Free Academic Exercises by K. J. Parker Page A

that, but I guess he forgave me. “I remember waking up,” he said, “and it was pitch dark and terribly quiet, and I couldn’t move. I was very scared. And then it occurred to me, I wasn’t breathing. I don’t mean I was holding my breath. I wasn’t breathing at all, and it didn’t matter. So then I knew.”
    I waited; but I hadn’t got all night. “And then?”
    He turned his head away. No hair, just a bulging purple scalp. A head like a plum. “I was terrified,” he said. “I mean, I had no way of knowing.” He paused, and I have no idea what was passing through his mind. “After a long time, I found I could move after all. I got my hands up against the lid, and I pushed, and I could feel the wood burst apart. That scared me even more, I thought the roof, I mean all the earth on top of me, I thought it’d cave in and bury me.” He paused again. “I was always frightened of tight places,” he said. “You know.”
    I nodded. Me too, as it happens.
    “I guess I panicked,” he went on, “because I kept pushing, and I somehow knew that I was incredibly strong, much stronger than I’d ever been before, so I thought, if I push hard enough. I wasn’t thinking straight, of course.”
    “And then?” I asked.
    “Pushed right up through the dirt and into the moonlight,” he said. “Amazing feeling. The first thing I wanted to do was run to the nearest farm and tell them, Look, I’m not dead after all.” He stopped; he’d said the word without thinking. “But then I thought about it; and I still wasn’t breathing, and I couldn’t actually feel anything. I could move my hands and feet, I could stand upright and balance, all that, but—you know when you’ve been sitting a long time and your feet go numb. It was like that, all over. It felt so strange.”
    “Go on,” I said.
    He didn’t, not for a long time. “I think I sat down,” he said. “I don’t know why I’d have done that, standing up didn’t make me tired or anything. I don’t feel tired, ever. But I was so confused, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. It all felt wrong.” He lifted his heels slowly and let them drop; clump, clump, clump. “And while I was there the sun started to come up, and the light just sort of flooded into my head and bleached everything away, so I couldn’t think at all. I guess you could say I passed out. Anyway, when I opened my eyes I was back where I’d started from, lying in the dark.”
    I frowned. “How did you get back there?”
    “I just don’t know,” he said. “Still don’t. It always happens, that’s all I know. When the sun comes up, my mind washes away. If I’ve gone any distance, I know I have to get back. I run. I can run really fast. I know I’ve got to be back—home,” he said, with a sort of breaking-up laugh, “before the sun comes up. I’ve learned to be careful, to give myself plenty of time.”
    He was still and quiet for a while. I asked, “Why do you kill things?”
    “No idea.” He sounded distressed. “If something comes close enough, I grab it and twist it till it’s dead. Like a cat lashing out at a bit of string. Reflex. I just know it’s something I have to do.”
    I nodded. “Do you go looking—?”
    “Yes.” He mumbled the word, like a kid admitting a crime. “Yes, I do. I do my best to keep away from where there might be people. It’s all the same to me; sheep, foxes, men. I’d go a long way away, into the mountains, if I could. But I have to stay close, so I can get back in time.”
    I’d been debating with myself, and I knew I had to ask. “What were you?” I said. “What did you do?”
    He didn’t answer. I repeated the question.
    “Like you said,” he replied. “I was a schoolteacher.”
    “Before that.”
    When he answered, it was against his will. The words came out slow, flat; he spoke because he had to. “I was a Brother,” he said. “When I was thirty, they said I should apply to the Order, they thought I had the gift,