but I would not rise, and, grudgingly, he brought the price of his services down another notch. Still it was probably five times what he charged the folk of Salla Old Town for the same benefit, but he knew I had money, and, thinking of Noim fuming in the car, I could not bring myself to haggle.
“Done,” I said.
Next he brought me the contract. I have said that we of Borthan are suspicious people; have I indicated how we rely on contracts? A man’s word is merely bad air. Before a soldier beds a whore they come to the terms of their bargain and scrawl it on paper. The drainer gave me a standard form, promising me that all I said would be held in strictest confidence, the drainer merely acting as intermediary between me and the god of my choice, and I for my part pledging that I would hold the drainer to no liability for the knowledge he would have of me, that I would not call him as witness in a lawsuit or make him my alibi in some prosecution, et cetera, et cetera. I signed. He signed. We exchanged copies and I gave him his money.
“Which god would you have preside here?” he asked.
“The god who protects travelers,” I told him. We do not call our gods aloud by their names.
He lit a candle of the appropriate color—pink—and put it beside the mirror. By that it was understood that the chosen god would accept my words.
“Behold your face,” the drainer said. “Put your eyes to your eyes.”
I stared at the mirror. Since we shun vanity, it is not usual to examine one’s face except on these occasions of religion.
“Open now your soul,” the drainer commanded. “Let your griefs and dreams and hungers and sorrows emerge.”
“A septarch’s son it is who flees his homeland,” I began, and at once the drainer jerked to attention, impaled by my news. Though I did not take my eyes from the mirror, I guessed that he was scrabbling around to look at the contract and see who it was that had signed it. “Fear of his brother,” I continued, “leads him to go abroad, but yet he is sore of soul as he departs.”
I went on in that vein for some while. The drainer made the usual interjections every time I faltered, prying words out of me in his craft’s cunning way, and shortly there was no need for such midwifery, for the words gushed freely. I told him how close I had come to lying to Stirron; I confessed that I would miss the royal wedding and give my brother injury thereby; I admitted several small sins of self-esteem, such as anyone commits daily.
The drainer listened.
We pay them to listen and to do nothing but listen, until we are drained and healed. Such is our holy communion, that we lift these toads from the mud, and set them up in their godhouses, and buy their patience with our money. It is permitted under the Covenant to say anything to a drainer, even if it is drivel, even if it is a shameful catalog of throttled lusts and hidden filth. We may bore a drainer as we have no right to bore our bond-kin, for it is the drainer’s obligation by contract to sit with the patience of the hills as we speak of ourselves. We need not worry what the drainer’s problems may be, nor what he thinks of us, nor whether he would be happier doing something else. He has a calling and he takes his fee, and he must serve those who have need of him. There was a time when I felt it was a miraculously fine scheme, to give us drainers in order that we might rid our hearts of pain. Too much of my life was gone before I realized that to open oneself to a drainer is no more comforting than to make love to one’s own hand: there are better ways of loving, there are happier ways of opening.
But I did not know that then, and I squatted by the mirror, getting the best healing that money could buy. Whatever residue of wrongness was in my soul came forth, syllable smoothly following syllable, the way sweet liquor will flow when one taps the thorny flanks of the gnarled and repellent-looking flesh-trees that grow by the Gulf of Sumar. As I spoke the candles caught me in their spell, and by the flickering of