by Steven Brust
She gave a little laugh. “The second time was more recent. I didn’t enjoy being robbed,” she added.
“I should think not.”
“They beat my husband—almost killed him.”
“I don’t beat people, Mother.”
“You just break into their homes?”
I said, “When you’re working with the mentally sick, do you ever worry about being caught in the disease?”
“Always,” she said. “That’s why I have to be careful. I can’t do anyone any good if I tangle my own mind instead of untangling my patient’s.”
“That makes sense. I take it you’ve done a great deal of this?”
“Some.”
“How much?”
“Some.”
“You have to go into his mind, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
I looked at her. “You’re frightened, aren’t you?”
She looked away.
“I would be, too,” I told her. “Breaking into homes is much less frightening than breaking into minds.”
“More profitable, too,” I added after a moment.
I felt Vlad looking at me, and looked back. He’d overheard the conversation and seemed to be trying to decide if he wanted to get angry. After a moment, he returned to looking at the papers.
I stood up, went over to the dog, and got acquainted. It still seemed a bit suspicious of me, but was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. Presently Hwdf’rjaanci said, “All right. I’ll start tomorrow.”
* * *
BY THE TIME I got there the next morning, Vlad had covered the table with a large piece of paper—I’m not sure where he got it—which was covered with scrawls and arrows. I stood over him for a moment, then said, “Where’s the boy?”
“He and the woman went out for a walk. They took Rocza and the dog with them.”
“Loiosh?”
“Flying around outside trying to remember if he knows how to hunt.”
He got that look on his face that told me he’d communicated that remark to Loiosh, too, and was pleased with himself.
I said, “Any progress?”
He shrugged. “Fyres didn’t like to tell his people much.”
“So you said.”
“Even less than I’d thought.”
“Catch me up.”
“Fyres and Company is a shipping company that employs about two hundred people. That’s all, as far as I can tell. Most of the rest of what he owned isn’t related to the shipping company at all, but he owned it through relatives—his wife, his son, his daughters, his sister, and a few friends. And most of those are in surrender of debts and have never really been solvent—it’s all been a big fraud from the beginning, when he conned banks into letting him take out loans, and used the loans to make his companies look big so that he could take out more loans. That’s how he operated.”
“You know this?”
“Yeah.”
“You aren’t even an accountant.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have to prove it—I’ve learned it because I’ve found out what companies he was keeping track of and looked at the ownership and read his notes. There’s nothing incriminating about it, but it gives the picture pretty clearly if you’re looking for it.”
“How big?”
“I can’t tell. Big enough, I suppose.”
“What’s the legal status?”
“I have no idea. I’m sure the Empire will try to sort it all out, but that’ll take years.”
“And in the meantime?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to have to do something, but I don’t know what.”
Savn and Hwdf’rjaanci returned then and sat down on the floor near the fire. The woman’s look discouraged questions as she took Savn’s hands in hers and began rubbing them. Vlad watched; I could feel his tension.
I said, “You have to do something soon, don’t you?”
He gave me a half-smile. “It would be nice. But this isn’t the sort of thing I can stumble into. I should know what I’m doing first. That makes it trickier.” Then he said, “Why are you helping me, anyway?”
I said, “I assume you’ve been making a list of all the companies you know about and who their owners are.”
“Yeah. They’ve gotten to know my face real well at City Hall.”
“That may be a problem later on.”
“Maybe. I hope not to be around here long enough for it to matter.”
“Good idea.”
“Yes.”
“No help for it, I suppose. Do you think it might be wise to pick one of these players and pay a visit?”
“Sure, if I knew what to ask. I need to figure out who really owns this land and—”
Loiosh and I reacted at once to the presence of sorcery in the room, Vlad just an instant later. Our heads turned toward Hwdf’rjaanci, who was holding Savn’s shoulders and speaking under her breath. We watched for maybe a minute, but there was no point in talking about it. I cleared my throat. “What were you saying?”
Vlad turned back to me, looking blank. Then he said, “I don’t remember.”
“Something about needing to find out who really owns this land.”
“Oh, right.” I could see him mentally shaking himself. “Yeah. What I really want is to get the picture of this thing as it’s going to emerge when the Empire finishes its investigations, say two hundred years from now. But I can’t wait that long.”
“I might be able to learn something.”
“How?”
“The Jhereg.”
Vlad frowned. “How would the Jhereg be involved?”
“I don’t know that we are. But if what Fyres was doing was illegal, and it was making a lot of money, there’s a good chance for a Jhereg connection somewhere along the line.”
“Good point,” said Vlad.
Loiosh was still staring at the woman and the boy. Vlad was silent for a moment; I wondered what Vlad and Loiosh were saying to each other. I wondered if they spoke in words, or if it was some sort of communication that didn’t translate. I’ve never had a familiar, but then, I’m not a witch. Vlad said, “You have local connections?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” he said. “Do it. I’ll keep trying to put this thing together.”
The woman said, “Cold. So cold. Cold.”
Vlad and I looked at her. She wasn’t shivering or anything, and the cottage was quite warm. Her hands were still on Savn’s shoulders and she was staring at him.
“Can’t keep it away,” she said. “Can’t keep it away. Find the cold spot. Can’t keep it away.” After that she fell silent.
I looked at Vlad and turned my palms up. “I might as well go now,” I said.
He nodded, and went back to his paperwork. I headed out the door. The dog gave its tail a half-wag and put its head down between its paws again.
It was over two or three miles to Northport, but I had been there often enough to learn a couple of teleport points, so I went ahead and put myself into an alley that ran past the back of a pawnbroker’s shop, startling a couple of local urchins when I appeared. They stared at me for a second, then went back to urchining, or whatever it is they do. I walked around the corner and into the dark little shop. The middle-aged man behind the counter looked up at me, but before he could say a word I said, “Sorry to disappoint you, Dor.”
“What, you don’t have anything for me?”
“Nope. I just want to see the upstairs man.”
“For a minute there—”
“Next time.”
He shrugged. “You know the way.”
Poor Dor. Usually when I come into his place it’s because I have something that’s too hot to unload in Adrilankha, which means he’s going to get something good for a great price. But not today. I walked past him into the rear of the shop, up the stairs, and into a nice, plain room where a couple of toughs waited. One, a very dark fellow with a pointy head, like someone had tried to fit him through a funnel,
was sitting in front of the room’s other door; the other one had arms that hung out like a mockman and he looked about as intelligent, although looks can be deceiving; he was leaning against a wall. They didn’t seem to recognize me.
I said, “Is Stony in?”
“Who wants to know?” said Funnel-head.
I smiled brightly. “Why, I do.”
He scowled.
I said, “Tell him it’s Kiera.”
Their eyes grew just a little bit wider. That always happens. It is very satisfying. The one stood up, moved his chair, opened the door, and stuck his head into the other room. I heard him speaking softly, then I heard Stony say, “Really? Well, send her in.” There was a little more conversation, followed by, “I said send her in.”
The tough turned back to me and stood aside. I dipped him a curtsy as I stepped in past him—a curtsy looks silly when you’re wearing trousers, but I couldn’t resist. He stayed well back from me, as if he were afraid I’d steal his purse as I walked by. Why are people who will walk into potentially lethal situations without breaking a sweat so often frightened around someone who just steals things? Is it the humiliation? Is it just that they don’t know how I do it? I’ve never figured that out. Many people have that reaction. It makes me want to steal their purses.
Stony’s office was deceptively small. I say deceptive because he was a lot bigger in the Organization than most people thought—even his own employees didn’t know; he felt safer that way. I’d only found out by accident and guesswork, starting when someone had hired me to lighten one of Stony’s button men and I’d come across pieces of his security system. Stony himself was pretty deceptive, too. He looked, and acted, like the sort of big, mean, stupid, and brutal thug that the Left Hand thinks we all are. In fact, I’d never known him to do anything that wasn’t calculated—even his famous rages always seemed to result in just the right people disappearing, and no more. Over the years, I’d tried to puzzle him out, and my opinion at the moment was that he wasn’t in this for the power, or for the pleasure of putting things over on the Guard, or anything else—he wanted to acquire a great deal of money, and a great deal of security, and then he planned to retire. I couldn’t prove it, I reflected, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someday he just packed up and vanished, and spent the rest of his life collecting seashells or something on some tiny island he owned.
Over the years, I had gradually let him know that I knew where he stood in the Organization, and he had gradually stopped pretending otherwise when we were alone. It was possible that he liked having someone with whom he could drop the game a little, but I doubt it.
All of this flashed through my mind as I sat in the only other chair in the room—the room just big enough to contain my chair, his chair, and the desk. He said, “Must be something big, for you to come here.” His voice was rough and harsh, and fitted the personality he pretended to; I assumed it was contrived, but I’ve never heard him break out of it.
“Yes and no,” I said.
“There a problem?”
“In a way.”
“You need help?”
“Something like that.”
He shook his head. “That’s what I like about you, Kiera. Your way of explaining everything so clearly.”
“My part isn’t big, and what I need isn’t big, but it’s part of something big. I didn’t want to ask you to meet me somewhere because I’m asking for a favor, and you don’t get anything from it, so I didn’t want to put you out. But it isn’t a favor for me, it’s for someone else.”
He nodded. “That makes everything completely clear, then.”
“What do you know of Fyres?”
That startled him a little. “The Orca?”
“Yes.”
“He’s dead.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He owned a whole lot of stuff.”
“Yeah.”
“Most of it will end up in surrender of debts.”
“That’s what I like about you, Stony. The way you have of reeling out information no one else knows.”
He made a loose fist with his right hand and drummed his fingernails on the desk while looking at me. “What exactly do you want to know?”
“The Organization’s interest in him and his businesses.”
“What’s your interest?”
“I told you, a favor for a friend.”
“Yeah.”
“Is it some big secret, Stony?”
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
“It goes up pretty high?”
“Yeah, and there’s a lot of money involved.”
“And you’re trying to decide how much to tell me just as a favor.”
“Right.”
I waited. Nothing I could say would help make up his mind for him.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll tell you this much. A lot of people had paper on the guy. Shards. Everybody had paper on the guy. There are going to be some big banks going down, and there are going to be some Organization people taking sudden vacations. It isn’t just me, but we’re in it.”
“How about you?”
“I’m not directly involved, so I may be all right.”
“If you need anything—”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“How did he die?”
Stony spread his hands. “He was out on his Verra-be-damned boat and he slipped and hit his head on a railing.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
He shook his head. “No one wanted him dead, Kiera. I mean, the only chance most of us had to ever see our investment back was if his stuff earned out, and with him dead there’s no way of it ever earning out.”
“You sure?”
“Who can be sure of anything? I didn’t want him dead. I don’t know anyone who wanted him dead. The Empire sent their best investigators, and they think it was an accident.”
“All right,” I said. “What was he like?”
“You think I knew him?”
“You lent him money, or at least thought about it; you knew him.”
He smiled, then the smile went away and he looked thoughtful—an expression I doubt most people would ever have seen. “He was all surface, you know?”
“No.”
“It was like he made himself act the way he thought he should—you could never get past it.”
“That sounds familiar.”
He ignored that. “He tried to be polished, professional, calculating—he wanted you to believe he was the perfect bourgeois. And he wanted to impress you—he always wanted to impress you.”
“With how rich he was?”
Stony nodded. “Yeah, that. And with all the people he knew, and with how good he was at what he did. I think that part of it—being impressive—was more important to him than the money.”
I nodded encouragingly. He smiled. “You want more?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’d better know why.”
“It’s a little embarrassing,” I said.
“Embarrassing?” He looked at me the way I must have been looking at Vlad when I realized that he was embarrassed.
“I have this friend—”
“Right.”
I laughed. “Okay, skip it. I owe someone a favor,” I amended untruthfully. “She’s an old woman who is about to be kicked off her land because everybody is selling off everything to stave off surrender of debts because of this mess with Fyres.”
“An old woman being foreclosed on? Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Would I make up something like that?”
He shook his head, chuckling to himself. “No, I suppose not. So what do you plan to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet. Just find out what I can and then think about it.” Or, at any rate, if Vlad had had any other plan, he hadn’t mentioned it to me. “What else can you tell me?”
“Well, he was about fourteen hundred years old. No one heard of him
before the Interregnum, but he rose pretty quickly after it ended.”
“How quickly?”
“He was a very wealthy man by the end of the first century.”
“That is quick.”
“Yeah. And then he lost it all forty or fifty years later.”
“Lost it all?”
“Yep.”
“And came back?”
“Twice more. Each time bigger, each time the collapse was worse.”
“Same problem? Same sort of paper castles?”
“Yep.”
“Shipping?”
“Yep. And shipbuilding. Those have been his foundations all along.”
“You’d think people would learn.”
“Is there an implied criticism there, Kiera?” His look got just the least bit hard.
“No. Curiosity. I know you aren’t stupid. Most of the people he’d be borrowing from aren’t, either. How did he do it?”
Stony relaxed. “You’d have to have seen him work.”
“What do you mean? Good salesman?”
“That, and more. Even when he was down, you’d never know it. Of course, when someone that rich goes down, it doesn’t have much effect on how he lives—he’ll still have his mansion, and he’ll still be at all the clubs, and he’ll still have his private boat and his big carriages.”
“Sure.”
“So he’d trade on those things. You get to talking with him for five minutes, and you forget that he’d just taken a fall. And then his secretaries would keep running in with papers for him to sign, or with questions about some big deal or another, and it looked like he was on top of the world.” Stony shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve wondered if he didn’t have those secretaries pull that sort of thing just to look good; but it worked. You’d always end up convinced that he was in some sort of great position and you might as well jump on the horse and ride it yourself before someone else did.”
“And there were a lot of us on the horse.”
“A lot of Jhereg? Yeah.”
“And in deep.”
“Yeah.”
“That isn’t good for my investigation.”
“You worried you might bump into the Organization? Is that it?”
“That’s part of it.”
“It might happen,” he said.
“All right.”
“What if it does?”
“I don’t know.”