by Steven Brust
Then Loiosh said, “Boss, the guy’s coming inside.”
“Okay,” I said, and I placed the sword against the wall behind me, resting it against a support beam where it would be, if not hidden, at least not horribly obvious. I made sure I had a dagger near to hand, then I finished sopping up the meal with the remains of the bread—a good black bread made with seeds of some kind.
In fact, they both came in—the man and the woman—and planted themselves in front of me; no doubt they’d received instructions from headquarters. I looked up at them with an expression of profound innocence, to which I tried to mix in a certain amount of alarm.
“Lord Kaldor?” said the man.
I nodded.
“May we speak with you for a moment?”
I nodded again.
“I’m Lieutenant Domm, this is Ensign Timmer, of Her Imperial Majesty’s Guard.”
I nodded for the third time. I was getting good at it.
They sat down, even though I hadn’t invited them to; I think they felt that standing while I sat would make it harder for them to intimidate me. Meanwhile, I tried to act like I was intimidated but trying to act like I wasn’t. I don’t think I did very well—it’s a lot easier to pretend to be tough when you’re scared than to pretend to be scared when you’re tough. Or, at least, it is for me.
“Need any help, boss?”
“Not yet, Loiosh.”
“We’d just like to ask you some questions. We understand that you’ve been telling people that we’re not conducting a thorough investigation into a certain matter. We’d like to know why you think so.”
I was betting on Reega over Endra, so I said, “My lord, I went over to the city hall today, where they’re—you’re—talking to everyone, and I told them what I knew, and they didn’t care, so I figured that must mean—”
“Bullshit,” said Timmer, opening her mouth for the first time. “What’s the real reason?”
“That’s the only—”
She turned to Domm and said, “Let’s take him back and work on him for a while. We don’t have time for this.”
“Be patient,” said Domm. “I think he’ll talk to us.”
“Why bother? We can peel him like an onion.”
Domm shook his head. “Not unless we have to. The big guy doesn’t like us destroying people’s brains unless there’s no other choice.”
“So who’s going to tell him?”
“Let’s try it my way first.”
“Okay. You’re the boss.”
He nodded and turned back to me. It was becoming harder and harder to try to look frightened. People all around us in the inn had now moved away and Trim was giving us uneasy glances. A reassuring wave, I thought, would probably not be a good idea. Domm leaned over the table to bring his face right up to mine.
“Who are you, what do you know, how do you know it, and what are you after?”
I sank back into the chair and made my eyes get wide, which is as good as I can do at pretending to be afraid. I tried to figure out if there was any way to talk my way out of this without giving them anything. Nothing came instantly to mind. Domm said, “Am I going to have to let Timmer here work on you? It isn’t how I like to do things, but if you don’t give me any choice, I’m going to have to give you to her.”
It suddenly occurred to me that, if they believed I was a professional, they wouldn’t be trying to pull stuff like that on me—I was in a better position than I’d thought I was.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”
Domm sat down again and waited, but kept his eyes fixed on me. I’ll bet he’s pretty good at telling when people are lying. But then, I’m pretty good at lying.
I said, “There was this man. He asked me if I wanted to make some money—fifty imperials, he said, to go to a room in the city hall, say all these things, then walk around to a couple of places and say some more things. He told me what to say.”
“Who is he?” snapped Timmer.
“I don’t know. I’d never seen him before.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Here—right here.”
Domm said, “How did he know to talk to you?” He was good, this guy.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, come on. You can do better than that. Do you expect us to believe he just walked in here and picked the first guy he saw to make this offer to?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
Domm said, “What House was he?”
“Orca,” I said. They looked at each other, which gave me the impression I’d scored a hit, although it was a pretty obvious thing to say.
Timmer said, “What did he look like?”
I started to make something up, then decided that Kaldor wasn’t all that observant, and they could work for what they got. “I don’t know, he was just, you know, just someone.”
“How old do you think he is?”
“I don’t know. Not too old. Twelve hundred or so.”
“Tall? Short?”
“I don’t know.”
“Taller than you?”
“Oh, yes. Everyone’s taller than me.”
Domm stood up. “Taller than me?”
“Uh, I think so.”
He sat down again. “Heavy-set?”
“No, no. Skinny.”
“Long hair? Short hair? Straight? Curly?”
And so on. Eventually they got a pretty good description of the non-existent Orca, and I told them I hadn’t realized I was so observant.
“All right,” said Domm, nodding slowly after I’d finished. Then he paused, as if thinking things over, then he said, “Now let’s have the rest of it.”
“Huh?” I said, pretending to be startled.
“Who are you, and why did he come to you?”
Okay, this was the tricky part. As far as they were concerned, they’d gotten me beat, and it was just a matter of squeezing a little to get everything out of me. So I had to keep letting them think that, while still trying to pull my own game. This was, of course, made more difficult by the fact that I didn’t know what my own game was—I was still trying to find out as much as I could about what was going on.
I gave a sigh, let my lips droop, and covered my face with my hands. “None of that,” snapped Domm. “You know who we are, and you know what we can do to you. You have one chance to make this easy on yourself, and that’s by telling us everything, right now.”
I nodded into my hands. “Okay,” I said to the table.
“Start with your name.”
I looked up and, trying to make my voice small, I said, “What’s going to happen to me?”
“If you tell us the truth, nothing. We may take you in for more questioning, and we’ll need to know where we can reach you, but that’ll be all—if you tell us the truth and the whole truth.”
I gave Timmer a suspicious look.
“She won’t do anything,” said Domm.
“I want to hear her say it.”
She smiled just a bit and said, “I stand by what the lieutenant said. If you tell us the truth.”
Lying bastards, both of them. I gave them a suspicious look. “What about your commander? Will he go for it?”
Domm started to look impatient, but Timmer said, “If we give him the answers, he won’t care how we got them.”
“Is that the one I first talked to? What was his name, Loftis?”
“Yeah. He’ll go for it.”
I nodded, as if I was satisfied. I could feel them relax. “I should never have done this,” I said in the tones of a man about to spill his guts. “I’m just a thief, you know? I mean, I’ve never hurt anyone. I know a couple of Jhereg who buy what I steal, but—wait a minute. You don’t have to know the names of the Jhereg, do you?”
“I doubt it,” said Domm.
“They’ll kill me.”
“It shouldn’t be necessary,” said Timmer comfortingly. “And we can protect you, anyway,” she lied.
“All right,” I said. “Anyway, it was stupid. I should have known better. But fifty imperials!”
“Tempting,” said Domm.
“That’s the truth,” I said. “Anyway, my real name is Vaan. I was named after my uncle, who built—But you don’t want to hear about that. Right?” I stopped and shook my head sadly. “I’m really in trouble, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” said Timmer.
“But you can get out of it,” said Domm.
“Do you do this a lot? I mean, track people down and question them?”
They shrugged.
“That must be fun.”
Domm permitted himself a half-smile. “You were saying?”
“Uh, right.” I remembered I had a glass with some wine still in it, so I drank some and wiped my face with the back of my hand. “You got onto me from the locals, didn’t you? I mean, you’re from Adrilankha—anyone can hear it from your voice—but you checked on me with the locals and they told you about me.”
They grunted, which could mean anything, except that Timmer let slip a look that said they’d rather die than have anything to do with the locals. That was important, although it wasn’t the big thing I wanted to find out. But I had them going now. They’d broken me, and they knew that I would tell them everything I knew about everything if they handled me right, and handling me right meant letting me talk, only nudging me if I got too far off course. So now I had to stay almost on course, and let them drift with me just for a bit.
I said, “The local Guards had me in once or twice, you know. They let me go because they could never be sure, but they know about me. They beat me once, too—they thought I knew something about some big job or another, but I didn’t know anything about it. I never know anything about big jobs. Big jobs scare me. This one scared me, and I guess I was right to be scared.” I drank some more wine and risked a look at them. They were relaxed now, and not paying all that strict attention—in other words, set up.
I shook my head. “I should have listened to my instincts, you know? I was telling some friends of mine just the other day that I had a bad feeling—”
All of a sudden Domm was no longer relaxed. “What friends?” he snapped. “What did you tell them?” Then he caught himself and looked at Timmer, who was looking at him and frowning. And that made the fourth “Ah ha” of the day, which I decided would have to be enough, especially because one of the things I learned from this one was that they—or at least Domm—had no intention of leaving me alive.
I reached back, grabbed my sword, and nailed Domm in the side of the head with the flat, trying to knock him both out and into Timmer, but I couldn’t get quite enough power for either to work with my thin little blade. Timmer was fast. Really fast. She was up, weapon out, and coming at me before I’d stood up, and I had to squeeze into the corner and parry with both hands or she’d have spitted me; as it was she did violence to my arm, which I resented. But before she could withdraw her steel I cut at her forearm, then sliced up at her head, and—because of one move or the other—her blade fell to the floor. She bent over to pick up her weapon while I reached down and got my parcel of clothes from next to my chair. Among other things, it had my boots in it.
Domm was shaking his head—I’d at least slowed him down. Timmer came at me again, but I knocked her sword aside with my parcel, then hit her with the parcel, and I came up over the table and on the way by I thumped Domm’s head with the pommel of my rapier. As I came over the table it tipped and I was able to put it between me and Timmer for a second, which then I used to turn and dash out the back door. I couldn’t go as fast as I’d have liked, because of those Verra-be-damned boots, but I made it before they caught up with me.
I’d had an escape route planned, but I hadn’t intended to be bleeding when I took it. I headed out of the alley and into another one while sheathing my weapon. I heard footsteps and I knew that Timmer was behind me. I wasn’t terribly keen on killing her—you know as well as I do what sort of heat it brings to kill a Guardsman—but I was even less keen on her killing me, and there was no way I could escape her by running—not in those boots. And if I teleported, of course, she’d just trace the teleport; no future in that.
I was just considering where I should make a stand when I got lucky. I turned a corner and someone vanished—some guy had just stepped out of some shop and teleported home with his purchases. If I hadn’t been wearing the black Phoenix Stone, which prevents Devine contact, I would have given a prayer of thanks to Verra; as it was, I ran right through the spot where he’d teleported from, held my arm against the parcel of clothes in the hopes that I wouldn’t drip any more blood, and ran another twenty feet and through the curtained entrance to the shop.
It turned out to be a clothier, and there were a couple of customers in it. The man behind the counter—a real Chreotha—said, “May I be of some service to you, my lord?”
“Yes,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Do you have something in red?”
“You’re bleeding!” said one of the customers.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s the fashion, you know.”
“My dear sir—” said the proprietor.
“A moment,” I said, and I pulled the curtain aside just a hair, just enough to see the end of Timmer’s teleport. “Never mind,” I said. “I think I like the pattern it’s making. Good day.”
I went back into the alley, and then to another one, and did my best not to leave a trail of blood. With any luck at all I had a good couple of minutes before Timmer realized that she’d followed the wrong man, and, I hoped, Domm was too far out of it to be a problem.
“Well, Loiosh?”
“You’re in the clear for the moment, boss.”
“Okay. Hang on for another minute, then join me.”
I found a little nook I’d noticed before, and spent a minute and a half becoming a bleeding Easterner instead of a bleeding Chreotha. I put the remains of the Chreotha disguise in the bag, took off the gold Phoenix Stone, and teleported the bag to a spot I knew well just off the coast of Adrilankha, where it went to join a couple of bodies who wouldn’t mind the intrusion. Loiosh arrived on my shoulder with a few choice words about how clever I thought I was compared to what a fool I’d been acting like. I thanked him for sharing his opinion with me.
Since I’d taken the chain off, anyway, there was no reason not to teleport back here, so I arrived at a point I’d memorized a little ways away into the wood, and here I am, Kiera, happy to see you as always, and has anyone ever told you that you’re lovely when you’re disgusted?
Interlude
“I’VE NEVER HEARD OF that Stony you talked to. If he’s just sort of midlevel in Northport, what made you think he’d know anything about Fyres?”
“That’s one of the things I can’t tell you.”
“Oh. There are a lot of things like that, aren’t there?”
“I told you there would be, Cawti.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve never known Vlad to use disguises before.”
“Neither had I. It was probably something he picked up while traveling.”
“What about the old woman? How was she taking all of this?”
“I suspect it bothered her a great deal, but she never let on. In fact, the whole time she had an attitude like none of it had anything to do with her.”
“I can’t blame her, I guess. It would be strange.”
“Yes.”
“It’s funny, you’re summarizing for me Vlad’s report to you about his conversations with others, which is three steps removed from the actual conversations, but I can still almost hear him talking.”
“You miss him, don’t you?”
“I—”
“He misses you, Cawti.”
“Let’s not start on that, all right?”
“If you wish.”
“It’s complicated, Kiera. It’s difficult. I don’t know any of the answers. Yes, I miss him. But we couldn’t live together.”
“He’s
changed, you know.”
“Are you trying to get us back together, Kiera?”
“I don’t know. I think at least he should know about—”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“All right. Maybe I should summarize even more.”
“No, you’re doing fine.”
“I have to say, though, that I don’t have a very good memory for conversations, so a lot of this I’m reconstructing and making up. But you get the gist of it.”
“I do indeed. You must have had a few words for him when he got back to the house. I know I would have.”
“Oh, yes.”
7
“WELL,” I SAID SLOWLY. “Congratulations, Vlad.”
He looked at me and waited for the punch line.
I said, “You’ve now not only got the Jhereg after you but also the Empire, and, as soon as they tie you to the documents we stole, the House of the Orca will want you, too—and me, by the way. That leaves only fourteen more Houses to go and you’ll have the set. Then you can start on the Easterners and the Serioli. Good work.”
“It’s a talent,” he said. “I can’t take credit for it.”
I studied him while considering his story. He was looking—I don’t know, smug wasn’t quite right, but maybe something like, amused with a veneer of self-satisfaction. Sometimes I forget just how devious he is, and how good he is at improvising, and his skill at calculating odds and pulling off improbable gambits. Sometimes he thinks he’s better at these things than he actually is, and it is likely to get him killed one of these days—especially now, when, between the gold and the black Phoenix Sx he wears, he is entirely cut off from those who would be most willing and able to help him.
“All right,” I said. “Either Fyres was murdered or the Empire is afraid Fyres was murdered, and, in either case, the Empire doesn’t want it known.”
“Someone in the Empire,” Vlad amended.
“No,” I said. “The Empire.”
“You mean the Empress—”
“I wouldn’t say the Empress knows, but it doesn’t matter either way.”