Students of the Order

by Edward W. Robertson

  "What are you going on about?"

  "You shall be Bound." Wit thumped his staff.

  The bandit lashed out with all his strength, but Wit experienced this as nothing more than the barking of a small, if very angry, dog. He examined the bandit's mind, until he found the memory of the trip to the cave from the village, and he studied this memory so that he might find the cave himself, if he had to. He also isolated the parts of the bandit's being that contained the knowledge of language, and the knowledge of how to breathe. He thought about identifying the parts of the bandit that controlled his limbs, but at that point the yapping of the bandit's resistance was beginning to aggravate him, and he figured the villagers could tie him to a horse or dump him in the cart.

  He took the rest of the bandit's being apart. Memories vanished, motor functions failed. He ripped savagely at the psychic structures, until they were merely heaps of essence, which he hammered into a strong box around the frail parts of the bandit that he had decided to save.

  He thumped his staff. "You are Bound, for five hours." He gulped down the rest of Wa'llach's flask.

  The bandit collapsed. Blood was trickling out of his nose and eyes and he had soiled himself.

  "Where is my child?"

  The bandit told her.

  "I am sorry about the smell," said Wit, supporting his weight with his staff as the villagers rushed onto horses and out of the village, "I didn't mean for that. I wan't thinking. I am so sorry….alwaysh wanted to be a good wishard, and do the little, look out for the little people, you know, but…I wan't thinking he'd shit himself. It's not the fault of the Order, it's all my fault…"

  Someone helped Wit into the tavern where they tried to get him to drink water, but he would only take ale.

  By the time that the peasants returned to the village with the children, the rest of the villagers had made a very definite decision to leave Wit alone. He chose not to dwell on whether this was because he was very drunk and they had just seen him destroy a man's mind in the town square or if they were sensitive to his actual desire for solitude. He found himself alone in the stable where they had left the Bound bandit, holding a bottle of wine that he did not remember picking up.

  Songs and laughter came from the inn. The man lay on the ground, vaguely undulating in a smelly heap. Every so often he would mumble a word, but as far as Wit could tell, the words had no relation to each other and conveyed no meaning. Accessing the Power, Wit could see that the Binding had worn off. What was left of the man was gradually dissipating, and would be gone soon enough. Wit sat on a bale of hay to drink his wine and see exactly how long it would take.

  He raised his head at a noise as Wa'llach entered the stable. Seeing the man on the ground, the dwarf took the axe from his belt, raised it, and stepped towards him.

  "No," said Wit.

  The axe stopped inches from the man's neck, and for an instant, Wa'llach twisted against his Binding, trying to complete the stroke, his body immobile, with only his eyes betraying an impossible exertion. Then he sighed, holstered his axe, and glanced from Wit to the bandit and back. "Aye—you'll see what you've wrought. It's wise, if it's also cruel as Tharg's damnation."

  "'Wise but damned cruel,'" Wit hiccuped. "I heard they were gonna have that be the Order's motto, until they thought better of it."

  Wa'llach chuckled. He sat beside Wit on the bale of hay. "You showed a great deal of courage and strength today, boy. Not many humans, nor even wizards, could have done what you did. A full pint of dwarven rum, and still standing!"

  Wit blinked. "I wasn't really standing, more leaning on my staff."

  "You're not the worst magician that those thieving, necrophiliac sons of goblins have turned out. Not the worst by a ways." Wa'llach slapped him on the back and left.

  A little bit later the bandit died. Wit poured some of the wine onto the ground and drank the rest.

  He awoke to the full sun in a bed that he had no memory of getting into. His head was pounding, he felt horribly nauseous and his tongue felt like battered dragon-hide.

  He woke up, as he had for the last eight years of his life, with the strong impression that he was late for something important. He tried to get out of the bed, but the wrenching in his stomach and throbbing in his head forced him to abandon the effort, and he slumped back down.

  The room he was in seemed like it was probably part of the inn. Outside the closed door he could hear the sound of many voices, some of them children. Eventually, he picked up Wa'llach's voice. "Oh, I am sure that he will be very happy to see you, as soon as ever he can—but using their power like that takes a mighty toll on the wizards. And I am sure that under other circumstances he would be very grateful for the fried wyvern—but the best thing for a wizard, when their magic is low, is simple foods, a clear soup, if you have it, bread, and a light ale."

  A pitcher of water and a cup stood on a table beside the bed. Wit struggled until he was sitting up in the bed and then reached over, poured himself a cup of water with shaking hands, and then managed to drink most of it. That seemed to make him feel slightly better. He gingerly put the cup back on the table and tried to get up—but his legs gave out, and he found himself lying down again, back where he had started.

  After an uncertain amount of time Wa'llach entered the room, carrying a tray. Wit ignored the bread and soup and gulped down a large swig of ale.

  "What time is it?" asked Wit.

  "A little before noon."

  "If you get the horses ready, and we are out of here in an hour, we should be able to make Beale a few hours after sunset."

  "What's the use?"

  "What?"

  "We're welcome here—they won't even look at our gold. You could use the rest. If we must, we'll leave tomorrow and make Palomyde. I'd as soon wait until at least the day after."

  "Our instructions are to get to the mines and then Youngkent as soon as we can."

  "With a full month to spare. Your Cardozo is wise—he knows that Youngkent is a miserable place, and I don't want to sit around a bunch of slimy dragars with a thumb up my ass any more than he does."

  Wit nodded. "It's not yet noon…what am I supposed to do today?"

  Wa'llach laughed at him. "I'm sure a wise wizard like yourself will figure something out," he said, and walked out the door.

  Wit drank more water, a little more ale, and then managed to nibble a bit of the bread. He supposed that if he wasn't going to be riding that day, he ought to read or write someone a letter. He wanted to write the Adepts—but probably his time would be better spent either with the herbal or Phreer on Binding.

  The herbal, while in many respects excellent, had obviously been written and organized by someone who had gained extensive knowledge of the mind altering properties of various plants through personal experience and reading it productively required a very particular kind of focus that Wit felt incapable of in his current state. And while Wit knew that he could stand to know more about Binding—the dead bandit being the latest proof—and Phreer's book was widely and justly regarded as the most comprehensive treatment of the subject in the history of magic, Phreer's prose style was as dry and dense as the barely edible biscuits that Wa'llach had gotten from the quartermaster—and Wit fell soundly asleep after several moments of thinking about it.

  He awoke to lengthening shadows and spent several moments reveling in the fact that he no longer felt especially awful. The absence of a throbbing in his head felt like pure bliss. Again, the urge to get up and do something, the feeling that he was late, hit him, but this time it passed. He stretched in the bed and eventually settled back into a pleasant doze.

  Eventually, he got up and drank some water. There was a basin in a corner of the room, and he walked over to it and washed up.

  He left the room and found himself in a hallway that led to a staircase, which he went down. He found himself in the main room of the tavern, which was full of people and oddly quiet.

  Four children, ranging from three to about six y
ears old, occupied a prominent place in the center of the room. Standing near them, Wit recognized the woman with the blood-stained dress. In another group, Wit saw the chief, along with several other better dressed villagers. The rest of the room was filled with various individuals, all giving off an air of expectation and curiosity.

  The quiet conversations that had been going on abruptly ceased as Wit entered the room, and every eye turned to him. Wit nodded politely, as it suddenly dawned on him that they had spent the whole day waiting for him to get up.

  A man pushed one of the children, the oldest, forward. He walked towards Wit. "Great Sir?"

  "Yes?"

  "Thank you very much for saving us, Great Sir. I know that we all are very lucky to live in an Order that's protected by such a wise and powerful land…" He looked back at the man in desperation, and Wit realized, with horror, that the boy was more terrified of him than he had been of the bandits.

  "You are most welcome," said Wit, as gently as he could. "The honor is mine, to have been useful to you. I am very sorry that such a frightening thing happened to you, but I am sure that you were very brave. Go back to your father," he added as the boy stared at him in terror, and the child quickly retreated and hid behind the man's legs.

  The headman approached Wit next. "We are all in your debt, yours and the Order's. You can see we are a poor people and could have barely afforded to give them what they demanded. Anything we have, anything we can do for you, only ask."

  "Thank you. But I am only an agent of the Order and its Power—and merely acted as the Power directed me."

  "Sir," said the woman in the blood-stained dress, "I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me for my words about you and your Order…I was so afraid for my child, which you gave back to me. I will never be able to repay you."

  Wit smiled. "You have nothing to apologize to me for, I am only glad that the Power of my Order was able to be useful to you." There was an awkward, heavy pause, and then Wit asked if he could have something to eat—and everyone seemed immensely relieved, and he was led to a place at a table, while people rushed off to fetch dishes.

  Under nearly any other circumstances, Wit would have loathed the attentions being paid to him, but as it was their fussing over him provided a welcome distraction from their gratitude and fear. They brought him the best of everything, ales that they were saving for feasts and the choicest parts of the wyvern that had held the children prisoner. Wit made a great show of enjoying everything, assuring his hosts that nothing that good could be had in Kroywen.

  Even so, it was a generally awkward meal. When Wit's last plate had been taken away, he told them that he was still feeling poorly and apologized for not being able to enjoy more of their hospitality. His departure caused a palpable sense of relief.

  Back in his room, he lit a candle, got out Phreer and settled into bed. However, instead of being numbed by the text, it brought back vivid memories of the Binding that he had done the day before. After a little more than a page, Wit put the book down, and blew out his candle.

  For a moment, the shadows of the strange room terrified him. Is that what I am to them, a foreign shadow, a sinister absence? The situation struck him as wildly unjust: he had, fairly ingeniously in his own opinion, helped them out of an impossible situation, and in return they would exhale with relief whenever he left the room. If only they knew me better, he thought, and then laughed out loud at the absurdity.

  Would he want them, or anyone, to understand the "Binding" that he had done? Short-term Bindings were a little different and trickier than longer ones, if only because the Order almost never could be bothered to Bind anyone for less than a year, and thus they were never practiced and rarely discussed. Wit was dimly aware of the theory behind them—but had even less experience with them than he had with the other kind. What other wizards would accomplish with skill, patience and finesse, Wit had done with violence, power and savagery.

  It was a somewhat open question how much care Binders were supposed to take with the minds of the Bound. Far worse damage than the month of memory that the carter had lost were unquestioningly accepted as the cost of doing business—and even on the rare occasions when someone was very badly hurt or even killed during a Binding, the overwhelming consensus was that the occasional disaster was worth the stability that the Order provided.

  But Bindings were meant to provide redress for damage caused, and not to punish the Bound. Most importantly, Bindings were meant to be survivable: at the conclusion of the period, the Bound person was supposed to be able to resume their life as it had been before. The world accepted the lost memories, and even occasional death, because Bindings existed only to provide an amount of redress that was exactly proportional to the damage suffered—and did not give the Order power to kill or inflict harm at will.

  From the second Wit had seen the blood on the woman's dress, he understood that he was going to kill the bandit. Wit knew that there were wizards who could have Bound the bandit for five hours without causing much lasting harm; and he knew very, very well that he was not one of them. He took the Order's impotence in the face of the wyvern trap, and the scorn in the peasants' eyes, as personal insults, and he knew that once he found a way to access the Power, he would rip the knowledge he needed right from the bandit's mind. He had spent every conscious moment of his life in service of the Order and he was not prepared to allow it to appear worthless in the face of a crisis; and he had spent too much of his life looking too deeply into the minds of others from above to consider the death of one man as especially significant compared to potential embarrassment for his Order and his occupation.

  So he had invented a pretense and killed, with a brutality that he still had trouble seeing in himself.

  He was not the first wizard to have done something like that. There were several stories of wizards who had managed to invoke the Power for one purpose and then use it for another—and "accidents" in a Binding were much more common when the Binder harbored a personal animosity towards the Bound. But these stories did not circulate through official channels, and were perpetuated by rumor and gossip—and although it was never fully discussed, the consensus was that wizards who over-used their power in this fashion generally paid a price.

  When Wit fell asleep, he dreamed the late bandit's dreams. Whatever meaning these dreams might have had had died with the bandit, but Wit watched wolves in a yard, faces that he had never seen, and places that he had never been to. Wit could not even tell if these would have been good or bad dreams to the original dreamer.

  Wa'llach grumbled intensely about leaving the next day, but Wit was feeling good enough to ride and very ready to be done with being both worshiped and feared. The villagers insisted on filling their saddle-bags, including two large jugs of an undrinkable local sprit, which Wa'llach partook of liberally and either the liquor or the obvious nausea that its smell caused in Wit had cheered him up considerably by the time that they were five miles out of town.

  When they arrived at Palomyde in the evening, the news had preceded them and they were given the best food and shown to the finest rooms. Wit still disliked being the center of attention and the subject of widespread admiration, but was pleased to notice that people who had not seen what he had done firsthand did not fear him. He repeated his platitudes about serving only the Power in generally good spirits and complimented everything that was given to him.

  He dreamt the bandit's dreams again, and woke feeling as if he had not slept at all. The dreams still meant nothing to him, and as he sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes, he toyed with the idea that they were somehow fainter than the night before. It seemed as likely to be wishful thinking as anything else and he recoiled in horror at the idea that he would have the dreams for the rest of his life. He washed and stared back into tired eyes in the mirror.

  When he walked into the stables he found one of the people who seemed to run the inn, a pretty girl maybe three years older than he was, inspecting his h
orse.

  She greeted Wit pleasantly. "They said that you were going on a long journey?"

  He nodded.

  "You might want a better horse than that, if you are expecting to go very far. We have a fine black horse that I think would suit you, and I can let you have it for this one and five pieces of gold."

  "No," said Wit. "This horse has done fine so far."

  "You won't even look at it?"

  He shook his head. "It feels like I have spent half my life selling horses, through other people's eyes. There's the obvious ones, where someone painted it or gave it a drug to make it run faster for a little while…"

  "Are you calling me a cheat?"

  "No. But our cheats are nice, we don't have to think too hard about them. What if the horse had a condition that was going to make it go lame? Was it on the buyer or the seller to figure that out?"

  "This is a very good horse."

  "What if the horse's condition only made it more likely that it would go lame? What if…"

  She stepped closer to him, and put a hand on his cheek, smiling softly into his eyes. Wit's heart nearly jumped out of his mouth. "You poor thing, you only see it when things go wrong. I've sold and bought hundreds of horses, and I've never been in front of your Order once…the real world isn't only the unfortunate ones who come to your hall for redress."

  She took his hand, and led him to a paddock behind the inn and showed him a large black horse with sleek fur and fiery eyes. Wit had watched a thousand horses appear excellent in the eyes of their purchaser, only to meet with an untold number of disasters and disappointments, but he could not help but be impressed.

  "Do you like him?"

  "Yes, very much."

  "I'll let you have him in an even trade, for stopping the bandits."

  "Thank you, thank you very much."

  "And to prove that the world is better than what you see in your halls."

  "When I was posted in Tricame, there were caverns going to and from Dragarland, and those journeys would often end with horses being eaten, and we were often asked to look into whose fault that was. I learned what types of horse taste better, and I think he will taste rather good, if it comes to that." Wit than realized that she did not know if he was trying to be funny, laughed to make sure that she did, at which point she laughed awkwardly as well, and helped him lead the horse out of the paddock.