Reave the Just and Other Tales by Stephen R. Donaldson Page A

general principle—oft repeated by my masters—that we could not escape our imprisonment by making unwarranted assumptions.
    The young man swallowed again. “He? She?”
    That question, also, he had asked more than once.
    No doubt deliberately, Isla chose to violate the litany of previous occasions. “You answer,” she ordered me. “I get tired, if he doesn’t.”
    Simply because I enjoyed variations of any kind, I tried to provoke her. “How are you tired? You do nothing except pace and complain.”
    “Tired,” she snapped, “of being the only one who cares.”
    Her defeat had predated mine—although neither of us could measure the interval between them. In fact, she had preserved my heart from despair. I could not have borne my own ordeal alone. But my gratitude did neither of us any good.
    And she was not the only one who cared.
    Smiling ruefully, I faced the young man. “I am Asper.” For entertainment’s sake, I performed a florid bow. “This uncivil termagant is Isla. We are here to serve you. However,” I admitted, “we have not yet grasped what aid you might need.”
    Isla snorted, but refrained from contradiction. She knew I spoke the truth.
    A small tension between the young man’s brows deepened. He may have been trying to anticipate the next blow. For him the litany remained unbroken. He had not moved from the spot where he had appeared in the cell.
    “Have we met before?”
    Since Isla had elected to vary the experience with silence, I continued alone. “Several times.”
    He did not ask, How is that possible? His masters had trained him well. He remained centered in his
qa
—and in his thoughts. Instead he observed hoarsely, “A mage has imprisoned us.”
    This was not an assumption. If it were, I might have challenged it. His conclusion was inescapable, however, made so by the perfect absence of a door through which any of us could have entered the cell. And by the fact that we yet lived.
    Keeping my bitterness to myself, I shrugged in assent.
    His sorrow augmented the weariness which burdened his spirit. In the unflinching lamplight, he appeared to dwindle.
    Sadly, he asked, “What are you?”
    The same questions in the same order.
    “By the White Lords,” Isla swore, “he learns nothing.”
    There my temper snapped. My own memory had been restored to me after my last defeat. I recalled too much death. “And what precisely,” I demanded of her, “is it that
we
have learned?”
    She answered at once, crying at the walls, “I have learned hatred! If he makes the mistake of letting me live, I will extract the cost of this abuse from his bones!”
    I understood her anguish. We both knew that neither of us would ever see the light of day again, if this
shin-te
master did not win our freedom for us.
    Still I was angry. I did not allow her to leave her place in the litany.
    Smiling unkindly at the young man, I performed a small circular flick with the fingers of one hand—a gesture both swift and subtle, difficult to notice—and at once a whetted dagger appeared in my palm. Without pausing to gauge direction or distance, I flipped the bladepoint at Isla’s right eye.
    My cast was true. Yet the dagger did not strike her. Instead it flashed upward and embedded itself with a satisfying thunk in one of the ceiling timbers.
    She adjusted the sleeve of her robe.
    We both gazed at the young man.
    Curling his hands over his heart, he accorded us the
shin-te
bow of respect.
“Nahia,”
he said to me. And to Isla,
“Mashu-te.”
    In our separate ways, we also bowed. We could not do otherwise. He had named us, although he remembered nothing.
    “Your mastery is plain,” he observed unhappily. “You must have answered better than I.”
    Opening his hand, he indicated what lay beyond our cell.
    “If that were true,” Isla snapped, “you wouldn’t be here.”
    For myself, I added, “Neither would we.”
    There was nothing for which we could hope if his mastery did not prove greater than