Free The Ladder in the Sky by John Brunner

She muttered, “Well, I didn’t do anything.”
    “Thanks anyway,” he countered.
    She hesitated. Then the urgent need to know what had come of this startling change in him caught hold of her. She gestured down the corridor. “Everyone is at the class in the canteen,” she said. “Come and tell me what they did to you, and what really caused your trouble.”
    A few moments later they were sitting facing each other in the empty cabin and Kazan was leaning back and looking with a puzzled expression at a spot on the far wall.
    “What they did to me,” he said. “That—well, I’m not sure. The doctor tried to tell me, but I didn’t get most of it.” A frustrated note crept into his voice. “He said something about selective stimulation of the brain. They put something over my head, and I went through all the things that were bothering me in a sort of slow motion so I had the chance to pick out what was real and what wasn’t. It didn’t hurt, but some of the things made me sweat. ”
    “But you know why you were in the mess you’d got into?” Clary pressed him.
    “That, yes.” Kazan rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. “Do I have to tell you about the lake, and the rest of that?”
    Clary shook her head quickly. She said, “I heard that just—just before I went to get the doctor to you. It was horrible.”
    “That’s so. But—well, see it like this. I came to on the mudbank by the lake, and just about all I could feel was that I was full of hate. To my ears I was full of it. I didn’t care about that dustbrain Hego, or the other one who helped to put me in the lake, Axam. It was Bryda I was after, and her sneering Prince Luth. I was going after them. I was going to sell out Luth’s proposed revolt, first of all. But that was too remote to satisfy me. Short of throwing him and Bryda in the lake where they’d thrown me, I wanted to see them die some other way. A good, ugly way.”
    Clary tried not to shudder, and failed. There was still acid venom in Kazan’s voice when he spoke of Bryda and Luth.
    “Well, it would take too long to tell you everything that got in my way. The thing that finished it was simple. Luth had this man Yarco serving him—a good guy, that I might have liked if I hadn’t met him the way I did. Yarco had been lost on a bet before he was born to the prince’s father, and he’d spent fifty years of life pledged to the royal family, never free to lift a finger for himself. And the night I was put in the lake Yarco killed himself. Word got around. It was held to be a bad omen. So when the prince’s revolt started to go wrong, someone close to him decided to cut his losses and poisoned him. I don’t know what happened to Bryda. Maybe the same.
    “You see, the only thing which had been driving me since I got up off the mud by the lake was my need to get even with Luth. I lost the chance. I got the idea into my head that I should have been dead anyway. So I acted as dead as I could, I guess.”
    “How did they get you out of it?” Clary said.
    Kazan shrugged. “Just made me see I was being a fool. I don’t know about that devil yet—and what seems crazy, I know for sure now that I didn’t dream about making the steps in the air. I really did that, and not even what the doctor put me through made me remember how I worked the trick. It doesn’t worry the doctor; he just said it was a quasi-real memory, whatever that means, and would take a long time to set right, but it wouldn’t worry me badly any more. Because he made me see the important thing.”
    “Which is—?”
    “That it was me, and not any devil, that got me out of the lake alive. He said some of it was sheer luck, but the rest was myself. He explained how sometimes under stress your mind will go into overdrive, and you’ll do things that will get you out of trouble without having to waste time on figuring them through beforehand. He made me see that the way my manacles were bitten through was the result of