Orca by Steven Brust Page B

and you may even turn out to be right. But more often than not, it works best the other way. It’s as if he’s trying to escape from pressure, and everything he perceives adds to the pressure. If I was more certain, I’d create a field around him that shut him off from the world entirely. It may yet come to that.”
    “You’ve had cases like this before?”
    “You mean people who were so pulled into themselves that they were out of touch with the world? Yes, a few. Some of them worse than Savn.”
    “Were you able to help them?”
    “There were two I was able to help. Three I couldn’t.” Her voice was carefully neutral. One way of looking at it was that the odds were against success. Another way was that she was due to win one. Neither was terribly productive, so I said, “How did you proceed?”
    “I tried to learn as much as I could about how they got that way, I healed any physical damage when there was some, and then, when I thought they were ready, I took them on a dreamwalk.”
    “Ah.”
    “You know about dreamwalking?”
    “Yes. What sort of dreams did you give them?”
    “I tried to guide them through whatever choice they made that put them in a place they couldn’t get out of, and give them another choice instead.”
    “And in three cases it didn’t work.”
    “Yes. In at least one of those, it was because I didn’t know enough when I went in.”
    “That sounds dangerous.”
    “It was. I almost lost my mind, and the patient became worse. He lost the ability to eat or drink, even with assistance, and he soon died.”
    I kept my face expressionless, which took some effort. What a horrible way to die, and what a horrible knowledge to cany around with you, if you were the one who had tried to cure him.
    “What had happened to him?”
    “He’d been badly beaten by robbers.”
    “I see.” I almost asked the next obvious question, but then I decided not to. “That must not be an easy thing to live with.”
    “Better for me than for him.”
    “Not necessarily,” I said, thinking of Deathgate Falls.
    “Maybe you’re right.”
    “In any case, I understand why you want to be careful.”
    “Yes.”
    She went over and sat down in front of Savn once again, staring at him and holding his shoulders. In a little while she said, “He seems to be a nice young man, somewhere inside. I think you’d like him.”
    “I probably would,” I said. “I like most people.”
    “Even the ones you steal from?”
    “Especially the ones I steal from.”
    She didn’t laugh. Instead she said, “How do you know I won’t turn you over to the Empire?”
    That startled me, although I don’t know why it should have. “Will you?” I said.
    “Maybe.”
    “Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me that.”
    She shook her head. “You aren’t a killer,” she said.
    “You know that?”
    “Yes.” She added, “The other one, the Easterner, he’s a killer.”
    I shrugged. “What could you tell the Empire, anyway? That I’m a thief? They know that; they’ve heard of me. That I stole something? They’ll ask what I stole. You’ll tell them, by which time Vlad will have hidden it, or maybe even returned it. Then what? Do you expect them to be grateful?”
    She glared at me. “I wasn’t actually going to tell them, anyway.”
    I nodded.
    A few minutes later she said, “You can’t have known the Easterner long—they don’t live long enough. Yet you treat him as a friend.”
    “He is a friend.”
    “Why?”
    “He doesn’t know, either,” I said.
    “But—”
    “What you’re asking,” I said, “is whether he can really do what he says he can do.”
    “And whether he will,” she agreed.
    “Right. I think he can; he’s good at putting things together. In any case, I know that he’ll try. In fact, knowing Vlad ...”
    “Yes?”
    “He might very well try so hard he gets himself killed.”
    She didn’t have anything to say to that, so she turned her attention back to Savn. Thinking about Savn