of lorica. “Hello,” I said.
Paralyzed, remember? I was hearing his voice inside my head. “I’m the smith’s boy.”
“That’s right, so you are. You went off to be a wizard in the City.”
“I’m back.”
He wanted to acknowledge me with a nod of the head, but found he couldn’t. “What’s going to happen to me now?”
“I think you know.”
I sensed that he took it resolutely—not happy with the outcome, but realistic enough to accept it. “The pain,” he said. “Will I feel it?”
This is a gray area, but I have no doubts about it myself. “I’m afraid so, yes,” I said. I didn’t add, It’s your fault, for coming back. You don’t score points off someone facing what he was about to go through. “You’ll still be alive, so yes, you’ll feel it.”
“And after,” he said. “Will I be dead?”
I hate having to tell them. “No,” I said. “You can’t die. You just won’t be able to control your body any more. You’ll still be there, but you won’t be able to do anything.”
I felt the wave of sheer terror, and it made me feel sick. To be honest with you, it’s the worst thing I can think of—lying in the dark ground, unable to move, forever. But there you go. It’s not like you decide to be a revenant, and experienced professionals advise you as to the potential downside. It just happens. It’s sheer bad luck. Also, of course, it runs in families, and thanks to a thousand years of inbreeding, the Mesoge is just one big family. I really, really hope it won’t ever happen to me, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do to prevent it.
“You could let me go,” he said. “I’ll move far away, somewhere there’s no people. I won’t hurt anybody ever again. I promise.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If my Order found out, it’d mean the noose.”
“They’d never know.”
Indeed; how could they? I would go back to the City, swear blind the pig was too strong for me, they’d send someone else, by which time Gnatho’s dad would be long gone (though they always come back; they can’t help it). And I’d lose my reputation as an infallible field agent, which would be marvelous. Everybody wins. And I sometimes can’t help thinking about my granddad, still awake in the wet earth; or what it would feel like, if it’s ever me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my job.”
We cut him up with a forester’s crosscut saw. If you aren’t familiar with them, they’re the big two-handed jobs. Two men sit on either side of the work; one pushes and one pulls. I took my turn, out of some perverse sense of duty, but I never was any good at keeping the rhythm.
I left my home village with mixed feelings. As I said before, once you’ve been through the experience you’ve been dreading for so long, you feel a certain euphoria; I’ve been back now, I won’t ever have to do it again, there’s a giant weight off my shoulders. But, as I walked up that horribly tiring long hill, I caught myself thinking: no matter how hard I try, this is where I started from, this is part of who I am. I think the revenant issue is what set me thinking that way. You see, revenancy is so very much a Mesoge thing. You get them in other places, but wherever it’s been possible to trace ancestries, the revenant always has Mesoge blood in him, if you go back far enough. God help us, we’re special. Alone of all races and nations, we’re the only human beings on Earth who can achieve a sort of immortality, albeit a singularly nasty one, born of spite and leading to endless pain. Reliable statistics are impossible, of course, but we figure it’s something like one in five thousand. It could be me, one day; or Gnatho, or Quintillus, or Scaevola—learned doctors and professors of the pure, unblemished wisdom, raging in the dark, smashing railings and crushing windpipes. And, as I said, they always—we always—come back, sooner or later. They—we—can’t help it.
Gnatho, a far more upbeat man than I’ll ever be, used to have this idea of finding out how we did it, why it was just us, with a view to conquering death and making all men immortal. I believe he did quite a bit of preliminary research, until the funding ran out and he got a teaching post and started getting more involved in Order politics, which takes up a lot of a man’s time and energy. He’s probably still got his notes somewhere. Like me, he never throws anything away, and his office is a pigsty.
The river had calmed down by the time I got to Machaera, and the military had been out and rigged up a pontoon bridge; nice to see them doing something useful for a change. A relatively short walk and I’d be able to catch a boat and float my way home in relative comfort.
One thing I’d been looking forward to, a small fringe benefit of an otherwise tiresome mission. The road passes through Idens: a small and unremarkable town, but it happened to be the home of an old friend and correspondent of mine, whom I hadn’t seen for years: Genseric the alchemist.
He was in fifth year when I was a freshman, but for some reason we got on well together. About the time I graduated, he left the Studium to take up a minor priorship in Estoleit; after that he drifted from post to post, came into some family money, and more or less retired to a life of independent research and scholarship in his old hometown. He inherited a rather fine manor house with a deer park and a lake. From time to time he wrote to me asking for a copy of some text, or could I check a reference for him; alchemy’s not my thing, but it’s never mattered much. Probably it helped that we were into different disciplines; no need to compete, no risk of one stealing the other’s work. Genseric wasn’t exactly respectable—he’d left the Studium, after all, and there were all sorts of rumors about him, involving women and unlawful offspring—but he was too good a scholar to ignore, and there was never any ill will on his side. From his letters I got the impression that he was proud to have been one of us but glad to be out of the glue-pot, as he called it, and in the real world. Ah well. It takes all sorts.
As with the things you dread that turn out to be not so bad after all, so with the things you really look forward to, which turn out to disappoint. I’d been picturing in my mind the moment of meeting: broad grins on our faces, maybe a manly embrace, and we’d immediately start talking to each other at exactly the same point where we’d broken off the conversation when he left to catch his boat twenty years ago. It wasn’t like that, of course. There was a moment of embarrassed silence as both of us thought, hasn’t he changed, and not in a good way (with the inevitable reflection; if he’s got all middle-aged, have I too?); then an exaggerated broadening of the smile, followed by a stumbling greeting. Think of indentures, or those coins-cut-in-two that lovers give each other on parting. Leave it too long and the sundered halves don’t quite fit together anymore.
But never mind. After half an hour, we were able to talk to each other, albeit somewhat formally and with excessive pains to avoid any possible cause of disagreement. We had the advantage of both being scholars; we could talk shop, so we did, and it was more or less all right after that.
One thing I hadn’t been prepared for was the luxury. Boyhood in the Mesoge, adult life at the Studium, field trips spent in village inns and the guest houses of other orders; I’m just not used to linen sheets, cushions, napkins, glass drinking vessels, rugs, wall hangings, beeswax candles, white bread, porcelain tea-bowls, chairs with backs and arms, servants—particularly not the servants. There was a man who stood there all through dinner, just watching us eat. I think his job was to hover with a brass basin of hot water so we could wash our fingers between courses. I kept wanting to involve him in the conversation, so he wouldn’t feel left out. I have no idea if he was capable of speech.
