to wipe tears from his eyes. His struggles had exhausted his flesh. Now his repeated return from death had begun to exhaust his spirit.

That also did not augur well.

When he spread his hands to show us that they were empty—that he was defenseless—we recognized that he had come to the point of his gravest vulnerability. So softly that he might have made no sound, he voiced the question which haunted us all.

“Why?”

We would have answered him kindly—Isla even more than I, despite her hate. We knew his pain. But any kindness would have been a lie.

“Presumably,” she told him, “it is because you failed.”

As we had failed before him.

Despite his training, he allowed himself a sigh of weariness and regret. That, too, was a slight variation. He had sighed before. With repetition, however, it had begun to convey the inflection of a sob.

His last question contained little more than utter fatigue.

“Is it safe to rest?”

I might have answered sardonically, “We survive the experience, as you see.” But Isla forestalled me.

“We will ward you with our lives,” she assured him. “While you are here, we have no other hope.”

He nodded, accepting her reply. Carefully, he moved to the nearest pallet and folded himself onto it. Within moments he had fallen asleep.

As before, I found no satisfaction in his willingness to trust us. I knew as well as he did that his weariness left him no alternative.

He had endured altogether too much death.

_______

Folk like myself might have said that we had already seen enough to content us. After simmering and frothing for the better part of a decade, the Mage War had at last boiled over three years ago, spilling blood across the length and breadth of Vesselege until all the land was sodden with it. For reasons which few of us understood, and fewer still cared about, the White Lords had scourged and harried the Dark until only one remained—the most potent and dire of them all, it was said, the dread Black Archemage, secure among the shadows and malice of his granite keep upon the crags of Scarmin. Even then, however, the victories of the White Lords, and the withdrawal of the Archemage, did not suffice to lift the pall of battle and death from the land. The reach of a mage was long, as we all knew. During that war, we learned how long. A hundred leagues from Scarmin’s peaks and cols, hurricanes of fire and stone fell upon Vess whenever—so we were told—Argoyne the Black required a diversion to ward him from some assault of the White Lords, and of Goris Miniter, Vesselege’s King.

Vess was Miniter’s seat, the largest and—until the Mage War—most thriving city in the land. So naturally I lived there, within a whim of destruction every hour of my days. By nature, I think, I had always enjoyed the proximity of disasters—as long as they befell someone else. Certainly, I had always been adept at avoiding them myself. And that skill had been enhanced and honed by my training among the
nahia
.

My poor father, blighted by poverty and loss, had gifted me there after my mother’s death. Though I had squalled against the idea at the time, I had learned to treasure it. When my masters had at last released me, I was a gifted pickthief, an impeccable burglar, and an artist of impossible escapes and improbable disappearances. I was also a true warrior in the tradition of the
nahia
. Faced by a single antagonist, I might leave him dead before he realized that I was not the one being slain. Confronting a gang of ruffians, I could dispatch half of them while the other half hacked at each other in confusion and folly.

Despite the visitations of power which blasted one section of the city or another at uncertain intervals, I lived rather well in Vess, I thought. Unfortunately, late in the third year of the War, some mischance or miscalculation must have brought me to the attention of one mage or another. The life I knew ended as suddenly as if I had severed it at the base of the neck. Without transition or awareness, I found myself in a stone cell with Isla and no door. When my memory was restored, I recalled days or weeks of bitter combat. I felt myself die again and again, until my spirit quailed like a coward’s. Yet I remembered nothing of how I had been taken from Vess—or why. And I had nothing but assumptions, which my masters abhorred, to tell me where I was.

Isla’s story, as I learned it after my memory had been returned, was completely different than mine—and entirely the same.

Her father and mother, her brother and sisters, her aunts and uncles—her whole family, in fact—had dedicated their lives to the
mashu-te,
the Art of the Direct Fist. As a young girl, fiery of temper, and quick to passion—or so I imagined her—she had been initiated in the disciplines and skills of those masters, and she had studied with the clenched devotion of a girl determined to prove her worth. The study and teaching of
mashu-te
had consumed her, and in all her years she had never left the distant school where her masters winnowed acolytes to glean students, and students to glean warriors. When she spoke of that time, I received the impression that she had never tested her skills against anyone not already familiar with them.

Still, her skills were extraordinary. It was said around Vesselege that a
mashu-te
master could stop a charging bull with one blow. I doubted that—but I did not doubt that Isla was a master. I had slipped once with her, and my
qa
still trembled in consequence.

From time to time, I had assured her that I could slay her easily, if I permitted myself to use my fang, the
nahia
dagger secreted within my robe. But that was mere provocation. I did not believe it. The truth was that I feared her—and not only because of her vehement excellence.

She had endured alone an ordeal which had nearly broken me despite her companionship.

Like mine, her life had simply ended one day, without transition or explanation, and she had found herself here. Like me, she had faced countless opponents and death, and had remembered nothing until her captor had given up on her. Yet she was whole. She was bitter, and she had learned hatred, but she was whole. I could not have said the same of myself. Without her, I would have succumbed to despair—that death of the spirit which all the Fatal Arts abhorred. She possessed the strongest
qa
I had ever encountered, surpassing even the greatest of my masters. I had never seen the like—until the young
shin-te
warrior joined us.