Reave the Just and Other Tales

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  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.

  For three years, we had both ignored the Mage War, after our separate fashions. Now, however, we considered it a personal affront. For that reason, among others, we did what we could to aid the new prisoner.

  _______

  After a time, he awakened. When he did so, there was food. There was always food when we needed it. He ate sparingly, respectful of his qa. Then he performed the ablutions and devotions of the shin-te, centering himself in meditation. Isla and I passed the time as we had on previous occasions, watching him with the tattered remnants of hope.

  Rest and nourishment had restored him somewhat, as they had in the past. His air of bereavement had been diminished, and the pallor of death had receded from his cheeks. After meditation, he asked us to train with him. His manner as he did so was curiously diffident, as if he considered it plausible that we might refuse—that if we aided him we would do so out of courtesy rather than desperation.

  So we trained with him, although our previous efforts had not done him any discernible good.

  The exercise was little changed from other occasions. Isla and I feinted and attacked, or attacked and feinted, as our inclination took us, but we made no impression on him. He altered his tactics in accordance with our assaults, varying his blocks and counters easily, deflecting us without effort. Despite his youth and forlornness, he seemed impervious to our skills, and our cunning. Behind his fluid movements and light stances, his qa had a staggering force. In truth, I feared him as much as I feared Isla. Although we challenged him furiously, he did us no harm. But the harm he could have done was extreme.

  How, I wondered, had such a very young man become so strong? And how was it possible that he had been slain so often?

  When he had thanked us for our exertions, he meditated again, perhaps on what he had learned, perhaps on nothing at all. No word or glance from him suggested that we had in any way given him less than he needed from us. Yet we knew better. We were not his equals, but we were masters, able to recognize the truth. And we could see it in the deepening sorrow which underlay every turn of his gaze, every shift of his mouth.

  Again and again, we failed to prepare him for his opponents. Or for his death.

  _______

  “We should stop holding back,” Isla muttered to me sourly. “This polite exercise is wasted on him.”

  She had said the same more than once.

  Earlier, I had argued with her. What if by some chance we injured or weakened him? What became of our hope then? But that debate had lost its meaning, and I gave it up. Matching her tone, I replied, “I will follow your example. When I see the full strength of the Direct Fist turned against him, I will do what a nahia can to emulate it.”

  She snorted in response, but I knew that her disgust was not directed at me. The training of the mashu-te had penetrated her bones. She would have considered it a crime to put all the force of her qa into blows struck against a training partner.

  The nahia spared themselves such prohibitions. I was restrained, not by conscience, but by understanding. If I slew him, my last hope would die with him. And if I attempted his death and failed, he might well break my spine.

  I was quite certain that if I died now I would not live again. No doubt that was just an assumption. Still, I believed it.

  _______

  Neither Isla nor I witnessed his disappearance. In some sense, neither of us noticed it. Nothing in the cell—or in our own minds—marked the moment. He was among us. Then he was not. Without transition or summons. He was removed from the cell with the same disdain for continuity with which we had been removed from our lives.

  This was precisely as it had been on any number of previous occasions.

  _______

  “I had thought,” Isla remarked with no more than ordinary asperity, “that the nahia were adept at escape. I must have been misinformed.”

  I sighed. “Give me a door, and I will open it. Give me a window—give me a gap for ventilation—give me somewhere to begin.” I had long since scrutinized the walls and ceiling and even the floor until I feared my heart would break. “The nahia are not mages, Isla.”

  “But we came and went,” she protested. “He comes and goes.” She meant the young man. “There must be a door.”

  “As there was among the mashu-te?” I inquired gently. “As there was on the streets of Vess? A door from those places to this? No doubt you are right. But it is a mage’s door, and I cannot open it.”

  Attempting to lighten her mood—or my own—I continued, “However, it may be that some among these stones are illusions.” I gestured at the walls. “Perhaps if you aim the Direct Fist at them all, one will shatter, revealing itself to be wood.”

  She avoided my gaze. “Do not mock me, Asper,” she said distantly. “I have no heart for it.”

  That did not augur well for any of us.

  _______

  He staggered as he returned, barely strong enough to remain on his feet. We saw differences he could not recognize, having no memory. As before, he breathed and moved among the living. As before, his wounds and bruises had been healed. Apparently, our captor wished to spare him the obvious consequences of death. Yet his exhaustion came near to overwhelming him. A glaze of forgotten pain clouded his eyes as he searched the cell, and us.

  But his thoughts had not been altered. Weary as he was, how could he have considered anything new? When he had recovered his balance, he began the litany of our doom.

  “Where am I?”

  We had no answer for him.

  “Who are you?”

  Suppressing fury or despair, Isla told me, “This must change. We are lost otherwise.”

  “How can he change it?” I countered. “Look at him.” I was less than she, and endangered by my own despair. “He has nothing left.”

  “Have we met before?”

  I would have given him an exact answer if I could. But the magery of his disappearances and returns foiled me. Although Isla and I could remember what we had said and
done, neither of us was able to keep a count of the days, or the deaths.

  “Your mastery is plain. You must have answered better than I.”

  Neither Isla nor I suspected him of mocking us.

  This time, however, he did not ask “Why?” He seemed to understand that he had failed. Perhaps his own weakness made the truth evident.

  At last he settled himself to sleep. Isla spread a blanket over his shoulders, then stooped to kiss his forehead. The gesture was uncharacteristic of her. There were uncharacteristic tears in her eyes. His bereavement had become infectious.

  Her voice thick with sorrow, she said, “Asper, it must change. If he cannot change it, then we must. Someone must.”

  I dismissed the idea that our captor’s intentions would alter themselves. “How?” I asked. Her gentleness frightened me more than her grief.

  “I do not know.” For the first time, she sounded like a woman who might surrender.

  _______

  She was right, of course. It must change. And I was a nahia master, adept—or so I claimed—at impossible escapes and improbable disappearances. The burden was mine to bear.

  While the young man slept, she and I neither rested nor watched. Instead, I questioned her closely, searching her knowledge of the other Arts for any insight the nahia did not possess.

  I hoped that the mashu-te might have some true understanding of shin-te.

  _______

  Shin-te. Nahia. Mashu-te. Here were represented three of the five Fatal Arts of Vesselege. Only ro-uke and nerishi-qa were needed to complete the tale of combative skills in all our land. And of the two, ro-uke was widely considered too secretive—too dependent upon stealth and surprise—to equal the others in open conflict. It was the Art of Assassination. As for nerishi-qa, it was said to be the most fearsome and pure of all the Five. The Art of the Killing Stroke, it was called. Indeed, legend claimed that every deadly skill contained in the other four derived from nerishi-qa.

  If legend could be believed, Isla and I had not been joined by a nerishi-qa master because no mage was sufficiently powerful to subdue one.

  That was an assumption, however—so ingrained that I hardly noticed it. My masters had respected all the Arts, but they feared only nerishi-qa.

  Unfortunately, Isla was well schooled in legends, but owned less practical knowledge than I. She spoke of shin-te masters who broke wooden planks with their fists while holding soap bubbles in their palms, but she had not been taught how such feats might be accomplished. If indeed they were possible at all. Her isolated life among the mashu-te had been more conducive to the proliferation of mythologies than to a detailed awareness of the world. Nahia was called the Art of Circumvention. Our skills and our qa were rooted in use. And the masters of the Direct Fist were so very scrupulous—

  If I desired understanding, I would have to gain it from the young man.

  _______

  As before, he roused himself at last, broke his fast, performed his ablutions and meditations. This time, however, he had slept in the grip of troubled dreams, and had awakened unrefreshed. His gaze remained dull, and the hue of his skin suggested ashes. Still he did not diverge from his pattern. When his meditations were complete, he asked us to train with him.

  I refused, in Isla’s name as well as my own.

  He seemed to flinch as if he had received another blow. His dreams had left him weaker than before—younger, and more lost. “You say that I failed,” he murmured. “Without training, I will surely fail again.”

  He had not regained his memory. By that sign, we knew that the mage was not done with him.

  “You have trained enough,” I informed him. “You need rest, not more exertion.” More than rest, he needed insight. “And we are already familiar with our limitations.

  “With your consent”—he was a master, and deserved courtesy—“I will question you.”

  “Concerning what?” Isla protested irritably. “Have you forgotten that he remembers nothing? What do you imagine he will tell us?”

  I ignored her, and instead watched doubts glide like shadows across his bereavement. In his eyes, I seemed to see his desire to trust us measure itself against his failures, or his dreams. And he may have guessed that I desired to probe the secrets of his Art. At last, however, he nodded warily.

  “I will answer, if I can.”

  Isla wanted me to account for myself, if he did not. But I wasted no effort on explanations. In fact, I had none to offer. I was simply groping, as my masters had taught me, hunting the dark cell of my ignorance for some object or shape or texture I might recognize.

  Stilling Isla’s impatience with a gesture, I began at once.

  “What,” I asked him, “are the principles of shin-te?”

  Having made his decision, he did not falter from it. Without hesitation, he replied, “Service to qa in all things. Acceptance of that which opposes us.” He remembered his training, if nothing else. “There is no killing stroke.”

  I stared at him witlessly. All the Fatal Arts were given to obscure utterance—it was one of the means by which we cherished our own, and deflected outsiders—but this seemed extreme, even to me. I pursued him as best I could.

  “Please explain. Your words will give us no aid if we do not understand them.”

  Politely, he refrained from observing that we were not intended to understand. The urgency of our plight was plain.

  “Qa,” he began, “is the seat and source of self. It is the power of self, and the expression. Without self, there is no action, and no purpose. To deny service to the self is to deny existence.”

  So much I could grasp. It was not substantially different than the wisdom of my masters. They expressed themselves more concretely, but their meaning was much the same.

  “Qa draws its strength from acceptance,” he continued. “To reject that which opposes us is death. Life opposes us. Nothing grows that is not contained. And life will not alter itself to satisfy our rejection. Without acceptance, there is no power.”

  Privately, I considered this mystical nonsense. He was worse than the mashu-te. I was nahia by nature as much as by training. I kept my opinion to myself, however. It was as useless to us as his oblique maxims.

  “That there is no killing stroke,” he concluded, “is self-evident. No man or woman slays another. There is only the choice to live or die.”

  In response, I laughed softly, without humor. I might have asked him if he denied the existence of nerishi-qa, but I did not. I wished to circumvent misunderstanding, not enhance it.

  Was not shin-te one of the Fatal Arts?

  “There we differ,” I told him. “I myself have shed blood and caused death. Do you call this illusion? Are the men I gutted still alive?”

  Isla nodded sharp agreement, although I was certain that she would argue in other terms.

  He appeared to regard my challenge seriously. Yet he gave no sign that it disturbed him. Rather, he considered how he would answer. After a moment, he stepped near to me and touched the place where I had secreted my dagger.

  “Strike me,” he instructed simply.

  I hesitated. Naturally I did not wish to slay him—or to harm him. But I felt a greater uncertainty as well. That he knew my fang’s resting place troubled me. As I had been taught, I varied its location frequently. And I took pains to ensure that I was not observed when I concealed it.

  “The shin-te teach that there is no killing stroke,” he insisted. “Show me that this belief is false.”

  “Asper—” Isla murmured in warning. Her wish to see blood spilled here was even less than mine.

  I understood him, however. He might have been a nahia master, reminding me to affirm nothing which I could not demonstrate.

  By no hint of movement or tension did I announce my intent. I had studied such moments deeply. Without discernible transition—or so I believed—I transferred my qa from rest to action. More swiftly than the blinking of an eye, my hand projected my fang into the arch between his rib
s.

  Yet my fang bit air, not flesh. Wrist to wrist, he had deflected my attack.

  I did not pause to admire his counter. Following the line of his deflection, I turned my stroke to a disemboweling slash.

  Again I found air rather than my target. He had shifted aside, guiding my hand so that my own motion helped him drive my wrist against the point of his knee.

  My grip loosened. Before I could secure it, he knocked the fang from my fingers.

  By that time, I had already directed a jab at his face, seeking to gouge him blind. But the motion was a mere formality, nothing more. With a negligent flick of his elbow, he knocked my arm aside.

  Then he stood a pace beyond my reach, holding my dagger lightly by its blade. I could not see that my efforts had inconvenienced him in any way. I told myself that I might have pressed my attack more stringently—that I might perhaps have retrieved my fang in a way which threatened him—but I did not believe it. He had made his point in terms I could not contradict by skill alone.

  When I had bowed to show my acquiescence, he restored the dagger to me and bowed in turn.

  At once, Isla advanced. Her desperation she expressed as anger so that it would not turn to despair. With the compact force of the Direct Fist, she flung a blow at him which caused my own qa to quake, although I was now a bystander.

  Her speed did not exceed mine, of that I was certain. However, the efficiency of the mashu-te had the effect of enhanced quickness. Her first strike touched his robe—as mine had not—before he turned it. And even then her fist focused so much qa that he was forced to recoil as if he had been hit.

  As easily as oil, she followed one blow with another.

  He did not deflect her again. Rather, he met her squarely, palm to fist. I hardly had time to see the flex of his knees, the set of his strength. When their hands met, I flinched, thinking that she had shattered his bones.

  Yet it was Isla who gasped in pain, not the shin-te. Her own force had nearly dislocated her shoulder. If the blow had betrayed any flaw, she would have ruined her arm.