Not So Much, Said the Cat

by Michael Swanwick

  If only he had not lost his temper and killed that soldier! They would not have seen that he fought like a military man and might well have left him, beaten but alive, where they’d found him.

  Or maybe not. Their sergeant had acted like one with the second sight. Those with a touch of talent often wound up as non-commissioned officers or better. In wartime, such men were drawn to the military, where they might rise through the ranks even though they were far from gentle-born.

  Ritter’s feet were damnably cold by now and his hands as well. There had been a mismatched pair of gloves in the pockets of his greatcoat. But they had been emptied out, along with his knife, matchbox, pipe and tobacco pouch, and a small sack of parched grains intended to stave off hunger. So he pulled in his arms from the coat’s sleeves, stuck them in his armpits, and kept on walking. And walking.

  Hours passed and the distant line of trees did not seem to be appreciably closer than it had ever been. But there was a farm building ahead with a blue curl of smoke rising from its chimney. Ritter debated whether to bypass it entirely or to stop and see if he could trade some labor ostensibly for food but in actuality for information. Farmers, in their isolation, were more gossip-prone than most people realized. It was even possible—barely—that he would have the opportunity to steal a horse.

  These were cheering thoughts. Yet the closer he came to the building, the greater his unease grew. The place looked . . . familiar.

  With sinking spirits, Ritter approached the farmhouse.

  There was a sign over the door.

  САНАТОРИЙ.

  He was back where he’d begun.

  For an instant, Ritter almost lost all hope. But then he squared his shoulders, turned ninety degrees and started walking again. As an officer and a Prussian gentleman, he could not give in to despair.

  The sun through the clouds cast the faintest of shadows. He kept it resolutely to his left and lining up unprepossessing landmarks in the middle distance, a rock, a frozen clod of dirt, a dead plant sticking up out of the snow. He concentrated on making his measurements as accurate as possible. Every now and again he stopped and looked behind himself to see his footprints stretching straight and unwavering toward the horizon. Until finally his legs buckled underneath him and he sank to his knees in the frozen field.

  A door opened nearby.

  “Well?” Dr. Nergüi said from the stoop of the sanitarium. “Are you convinced yet?”

  Wearily, Ritter looked up at her and then to one side and the other. A path of sorts had been trod into the icy ground. It bent inward to each side of the building. He had been walking around and around the farmhouse all day.

  Then Borsuk was helping him to his feet and leading him inside. It was warm there. Gratefully, he felt the weight of his greatcoat removed from his shoulders. Borsuk eased Ritter onto a couch. Then he sat down in an overstuffed chair and said, “We are going to try something different now. Would you prefer we talk about your mother or your sex life?”

  Dr. Nergüi held up a hand. “Look at him. He remains defiant.”

  Borsuk’s face grew very still. Then he said, “Remarkable. He still hopes to escape.”

  “There is a thin line between hope and delusion. In my professional judgment, our patient would benefit from having a glimpse of his future.”

  “I concur,” Borsuk said.

  In a ramshackle boarding house in Miller’s Court in Whitechapel, Ritter sat on the bed that was his room’s only furniture, pulling off his boots. He feared he had caught a fungus. The skin between his toes was white as corpse-flesh and a horrid stench rose up when he peeled away the socks. Not much to be done about that. The tips of several toes were black with frostbite. With the point of his knife, he pricked each of them. Three had no sensation. There were blisters too, but best to leave them alone. Punctured, they could get infected.

  Not that he expected to live long enough for that to happen.

  The guards at Government House had turned Ritter away when he tried to see Sir Toby. But he had expected that. Weeks of hard living had transformed him completely. He no longer looked like the sort of man who might have business with the Office of Intelligence. Even their underworld informers dressed better than he.

  Ritter held up his candle stub and, waving it back and forth, was able to locate a nail in the wall by the motion of its shadow. He hung one of his socks on it to air. Then, when he could not find another nail, he draped the second sock over the first.

  He lay down on the bed and tried to think. But his head was a buzz of conflicting voices. How long had it been since he had slept? His limbs were as restless as they were weary. His fingers twitched and every time he closed his eyes they flew open again.

  Down deep, all men hate their fathers.

  Concentrate, damn it! There was no point in going to Sir Toby’s club—even when he had looked the part of an officer, he would not have been allowed in without the company of a member. So he would have to find the man in the streets, going to or coming from his office. Ritter had to deliver his message to Sir Toby in person. It could not be given to anyone else. That was imperative.

  Ritter thrashed from side to side but could find no comfort. He sat up convulsively and wrapped his arms around his stomach.

  He thinks that sleep will restore him.

  A guilty conscience, even in repose, knows no rest.

  Throwing back his head, Ritter ran his fingers through greasy, tangled locks. Not half an hour ago, he had paid the last few coins he had for this room, hoping that some rest would clear his thoughts. It was money wasted. He couldn’t lie still for a single moment, much less for long enough to nod off.

  With a groan, he sat up and began pulling on his boots again. His socks he left hanging on the wall.

  By the time he’d made his way to Charing Cross, it was twilight.

  The streets glistened from a rain which Ritter could not remember, though his coat was damp from it. He faded back into the shadows, watching the carriages clatter by, eyes cocked for one in particular. A coach which rarely took the same route two days in a row, out of Sir Toby’s natural reluctance to make himself an easy target for assassins. So there was no way of being sure Ritter would see it tonight. Still . . . there were only so many ways of getting from the one place to the other. And there were always other nights.

  Then a carriage came rattling toward him. He recognized it immediately, for he had ridden in it many times. Desperately, he lunged forward. “Sir Toby!” The words flew from his mouth like ravens. He was running alongside the carriage now, waving, frantically trying to attract the man’s attention. Above him, he could see the coachman lifting his whip to warn him off.

  But now, in the carriage window, that round, complacent face turned and its eyes widened in astonishment. “Ritter!” Sir Toby flung open the door and, extending a hand, pulled Ritter into the interior, alongside him. They tumbled down together in a heap and then clumsily righted themselves.

  He was inside, and the carriage hadn’t even slowed down.

  “I . . . have . . . a . . . message,” he gasped. It seemed he would never catch his breath. “For . . . you.”

  “My dear fellow, I thought you were—well, never mind what I thought. It is wonderful to see you again. We must get you into some clean clothes. A good meal wouldn’t hurt either, by the look of you. I’ll rent you a room at the Club; it isn’t normally allowed, but I think I can swing it. Oh, dear me, you do look dreadful. What Hells you must have been through.”

  “The . . . message.” Ritter reached inside his greatcoat, fumbling for an inner pocket.

  “There will be plenty of time for that after you eat.” Sir Toby patted his arm soothingly.

  “No . . . it. . . .” To his astonishment Ritter saw his hand emerge clutching the Sheffield knife he had been given so long ago.

  And then he was stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and blood spurted everywhere.

  “There’s our first drop of water,” Dr. Nergüi said.


  “Don’t try to be a man of iron.” Borsuk produced a handkerchief and Ritter buried his face in it. “It’s all right to cry.”

  To his horror, Ritter felt great wracking sobs of grief welling up within him. It took all of his strength to hold them back. He was not sure he could do so indefinitely. But a cold, distant part of his mind thought: All right, then, and reached out into the darkness.

  If this was how they were going to play the game, he would match them parry for thrust. He imagined Freki as he would be were he human: Hulking, rangy, shaggy, dangerous. A murderer if need be, but utterly without malice and unswervingly loyal to his friends. Wolfish, in a word. Layer by layer, he created this fiction, until all it lacked was a name fitting for a man. Ritter chose Vlad. Vlad, he thought. Come. The wolf would not understand why the image of a human he did not know was being pressed into his mind. But he was trained to obey a command. He emerged from the culvert in which he had been hiding.

  Simultaneously, Ritter let the tears out. He had, he discovered with great surprise, rather a lot to cry about. Losses he had never mourned. Sorrows he had suffered and then locked away within himself. Well, then, he would make them work for him.

  Ritter threw his head back and howled.

  “I think he is ready,” Borsuk said at last.

  “Excellent work. I’ll hold him passive. You start the questioning.”

  Almost, Ritter slept. But though he fell into a restful lassitude, his eyes did not close. He simply felt unable, or perhaps unwilling, to act. It was like that state of borderline sleep when one is fully aware of one’s surroundings and struggles to awaken yet cannot. In a distant part of his brain, he could feel Freki trotting silently across the fields toward the sanitarium. But, of course, his captors weren’t looking there. Just into his surface thoughts. Borsuk reached over to brush back into place a strand of hair that had fallen over Ritter’s forehead. “Tell us a secret, my dear. Nothing big, nothing important. Just a little one to start with.”

  Ritter shook his head. Or maybe he only meant to.

  “You know you must. You’ve seen that you will. Why put off the inevitable?”

  “There is—” Ritter stopped.

  “Yes?”

  With all the reluctance he could put into his voice, Ritter said, “A map. Sewn into the lining of my greatcoat.”

  “Is there really?” Borsuk sounded pleased. He stood and went into the bedroom. When he returned, he had Ritter’s knife, which he used to cut open the coat. From the lining he extracted a square of white silk on which was printed a detailed map of the region. Ritter’s meeting place with his contact was not marked on it. But of course they already knew that.

  Borsuk let the map flutter down onto a stand next to the couch and lay the knife atop it. Ritter tried not to show how aware he was of the knife’s proximity. But a wry chuckle from Dr. Nergüi told him that that the blade had again been rendered untouchable by him.

  “You see? The world is unchanged. Save for how much better you feel now that you’re no longer struggling in a lost cause. Now. Tell me the name of your companion, the one we haven’t caught yet.”

  Ritter heard himself say, “Vlad.”

  “Your friend is a Slav, then?”

  “It is a nickname,” Ritter said in a dead voice.

  “Ahhh. After the Impaler, no doubt. Tell us about him.”

  Slowly at first, and then volubly, Ritter began describing the Freki-analogue as he had reimagined him: Vlad’s strength, both mental and physical. His dedication to his partner’s welfare. The playful side that came out at unexpected moments. His gluttonous appreciation of food. All the while feeling Freki coming closer and closer, until finally stopped, just outside the sanitarium. Ritter felt a gentle yet unmistakable mental nudge. Freki was awaiting further orders.

  “Enough.” Dr. Nergüi held up a hand. “Where is he now?”

  Ritter managed to crack the slightest of smiles. He turned his head toward the window and sensed that the others did too. “Look there.”

  Shards of glass and wood exploded inward as Freki came crashing into the room.

  In that instant of shock, the two alienists lost all control over their conscious thoughts, and thus over Ritter. Freed of their control, he came up from the couch, slapping a hand on the side table to seize the knife. This time, his fingers easily closed about its handle.

  He buried it in Borsuk’s heart.

  Freki had Dr. Nergüi down on the floor, with his teeth in her throat. Ritter was bit twice in the course of pulling the wolf away from the old woman’s corpse. But it was imperative to separate the two of them as quickly as possible. He didn’t want Freki to acquire a taste for human flesh.

  The address Ritter had been given was a piece of wasteland, neither field nor commons, close by an old town dump. It was terrifyingly exposed space. He supposed that his contact wanted to be sure, on his approach, that only one man was waiting for him. Still, it was dreadfully open. He built himself a small vagrant’s camp there and waited, in constant danger of being discovered by foraging soldiers or a press gang.

  He did not know who he was waiting for—Ritter only had a code name, a nom de guerre, for his contact. He had arrived at dawn on the day appointed, to find only empty land. Nor had the man he expected shown up by sundown. In such an event, he had been told, he was to wait three days. No more, no less. He had already waited two.

  Ritter was bent over his wee fire, nursing along a pot of watery rabbit stew, when Freki whined from beneath the grey blanket that hid his presence from prying eyes, warning him that somebody was approaching.

  Slowly, Ritter stood.

  The man who came walking across the barren land was at least a decade older than himself. By his clothing, a man of substance. By his wariness, no friend of the Mongolian Wizard or his empire. He carried a walking stick which Ritter suspected was more than it seemed. Though Ritter knew himself to be a fearsome sight after all he had been through, the stranger continued steadily toward him.

  When he reached the campfire, the man stopped. He looked evenly at Ritter, with neither trust nor fear. He said nothing. He looked to be equally prepared to fight or to bolt. Ritter knew this could only be the man he had been waiting for.

  Extending his hand, Ritter said, “The wizard Godot, I presume?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Swanwick published his first story in 1980, making him one of a generation of new writers that included Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. In the third of a century since, he has been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards and received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six years. He also has the pleasant distinction of having lost more major awards than any other science-fiction writer.

  Roughly one hundred fifty of his stories have appeared in Amazing, Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, High Times, New Dimensions, Eclipse, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, the Infinite Matrix, Omni, Penthouse, Postscripts, Realms of Fantasy, Tor.com, Triquarterly, Universe, and elsewhere. Many have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies and translated into Japanese, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Czech, and French. Several hundred works of flash fiction have been published as well.

  A prolific writer of nonfiction, Swanwick has published book-length studies of Hope Mirrlees and James Branch Cabell as well as a book-length interview with Gardner Dozois. He has taught at Clarion, Clarion West, and Clarion South.

  Swanwick is the author of nine novels, including In the Drift (an Ace Special), Vacuum Flowers, Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, The Dragons of Babel, and Dancing with Bears. His short fiction has been collected in Gravity’s

  Angels, A Geography of Imaginary Lands, Moon Dogs, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar Box Faust and Other Miniatures, The Dog Said Bow-Wow, and The Best of Michael Swanwick. His most recent novel, Chasing the Phoenix, which
chronicles the adventures of confidence artists Darger and Surplus in post-Utopian China, is currently available from Tor Books. He is currently at work on a third and final novel set in Industrialized Faerie.

  He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. This year, he will be guest of honor at MidAmeriCon II, the 2016 World Science Fiction Convention.