David Brin - The Practice Effect

There was a staccato sound, and several things happened all at once.

The polished wood of the halberd’s handle split into fragments as a stream of high-velocity metal slivers tore into the elevated weapon. Gil’m ducked aside as the glistening blade fell. The guard stared dully at the severed stump of his weapon.

But Dennis couldn’t hold on as the recoil kicked the needler out of his slippery right hand. It bounced off his chest, then went rattling along the ground in front of him.

He and Gil’m stood in a momentary tableau, both of them suddenly disarmed. The guard’s face was blank and the whites of his eyes showed. He didn’t move.

Dennis started to edge forward, hoping the fellow’s daze would last long enough for him to retrieve his weapon. The needler had fetched up against the fallen halberd blade, midway between him and the giant.

Dennis was reaching for it when two more soldiers in high bearskin hats appeared in the alleymouth. They shouted in surprise.

Dennis grabbed the needler and raised it. But in that telescoped moment he found that he just couldn’t bring himself to kill. It was a flaw in his personality, he realized, but there was nothing he could do about it.

He turned to run but only got a dozen paces before the butt of a thrown knife struck him on the side of the head, knocking him forward into the dark shadows.

“ ’ere, now. Easy do it. Ye’ll have a bruise like a searchlight in a day or so! A real shiner it’ll be!”

The voice came from somewhere nearby. Bony fingers held his arm as Dennis sat up awkwardly, his head athrob.

“Yep, a real shiner. Practice it good an’ you’ll be able to use it to see in th’ dark with!” The voice cackled in generous self-appreciation.

Dennis could barely focus on the person. He tried to rub his eyes and almost fainted when he touched the bruise on the left side of his face.

Blearily, he saw an elderly man who grinned back at him with only half a mouth of teeth. Dennis nearly fell over sideways in a wave of dizziness, but the old fellow caught him.

“I said easy there, didn’ I? Give it a minute an the worl’ will look a lot better. Here, drink some o’ this.”

Dennis shook his head, then coughed and choked as his would-be nurse grabbed his hair and poured a slug of tepid liquid into his mouth. The stuff tasted vile, but Dennis grabbed the rough mug in both his own hands and gulped greedily until it was taken away.

“Tha’s enough for now. You just sit an’ get yer senses back. You don’t gotta start workin’ ’til second day, not when they bring you in lumped like this.” The man arranged a rough pillow behind his head.

“My name is Dennis.” His voice came out a barely audible croak. “What is this place?”

“I’m Teth, an’ you’re in jail, punky. Don’ you recognize a jail when you see one?”

Dennis looked left and right, able at last to focus his eyes. His bed was part of a long row of rude cots, sheltered by an overhanging wooden canopy. A wattle and daub wall behind him supported the roof. Beyond the open front of the shed was a large courtyard, hemmed in by a tall wooden palisade.

On the right stood a far more impressive wall, one that gleamed seamlessly in the bright sunshine. It was the lowest and widest in a series of tiers that extended up a dozen stories or more. In the center of the shining wall was a small gatehouse. Two bored guards lounged on benches there.

Men in the courtyard, presumably his fellow prisoners, moved about at tasks Dennis couldn’t identify.

“What kind of work are you talking about?” Dennis asked. He felt a little giddy, with a trace of that queer detachment from reality that had come over him before. “Do you make personalized license plates here?”

He didn’t care when the old man looked at him funny.

“They work us hard, but we don’ make nothin’. We’re mostly lower-class riffraff in here—vagrants an’ such. Most of us wouldn’ know how to make anythin’.

“O’ course, there’s some in here for gettin’ in trouble with th guilds. An’ others who served the old Duke long afore Kremer’s father moved into these parts an’ took over. Some o’ them might know a little about makin’ things, I suppose…”

Dennis shook his head. Teth and he didn’t seem to be talking on the same wavelength at all. Or perhaps he just wasn’t hearing the fellow right. His head hurt, and he was all confused.

“We grow some of our own food,” the old man went on. “I take care of new gremmies like you. But mostly we practice for the Baron. How else would we earn our keep?”

There was that word, again… practice. Dennis was getting sick of it. He got a gnawing sensation whenever he heard it, as if his subconscious were trying to tell him something it had already figured out. Something another part of him was just as frantically rejecting.

With some difficulty he sat up and swung his feet over the side of the cot.

“Here, now! You shouldn’ do that for a few hours yet. You lie back down!”

Dennis shook his head. “No! I’ve had it!” He turned to the old man, who looked back with plain concern. “I’m finished being patient with this crazy planet of yours, do you hear? I want to know what’s going on, now! Right now!”

“Easy,” Teth began. Then he squawked as Dennis grabbed his shirtfront and pulled him forward. Their faces were inches apart.

“Let’s get down to basics,” Dennis whispered through gritted teeth. “This shirt, for instance. Where did you get it?”

Teth blinked as if he were in the grip of a lunatic. “It’s bran’ new. They giv’ it to me to break in! Wearin’ it’s one of my jobs!”

Dennis clutched the shirt tighter. “This? New? It’s hardly more than a rag! The weave is so coarse it’s about to fall apart!”

The old man gulped and nodded. “So?”

Dennis snatched at a spot of color at the fellow’s waist. He pulled free a square of filmy, opalescent fabric. It bore delicate patterns and had the feel of fine silk.

“Hey! Tha’s mine!”

Dennis shook the beautful cloth under Tern’s nose. “They dress you in rags and let you keep something like this?”

“Yeah! They let us keep some of our personal stuff, so it won’t go bad wi’out us workin’ on ’it! They may be mean, but they’re not that mean!”

“And this piece isn’t new, I suppose.” The kerchief looked fresh from some expensive shop.

“Palmi no!” Teth looked shocked. “It’s been in my family five generations!” he protested proudly. “An’ we been using it nonstop all that time! I look at it an’ blow my nose in it lots of times every day!”

It was such an unusual protestation that Dennis’s grip slackened. Teth slid to the floor, staring at him.

Shaking his head numbly, Dennis stood up and stumbled outside, blinking against the brightness. He walked unevenly past knots of laboring men—all dressed in prisoners’ garb— until he reached a point where the outer palisade came into contact with the glistening wall of the castle.

With his left hand he touched the rough treetrunks, crudely trimmed and mud-grouted, which comprised the palisade. With his right hand he stroked the castle wall, a slick, metal-hard surface that shone translucently like a massive, light-brown, semiprecious stone…or like the polished trunk of a mammoth petrified tree.

He heard someone approach from behind. He glanced back and saw it was Teth, now accompanied by two more prisoners, who looked over the newcomer curiously.

“When was the war?” Dennis asked softly without turning around.