“Basic courtesy,” I said. “Maybe all languages have rote responses for those: hello, how are you, that sort of thing. I wonder.”
“They do,” said Teldra.
“Are you sure?”
“The languages without courtesy built into them didn’t survive long enough for us to remember them. Because, of course—”
“Yes,” I said. “I see.”
I pondered this linguistic profundity for a moment.
I considered what I had just done, and was soon going to do again. “Is witchcraft a language?”
“Hmmm. I don’t know. I should imagine it is. I know that sorcery is.”
“Witchcraft,” I said, “does not have courtesy built into it.”
She laughed. “All right. If we’re counting, you’ve scored a point. If we are going to call those languages, and we might as well, they don’t have built-in courtesy.” She frowned suddenly “Unless we consider ... no, that’s too far-fetched.”
I didn’t want to encourage her to go wherever she had been about to go, so I said, “How did you and Morrolan meet, anyway? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“It was out East,” said Teldra. “During the Interregnum, in a village whose name translated to ‘Blackchapel.’ This was before he knew who he was, and—”
“Before he knew who he was?”
“Before he knew he was human.”
I blinked. “I think you’re going to have to explain that.”
“I didn’t realize you didn’t know,” said Teldra. “Certainly, it is no secret.”
“All right.”
“The Lord Morrolan was brought to the East, beyond his ancestral homelands, as an infant, just around the time of Adron’s Disaster. His parents didn’t survive, and so he was raised by Easterners. He grew up thinking he was simply an extraordinarily tall Easterner.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, my lord.”
“Well I’ll be—really? He thought he was human? I mean, Easterner?”
She nodded.
I shook my head. “Amazing.”
“Yes.”
“Most extraordinarily tall,” I reflected. “How did he find out?”
“It couldn’t be concealed forever,” she said. “In any case, I was also in the East, and of much the same age. We met at about the time he was completing his pact with Verra, in which I was able to be of some service to him, and I was also of some help when he was gathering his Circle of Witches.”
I nodded. I knew this circle existed—they occupied the East Tower, but I had never had occasion to go there, and still didn’t know exactly what he used them for. But, no doubt, I would never know all there was to know about Morrolan.
I shook my head, trying to get used to the idea of Morrolan being raised as an Easterner.
“Where in the East was he?”
“There are—or, rather, were—a series of small kingdoms near Lake Nivaper, just south of the Hookjaw Mountains.”
“Yes, I know them. They speak Fenarian in some of them.”
She nodded. “His name at the time was Fenarian: Sötétcsilleg. ‘Morrolan’ is just the same thing, rendered into the ancient tongue of the Dragon.”
“Amazing,” I said. “All right, so you helped him sacrifice villages of Easterners to the Demon Goddess. Then what?”
She smiled. “That was later, and they were Dragaeran villages. Eventually, he returned to reclaim his ancestral homeland, and he was gracious enough to give me residence. I was poor, of course, and had nowhere else to go. I remain very grateful to him.”
I nodded, wondering what she was leaving out. Most likely, anything that was to her credit or Morrolan’s discredit. She was like that. It sometimes made me a little uncomfortable to never know exactly what she was thinking, but, on the other hand, it was nice to know that there was at least one being in the world who wouldn’t say anything nasty about me.
“You’re awful sensitive for an assassin, Boss.”
“You’ve said that before, Loiosh.”
We returned to silence; I waited to recover and hoped I’d have time to do so; in the meantime my mind wandered, starting with the rather remarkable revelations about Morrolan and proceeding from there. I don’t remember most of what I thought about—the sort of flitting, random thoughts that can only just barely be called thinking. But then I did eventually have a real, true thought, and it brought me up so sharply that it burst out of my mouth before my brain had entirely finished processing it: “Aw nuts. If Morrolan and Aliera did escape, I’ll bet they’re going to want to rescue us.”
“Of course,” said Teldra.
“Ready to start, Loiosh?”
“Boss—”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Boss—”
“If I’m still chained to this wall when Morrolan and Aliera show up, I’ll almost certainly die of shame. The chances of messing up the spell are much less.”
I got the impression Loiosh wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t either.
“Teldra,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind. You can help.”
“Yes?”
“You saw what I did with the knives?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” I said, and reached to hand her some—and only then realized that the Spellbreaker was back around my wrist I stopped, hand in midair, and looked at Teldra.
“What is it, Vlad?”
“Loiosh,” I said, “how; did it get back there? Last I remember it was in my hand, and I was waving it around like an idiot. I can’t believe the Jenoine not only let me keep it, but were kind enough to put it back around my wrist for me.”
“They didn’t, Boss.”
“Talk.”
“It sort of slithered over to you, and, uh, it kind of crawled up your arm.”
“On its own?”
“‘Fraid so, Boss.”
Well. Wasn’t that interesting?
I handed Teldra my last three daggers, pulling them out of various places. I hoped they would be enough—I used to carry lot more.
“You know what to do?”
“I know what to do, but not when to do it.”
“I’ll try to say something. If I seem to lose consciousness, that would be a good time. Oh, give me one back for a second, need to expose some more skin first.”
She didn’t ask, and I didn’t explain; I just cut away four more strips from my jerkin. The air was even colder with still more of my belly exposed. I handed two of the strips to Teldra, asking her if she knew what to do with them. She nodded. She didn’t appear at all nervous, which I attribute to acting ability, probably inherited; stupidity would be the only other possible explanation, and I didn’t think she was stupid.
When we had managed to get the leather between the manacles and our wrists, she nodded at me, as if signaling that she was ready. I gave her back the last knife. I was now as close to unarmed as I’d been in some time. My rapier—“Where is my rapier?” I said.
“Across the room, I think.”
“How did that happen?”
“I don’t know.”
I considered the matter further, saying aloud, “If they know how we got out the last time, they might have done something to prevent this from working.”
“I know,” said Teldra.
“But they keep not behaving the way captors are supposed to.”
“They probably weren’t raised on the right sorts of bedtime stories and songs.”
“And bad theater,” I agreed. “But I’m starting to think they have a whole other plan in mind.”
“What sort of plan?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, which was not an outright lie, at any rate. “All right, then. Let’s try it.”
She said, “Vlad, do you think we’re doing what they want us to?”