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

ours.
    Fortunately, he appeared to understand us without more explanation. We had none to offer. Nothing had been revealed to us. If our captor had placed any value on our comprehension, we would not have been deprived of our memories while we fought and failed.
    Shouldering his dismay as well as he could, he asked the question which must have given him the most pain.
    “Who am I?”
    Because we were familiar with his distress, both Isla and I faced him openly so that he could see that we had no reply for him. We knew only what he had told us—and he remembered only
shin-te
.
    For the first time, he varied our litany of question and response himself. Slowly, he raised his hands to wipe tears from his eyes. His struggles had exhausted his flesh. Now his repeated return from death had begun to exhaust his spirit.
    That also did not augur well.
    When he spread his hands to show us that they were empty—that he was defenseless—we recognized that he had come to the point of his gravest vulnerability. So softly that he might have made no sound, he voiced the question which haunted us all.
    “Why?”
    We would have answered him kindly—Isla even more than I, despite her hate. We knew his pain. But any kindness would have been a lie.
    “Presumably,” she told him, “it is because you failed.”
    As we had failed before him.
    Despite his training, he allowed himself a sigh of weariness and regret. That, too, was a slight variation. He had sighed before. With repetition, however, it had begun to convey the inflection of a sob.
    His last question contained little more than utter fatigue.
    “Is it safe to rest?”
    I might have answered sardonically, “We survive the experience, as you see.” But Isla forestalled me.
    “We will ward you with our lives,” she assured him. “While you are here, we have no other hope.”
    He nodded, accepting her reply. Carefully, he moved to the nearest pallet and folded himself onto it. Within moments he had fallen asleep.
    As before, I found no satisfaction in his willingness to trust us. I knew as well as he did that his weariness left him no alternative.
    He had endured altogether too much death.
    _______
    Folk like myself might have said that we had already seen enough to content us. After simmering and frothing for the better part of a decade, the Mage War had at last boiled over three years ago, spilling blood across the length and breadth of Vesselege until all the land was sodden with it. For reasons which few of us understood, and fewer still cared about, the White Lords had scourged and harried the Dark until only one remained—the most potent and dire of them all, it was said, the dread Black Archemage, secure among the shadows and malice of his granite keep upon the crags of Scarmin. Even then, however, the victories of the White Lords, and the withdrawal of the Archemage, did not suffice to lift the pall of battle and death from the land. The reach of a mage was long, as we all knew. During that war, we learned how long. A hundred leagues from Scarmin’s peaks and cols, hurricanes of fire and stone fell upon Vess whenever—so we were told—Argoyne the Black required a diversion to ward him from some assault of the White Lords, and of Goris Miniter, Vesselege’s King.
    Vess was Miniter’s seat, the largest and—until the Mage War—most thriving city in the land. So naturally I lived there, within a whim of destruction every hour of my days. By nature, I think, I had always enjoyed the proximity of disasters—as long as they befell someone else. Certainly, I had always been adept at avoiding them myself. And that skill had been enhanced and honed by my training among the
nahia
.
    My poor father, blighted by poverty and loss, had gifted me there after my mother’s death. Though I had squalled against the idea at the time, I had learned to treasure it. When my masters had at last released me, I was a gifted pickthief, an impeccable burglar, and an artist of impossible