Steven Brust - Orca

He stood clothed only in pants and boots, his upper body naked and full of curly hairs, and he was sweating heavily, although he didn’t seem to be breathing hard.

“Nice evening,” I told him.

He nodded.

I said, “What have you been doing?”

“Practicing,” he said, pointing at a tree some distance away. I noticed several knives sticking out of it. Then he touched his rapier, sheathed at his side, and said, “I’ve also punctured my shadow several times.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Only when I missed.”

“Did it get any cuts in?”

“No. But almost.”

“Good to see you’re keeping your hand in.”

“Actually, I haven’t been lately, but I thought it might be time to again.”

“Hranun.”

“Besides, I needed to get out.”

“Oh?”

“It’s ugly in there,” he said, gesturing toward the cottage.

“Oh?” I said again.

“The old woman is doing what she promised.”

“And?”

He shook his head.

“Tell me,” I said.

“He’s all screwed up.”

“That’s news?”

Vlad looked at me.

“Sorry,” I said.

“He keeps thinking he killed his sister, or he has to save her, or something.”

“Sister?”

“Yeah, she was involved, too. He feels guilty about her.”

“What else?”

“Well, he’s a Teckla, and Loraan was his lord, and if you’re a peasant, you don’t do what he did. Deathgate, Kiera. Even touching a Morganti weapon—”

“Right.”

“So if he didn’t kill Loraan, he must have killed his sister.”

I said, “I don’t follow that.”

“I’m not sure I do, either,” said Vlad. “But that’s what we’re seeing. Or what we think we’re seeing. It isn’t too clear, and we’ve been doing a lot of guesswork, but that’s how it looks at the moment. And then there’s the bash on the head.”

“What did that do?”

“She thinks there may be a partial memory loss that’s contributing to the whole thing.”

“Better and better.”

“Yeah.”

“What now?”

“I don’t know. The old woman thinks we have to find some way of communicating with him, but she doesn’t know how.”

“Does he hear us when we talk? See us?”

“Oh, sure. But we’re like dream images, so what we say isn’t important.”

“What is important? I mean, she probed him, right? What’s he doing in there?”

He shrugged. “Trying to keep his sister away from me, or away from Loraan, or something like that.”

“A constant nightmare.”

“Right.”

“Ugly.”

“Yes.”

“And there’s nothing you can do.”

“Nothing I can do about that, anyway.”

“If you could go in there yourself, I mean, into his mind—”

“Sure, I’d do it. In a minute.”

I nodded. “Then I might as well tell you what I learned today.”

“Do.”

“Do you want to go inside?”

“No.”

“All right.” He put his shirt on and nodded to me and I told him. He was a good listener; he stood completely still, leaning against a tree; his only motion was to nod slightly every once in a while; and he was spare with his questions, just asking me to amplify a point every now and then. Loiosh settled on his left shoulder, and even the jhereg appeared to be listening. It’s always nice to have an audience.

When I was finished, Vlad said, “Well. That’s interesting. Surprising, too.”

“That the Organization is involved?”

“No, no. Not that.”

“What?”

He shook his head and appeared to be lost in thought—like I’d told him more than I thought I had, which was certainly possible. So I gave him a decent interval, then said, “What is it?”

He shook his head again. I felt a little irritated but I didn’t say anything. He said, “It doesn’t make sense, that’s all.”

“What doesn’t?”

“How well do you know Stony?”

“Quite.”

“Would he lie to you?”

“Certainly.”

“Maybe that’s it, then. In any case, someone lied, somewhere along the line.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me think about this, all right? And do some checking on my own. I want to follow something up; I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

I shrugged. There’s no reasoning with Vlad when he gets a mood on him. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

He nodded. Then he said, “Kiera?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

I slept late the next day, because there was no reason not to. It was around noon when I got to the cottage, and no one was there except the dog. It shuffled away from me. I devoted some effort to making friends with it, and of course I succeeded. I talked to it for a while. Most cat owners talk to their cats, but all dog owners talk to their dogs; I don’t now why that is.

I’d been there an hour or so when the dog jumped up suddenly and bolted out the door, and a minute or so later Hwdf’rjaanci returned with Savn. I said, “Good day, Mother. I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in. I’ve made some klava.”

She nodded and had the boy sit down, then she closed the shutters. I realized that each time I’d been there during the day the windows had been shut. I got her some klava, which she drank bitter.

I said, “What have you learned, Mother?”

“Not as much as I wish,” she said. I waited. She said, “I think the two biggest problems are the bump on the head and the sister.”

“Can’t the bump be healed?”

“It has healed, on the outside. But there was some damage to his brain.”

“No, I mean, can’t the damage be healed? I know there are sorcerers—”

“Not yet. Not until I’m sure that, if I heal him, I won’t be sealing in the problem.”

“I think I understand. What about the sister?”

“He feels guilty about her—about her being exposed to whatever it was that happened.”

She nodded. “That’s the real problem. I think he’s somehow using guilt about his sister to keep from facing that. He creates fantasies of rescuing her, but always shies away from what he’s rescuing her from. And then he loses control of the fantasies and they turn into nightmares. It’s worse, I think, because he used to be apprenticed to a physicker, so he’s even more tormented about what he did than most peasant boys would be.”

I nodded. Speaking like this, she’d changed somehow—she wasn’t an old woman in a cottage full of ugly polished wood carvings, she was a sorcerer and a skilled physicker of the mind. It now seemed entirely reasonable that, as Vlad had told me, the locals would come by from time to time to consult with her on whatever their problems might be.

“Do you have a plan?”

“No. There’s too much I don’t understand. If I just go blundering in, I might destroy him—and myself.”

“I understand.” I opened my mouth and closed it again. I said, “What are the walks for?”

“I think he’s used to walking. He gets restless when he’s sitting for too long.”

“And the closed shutters? Are they for him, or do you just like it that way?”

“For him. He’s had too much experience, there have been too many things for him to see and hear and feel all at once—I want to limit them.”

“Limit them? But if he’s trapped in his head, won’t it help to give him things outside his head to respond to?”

“You’d think so, and you may even turn out to be right. But more often than not, it works best the other way. It’s as if he’s trying to escape from pressure, and everything he perceives adds to the pressure. If I was more certain, I’d create a field around him that shut him off from the world entirely. It may yet come to that.”