The Book of Athyra

by Steven Brust

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to see you get hurt, Kiera.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “How far beyond Northport does this thing go?”

  “Hard to say. It’s all centered here, but he’d begun spreading out. He has offices other places, of course—you have to if you’re in shipping. But I can’t say how much else.”

  “What was going on before he died?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have the impression things were getting shaky for him.”

  “Very. He was scrabbling. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but there were rumors that he’d stepped too far out and it was all going to crumble.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Still wondering if someone put a shine on him?”

  “Seems like quite a coincidence.”

  “I know. But I don’t think so. As I said, I never heard any whispers, and the Empire investigated; they’re awfully good at this sort of thing.”

  I nodded. That much was certainly true. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem. If there’s anything else, let me know.”

  “I will.” I stood up.

  “Oh, by the way.”

  “Yes?”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “Seen anything of that Easterner you used to hang around with?”

  “You mean Vlad Taltos? The guy who screwed up the Organization representative to the Empire? The guy everyone wants to put over the Falls? The guy with so much gold on his head that his hair is sparkling? The guy the Organization wants so bad that anyone seen with him is likely to disappear for a long session of question and answer with the best information-extraction specialists the Organization can find? Him?”

  “Yep.”

  “Nope.”

  “I hadn’t thought so. See you around, Kiera.”

  “See you around, Stony.”

  4

  MY FIRST STEP WAS to fill Vlad in on what I’d learned; but I took a long, circuitous route back just in case I was being followed, so it took me almost until evening to get back to the cottage. When I turned the last corner of the path, Vlad was waiting for me, on the path, about fifty meters from the cottage. That startled me just a bit, as I’m not used to being seen so quickly even when I’m not trying to sneak, until I realized that Loiosh must have spotted me. I must remember to be careful if I ever have to sneak up on that Easterner.

  He stood clothed only in pants and boots, his upper body naked and full of curly hairs, and he was sweating heavily, although he didn’t seem to be breathing hard.

  “Nice evening,” I told him.

  He nodded.

  I said, “What have you been doing?”

  “Practicing,” he said, pointing at a tree some distance away. I noticed several knives sticking out of it. Then he touched his rapier, sheathed at his side, and said, “I’ve also punctured my shadow several times.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Only when I missed.”

  “Did it get any cuts in?”

  “No. But almost.”

  “Good to see you’re keeping your hand in.”

  “Actually, I haven’t been lately, but I thought it might be time to again.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Besides, I needed to get out.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s ugly in there,” he said, gesturing toward the cottage.

  “Oh?” I said again.

  “The old woman is doing what she promised.”

  “And?”

  He shook his head.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “He’s all screwed up.”

  “That’s news?”

  Vlad looked at me.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “He keeps thinking he killed his sister, or he has to save her, or something.”

  “Sister?”

  “Yeah, she was involved, too. He feels guilty about her.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, he’s a Teckla, and Loraan was his lord, and if you’re a peasant, you don’t do what he did. Deathgate, Kiera. Even touching a Morganti weapon—”

  “Right.”

  “So if he didn’t kill Loraan, he must have killed his sister.”

  I said, “I don’t follow that.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either,” said Vlad. “But that’s what we’re seeing. Or what we think we’re seeing. It isn’t too clear, and we’ve been doing a lot of guesswork, but that’s how it looks at the moment. And then there’s the bash on the head.”

  “What did that do?”

  “She thinks there may be a partial memory loss that’s contributing to the whole thing.”

  “Better and better.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What now?”

  “I don’t know. The old woman thinks we have to find some way of communicating with him, but she doesn’t know how.”

  “Does he hear us when we talk? See us?”

  “Oh, sure. But we’re like dream images, so what we say isn’t important.”

  “What is important? I mean, she probed him, right? What’s he doing in there?”

  He shrugged. “Trying to keep his sister away from me, or away from Loraan, or something like that.”

  “A constant nightmare.”

  “Right.”

  “Ugly.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s nothing you can do.”

  “Nothing I can do about that, anyway.”

  “If you could go in there yourself, I mean, into his mind—”

  “Sure, I’d do it. In a minute.”

  I nodded. “Then I might as well tell you what I learned today.”

  “Do.”

  “Do you want to go inside?”

  “No.”

  “All right.” He put his shirt on and nodded to me and I told him. He was a good listener; he stood completely still, leaning against a tree; his only motion was to nod slightly every once in a while; and he was spare with his questions, just asking me to amplify a point every now and then. Loiosh settled on his left shoulder, and even the jhereg appeared to be listening. It’s always nice to have an audience.

  When I was finished, Vlad said, “Well. That’s interesting. Surprising, too.”

  “That the Organization is involved?”

  “No, no. Not that.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head and appeared to be lost in thought—like I’d told him more than I thought I had, which was certainly possible. So I gave him a decent interval, then said, “What is it?”

  He shook his head again. I felt a little irritated but I didn’t say anything. He said, “It doesn’t make sense, that’s all.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “How well do you know Stony?”

  “Quite.”

  “Would he lie to you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Maybe that’s it, then. In any case, someone lied, somewhere along the line.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let me think about this, all right? And do some checking on my own. I want to follow something up; I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

  I shrugged. There’s no reasoning with Vlad when he gets a mood on him. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

  He nodded. Then he said, “Kiera?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  * * *

  I SLEPT LATE THE next day, because there was no reason not to. It was around noon when I got to the cottage, and no one was there except the dog. It shuffled away from me. I devoted some effort to making friends with it, and of course I succeeded. I talked to it for a while. Most cat owners talk to their cats, but all dog owners talk to their dogs; I don’t know why that is.

  I’d been there an hour or so when the dog jumped up suddenly and bolted out the door, and a minute or so later Hwdf’rjaanci returned with Savn. I said, “Good day, Mot
her. I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in. I’ve made some klava.”

  She nodded and had the boy sit down, then she closed the shutters. I realized that each time I’d been there during the day the windows had been shut. I got her some klava, which she drank bitter.

  I said, “What have you learned, Mother?”

  “Not as much as I wish,” she said. I waited. She said, “I think the two biggest problems are the bump on the head and the sister.”

  “Can’t the bump be healed?”

  “It has healed, on the outside. But there was some damage to his brain.”

  “No, I mean, can’t the damage be healed? I know there are sorcerers—”

  “Not yet. Not until I’m sure that, if I heal him, I won’t be sealing in the problem.”

  “I think I understand. What about the sister?”

  “He feels guilty about her—about her being exposed to whatever it was that happened.”

  She nodded. “That’s the real problem. I think he’s somehow using guilt about his sister to keep from facing that. He creates fantasies of rescuing her, but always shies away from what he’s rescuing her from. And then he loses control of the fantasies and they turn into nightmares. It’s worse, I think, because he used to be apprenticed to a physicker, so he’s even more tormented about what he did than most peasant boys would be.”

  I nodded. Speaking like this, she’d changed somehow—she wasn’t an old woman in a cottage full of ugly polished wood carvings, she was a sorcerer and a skilled physicker of the mind. It now seemed entirely reasonable that, as Vlad had told me, the locals would come by from time to time to consult with her on whatever their problems might be.

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “No. There’s too much I don’t understand. If I just go blundering in, I might destroy him—and myself.”

  “I understand.” I opened my mouth and closed it again. I said, “What are the walks for?”

  “I think he’s used to walking. He gets restless when he’s sitting for too long.”

  “And the closed shutters? Are they for him, or do you just like it that way?”

  “For him. He’s had too much experience, there have been too many things for him to see and hear and feel all at once—I want to limit them.”

  “Limit them? But if he’s trapped in his head, won’t it help to give him things outside his head to respond to?”

  “You’d think so, 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 carry 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 didn’t help me any, and thinking about Vlad getting killed was worse, so I went out and took a walk. Buddy came along, either because he liked my company or because he didn’t trust me and wanted to keep an eye on me.

  Good dog, either way.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME WE returned, it was getting dark, and Vlad was sitting at the kitchen table, with a bandage wrapped around his left forearm and no hair growing above his lip. I’m not sure which surprised me more. I think it was the lack of hair.

  There was some blood leaking through the bandage, but Vlad didn’t seem to be weak or even greatly disturbed. Buddy bounded up to him, asked him to play, sniffed at his wound, and looked hurt when Vlad pulled his arm out of reach. Loiosh watched the display with what I would have guessed to be disdain if I ever knew what jhereg were thinking.

  He saw me looking at him and said, “Don’t worry. It’ll grow back.”

  “Well,” I said. “You seem to have been busy.”

  “Yes.”

  “How long since you’ve returned?”

  “Not long. Half an hour or so.”

  “Learn anything?”

  “Yes.”

  I sat down opposite him. Savn was on the floor, resting. The old woman sat beside him, watching us.r />
  “Shall we start at the beginning?”

  “I’d like a glass of water first.”

  The old woman started to get up, but I motioned her to sit, went outside to the well, filled a pitcher, brought it in, filled a cup, and gave it to Vlad. He drank it all, slowly and carefully.

  “More?” I said.

  “Please.”

  I brought him more; he drank some of it, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and nodded to me.

  I said, “Well?”

  He shrugged. “The beginning was your own story.”

  “Go on.”

  He said, “It didn’t make sense.”

  “So I gathered at the time. What part of it didn’t make sense?”

  He frowned and said, “Kiera, have you ever been involved in investigating someone’s death—in trying to determine cause of death?”

  “No, I can’t say I have. Have you?”

  “No, but I’ve been concerned with several, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean. And I have an idea of what’s involved in an investigation like that.” I shrugged. “What about it?”

  “How long does it take to decide that someone wasn’t murdered?”

  “Wasn’t murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. Looking at the body—”

  “Takes a day, maybe two, if he was murdered.”

  “Well, yes, but to prove a negative—”

  “Exactly.”

  “They’d have to go over him pretty carefully, I suppose.”

  “Yes. Very carefully. And they look at everything else, too—such as if he was the sort of person likely to be murdered, or if there is anything suspicious in the timing of his death, or—”

  “Exactly the sort of circumstances that surrounded Fyres’s death.”

  “Yes. Fyres’s death would set off every alarm they have. If you were the chief investigator, wouldn’t you want to be extra careful before putting your chop on a report that stated he died of mischance attributable to no human agency, or however they put it?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Your friend the Jhereg told you that the Imperial investigators had determined the cause of death to be accidental.”

  “And?”

  “And when did Fyres die?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. A few weeks ago. Kiera, they can’t have decided that this quickly. The only thing they could know this quickly is if it was a murder.”