by Steven Brust
“One of them tried to let a few friends know, but no one would listen. The other, apparently, doesn’t have any friends, and figured he could eliminate a great deal of competition. He was right, by the way—some very heavy people will be going down over this.”
Hwdf’rjaanci got up and went outside, I suppose because she could still hear us. Buddy looked at her, thumped his tail once, but decided he wanted to stay and listen.
Vlad considered my remark and said, “That ties Fyres into the Jhereg without any question, but . . . how did he land that contract with the Imperial Navy, after having proved what he was twice before?”
“Ah,” I said. “Very good. That is the question, isn’t it? Because that brings the Empire into this. The answer is, I don’t know. Somewhere along the line, he talked someone into something.”
“Yep,” said Vlad. He was quiet for quite a while then—maybe a minute. Then he said, “And that someone screwed up and then tried to cover himself. And I think . . . yeah, it all fits, I’m afraid.”
“What does?”
“Here’s what I think happened—no, on second thought, I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to for the last couple of days, and see if you can put it together.”
“All right,” I said. “Go to it.”
10
LET ME THINK NOW. When did you leave? A lot has happened since then. It was early afternoon, right? Okay, I’ll just take it as it happened.
After you left, I made an effort to get Savn talking again, and he went off on knives some more. I decided that it probably wasn’t healthy to keep him fixated like that, and the old woman told me the same thing a few minutes later, so that was about it. I couldn’t think of anything else to do with him, and eventually I realized that half the reason I wanted to was to avoid having to do something I was a bit afraid of. Let me explain.
I kept thinking about that banker, and what you’d said about the Jhereg connections, and what I couldn’t get away from was the idea that, if the Jhereg was connected to Fyres, and Fyres was connected to the Empire, then the Jhereg was connected to the Empire. If that was true, what was the connection, and how did it work, and like that? Now Side-Captain Vonnith—what’s a side-captain, by the way?—must have been tied into Fyres because she’d jumped ship, so to speak, within a week of Fyres’s death, and you’d proven that she was connected to the Empire, so I couldn’t help wondering if she was connected to the Jhereg, too.
The trouble was, I couldn’t go waltzing into Stony’s office and ask about it, because he’d kill me on the spot and because you’d be annoyed with me, which meant I’d have to work through either Vonnith or Loftis. From what you said, I had the impression that Vonnith would bolt if she got any more jumpy, and that might be inconvenient, so that left Loftis.
Loftis.
I have to tell you, Kiera: I wasn’t all that excited about going up against him straight, and I wasn’t very happy about trying to put anything past him again. You’ve met him, too, and you know what I’m talking about—I think we were both lucky the first time we ran into him.
The only thing I could think of was to keep him off balance long enough for me to learn what I needed to learn, and, with him alerted, I didn’t think much of my chances of shoving another barrel of lies at him. To the left, however, telling him the truth wouldn’t get me anywhere. So that left giving him some of the truth, and either feeding it to him a bit at a time—trading information, in other words—or hitting him with enough of the truth to make him stumble, and hoping to get something while he was recovering his balance, if you follow my metaphor. As for which of those I’d do, I didn’t know—I was just going to approach him, talk to him, keep my ideas in mind, and see how it went.
That, at any rate, was the plan—if you can so dignify vague intentions with the word. After arriving at this magnificent conclusion, I had to make some food, and then clean up, and then try to talk to Savn about something other than knives, which produced no response at all. Unfortunately, after all of that, there was still time to visit Loftis, and I couldn’t find any more reasons for putting it off, and Loiosh was making fun of me, so I got myself dressed up as myself—that is, an Easterner, although not a Jhereg-and headed into town.
I liked your method of finding a quiet place to talk, so I used it myself. When I’d located a suitable establishment, I paid for two rooms, across the hall from each other. The host probably wondered exactly what sort of bizarre activity I was going to engage in, but she didn’t ask and I didn’t volunteer the information. I found a kid to act as messenger and gave him a note to pass on to Loftis. The note said where I was, including the room number, and I signed it Margaret—I hope you don’t mind. Then I went into the room across the hall from the one I’d given him, and amused myself by talking to Loiosh, who was, by the way, waiting outside the building—I didn’t want to introduce that complication into things at this point, and I admit I was worried, because Loftis was potentially in touch with the Jhereg, and the Jhereg was looking for an Easterner with a pair of jhereg, so why take chances? The two-room bit, by the way, proved unnecessary. The idea was that if he decided to show up with a couple of additional blades, it would give me an edge to be behind him, but he had no such plans.
It took him about an hour and a half to get there, but eventually I heard him—that is, I heard one set of footsteps, and someone clapped outside the door. I moved the curtain back, and he turned quickly, and he saw me. Then he looked at me again, more closely, and I could see him start to put things together—Kaldor to the Easterner, the Easterner to Margaret, Margaret to the Empire, the Empire to Kaldor—and I took a certain pleasure in shocking him. I said, “I don’t like this place for conversations. Let’s walk. You lead.” Then, in spite of my words, I stepped in front of him and led the way out of the place. He followed.
“Anything?”
“All clear, boss.”
“Stay out of sight. I don’t know where we’re going, so—”
“I’ve done this before, boss. Honest.”
When we reached the street, I indicated that he should take us somewhere, and he set off in a direction where there would be less traffic. I didn’t want to give him too much time to think, so I said, “Margaret sends her regrets, but she was detained by the need to look into the Jhereg end of this—I assume you know about that?”
“Who are you?”
“Padraic,” I said.
“And you’re working with Margaret, is that it?”
I shrugged. “Things are happening faster than we’d thought they would, especially on the Jhereg side.”
“What is the Jhereg side?”
“Don’t play stupid, we don’t have time for it. Vonnith is ready to bolt, and Shortisle is getting jumpy.”
“Getting jumpy?”
“All right, getting even more jumpy. How soon can you close up shop?”
“We can finish tomorrow, if you don’t care about everyone figuring out that we didn’t run a real investigation. Now, I want to know—”
“I don’t care what you want to know,” I said. “What did Timmer say? Has she put it together?”
He fumed for a moment, then said, “If she has, she isn’t saying anything.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s probably wise.”
“How is it,” he said grimly, “that you, that an Easterner, came to be involved in the security of the Empire?”
“Perhaps,” I said, giving him a smile that was almost a leer, “Her Majesty doesn’t have the same feelings about Easterners that you do.” He scowled. He’s heard the rumors about Her Majesty’s lover, too, but perhaps hadn’t believed them. But then, I’m not sure if I believe them, either. Before he could come up with an answer, I said, “Are you aware how high this goes?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I wished I knew. “All right, then. No, don’t make it obvious, but hurry it up. Get your work done as fast as you can and get out.”
He held up his hand in a signal to stop, and he began
looking around. I did, too, and didn’t see anything. The area we were walking through was almost empty of traffic and anything else—there were a couple of closed shops, a couple of houses with boards across the door, and a scattering of places that looked lived in. I said, “What is it?”
“Nothing special.”
I looked around again, but still saw nothing except a desolate neighborhood, of which I’d seen plenty in South Adrilankha. I said, “Where are we?”
“I just wanted you to see this.”
“What?”
“This area.”
“What about it?”
“Look.”
I’d been looking, but now I looked closer, and realized that the paint was new on most of the buildings and houses, and, furthermore, the houses, though small, looked like they’d been built for one family, and they were still in good condition. In fact, very good condition for how few people were here. I gave him a puzzled look.
He nodded. “When I got to town, just a couple of weeks ago, that place was open, and that place was open, and there were people living there, there, and there.”
“Where are they now?”
“Gone,” he said. “Maybe on the street, maybe moved to another town, maybe out in the woods hunting and living in tents. I don’t know.”
“Two weeks?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Fyres?”
“Yeah. The bank closings, and the closing of the three shipbuilders—”
“Three shipbuilders?”
“Yeah. He had a stake in about six or seven, and in three cases it was enough to shut them down. This area was developed about three hundred years ago by Sorenet and Family, Shipwrights, and pretty much everyone who lived around here worked for them. Some Orca, some Chreotha, mostly Teckla just in from your favorite village a generation ago. Now Sorenet is gone, and so is everyone who worked there.”
“I’ve never seen a neighborhood die so quickly,” I said.
“Nor have I.”
We started walking again. “You’ve surprised me in another way,” I said. “I hadn’t been convinced that Fyres was ever involved in anything real at all.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t, either. I still don’t know how involved he was, or why, or what the mechanics are. That’s the sort of thing we’d be finding out, if we were really doing what we’re supposed to be doing.”
This neighborhood seemed about the same as where we’d stopped. It was making me nervous. Loiosh, who was staying out of sight behind me, reported that nothing terrible was about to happen. I said, “Do you really think you can keep the Tiassa from finding out what you’re up to?”
“Probably,” he said. “He won’t check on us—he trusts us.” There was enough bitterness in that remark to ruin a hundred gallons of ale.
I said, “It isn’t like you had a choice.”
“I could have resigned.”
“And done what? And what would you have told the Tiassa when he asked you why? And on top of it, you’d have known someone else was doing it, and probably bungling it—frankly, I don’t trust your man Domm.”
“The lieutenant’s all right,” he said quickly. “He has a bit of Waitman in him, but that just means he’ll lose a few times before the Stand at Spinning Lake, which is nothing to be ashamed of. Waitman got an Imperial title for that, which isn’t bad for someone with that sort of disposition.”
“Maybe,” I said. “And please don’t explain. The point is, they knew just how to put the screws in.”
“Sure,” he said. “And who to put them to.”
In case you’ve missed it, Kiera, I was now the one who was off balance; while showing me around the neighborhood, he’d had a chance to do some thinking, and now it was me who wanted some time to sort things out.
We had apparently sold Loftis on our story far more completely than I’d expected to, and that puzzled me. But more than that, I just couldn’t reconcile everything he was saying with the idea that he was the sort of guy who’d go in for this kind of action. There was a piece of this—a big piece of this—that didn’t make sense, and I was no longer at all sure how to proceed. I had this awful urge to just flat out ask him everything I needed to know, like, for example, who was behind this, and how exactly had the pressure been brought; but someone like Loftis is going to figure out more from the questions you ask than you will from the answers he gives, and if he figured out too much, he’d stop answering the questions at all. A damned tricky business, that made me long for the days when all I had to do was kill someone and not worry about it.
I needed a distraction.
I said, “There’s another thing that’s puzzling me.”
“There’s a lot that’s puzzling me.”
“Some of the smaller companies in Fyres’s little Empire—”
“Not so little, Padraic.”
“Yeah. Some of them hold land.”
“Sure.”
“And they’re selling the land.”
He nodded.
“And they’re going under.”
“Right.”
“So they’re not able to sell it.”
“I guess. What’s your point? If it’s the legalities of it—”
“No, no. We have more advocates than the Orb has facets. I’m trying to figure out what sort of business sense that makes, or what kind of other sense it makes that overrides business sense.”
“You think they have any choice?”
“Maybe.”
He shook his head. “If you’re going somewhere, I can’t see it. As far as I can tell, they’re bailing out as they go, and if that means they lose some property, they’ll let the property courts and the advocates worry about it later. I don’t think there’s any plan involved.”
This was all news to me. I said, “I’m not convinced.”
“You have a devious mind.”
“It goes with the job.”
“Do you have any evidence? Any reason to think so?”
“Just a feeling. That’s why I wanted to find out if you’d had any ideas about it.”
“No.”
“Okay,” I said.
We were heading back in the general direction from which we’d come. He said, “So, all right, what is it you wanted? You had me make contact with you for some reason, and so far all we’ve done is chat, along with a warning so general there’s no point in giving it, and a question you could have had a messenger ask. What are you after?”
Damn. I had certainly given him too much time to think. I said, “There’s someone who knows too much about what you’re doing, and I can’t find him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that something’s slipped, and I’m pretty sure it’s at the top, or near the top at any rate. I’m running into opposition, and I can’t pin it down.”
He shook his head. “I haven’t run into it yet. The only suspicious action I’ve seen so far has been you and your friend Margaret.”
Damn again. That wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted him thinking about.
“Look,” I said, “I’m going to have to trust you.”
“Trust all you want,” he said. “I haven’t shut you down, but I’m not under your orders.”
He was ahead of me again.
“And now I want a few answers.”
And gaining.
“Your friend Margaret claimed to have a certain hold on me.”
“The letters. Yes. They’re real.”
“I told her then they wouldn’t go very far, and this is as far as they go. Exactly who do you work for, and what is your job?”
“I know your job, friend Loftis; but if you want to put everything out in front, then let’s hear you say who you work for.” As I said that, I was desperately trying to remember the names of the different groups you’d mentioned, and figure out which one I could most reasonably claim to be part of.
“Heh. I am a lieutenant in the Imperial Army, Corps of the Phoenix Guards, Special Tasks Group.”
>
“And you know bloody well that wasn’t my question.”
“Are all Easterners psychically invisible, or just you? And is that why you were hired, or is it just a bonus?”
“It helps,” I said.
“Exactly what are you after?”
“I’ve told you that.”
“Yes, you have, haven’t you? You’ve told me just about everything my heart could desire, haven’t you?”
I shook my head. “Play all the games you want, Loftis, but I don’t have time to muck around, not if I’m going to do what I was sent here to do.”
“Shall we get something to eat?” he said.
Add another damn or two. He was pulling all of my tricks, and he was better at them than I was—which I suppose only made sense. I said, “I’ve been told that Undauntra always wanted her troops to fight hungry, whereas Sethra Lavode always wanted hers to fight with a full meal in them.”
“I’ve heard that, too,” he said. “But it isn’t true. About Sethra, that is.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I’m also told that when a Jhereg boss hires an assassin, the deal is usually made during a meal.”
“I can believe that.”
“And I happen to know that there is a curious custom in parts of the East of making a big ceremony out of the last meal someone eats before he’s executed. He’s given pretty much anything he wants, and it’s prepared and served quite carefully, and then they kill him. Isn’t that odd?”
“I suppose, but I think it’s rather nice, actually.”
I shook my head. “If I were about to be executed, I either wouldn’t be able to eat, or I’d lose the meal on the way to the Executioner’s Star, or the gallows, or the Pilgrim’s Block, or wherever they were to lead me.”
“I see your point,” he said. “But I think I’d like the meal, anyway.”
“Well, perhaps I would, too.”
“There’s got to be someplace around here.”
We stopped at the first place we came to, which meant nothing since he’d been leading the way. It was marked by a sign that was so faded I couldn’t make it out, and reached from the street by walking down three steps below a hostel. It had probably been on the street level a few hundred years earlier—it seemed old enough, at any rate.