Steven Brust - Orca

“The House of the Orca, I think. And the Jhereg. And someone, somewhere, high up in the Empire—like, maybe, whoever it was who hired you?” He’d slipped his right hand down behind his leg, where he was, no doubt, concealing something, and I hadn’t even seen him do it.

“No,” I said. “But good guess.”

He shrugged. “What else do you want to know?”

I wanted to know how Loftis had been conned, or pressured, into doing this in the first place, but this was the wrong time to ask. I said, “That’ll do for now. I’ll be in touch.”

“Okay. Pleasure meeting you, Margaret.”

“And you, Lieutenant.”

I got up and walked out of the room, my back itching as I passed him, but he made no move. On the way out of the inn, I flipped the host a couple of imperials and apologized about the door. I walked around some corners to make sure I wasn’t being followed, then I teleported back to the blue cottage and went in.

Vlad was waiting for me. He said, “Well?”

One disadvantage of teleports is that they sometimes get you there too quickly—I hadn’t had time to sort out my thoughts yet. I said, “Is there anything to eat?”

“No. I could cook something.”

I nodded. “That would be good. I’m a bit tired.”

“Oh?” said Vlad.

“I’ll get to it.”

He shrugged. Savn was near the hearth, sitting up and looking at nothing. Hwdfrjaanci sat hear him, with Buddy at her feet. Buddy watched me as he always did, but wasn’t unfriendly. Loiosh sat on Vlad’s shoulder. I felt like I’d been through a pitched battle, and it was somehow amazing that no one in the house shared my exhaustion.

Vlad said, “Do you want to hear my news first, or after yours?”

I said, “Let’s look at your arm.”

Vlad shrugged, started to speak, and then apparently realized that I wasn’t ready to think about anything quite yet. He wordlessly took off his shirt. I undid the bandage and inspected the wound, which seemed about the same as it had four hours earlier.

Only four hours!

I washed it and walked over to the linen chest to find something clean to wrap it in.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“I suppose so,” said Vlad.

“You’ve been stabbed,” said Savn.

Even Buddy—tail thumping and floppy ears vainly trying to prick forward—was staring at him. He, in turn, was staring at Vlad’s arm—an intense stare, a creepy stare; he was standing up, his whole body rigid. Savn’s voice had the uneven rasp of long disuse, or of young adulthood, take your pick. He said, “You were stabbed with a knife.”

“That’s right, Savn,” said Vlad, and I could hear him working to keep his voice even. He didn’t move a muscle. Hwdf rjaanci wasn’t moving, either; for that matter, neither was I.

“Was it really cold when it went in? Did it hurt? How deep did it go?”

Vlad made some odd sort of sound from his throat. Savn’s questions came slowly, as if there was a great deal of consideration behind them; but the tone was of casual curiosity, which in turn was at odds with his posture—it was very unsettling for me, and I could see that it was even more so for Vlad.

“Not all knives have points, you know,” said Savn. “Some of them you can’t stab with, only cut.” As he said that word, he made a quick cutting gesture with his right hand; and that was creepy, too, because while he did it the rest of his body didn’t move, and his face didn’t change expression; it was only the arm movement and the emphasis in his voice.

“Only cut,” he said again.

Then he didn’t say anything else. We waited, not moving, for several minutes, but he’d said what he had to say. Vlad said, “Savn?” and got no response. Savn sat down again, but that also showed something—he hadn’t been told to. Vlad came over and knelt down facing him. “Savn? Are you ... are you all right?”

The boy just sat the way he’d been sitting all along. Vlad turned and said, “What happened, Mother?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think it’s a good sign. I know it’s a good sign. I don’t know how good, but we’re getting somewhere.”

“You think that came from healing the injury?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it was time. Or the right stimulus. Or some combination. Have you been cut in the last year?”

“Not even threatened,” said Vlad.

“Then that may be it.”

“What do we do now? Should I cut myself some more?” I wasn’t certain he was joking.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Talk about knives, maybe.”

I was watching Savn the whole time, and at the word “knives” there was a perceptible twitch around the left side of his mouth. Vlad saw it, too. He said, “Savn, do you want to talk about knives?”

The boy’s expression didn’t change, but he said, “You have to take care of the good ones. A good knife is expensive. The good ones stay sharp longer, too. Sometimes you have to cut people to heal them, and you should use a really good one, and a really sharp one for that. You can hurt someone more with a dull knife than with a sharp knife.”

“Are you afraid of knives?” said Vlad.

Savn didn’t seem to hear him. He said, “You should always clean it when you’re done—wash it and dry it. You have to dry it, especially. It won’t rust—the good ones are made so they don’t rust. But if you leave something on it, it can corrode, and that ruins it, and good knives are expensive. Good knives stay sharp. They get sharper and sharper the more they’re used, until they get so sharp they can cut you right in half just by looking at you.”

“Knives don’t get sharper on their own,” said Vlad.

“And they can stab you, too. If the point is sharp, it can stab all the way through you, and all the way through everybody, and stab the sky until it falls, and stab all the way through everything.”

Then he fell silent once more. After a couple of minutes, Vlad turned around and said, “He isn’t responding to what I say, Mother.”

“No,” she said. “But you got him started. That means, on some level, he is responding to you.”

Vlad turned back and looked at him some more. I tried to read the expression on Vlad’s face, then decided I didn’t want to.

He got up and came over to where Hwdf rjaanci and I stood watching. He whispered to her, “Should I try again, or let him rest?”

She frowned. “Let him rest, I think. If he starts up again on his own, we’ll take it from there.”

“Doing what?” I said.

“I don’t know. I’m encouraged, but I don’t know.”

“All right,” said Vlad. “I’m going to make some klava.”

By the time it was done, Savn had gone to sleep—perhaps talking for the first time after a year’s silence had tired him out. We drank our klava standing on the far side of the room, near the stove and the oven. Hwdf rjaanci eventually went over and sat down next to the boy, watching him while he slept. Vlad took a deep breath and said, “All right, let’s hear it.”

“Huh? Hear what?”

He laughed. “What you came in with an hour ago, and were so excited about that you had to take some time before you could talk about it. Remember?”

“Oh.” I felt myself smiling. “Oh, that.”

“Yeah. Let’s hear it.”

I nodded and gave him the short version, which took about ten minutes. He said, “Let’s have it all.”

“Do you really need it?”

“I won’t know until I hear it.”

I was going to argue, but then I realized that if he’d given me the short version of his sortie, I wouldn’t have made the connection to Lord Khaavren, and my talk with Loftis would have gone rather differently. So I filled in most of the details, helped now and then by Vlad’s questions. He seemed especially interested in exactly when everything had happened and in precisely how I’d fooled Loftis—that, in particular, he wanted me to go over several times, until I felt like I was being questioned under the Orb. I pleaded poor memory for the parts of it I didn’t want to talk about and eventually he relented, but when I was done, he looked at me oddly.