Issola

by Steven Brust

  “Boss—”

  This had happened to me before—going forward into danger that wasn’t at all my type of danger, when I knew I ought to stay back, and I hadn’t then understood why I did it, and I didn’t know this time. Bugger. The Morganti dagger seemed alive in my hand. Yes, it was a dull, grey color. Yes, it did have a blood-groove. It was a narrow blade, very light and useful-feeling in my hand, about eighteen inches long, and not nearly as blade-heavy as I’d suspected it would be. It was also hungry, and, as I’d suspected, it was very powerful; I felt it and hated it.

  And worried about it, as well. The Jenoine had given it to me, and now I was going to use it against them. Wouldn’t they have thought of that? Was that what they wanted me to do? Could it hurt them, in any case? According to Verra, no it couldn’t. But if not, then I didn’t have anything that could.

  The Jenoine took a step forward, and extended its left hand; I felt the sick tumble in my stomach that accompanies the realization that action, and a sort of action I hate, is now inevitable: The maybes had dissolved into the dust, the I hopes taken wing, the alternatives had narrowed to one, which was the same as vanishing to none at all—I’ve never understood the arithmetic of that.

  All right, then. If Morrolan could fight with two weapons at once, so could I; I let Spellbreaker fall into my left hand.

  “Tell it,” said Morrolan, still spinning his staff, “that it will permit us to leave at once, or we shall destroy it.”

  Teldra said, “Lord, that’s what I’ve been telling her, though I have perhaps phrased it differently.”

  “And?”

  “She is considering her options.”

  “How rational,” said Aliera.

  “Was Aliera being ironic, Boss? Or was that an insult?”

  “We’ll probably never know, Loiosh.”

  “Vlad,” said Morrolan. “I can feel the gate. Are you ready to go through it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But now, what’s the plan. Are we trying to escape, or do we want to kill this thing?”

  The thing we were talking about kept looking at us; I had impression it was holding itself ready for action, and that it didn’t seem terribly worried.

  “Kill it,” said Aliera, and, at the same time, Morrolan said, “If we can get out cleanly, we should.”

  “I’m with you, Morrolan.”

  Aliera sniffed disdainfully.

  Then things happened too fast for me to follow—it was one of those. I can’t tell you who attacked first, or what form the attack took. I can’t tell if the Jenoine’s response was physical, magical, or some combination. I only know that, suddenly, everyone was moving, and I was lost in the combinations of limb, steel, and spell. I know that I was looking for an opening to use the Morganti dagger I held, and I know that I was trying to keep Spellbreaker in between me and anything nasty that it might send at me, and I know that I failed miserably at both efforts.

  I can’t tell you what Morrolan, Aliera, and Teldra were up to, but my part in the affair was mercifully brief—I lost consciousness within a matter of seconds. And, while I couldn’t be sure what their situation was after it was over, at least mine was easily and readily understood when I awoke: I was manacled to the wall in almost exactly the same spot Aliera had occupied before. Teldra was next to me, unconscious, blood trailing down from the corner of her dainty mouth.

  Well, Morrolan and Aliera were now free, in exchange for an Issola seneschal and an Easterner ex-assassin. A neat two-for-two swap. I wondered who had come out ahead on the trade I was pretty sure it wasn’t me.

  7

  Asking for and Receiving Assistance

  “Think you can wake her up, Boss?”

  “Don’t know, Loiosh. Any reason why I should?”

  “Uh ... I’ll get back to you on that. Think you can break these manacles the way you broke the other ones?”

  I hefted them ... they were lighter than they seemed.

  “I hate repeating a trick,” I told him. “But I’m willing to make an exception this time.”

  “That’s big of you, Boss.”

  “But I’m going to wait, if you don’t mind; I don’t think I could manage a sleep spell right now.”

  While I waited and recovered, I did a quick check, and found to my surprise that the Jenoine had left me all my weapons. Why would they do that? The Morganti weapon was lying on the floor, no doubt right where it had fallen; they hadn’t even taken it. Why would they capture me, but leave me all my weapons? They weren’t supposed to do that. Maybe I should get them a copy of the rules.

  Teldra stirred next to me.

  “Good morning,” I told her.

  She squeezed her eyes shut without ever opening them, then did so again, and again. I waited.

  “Any idea what that thing did to me, Loiosh? Why I lost consciousness?”

  “No, Boss. It happened too fast. I didn’t notice it even looking at you—you just went down.”

  I looked at Teldra again; she was working on becoming conscious, but it was taking a while.

  “Okay, let’s make a note not to underestimate the Jenoine.”

  “Right, Boss.”

  I leaned my head back, started to take a deep breath, and caught myself. I hate it when I need to take a deep breath but I can’t—I’d have to find a different psychological crutch.

  I caught an echo of my familiar’s psychic snicker.

  “You aren’t helping any.”

  “What happened?” said Teldra.

  “To begin with,” I said, “the world was created from the seeds of amorphia spread from the droppings of a giant... no, I guess you aren’t awake enough to appreciate my wit. I don’t know what happened, Teldra. We’re right where Morrolan and Aliera were, but I’m assuming our friends got away. Well, I don’t know; maybe I shouldn’t assume that. I hope they got away. I don’t know. Tough bastards, those guys.”

  She chuckled. “Morrolan and Aliera, or the Jenoine?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Teldra nodded.

  “How do you feel?” I asked her.

  She stared at me. I recognized the look; I’d been on the other side of it often enough.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Stupid question.”

  She flashed me a Lady Teldra smile.

  “It seems she’s all right, Boss.”

  “Guess so.”

  Teldra seemed about to speak, but I closed my eyes and rested my head against the wall behind me, and she held her peace. The wall was smoother than it looked. I relaxed, prepared myself, and considered what I was about to do. After several minutes, Teldra said, “You’re going to do something, aren’t you?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Can I help?”

  I stirred, opened my eyes, looked at her. “Any training in witchcraft?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then I’m afraid not,” I said.

  I closed my eyes again and muttered, “Trágya.”

  “Legalább,” she agreed.

  My head snapped around. “You speak Fenarian?”

  “Why yes,” she said.

  I grunted, wondering why I was surprised. “How many lan­guages do you speak, Teldra?”

  “Several,” she said. “And you, Vlad?”

  I shook my head. “None well. A bit of Fenarian. A smattering of a few other Eastern languages. But not enough to actually think in any of them—I always have to translate in my head.”

  “I see.”

  “How do you do that? How do you learn to think in another language?”

  “Hmmm. It isn’t an all or nothing thing, Vlad. You say you don’t think in Fenarian, but what would you say if I said, Köszönöm?”

  “Szivesen.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “You said, ‘Thank you’; I said, ‘You’re welcome.’”

  “But did you make that translation in your head, or was it automatic?”

  “Ah.
I see.” I thought about that. “Okay, you’re right. It was automatic.”

  “That’s the beginning of thinking in the language.”

  “Like whenever I make a comment, Boss, and you say—”

  “Shut up, Loiosh.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You make a good point. But if I’ve got the basics, the rest is awful slow to follow.”

  “But it will get there if you keep speaking it. It starts with rote responses, such as thank you and you’re welcome.”

  “Basic courtesy,” I said. “Maybe all languages have rote responses for those: hello, how are you, that sort of thing. I wonder.”

  “They do,” said Teldra.

  “Are you sure?”

  “The languages without courtesy built into them didn’t survive long enough for us to remember them. Because, of course—”

  “Yes,” I said. “I see.”

  I pondered this linguistic profundity for a moment.

  I considered what I had just done, and was soon going to do again. “Is witchcraft a language?”

  “Hmmm. I don’t know. I should imagine it is. I know that sorcery is.”

  “Witchcraft,” I said, “does not have courtesy built into it.”

  She laughed. “All right. If we’re counting, you’ve scored a point. If we are going to call those languages, and we might as well, they don’t have built-in courtesy.” She frowned suddenly “Unless we consider ... no, that’s too far-fetched.”

  I didn’t want to encourage her to go wherever she had been about to go, so I said, “How did you and Morrolan meet, anyway? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “It was out East,” said Teldra. “During the Interregnum, in a village whose name translated to ‘Blackchapel.’ This was before he knew who he was, and—”

  “Before he knew who he was?”

  “Before he knew he was human.”

  I blinked. “I think you’re going to have to explain that.”

  “I didn’t realize you didn’t know,” said Teldra. “Certainly, it is no secret.”

  “All right.”

  “The Lord Morrolan was brought to the East, beyond his ancestral homelands, as an infant, just around the time of Adron’s Disaster. His parents didn’t survive, and so he was raised by Easterners. He grew up thinking he was simply an extraordinarily tall Easterner.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No, my lord.”

  “Well I’ll be—really? He thought he was human? I mean, Easterner?”

  She nodded.

  I shook my head. “Amazing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Most extraordinarily tall,” I reflected. “How did he find out?”

  “It couldn’t be concealed forever,” she said. “In any case, I was also in the East, and of much the same age. We met at about the time he was completing his pact with Verra, in which I was able to be of some service to him, and I was also of some help when he was gathering his Circle of Witches.”

  I nodded. I knew this circle existed—they occupied the East Tower, but I had never had occasion to go there, and still didn’t know exactly what he used them for. But, no doubt, I would never know all there was to know about Morrolan.

  I shook my head, trying to get used to the idea of Morrolan being raised as an Easterner.

  “Where in the East was he?”

  “There are—or, rather, were—a series of small kingdoms near Lake Nivaper, just south of the Hookjaw Mountains.”

  “Yes, I know them. They speak Fenarian in some of them.”

  She nodded. “His name at the time was Fenarian: Sötétcsilleg. ‘Morrolan’ is just the same thing, rendered into the ancient tongue of the Dragon.”

  “Amazing,” I said. “All right, so you helped him sacrifice villages of Easterners to the Demon Goddess. Then what?”

  She smiled. “That was later, and they were Dragaeran villages. Eventually, he returned to reclaim his ancestral homeland, and he was gracious enough to give me residence. I was poor, of course, and had nowhere else to go. I remain very grateful to him.”

  I nodded, wondering what she was leaving out. Most likely, anything that was to her credit or Morrolan’s discredit. She was like that. It sometimes made me a little uncomfortable to never know exactly what she was thinking, but, on the other hand, it was nice to know that there was at least one being in the world who wouldn’t say anything nasty about me.

  “You’re awful sensitive for an assassin, Boss.”

  “You’ve said that before, Loiosh.”

  We returned to silence; I waited to recover and hoped I’d have time to do so; in the meantime my mind wandered, starting with the rather remarkable revelations about Morrolan and proceeding from there. I don’t remember most of what I thought about—the sort of flitting, random thoughts that can only just barely be called thinking. But then I did eventually have a real, true thought, and it brought me up so sharply that it burst out of my mouth before my brain had entirely finished processing it: “Aw nuts. If Morrolan and Aliera did escape, I’ll bet they’re going to want to rescue us.”

  “Of course,” said Teldra.

  “Ready to start, Loiosh?”

  “Boss—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Boss—”

  “If I’m still chained to this wall when Morrolan and Aliera show up, I’ll almost certainly die of shame. The chances of messing up the spell are much less.”

  I got the impression Loiosh wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t either.

  “Teldra,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind. You can help.”

  “Yes?”

  “You saw what I did with the knives?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” I said, and reached to hand her some—and only then realized that the Spellbreaker was back around my wrist I stopped, hand in midair, and looked at Teldra.

  “What is it, Vlad?”

  “Loiosh,” I said, “how; did it get back there? Last I remember it was in my hand, and I was waving it around like an idiot. I can’t believe the Jenoine not only let me keep it, but were kind enough to put it back around my wrist for me.”

  “They didn’t, Boss.”

  “Talk.”

  “It sort of slithered over to you, and, uh, it kind of crawled up your arm.”

  “On its own?”

  “‘Fraid so, Boss.”

  Well. Wasn’t that interesting?

  I handed Teldra my last three daggers, pulling them out of various places. I hoped they would be enough—I used to carry lot more.

  “You know what to do?”

  “I know what to do, but not when to do it.”

  “I’ll try to say something. If I seem to lose consciousness, that would be a good time. Oh, give me one back for a second, need to expose some more skin first.”

  She didn’t ask, and I didn’t explain; I just cut away four more strips from my jerkin. The air was even colder with still more of my belly exposed. I handed two of the strips to Teldra, asking her if she knew what to do with them. She nodded. She didn’t appear at all nervous, which I attribute to acting ability, probably inherited; stupidity would be the only other possible explanation, and I didn’t think she was stupid.

  When we had managed to get the leather between the manacles and our wrists, she nodded at me, as if signaling that she was ready. I gave her back the last knife. I was now as close to unarmed as I’d been in some time. My rapier—“Where is my rapier?” I said.

  “Across the room, I think.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I considered the matter further, saying aloud, “If they know how we got out the last time, they might have done something to prevent this from working.”

  “I know,” said Teldra.

  “But they keep not behaving the way captors are supposed to.”

  “They probably weren’t raised on the right sorts of bedtime stories and songs.”

  “And bad theater,” I agreed. “But I’m
starting to think they have a whole other plan in mind.”

  “What sort of plan?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, which was not an outright lie, at any rate. “All right, then. Let’s try it.”

  She said, “Vlad, do you think we’re doing what they want us to?”

  I paused, then sighed. “I wish I knew. Are you willing to go through with it anyway?”

  She smiled. “Of course. It would be rude not to,” proving that even Issolas are capable of self-directed irony. This, while maybe not an important discovery, was, somehow, a pleasing one.

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  She nodded. I held out my hand, and she took it; her hand was dry and cool.

  I began.

  You don’t need to hear about it again, do you? I knew better than to let my fear interfere with what I had to do. Loiosh was his usual steady self, and, to make a long story short, I turned out to be sufficiently rested not to destroy myself.

  The big difference between doing it on someone else and doing it on myself was that the coldness from my wrists became more and more insistent, and there was an awareness somewhere deep inside me that I could be seriously hurting myself. I had to trust Loiosh.

  I was used to trusting Loiosh; over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

  I concentrated, and pulled at imaginary skeins of fabric until it rolled over me, covered me, and I felt like I was going to drown in it; the chill on my wrists beginning to feel like heat, and insisting more and more on my attention; but I still had a bit left in me when the whole thing was shattered—quite literally—and I was pulled back to a hazy sort of half consciousness, vaguely pleased that my wrists were now free, noting that Teldra’s were as well, and hoping that I wouldn’t have to do anything strenuous like moving for at least a year or so.

  She said something, but I didn’t quite catch it. I tried to ask her to repeat it, but that, too, was beyond me.

  In case you’ve missed it, I was more than a little exhausted. I closed my eyes, leaned against the wall, and concentrated on keeping my breathing even and shallow.

  “I imagine,” I said after a while, “they ought to be showing any second.”

  “The Jenoine?” asked Teldra. “Or our friends?”

  “Both, I should imagine. At the same time, presumably, it’s how it ought to work out.”